“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.