The five-foot tall girl hissed with the fury of a cobra, and angrily slammed shut the door to her near-palatial bedroom. She was seething. Why couldn't they do anything about it?

None of the doctors could do anything for her. They were accusing her of being melodramatic! How dare they!

The Yifan household, under its industrialist patriarch, was not short of resources for medical care. Xie, 23 years old, was very accustomed to having whatever she thought was desirable, often almost before she could even express it. Her father intentionally immunized her against hard work and fair play and cultivated her loyalty and ruthlessness to take a prominent place in his organization. In the meantime, he showed endless patience and largely made certain of her happiness through whatever material ends were required.

But today had proven that wealth was not capable of fixing the pain she felt in her stomach. When she begged the pain to disappear, in the presence of a doctor it did, for all practical purposes - there was no abnormal reading or measurement they could find anywhere in her body. She was a fit, athletic, hardy young woman who was rarely sick. She had spent the past sixteen hours at the hospital, cycling through tests and panels and demanding that the results be hastened to her while her father hung on her every suggestion, and showed the greatest deference to whichever doctor could come up with the more outlandish theory for why she felt this pain.

Spending money was requisite to Mr. Yifan. He was firmly convinced that the staff were simply not thinking hard enough and needed the right incentive. They were told enticingly that a check for a "research grant" was waiting for the one who could heal her. The doctors came in waves, eager to question her and find out what the problem was. An administrator was bribed into text-spamming dozens of doctors off duty to come in if they had even the faintest idea. Xie saw almost every tangentially-related specialist, and ultimately the hospital staff was at a loss. They offered to keep her in the hospital for as long as she wanted in case some of the symptoms would manifest. But Xie was not content with that vague promise, and demanded that they come up with a plan of care for her right now.

Starting to lose hope, the administrator called in a psychiatrist quietly. Xie bristled and screamed for the man to be withdrawn, that this was decidedly not in her head.

Several of the frustrated attendings in the room at that point were convinced it was completely in her head for a different reason. To them, this was some elaborate, cruel prank that had distracted them from the care of others. A sociopathic experiment, where this petty and egotistical millionaire tried to convince his daughter that nothing was shameful anymore, nothing too low.

But Xie's pain was real, and it was unlike anything she had experienced before. She was desperate for something to feed herself with that would sate the urgency. The desperation grew. She started to cry alone, making her way to the bed. Hot, heavy tears of desperation that she was going to die of an unknown and unprovable condition.

She knew that her wailing would be perfectly contained in her cavernous room. Nobody would bother her when she shut that door, not even daddy.
It was therefore a heart-stopping surprise to feel a small, humanoid presence falling onto her lap.



Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Jerritt screamed ineffectually as he tumbled from the solid floor of the fake classroom at an indefinite point in space to Earth. It seemed like miles. He had fallen through the blue and white of the sky, through the hull of an airliner, seen the globe grow larger, and the continent of Asia come into focus in front of him. Still falling into a gaudy mansion in Shanghai, passing through the roof as if it had been a fluffy stratocumulus cloud, finally landing on the creamy bare thigh of a young Chinese woman wearing shorts sitting barefoot on the edge of her bed.

He looked up at her face. It was red and puffy. Her long black hair fell roughly across her shoulders and face. She looked genuinely distraught and he didn't know what he was supposed to say. Did she also intend to eat him? How would he talk to her - did she know English?

Xie immediately stopped crying and tilted her head in rapt curiosity. What was this thing? She looked around, and up. There were no holes in the ceiling, no open windows, no open doors - how had this small human doll landed on her lap?

"Ni hao....." Jerritt said finally. That had exhausted his Mandarin already.
To his surprise the girl's sad face twisted into a smile and she giggled. Her high-pitched voice was slightly grating. He couldn't tell if she was more amused that he had spoken at all, or that he had done so in the local language with a Texas accent.
She started to talk to him with great familiarity, and he couldn't understand her at all.
"Wait, wait, what are you saying? I don't actually know Chinese, sorry."

Xie's smile disappeared. She shook her head showing confusion. Jerritt's fear increased as he realized that either she didn't understand him at all, or couldn't respond in English.
How long would it take her to figure out he was food? As the girl paused to think, and absentmindedly pulled down her lower lip with her finger, he could see into her mouth. Her teeth were pearly white and straight as a supermodel's. It was a glimpse into his near-term fate.

The hand came for him. She grabbed him uncaringly like a doll. He felt the soft, clammy skin of her hand grip his torso as he faced her enormous visage. She pointed at him, and grabbing her phone, pointed to a picture of the human body. She pointed at the stomach, pointed at her stomach, and made a moaning sound as to indicate pain.
"Yes I understand that you are hungry, but really I don't have anything to do with this...."
"Hung-ry!" She said with satisfaction. She rapidly continued talking to him, making intonations as if asking questions and then answering them herself.

Finally she decided what to do with him. Maybe she had worked out that he was a small robot and not a living creature, or she was thinking she was dreaming, or this was some superstitious response. But she suddenly opened her mouth and held him out over it.

He saw her petite pink tongue snaking about, the mouth wet with anticipation. He could smell no odor nor see any evidence of a recent meal in her teeth. Here we go again, he thought.... was he going to drown in there? Readying for a third death, all he could think to himself was, at least she's my age and hot. And her breath smells good, at least. But it was such a lame distraction when faced with imminent death. His heart was pounding again. Nothing can prepare you for the sure knowledge that you're going to die, and for no good reason, with no end in sight to follow.

"ahhhh.... " Xie said as she dangled the boy over her mouth, finally letting him go.
To Jerritt's horror, she did not pause to suck on him and while he did wrestle briefly with her tongue, she was just trying to position him between her teeth and hold him in place to be squeezed. She was fully intending to chew him up, bones and all, as though he were a sardine. Then the teeth came down. First on his left side, crushing some of his ribs and severing his left arm and leg messily. Jerritt closed his eyes and screamed in agony. This was a million times worse than drowning. He felt the angle of his body tilt slightly. She was brushing him playfully with her tongue so his head was in direct contact with her biggest molar. The pressure built up and he felt his nose break, his cheekbones start to shatter, and finally his skull was squelched by the great force of her jaw like a grape. With his brain crushed, his earthly senses disappeared, and his last image was of pure white.

Xie tasted a hemoglobin-drenched cascade of warmth swirl around as her teeth crunched into the flesh and bones of the small creature, spurting his blood to coat the inside of her mouth while she could barely hear the cries within. She imagined that this was some strange gift, maybe the drugs she had tried to take earlier were giving her hallucinations, but she had been overcome with the desire to cure her hunger by eating this thing. She wanted to eat it completely, crunch its bones into dust and take it out of existence. Cute little things did not please her now, but the intoxicating power of overcoming her hunger did.

And the flavor was mangificent to her. Jerritt's blood coated her mouth like a decadent syrup, and the meaty, silky texture of his body felt like high-grade Waygu beef between her perfect molars. She heard the cries fall silent after the second big crunch, and he had clearly died by that point, but she kept chewing and gnawed the internal organs as though they were tapioca balls. She continue to pulverize his corpse, and swallowed it in one gulp when it had been adequately masticated. The boy's remains went into her stomach, then full of watery, mostly-digested chicken and rice.

She suddenly felt the pain vanishing. She felt so good. What was happening? It was like the whole condition instantly disappeared. No evidence of her suffering in the medical records, no pain currently - what had happened to her?
Daddy wouldn't care. He just wanted her feeling good. He would believe her if she had told him that she had eaten a small man and it had made her feel better. And for good measure, he probably would have fed her shrunken dudes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Starting with his business rivals. She snorted and wondered if she could eat her little sister's boyfriend Yupu. He was such a jerk.

But of course the thing she ate wasn't a real person. It looked like a little human but it couldn't be. Weird genetic experiment maybe. But surely there was nothing wrong with eating them, whatever they were. And if she needed to find sub-humans to eat for sustenance, why should she feel guilty?

But it was still really weird. How would she explain this to her mom and boyfriend? She was going to have to fake it for a little while longer and come up with an excuse for her recovery that made some kind of sense.

Exhausted and satisfied, Xie laid down and fell asleep as she digested the mortal remains of Jerritt.