“It was worth a try,” he said.

“Now let’s look at your poetic outline of what’s next,” said Colleen, and read the latter verses again, “… Very well put. I think I can do all that.”

She put out her tongue right in front of him. It extended right to his feet. She licked his shoulders and face slowly, and drew her tongue into her mouth slowly, so that he could look at it.

Then she repeated the licking process this way for a few minutes.

Then she swished the sides of her tongue against his face in turn.

“How’s that so far?” she asked.

“This part of it’s fantastic!” he admitted.

“See, it’s worth making the most of it, like I said.”

Again and again her incredible taste buds slid over him. It was surreal to think that he was in the process of actually being eaten, and yet that the early steps were all beautiful and thrilling beyond his wildest dreams. The final certainty of his fate seemed to have the strange side effect of removing all his anxieties. As there was nothing to be done, there was no need to stress. He wondered if, given the chance, he would have traded the previous night’s romantic experiences for an absence of his current situation, and was still trying to decide this academic consideration, when she spoke again.

“Alright, I’m going to put you into my mouth now. I’ll give you plenty of time on my tongue, before I draw you into my throat, and then you can make your attempt to stay there, before I overpower you with a final deep gulp, just like it says in your brilliant poem. I’m going to keep that and treasure it forever.”

“I always wanted to win a girl over with a poem,” he said, “Now I have.”

“You won me over, when you offered to help me yesterday. The poem is just icing on the candy man. Do you have anything you’d like to say before I pop you in?”

“I was thinking, while you were licking me, trying to work out if not having met you in the first place would have been better. I still couldn’t decide until now. But I actually prefer the way it turned out, except that I wish I’d had all these licks before we did our flower bed chase, and then managed to get away after that?”

“What would you have done if you had? Nobody else could restore your size.”

“So the machine does reverse the process.”

“Yes, but that’s just hypothetical, since you know I never will.”

“I guess I’m ready to go in then.”

She kissed him goodbye, and slid him across her lower lip and into her mouth, left it open for a while, and laughed from down in her throat, as she felt him sliding around to face the front of her mouth. He lay on her tongue, saw her mouth close, and lay there in comfort in the darkness, until he felt her draw him into her throat.

He pushed himself into a sideways position that gave him less room, and stayed in her throat and wondered if it was good enough to resist the gulping pressure that would soon come.

Then she suddenly gulped so powerfully that all of his efforts were as nothing at all, and drew him down, down, down, into her tummy.

Colleen stood up folded the rug, packed it away in the basket, carried everything home, had a shower, climbed into bed with no food, and read his poem again, before lying down to start enjoying pleasant dreams about the day’s events.