Margaret Black had not been out of school for long, and basically enjoyed her job as a clerk at the Regal Umbrella Health Fund. The company had a few building premises, including the head office where she worked. It was a skyscraper at Bond Street Junction, with departments on several floors, and a large canteen with dining area at the top.

She started work for the day as usual, and soon came to the point where she needed to collect the template letters from the secretary and collate them with medical forms to be sent out to prospective clients and their medical practitioners.

She made her way over to the typing pool and met the new trainee junior secretary Pierre, who had just started. Rumour had it that he’d finished school a few months earlier, started a university course, found himself out of his depth and dropped out. If secretarial work was his comfort level, then preparing her letters would have been, as the saying goes, right up his Alley.

Or so she thought.

Pierre had excelled at Mathematics and two foreign languages at school, because he followed a simple approach which tended to lead to good marks in assignments and exams. He learned rules of foreign grammar as easily as he learned mathematical formulae, and then had no difficulty doing countless exercises which merely applied the well established rules. He majored in Mathematics and the two languages, and adapted his flair to making up his curriculum with additional units of English and Science, specializing in physics and chemistry, which were to some extent merely applied forms of Mathematics.

Allen Timms, the previous secretary had been promoted to a new role, and had spent the first day of his promotion training Pierre. He covered everything Pierre would routinely do within the typing pool, albeit with some incorrect instructions for a stamp duty task that Pierre would need to be retrained in by another staff member down the track. The other thing that hadn’t come up in Pierre’s training was the part of the task that involved interacting with Margaret’s department.

Pierre had survived ten years of relentless physical and verbal bullying by boys and teachers alike in two private schools, and had spent most of his school years without friends or team interaction of any kind. He had done his French group assignment without teaming up with anyone else.

“I know you can do it,” his teacher had protested.

“These people won’t accept me,” he had proclaimed, stubbornly soldiered on alone, and gotten one of the highest marks.

However, when Margaret’s expectation of his duties with the template letters took him by complete surprise, instead of adapting to the situation, he seemed to blow a fuse right in front of her. His face turned chalk white, and gave the best silent impression of a complete mental breakdown.

She explained what she needed from him and got accustomed, but not satisfied, with her daily round of awkward encounters with him over the next few months.

Pierre himself was finding that simple secretarial work was far more challenging and psychologically draining than the highly demanding requirements of studying in his final year of school had been, for two simple reasons. Firstly, as he discovered over time, Regal Umbrella Health Fund was an organization with by far the worst widespread rank office politics that anyone could ever encounter in one lifetime. Many other staff members were well aware of the problem, yet like himself so deeply entrenched in it, that they had become part of it. Secondly, the demoralizing culture of the company was compounded by his own considerable immaturity, stunted social growth and inflexibility to the expectations of his colleagues.

It was something of a coincidence, that Pierre’s 18th birthday fell on the same day as the firm’s centenary celebration dinner. Pierre hadn’t thought to attend, given his poor track record of demonstrating how to worry friends and irritate people for his first three months on the job. However the celebration’s coordinator Ron Shirkin talked Pierre into buying a ticket with a false promise that he’d get a special mention on the night. That was how Ron perceived it, but Pierre couldn’t have cared about his birthday, and had just given in under pressure.

Margaret found Pierre had been seated at her table on the night, dressed in a period piece suit as per the dinner’s theme of emulating the fashions of the time of the company’s formation 100 years earlier. Pierre clowned around at the table, posing for comedic photography shots with a woman from another department in whom he had no interest at all, purely for the sake of passing the time, while Margaret’s boredom reached an all time low.

Pierre’s vocational ineptitude worked most effectively with his supervisor Alene Sirley’s poor communication of instructions to see him frequently in trouble and subsequently denied the right to ‘argue’ his case. This would account for much of his difficulty in making a good impression on the company, but didn’t excuse the selfish way he clung to his old schoolboy approach to work at Margaret’s expense on a daily basis.

One day she found herself sitting opposite him around a table in the top floor canteen at lunch time. She looked at the large pile of salad and meat on her plate and said aloud, “I get called Rabbit, because I like to eat a lot.”

Her mouth went to work on the entire assortment in a dainty manner, without seeming hurried or greedy, and conversation continued, with Pierre making no contribution whatsoever to the dialogue.

A few days later, the canteen began a buffet special which would run every Friday, under the banner ‘all you can eat.’

Her nickname was unofficially contested, when Pierre ate more than her to begin with, and then took his plate back for seconds.

The canteen staff told him that second helpings weren’t part of the deal.

“Then it should say ‘all you can fit on your plate’,” said Pierre.

The following Friday, the buffet was billed accordingly with appropriate signage, and Pierre adapted far more rapidly to this change in circumstances than he had ever managed to adjust his secretarial approach to the requirements of her department.

Something cognizant of a miniature model of Mount Everest adorned his plate, as he set it down on the table, piled high enough to accommodate as much food as possible, while barely avoiding a culinary avalanche which would have worn out several paper towels by the time the table had been cleaned.

“Gluttony is one of the seven deadly enemies of mankind!” said a middle-aged clerk at their table, “The buffet price wouldn’t cover what you have there.”

Margaret had nothing to say. The elegant empress of eating had been far surpassed in one lunch break by the prime prince of pigs.

This would be the last opportunity for Margaret to witness any of Pierre’s dysfunctional dining. Two weeks later she was talking with a few people at the typing pool, and heard Pierre saying, “Alene’s made me take a 12 o’clock lunch from now on, so I’m always on hand to answer the phones here during everyone else’s lunch break from one pm until two.”

“Everyone else seems satisfied,” said Margaret coldly, and turned around to head back to her own department.

“Because everyone else got a choice and the chance to have lunch together,” she heard him mumbling.

Perhaps her comment had been irrational and unfair, she reflected, but his constant self-involvement had by then conditioned her to see nothing reasonable in anything Pierre said. Her knee-jerk reaction had been to tell him off. By then it was known that he was the youngest person in the firm, having finished school 11 months younger than the average age of a school leaver. Still he should have been able to modify his working habits to suit an interactive secretarial position by now.

“He always annoys me,” she told Alene Sirley over lunch one day, somewhat relieved that Pierre was obliviously manning the telephones downstairs at the time.

When she attended the staff variety show, replete with comedic skits and other material performed by various employees, it hardly took her by surprise to hear Pierre singing an old blues number with the words rewritten to poke fun at every aspect of his own job, including a verse devoted to the template letters he was supposed to have done for her.

Two months later, it was another staff member’s chance to step under the musical spotlight. Allen Timms invited a few of his colleagues to his band concert, which was held in a night club just next door to Town Bank. Margaret Black went along and saw that Pierre was there too. She decided to take the opportunity to address his workplace shortcomings with a different approach.

“Are you nervous at work?” she asked.

“I guess so,” said Pierre.

“Just imagine we’re all in our underpants,” said Margaret.

“With or without umbrellas?” he asked.

“Ohhhh!!!” she thought.

He would never change, it seemed.

Her life improved somewhat, with compensations for her painful daily career of coping with Pierre’s office behaviour. She met a guy named Dan socially, and he asked her out. Soon they were dating frequently, and she felt she needed to move out of her parents’ home and into an apartment which was closer to both Dan and Regal Umbrella Health Fund head office. St Clements was close to the beach and less than an hour by train from the office.

She moved in and invited everyone on her floor in the Regal Umbrella building to a house warming party.
Pierre showed his appreciation by lying on the carpet by himself most of the time, and then leaving early. Dan wasn’t there, and not many people from the office had come, but she made the most of the night and cleaned up and went to bed.

Christmas drew near and Pierre made the rounds of the office, giving everyone a card, Margaret included.

She applied her uniquely talented handwriting skills to a card for him, and took it to his desk the next day:

                                    Dear Pierre,

                                    Have a wonderful Christmas

                                    & a fantastic New Year.

                                    Love always,

                                    Margaret

Pierre noticed that her capital letters, as well as even her lower case ‘f’ always included a wide flourishing exaggerated curvature, which was in itself a form of art. What he had once again failed to notice, was that she had always done the kind considerate thing, in spite of all the frequent frustration points he’d earned with her as a childish colleague. It was as lost on him as her attempts to bolster his confidence had been at Allen Timms’ band concert.

In early January, Ron Shirkin got hold of some discount movie tickets for a mid week screening, and sold one to Margaret, two to other staff, and one to Pierre.

“Just don’t sit too close to Margaret,” he told Pierre, “Her boyfriend would kill you.”

Unaware of this particular example of social guidance counselling, Margaret walked down the city street with Pierre and the others after the movie, and they found themselves in a games arcade. Margaret stopped beside a glass cabinet with a remote controlled mechanical scoop suspended inside it above a pile of stuffed toy animals.

Pierre seemed to scoff at the very concept of such a place as a waste of money.

“It’s okay to play games!” said Margaret, wondering if her colleague would ever mellow out.

He soon went to the station and caught the train home.

A week later, she went to use the computer in her department and found Pierre already there. His own department’s computer was down and he was racing through his typing tasks as fast as he could. She asked him to vacate it, as she needed it to perform tasks for her own department, but he wouldn’t budge. A mature gentleman would have vacated his own department’s compute for her sake, but twelve months after leaving school, Pierre was still trying to function like an independent schoolboy in a classroom.

Margaret stormed back to her desk exasperated.

A few minutes later she sought the assistance of her supervisor, who relieved Pierre of the computer, thus facilitating Margaret’s ability to get on with her work.

Two weeks later, Pierre surprised everyone in the office by handing in his resignation. There was no conflict leading up to it. In fact, in the two months leading up to Christmas, he had at least improved his game in the typing pool and passed his extended probation period with flying colours. Although still a pain in the neck to Margaret, he was now getting on well with his own department’s supervisor Alene Sirley and those around him. It turned out that he had always intended to return to university, but after dropping out, had taken a secretarial job for the balance of that year, while awaiting an admission to a different university, to start a different course more suited to his aptitude, namely science. He had kept his hidden agenda under wraps for eight or nine months and just now announced his real intentions. Since passing his probation, he had also been moved into the position that Allen Timms had occupied for the last 8 months of the year, while Allen had gone to another department.

So his secretarial interactions with Margaret had been over for some time, leaving his misappropriation of her department’s computer as her only residual headache.
Once again, Margaret did the kind considerate thing, being one of the few people to actually join him in the local snooker club’s social function room for his farewell after work on his last day. Before the time came, she also wrote on the farewell card that was presented to him in the office, using her uniquely artistic handwriting once more:

                                                Dear Peter,

                                                Good luck with your studies.

                                                I hope H.D.’s come your way

                                                easily.

                                                Love & Best Wishes,

                                                Margaret B.

 The farewell didn’t last that long, and then he was gone.

She found that the office was like a farm relieved of a disruptive animal from then on. She was able to get on with her work, without constantly wondering what manner of trouble would find its way to her desk at the hands of Pierre the company’s former resident coming of age brat.

When one of her monthly rostered days off was due, she finished her work the night before, went home to her apartment ate a light dinner and sat down to read on the carpet, with the bar heater positioned behind her. Little by little, she became drowsy, and was soon lying on her side, holding the book as best she could to continue reading, until she put it down altogether and yawned. She rested her hands under her cheek and wondered how long she would keep her eyes open. If she went to her bedroom, she might well drop off. If she didn’t, she might have difficulty sleeping on the floor, or just doze off for long enough to revitalize her mind for reading the rest of the book.

Then she saw a small shadow projecting from behind the leg of the couch. It wasn’t the couch leg itself, but looked more like a man would have looked, if the man had been less than two inches tall. Curious, she crawled around to the side of the couch, but the shadow seemed to move as well. When she reached the side and peeked under again, she could still see only a shadow. She moved back again, this time reaching around the front of the leg with her hand and felt something small run into it. She closed her fingers around it gently and brought it out and set it down on the floor in front of her face, while she lay down on her stomach, resting her face on her hands. It was in fact a very tiny man!

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Well, it’s a bit hard to explain,” said the little man.

She gave a deep wide yawn, and the little man gaped into her mouth, apparently awestruck by the size difference between them. He was so small that she could have swallowed him in a few seconds, if he’d been inside her mouth at the time.

“There’s something about your voice,” she said, moving her head forward a little, so that her eye was right in front of the tiny figure’s face, “Pierre, it’s you!”

“I didn’t know where else to go,” he said, “I was falling behind in my chemistry exercises and had to stay behind in the science laboratory at the university, all by myself to catch up. I was having trouble understanding the text book, after a year out of school doing health fund letters instead of science classes. I started rushing through it too fast, and I must have made some big mistake. I combined some fluids from different test tubes, and they caused a huge cloud of vapour to come out of the beaker and …Well then it made me this size. I remembered from your house warming party here, that the university turns out to be near your home. So I came here by hitching a ride on a car’s undersides unseen and then climbing the cling vine to your balcony ledge, slipping under the door and hiding here. I wanted to ask you for help, but I didn’t know how to explain myself.”

“Well I was thinking about going to bed,” she said, sitting up and picking him up.

She put him into her mouth and walked to her bedroom, changed into a nightie and climbed into bed. She sat up, leaning her back against the back of the bed, took Pierre out of her mouth and set him down on her pillow and then lay down with her head beside him.

“I wondered if you were going to swallow me,” said Pierre, “You said you’re called Rabbit because you like to eat a lot.”

“I’m surprised you remember that. I wanted to find out what you taste like,” said Margaret, “You didn’t stay here very long at my housewarming party.”

“Oh… you were here without your boyfriend that night. I didn’t want to overstay my welcome.”

“You can stay a lot longer this time. Tomorrow’s my rostered day off. You can help me live up to my nickname at lunch time, or maybe I’ll wait until dinner.”

“Live up to your nickname? Do you mean you’d actually consider eating me?”

“I mean that I have considered it, and I’m going to do it. You’ll be much better than anything on the staff canteen’s buffet, and at that size you’ll go down without my teeth having to do anything.”

“You’re going to swallow me whole!”

“What happens after that will be your own adventure to keep to yourself, like your secret plans to go back to university. I’ll never know the details.”

“I only kept that a secret, because I otherwise would probably have never gotten the job, and I’d certainly have had even more difficulty holding it. How can you just decide to eat me, without considering my needs?”

“I don’t know where I learned that from,” she scoffed sarcastically, “Did you consider my needs when you were so uncooperative about doing my template letters?”

“I was learning a new job for the first time. Allen didn’t teach me that part of it. When you asked for them, I panicked.”

“And did you panic at one of Allen’s so-called oversights when you hogged my department’s computer?”

“I was either just worrying too much about getting my job done or worked up about something else.”

“What about when you couldn’t even hang around and be sociable in the games arcade?” asked Margaret.

“Well that was definitely because of the something else. It was hard enough going to your house warming party when you have a boyfriend, but then you went to the movies with us instead of him and wound me up even more afterwards. Ron Shirkin warned me not to sit near you in the cinema, because of Dan. I’ve been behind the eight ball ever since your template letters task took me by surprise, making a bigger and bigger fool of myself….,” said Pierre.

“Or a much smaller one at the moment,” she interrupted, smiling sympathetically.

He allowed himself a brief burst of laughter, and then continued.

“Every mistake I made in the office with you, I just dug myself deeper and deeper. I’ve been in love with you since day one, but couldn’t show it. Alene Sirley said that I annoy you, when she did my performance appraisal interview, just before they extended my probation period. When we went to Allen’s band concert, and you said to imagine you all in your underpants, I just kept thinking how nice you look in a long dress. I only left my own farewell party so soon, to get over the heartbreak and try to adjust to preparing for university.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” she said, lifting her head a little and moving it closer to him, “I’m sorry I broke your heart.”

Her full shapely red lower lip came down and pressed tightly but harmlessly against his entire face for well over half a minute. Then she withdrew it and rested her head on the pillow again.

“Well I don’t know where I stand, given that Dan’s still in the picture, but that was the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Pierre.

“You can stay the night here beside me, and I’ll decide about lunch after I wake up in the morning,” she said.

“So you might still be thinking of having me for lunch,” he said, “I never saw this coming the day we were having lunch at the canteen and you told us why you’re called Rabbit. I guess I’ll have to wait until the morning to see whether you decide to keep me or eat me.”

“I meant that when morning comes, I will decide whether to have you for lunch or for dinner. I hadn’t finalized that choice back when we started this discussion.”

“But you’ve got to give me a chance…I love you!”

“I don’t have to give you anything,” she said, leaning across with one arm, to turn off the bed lamp, “I have a good job, made better without any more of your nonsense in the office. I have an apartment, a boyfriend, and my full size intact. And tomorrow, I will have either the best lunch or the best dinner I’ve ever enjoyed in my life. Think about that!”

She lay there in silence, while he took in all that had happened that day alone, and then reflected back over everything that had happened since he’d first met her.

The huge kiss had apparently been just another example of her doing the kind considerate thing, in spite of his upcoming place on her menu. He ultimately meant nothing to her as a potential boyfriend, and yet her lunch or dinner plans for him were foremost in her mind.

He dropped off for a few hours, and then awoke to see her elegant face beside him in the moonlight. He looked to see that the curtains had been left open, but the window was well and truly locked, even if he could have somehow gotten down from the bed and made it to the window ledge. There was probably enough cling vine outside the window to see him all the way to the street level of the apartment block’s garden, but no way to get out of the room.

He looked at Margaret’s soft white cheek, and decide to gently snuggle against it. Maybe he would pull it off without disturbing her sleep.

He felt her facial skin against his cheek and shoulder and the right side of his chest, as well as his right leg. Then he felt her stirring a little, but keeping her cheek in the same position.

“You’ve made yourself comfortable,” she murmured.

“I hoped you wouldn’t mind, or wouldn’t wake up.”

“It’s fine,” she replied, “It’s the least I can do for you really.”

“When you pronounced my final fate, you said ‘Think about that’. I have been thinking, not just about that, but about everything that’s happened. I’m really sorry about all the times I let you down in the office.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that, but don’t worry about it anymore. You’ll soon make up for it in your little way.”

“You always did kind things and said kind things for me, no matter how much I got on your nerves at work. You said nice things at the band concert. You wrote nice things on my cards. You even invited me here when you moved in, when you could have enjoyed the housewarming without the goofball of the typing pool in your way that night. I could never understand why you were like that, all things considered. You’re not just very beautiful. You’ve also been very thoughtful. It’s no wonder I’m in love with you.”

“It’s nice of you to say so, even nicer of you to have remembered all those things. It won’t do you any good though. By this time tomorrow night, you’ll be down in my tummy.”

“I know.”

“I just didn’t want to lead you on and let you build up any false hopes.”

“Of you becoming my girlfriend, or just of you changing your mind about eating me?”

“Both of those things. I’m going to gobble you all up, little Pierre.”

“I guess this is one time I will be doing something good for you.”

“You surely will. I’m really looking forward to it.”

“I’ll try to look forward to making you happy for once then, no longer the failure as a secretary.”

“Well you’re certainly not a failure as a science student. You invented a size reducing vapour without even trying to.”

“I don’t think I’ll be as successful in coming up with the antidote.”

“You might, if I would have given you the chance. We’ll never know.”

“I always loved your handwriting for some reason. It reminded me of something, but I never knew what until tonight. It looks like it belongs on the pages of a fairytale. Now I seem to be living in one.”

“Yes, there have been a number of fairytales about little boys being eaten,” said Margaret.

“But none of them have involved a beautiful woman doing the eating.”

“Are you trying to get out of it with flattery?”

“It’s not flattery if you know it’s true.”

“Well you’re still not going to dissuade me.”

“I’m not trying to.”

“Good!”

“Actually, while I was lying there thinking, I realized that most of our problems in the office were my doing. In fact, the only unfair thing you ever said was ‘everyone else is satisfied’, when I was griping about having to have lunch at 12 o’clock instead of one.”

“I heard what you said when I was walking away that day. Sorry I didn’t see your point of view.”

“Well the worst of it was that I couldn’t be with you when you were having lunch after Alene Sirley put me on the 12 o’clock lunch slot. I guess I’ll have plenty of chance to be with you at tomorrow’s lunch, whether or not I’ll be there as the main course.”

“I suppose I’ll save you for dinner,” she said, with a yawn, “I think I’m dropping off again. I hope you sleep well, for the rest of the night.”

“Thank you. Goodnight Margaret.”

The next morning she asked what he’d like to do.

“Maybe we could play hide and seek,” he suggested.

“Alright, but I’ll just make sure you don’t get any ideas,” said Margaret.

She took a spare towel from the linen cupboard, pushed it under the balcony door tightly, so that it completely blocked his chances of slipping back out under the door from which he had gained entry. Then she took another cloth and blocked the front door to the apartment the same way.

She lay down on the floor and closed her eyes.

“I’ll count to 100 and then come and get you,” she said.

He ran and hid behind a curtain and watched her finish counting, sit up and crawl around the room until, by a process of elimination, she deduced his only possible hiding place, and came crawling towards him. She parted the curtain with her hand, as he scurried off. She crawled in hot pursuit and caught him quickly and picked him up.

“I guess the health fund doesn’t have any policy clauses to cover sudden size loss conditions,” he mused.

“It doesn’t even have anything for upset stomachs,” said Margaret, “But I don’t think you’ll give me one of those.”

She served them both lunch at the kitchen table. He looked up at her beautiful mouth going to work on the food, from a vastly different perspective than the one he had seen in his early lunch breaks at Regal Umbrella Health Fund, and with a vastly different outlook. Every time he saw a piece of food make its way between her full shapely red lips and onto her sparkling tongue, it was like the first scene in a prelude for his own experiences at their upcoming dinner arrangement.

As each mouthful was gulped down her elegant throat, the second scene presented itself like an equally inviolate premonition. Occasionally her tongue swished from side to side, as she licked her lips, providing a different view of the taste organ for which he was bound. Everything about her was unquestionably and uniquely beautiful, if only he could have explored it as her normal sized boyfriend, rather than her evening meal.

After lunch, she sat with him on the couch and talked for the afternoon.

“Don’t beat yourself up about your shortcomings in the office,” she said, “I should really tell you that they haven’t had any bearing on my decision to have you for my dinner. I imagine that I’d have done it regardless, simply because I’ve never eaten a delicious little fellow before. I doubt that any other science student will ever repeat your accidental discovery, let alone end up in my apartment. So you’re my only chance to eat someone. I couldn’t let such an opportunity pass, no matter what you were like when I knew you at full size.”

“I understand,” he said.

She sat with her hands in the lap of her dress, and her palms open, with Pierre lying back on her hand, comfortably looking up at her towering beautiful face. As they both seemed to run out of things to say, they went simultaneously silent. He looked as her eyes looked up a little and out in thought. He remembered her declaration she’d made the night before, of everything she had to enjoy and her stern intent on eating him up. She seemed to be contentedly reflecting on all of those things now, without even looking down in his direction. He became more and more adjusted to the destiny which had been spread before him. In one afternoon, he did more to adjust himself to becoming a thoroughly appealing and satisfying meal for her than he had done in the best part of a year to adjust himself to becoming a tolerable co-worker in the office. Necessity caused results, and he simply had no choice but to make himself as ready as he could be for what would undoubtedly happen soon enough.

She later sat him on her shoulder for a while, and then he made his way closer to her neck, and put his arms around it and kissed it.

“Sorry if I crossed the line,” he said.

“You’re free to make the most of the afternoon,” she replied.

“It’s such an unusual situation. In a way I mean nothing to you, and in another way I mean something to you that nobody else can. I always dreamed in vain of having a dinner date with you, and now I don’t have any say in being one.”

“That you don’t,” she said pleasantly.

Time was fast running out, and he noticed the sun going down around them.

“I think now is as good a time as any to have you for dinner,” she said, and took him to the dining table and set him down on a plate.

“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” he said, once she’d taken her place at the table.

“I’m very glad you came here when you shrank. I know I haven’t been the help you’d hoped for, and I’m not going to be your girlfriend either. But if you hadn’t come here, I’d never be able to enjoy this dinner so much. I hope you can see that from my perspective,” said Margaret.

“I really can. I might as well hope you enjoy it as much as you possibly can,” said Pierre.

“I wonder if that high school graduate I met last year would have been able to say that. You’ve come a long way in less than 24 hours.”

“And now I’ve got just a little further to go.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well up to your face, into your mouth, down your throat, and into your stomach.”

She smiled.

“Rapidly maturing and pragmatic too. You’ll go far, Pierre, and now is as good a time as any to send you on your way.”

She lifted him up to her face.

“Well as you would say on your cards, love always from me.”

“I hope you have a comfortable ride,” she said, “Farewell Pierre.”

Margaret opened her mouth wide and slid him gently into it. He’d been there the previous evening, while she’d walked to her bedroom and changed. However, back then he hadn’t been so completely certain of the outcome. He remembered lying in her mouth and thinking that she had almost certainly placed him inside it in order to swallow him, and then seen a reprieve materialize when she had taken him out again in her bedroom. What little respite this had brought him had not lasted long before she had announced and later affirmed her plans to gobble him down less than a day later. This time there would be no coming out of that mouth.

He lay in her mouth, knowing that he had only as long as she chose to savour the taste of a tiny student. He remembered the first time he had laid eyes on her, how her beautiful lips had been the first aspect of her resplendence to catch his eye, and how they had so soon afterwards announced their need for him to produce the template letters. Now her requirements were entirely different, and there was no debating them from within that beautiful mouth. He thought of the lunches in the canteen with her in attendance, the centenary dinner, the cards she’d written on, the housewarming party, the trip to the movies and his farewell gathering. It was ironic that he’d never gotten this close to her on any of those occasions, but nor would he have sought to under these circumstances.

He began daydreaming of having instantly responded much better about the template letters that day, imagining that she liked him instead of her boyfriend, and picturing them both dancing arm in arm to soft music in a nightclub or on her balcony.

Then he felt inevitable movement, and was gulped suddenly into her throat.

“I still love you anyway, Margaret!” he called, and then a second gulp carried him deep down her throat, and he slid into her stomach.

“I never knew I’d be this pleased that he left the Health Fund to become a science student,” thought Margaret, as she finally sat down on the floor to finish the book she’d commenced reading the night before.