He knew he could never confide such an unusual daydream to her, but he found himself thinking of it so often during classes, as he looked at her. It became the focus of his goals and dreams. He kept trying to think of ways to bring it about. He no longer wanted to be eaten as a salad. Somehow, he wanted her to eat him as himself. Yet he knew that such a thing, although possible, would hurt him physically. So even his thought processes would come up against this dead end of illogical yearnings.

One day he was fortunate enough to be eating cream buns with Mrs Parkin after lunch. She bit enthusiastically into hers, and left large quantities of cream on her lips and chin. He watched her tongue circling about her mouth, licking her lips, but soon saw that it could not reach the cream, which she still felt sticking to her cheek. How he found the courage to act, he would never know, but Pixi saw his chance. He reached out and scooped the cream off her cheek with his finger and said, “You can use my finger as a spoon.”

“You’re a thoughtful boy,” she said, and opened her mouth.

Pixi now had the chance to place his finger in her mouth and feel her tongue sucking the cream off. He turned his finger to the side as he withdrew it, so that the clean part of his finger would benefit from sliding against her tongue on its way out of her mouth. He had finally touched her tongue, and she thought he had done it as an act of politeness!

He could still feel the touch of her tongue in his mind that night in bed. How he longed for more of it.

A few days later, Mrs Parkin taught him a little about the theatre and explained that most conventional schools gave their students a chance to act in school plays. She told him of the process of building the props and sets and designating a stage upon which to perform it.

“This room would be a good enough stage for you and I to practice acting in a play,” she said.

She went on to ask him if there was any story he could think of that he would like to act out with her. He couldn’t think of one on the spot.

“Maybe you can tell me tomorrow,” she said, “We’ll go onto some mathematics for now.”

That night he went to bed again and began what had become a nightly habit of playing out the story of the Three Little Pixies in his mind, imagining himself as one of the first two and Mrs Parkin as the Big Bad Woman pulling his house apart and snatching him up and eating him.

Why hadn’t he thought of it before, earlier in the day? He knew exactly what to do now. The next day he took the book to lessons and showed her the story.

“I would like to act out this one,” said Pixi, and added as an excuse, “My name is like Pixie.”

“And you have a very clever brain,” said Mrs Parkin, “I might call you the Brainy Pixie sometimes, from now on, “Which Pixi would you like to play?”

“I could be all of them,” he said.

“Could you remember all their lines?” she asked.

“They’re mostly the same, and I’ve read the story lots of times.”

“Well the obvious role for a lady or governess to play would be the Big Bad Woman,” said Mrs Parkin, “So we’ll make the props together, and then learn our lines and act out the play.”

Pixi was overjoyed. Without sharing his embarrassing and unusual secret, he had used his governess’s own frame of reference to set the scene for having her act out his fantasy with him.