An administrator who worked in Admissions for 12 years, Amparo Gutiérrez was a familiar face to thousands who had passed through Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Monterrey, Mexico. She led a private personal life, spending most of her time alone or with her family, and making just a few friendships among her coworkers. One of them was a nurse in the campus clinic, in whom she had confided her weight loss goals a few weeks ago.

Amparo started the new year, the 35th year of her life, intending to lose at least 80 lb. It was going to be tough. But recently, she had been doing a very good job avoiding carbs and maintaining a high-protein keto diet – more meat than ever, but it seemed to work. Her 5’5” frame currently weighed 240 lb, down 10 lb from her peak weight.

Her obesity had come from a place of depression and loneliness. After she learned she was unable to bear kids, her husband divorced her, and it had been an ordeal for her to come to grips with her new reality. Cooking and eating was a coping mechanism. Colleagues commented favorably on the cakes she brought to the office, and asked what the terrific smell was as she microwaved her leftover barbecue to take lunch privately in her office. Some of them quietly wondered, however, why Amparo had so many leftovers that evidenced such large, ambitious meals when she lived alone and cooked only for herself most of the time.

Nurse Aimee Davila greeted her friend with a smile as she saw Amparo approaching in the clinic just after both of their workdays ended. They talked on the move together across the lush green campus on the way to the parking garage.

Amparo seemed concerned and could barely reciprocate the smile. “So the diet… it started to work, I was losing some weight, but I started feeling tremendous hunger. I’ve been so weak ever since yesterday! I ate a big dinner last night and it didn’t help.”

Aimee, somewhat accustomed to this level of dramatic suffering by her food-loving friend, asked Amparo basic questions to try and see if it was anything serious. Amparo wasn’t dehydrated, didn’t have a fever, had a normal blood pressure, had been having normal bowel movements, was not nauseated or vomiting, and had been eating and drinking enough. Cautious of dispensing bona fide medical advice, but without perceiving an imminent emergency, Aimee suggested that she should go see the doctor if she was concerned.

Tomorrow I will go, Amparo resolved. She didn’t want to go to the ER for this tonight, and hoped that the weakness and hunger pangs would subside.

Fast forward three hours, and they hadn’t ended. She kicked off her flats and laid down in bed without changing clothes. She had eaten a hearty dinner to no effect. Falling asleep was impossible. Amparo rubbed her temples and sighed. She was nearly ready to cry, wishing to herself a solution to her unexplained pain and weakness. She set her phone down and closed her eyes. It was 8:34pm, and she would try to rest.

Jerritt awakened sharply, on the bedside table of the enormous woman. It seemed like one second ago he had been in Gaia's illusionary classroom doing nothing. He had convinced himself while drifting around the empty classroom after Gaia’s departure that it was a dream, but the dream was now going on so long and passing through so many phases that he was starting to wonder if he truly was dead and this truly was his purgatory.

Then he looked over and saw Amparo. He recognized her face as one of the women from the classroom. She had been the one chomping bubble gum. She was the chubbiest, with massive breasts, tree-trunk thighs and a bulging gut.Of course she was going to eat him now.

Oh, fuck, he mouthed breathlessly.

The words, tinny as they were at his size, were heard by the slightly groggy woman lounging in her bed. She heard him faintly, and Jerritt had little time to flee as he saw the mocha-colored skin of her pudgy hand groping across the bedside table.

She grasped the strangely resistant intruder, and held him wordlessly over her face by his clothing, peering at him with her hazel eyes, raising and lowering eyebrows in bemusement. What was this creature? Why did it look so human? Did she have a toy that looked like a person that she had forgotten about? But it was so realistic! She was as uncertain of the reality as he was.

Amusement overtaking her, Amparo grinned widely and started to laugh, peppering Jerritt with her stale breath. “¿Quién eres tú? (Who are you?) ¿estoy soñando? (Am I sleeping?)”

Jerritt, above her, tried to plead for his life. “DON’T eat me! This is all a mistake!”

She was so startled to hear the words that her mouth flung open involuntarily, and then she tried to respond to the thing in English, at which she was passable.

“W… wow! Are you a person? Really, so small!”

“I am a person! Wait, don’t you know who I am?” Jerritt asked, swaying above her face with some sudden relief. Maybe if she forgot the rules she had received in her dream, it wouldn’t occur to her to eat him. Maybe he would be saved yet.

“I know who you are.” Amparo’s eyes narrowed and she suddenly looked very mischievous and thoughtful. She put a finger beside her lip and pulled downward on it, exposing her lower teeth, and causing a popping sound as the lip snapped back into place.

“You’re a dream. I don’t know why I dream of a tiny, cute boy, but I only have one use of you now. You see, I am so hungry. So very hungry!”

Jerritt gulped. He started to get the same feeling of blood-curdling fear and desperation that he recalled experiencing before he had plunged to his death on the bridge. This was real, not a dream.

“So you are here to feed me. Maybe I can at least feel full in my dreams.”

“But I don’t want to be eaten!” Jerritt said. “Please don’t, I am a person!”

Amparo’s face twisted into fake concern. “Awwww my little sweet! You not a person, you’re my food! It is my dream, and I know no people are your size! So I say you get to be my food!”

Her fingers parted. Jerritt floated in air, feeling a few seconds of gravity pulling him to his doom. Her eyes disappeared from his vision. The dark red tongue shot towards him as her full lips, clad in faded maroon lipstick, passed beyond his vision. The light receded.

He hit the tongue with a splash, its moist fleshiness softening the impact, but the rough texture of the taste buds leaving his skin raw from the impact as though he had landed on a bed of pickles. The woman’s powerful mouth organ swished him around, and he heard her moan in pleasure. It was not quite an orgasmic sound, but the sound of a person deeply enjoying their favorite food. Hot, thick, stale-smelling saliva was forced all around him. He pinched his nose, slippery with moisture, squeezed his eyes and mouth shut, but as she swirled him around, his arms were forcibly separated from his nose which he could not force shut. She started to suck his body with tremendous force, causing painful pressure in his ears, and her spit promptly wicked up his nostrils and caused an agonizing burn in his sinuses. He was stewing in her mouth while she sucked him like a hard candy.

There was no air to breathe, and he was starting to taste her musky, sour saliva as it coated the inside of his nasal cavity and throat. It tasted faintly of her last meal, something with meat and potatoes.

Jerritt knew he could hold his breath for at least 3 minutes, from when he swam as a kid and timed such things. Unless his vaping habit had cut down on his ability to store oxygen somehow. But, pausing to remember the mantra that he had heard, that calm people survive and panicked people die, he tried to hold out. Maybe she would let him go and stop before he gave out. It was his only hope. But another full minute passed as he lay there motionless. The woman kept playfully sucking him, seemingly energized by his passivity and wishing to demand his response. She wasn’t releasing the pressure but was ramping it up. His ears were bleeding now, and he could feel the air being sucked fully out of his lungs and his diaphragm was powerless to resist the external pressure.

Finally the pressure released and he instinctively inhaled, but there was still no air. His mouth, throat and lungs were inundated with her spit. He lost all ability to stay calm and start to flail about realizing he was truly drowning and there was nothing he could do.

Amparo savored the treat. She was in a stupor that she thought was a dream, motivated by the hunger she still felt, and the tremendous satisfaction that eating this little creature had brought her.

Jerritt’s consciousness began to fail. His life systems were shutting down, he started to see a hazy white sheen creep over his vision in the darkness of the woman’s mouth. He knew he was dying, that it was for real this time, and he wished profoundly to be saved by God and cast into Heaven.

Jerritt drowned, mouthing the word “mommy” as he slipped away from the world.

At that moment, Amparo tilted her head back and swallowed the now-lifeless boy. She found him surprisingly, inexplicably delicious, and her hunger was rapidly mitigated as her stomach accepted his body with a thankful groan. It was an amazing, delightful feeling. She was so satisfied and thrilled; the initial stages of digestion seemed to give her tremendous energy. This was the moment to dance, she just felt so good!

On standing, she promptly stepped on a hair pin she had mistakenly left on the floor. Yeeeeouch! She exclaimed with fury. But she didn’t wake up.

Pain, like this? Sharp pain in a specific part of the body? In a dream? Was it possible? Was she actually dreaming at all? It was so much more vivid than any dream before.

As Amparo sat back down on the bed, she heard a faint buzzing sound that repeated. Brrzzzzzz. Brrzzzzzz. Brrzzzzzz.

Ah, it was her phone vibrating on the bedside table. She picked it up and noticed that the time was only 8:39pm.

Wait, what? If she had been asleep, she would have been out for less than 5 minutes from when she had last looked at the clock. She thought to herself, “That is not a normal amount of time to sleep and dream in, it takes longer than this.”

But as the phone stopped vibrating, it started again. She accepted the call.

“Hello?”

“Hi it’s me Aimee. How are you feeling Amparo?”

Amparo’s face fell and her dancing impulse left. This was not a dream. The details, the pain, the friend calling in a way entirely realistic with her day. It couldn’t be. She had not been dreaming; she had literally eaten some small, living thing which spoke English. But nobody would believe her. This was some evil curse placed on her.

Amparo could barely speak to her friend over the phone. After assuring her that she was now feeling fine, that she must have been sick with something minor, Amparo hung up the phone.

She had not only killed the living thing, she had drowned it in her mouth. It must have been so frightening and awful for it. She started to feel shame and unease from her actions, and she sat up to pray at the foot of her bed.

Oh God, if I do still dream, please awaken me and forgive me for my primordial instinct to kill for food. I don’t want to hurt any person, I just wanted to be full. If I am awake, please make clear to me your lesson, I am so confused how a person could be so tiny. If I have killed a person, please forgive me, I did not know what it was I had done.”

Amparo, hobbling unsteadily from her tender foot pierced by the pin, went to the bathroom, and forced herself to vomit into the toilet. An angry orange stream of acidic liquid belched out of her gullet, leaving behind mostly liquid and some food particulate. The boy was almost an inch long, had been reasonably big to swallow, so he should be visible among the other undigested detritus.

There it was. The nervous woman saw a lifeless, slightly bloody corpse floating in her toilet bowl, about the size of a Lego figurine. It had certainly been real.

Her hunger was also real. It was now back strongly. It was painfully back – she felt as though her stomach had kicked her internal organs in every direction, demanding more sustenance.

“Aghhhh free me from this stomach pain! God!” Amparo cried. It was the worst pain yet.

She felt the strangest, most repulsive impulse to grab the corpse and swallow it again. It was as though part of her was possessed. The unpossessed part of her stuck out her tongue and yelled “Ewwwgh!” as her hand forced him into her mouth again.

Pushing him straight down her throat, ignoring the cloying acrid taste of the vomit soaking her snack, she swallowed the boy for a second time. And a second time, the hunger disappeared.

Amparo soberly realized that this little creature was the only thing that could make her feel good and full. She had to hope it wasn’t a real human and that she wasn’t damning her soul for this, because she knew that if she saw another creature like it, she was damn well going to eat him. Yes, she would. The pleasure gotten, the relief garnered, was so acute that she could not pass it up. Her newfound fullness was so pleasant that she was able to fall asleep soundly, unvexed by any more thought of the possibility of humanity in the creature she had killed and eaten.

Jerritt woke up with a start, as though he had been in a dream where he was falling. He was back in the weird classroom setting he had seen earlier but he was again alone, sitting at one of the desks.

Time to do some checks on the breadcrumbs he'd left behind.

Interestingly, the books he had taken off the shelf remained as he left them on the desk surface. Including the intricate paper airplanes he had made. Jerritt had had hours, perhaps as much as a day, to sit alone in this classroom after Gaia departed. Then there was the whiteboard. He made marks of sufficient detail and randomness in five different marker colors, that he would prove to himself that it was not a dream if he uncovered them later.

And there they were. All the marks, in all their strange glory. This was no dream. He actually was dying and going back to this place each time.

Jerritt staggered with the weight of this realization. This had been his second death. He really had drowned. The pain and desperation and realness of it – he would feel the weight of mortality over and over again. Would the panic and fear that he felt from his primordial soul ever stop happening in these perceived final moments? Would he be able to act upon the knowledge that it wasn’t truly over, that he was going to be resurrected to be eaten again, or would it feel this terrible each and every time?

And how long would he be here? He got absolutely nowhere convincing the first woman to so much as pause and hear him out before he was eaten. Would he be here for the rest of their lives, until all the women had died? Would he be here forever- was this Hell?

Would his memories of his real life fade and be replaced with memories of this classroom and the countless number of times he was going to see the inside of their stomachs?

For whatever comfort it offered, it seemed that this classroom, this illusion of whatever kind it was, had an ongoing and consistent role. This was the place of Purgatory, the concourse where he would reside alone with his own thoughts until he was called next.

And he knew he would be called. If this woman was the first to become unbearably hungry, the others couldn’t be far behind. With so much of Gaia's words proven already, he had no choice but to believe her seriousness when she had stated that he would be selected to be eaten at their beck and call.

At least he had a surfeit of books to read while waiting. The shelves in the room were stuffed with volumes on art, history, science, languages, and philosophy.

Jerritt suddenly became very tired and laid down on the desk to sleep again… it seemed like his time was already up. Time to be a piece of meat again.