She took out a photo album and sat on the couch, placing him on her chest to look down at the album while she turned the pages.

“Pick out any you like and I’ll leave them on the floor for you,” she said.

He chose three pictures, and she slid them out of the transparent sleeves in the album and placed them on the floor, and set him down gently too.

“I’ll be going now, but I’ll see you for lunch, darling,” she said.

“See you too, my love,” said Kenneth.

She walked out and locked the front door. He walked over and saw that there was no room to squeeze under it, and looked around the room. He could see no way out, and ran through the house, scrutinizing all of the downstairs rooms for possible exits. It was a lot of time consuming exercise for a shrunken boy. Finding no openings in other rooms, he returned to the lounge room. If he could make her think that he had escaped, she might eventually leave him a chance to slip out the front door, or even be carried out in her bag without her knowing, and get away from her when she put it down somewhere at one of her future destinations. There seemed to be a ventilation opening just beside the curtain rod.

He looked at the clock. It was 10:45. He began to climb the closed curtain, looking out of the window at the scenery as he did so. It was still overcast and would have made for a very romantic scene with Colleen, if she had planned to eat him a day or two later. He was almost at the top, when he saw Colleen running up the hill towards the house, with a significant look of urgency in her steps.

She wasn’t supposed to return for over an hour, he thought. He had to make it to the ventilation opening before she reached the lounge room. It might even lead out of the house, although getting down from that height on the outside would be problematic at best.

He staggered onto the curtain rod and ran along it to the end, and reached the grid, just as he heard her footsteps outside the front door. Kenneth jumped into the ventilation opening and saw that it only went in a few inches and seemed to have no opening at the other side. It had either been filled in since Colleen bought the house or had only been there for show.

Kenneth sat down and looked out as Colleen came into the room.

“I realised while I was out, that you called me Colleen, when you asked for the photos,” she said, “I never told you my name, and if you knew that, it could only have been from hearing me talking with my friend on some other occasion. I think that you might have overheard me talking about my dining interests in leprechauns too. Not so keen to be eaten as you represented yourself to be, are you?”