“Different… clothes?” the twelve-inch Scott mumbled hesitantly from Judy’s lovingly cradled arms as she marched smoothly through the hallway.

            “That’s right.  I don’t want you getting these ones all dirtied up for what you’re doing next,” his mother responded with a friendly smile.  She pursed her lips and flinched in the silence that followed, though Scott couldn’t tell why.

            When they arrived in her bedroom, Scott found himself deposited gently onto the neatly folded bedspread of the king mattress that stretched before him like an oversized flower-motif moon bounce.  Judy continued to loom above him, though she leaned her knee against the edge of the bed for balance.

            “So…” Scott began again, not sure whether or not he wanted the answer to the question of what his mother was so concerned about dirtying his clothes.

            “I was going to give you another bath before we did this, but I know you gave yourself one this morning, and, well… this is starting to sting too much, so I’d rather just go ahead.  Did you clean yourself well?” Judy asked, jamming an index finger between her lips and poking at a spot somewhere along her inner cheek.  She flinched again at the contact and withdrew her finger.

            “I… yeah, yeah I did,” Scott reassured truthfully.  He always made a point to wash himself a thorough three times whenever he was given the chance to bathe on his own, with the hope that it would eventually convince his mother he didn’t need the help.  Of course, it had yet to make much difference.

            “You smelled fine to me.  I think we’re okay to go ahead,” Judy said with a nod.

            “Okay to go ahead for what?” Scott pleaded, growing more nervous by the second.

            “You’ll see.  Don’t be nervous, honey.  Now, I am going to need you to take your clothes off so you can fit into this,” she soothed in a honeyed voice as she lifted a folded piece of what looked like thin rubber off the top of her dresser.  Undoing the folds with a few tugs from her fingers, Judy revealed what looked like a black padded wetsuit, just the right size for someone of Scott’s stature.

            “I… um, wait, I just…” Scott uttered with a befuddled frown at the sight of the scuba attire.

            “Scott?”

            “Mom, it’s just…”

            “C’mon.  Clothes off now,” Judy instructed, still with the same uncharacteristic kindness in her words she’d so recently adopted, but with the familiar imperiousness returning.

            Realizing this was in no way up for even the most meager of debates, Scott closed his eyes and whipped his shirt, pants, and underwear off and stepped out of them atop his mother’s bedspread before he even had a chance to feel embarrassed.  Still with his eyes closed, he held his arm out and accepted the wetsuit as Judy draped it over his hand.  Even without looking up, he could tell Judy hadn't made any attempt to avert her gaze from his exposed form.

            It was something of an awkward struggle getting into it, but Scott managed it as quickly as possible to minimize his time spent exposed.  When he’d finished garbing himself in the black scuba attire, he sealed the back and patted down a couple of times to smooth out the wrinkles before finally opening his eyes to find his mother now crouching over the bed, her forearms resting about a foot away from where he stood.

            There was an eerie quietude as Judy stoically propped her chin on her arms and observed her son in his rubber outfit before she opened her lips and exhaled dramatically.  She spoke in a lowered and relaxed tone as though conversing with a trauma victim.  Ironically, she wasn’t far off from doing just that.

            “W-What’s happening?” Scott mustered.

            “Honey, the other day… with the syrup on your arm, when I… helped clean you off?”

            “Yeah?”

            “I… well, I didn’t just do it to be funny.  I did it because I just wanted you to know what it felt like, so you’d have the chance to get used to it.”

            “Get used to what?”

            “My mouth,” Judy simpered casually, instinctively running the tip of her tongue over her lower lip.

            “Your m-m… W-Why?”

            “So you wouldn’t be scared when I put… all of you.  Inside,” Judy declared tenderly, widening her jaws to give her foot-tall son a better view, which, from the conversation, made the confused and terrified young man unable to keep from gazing into it.

            Dark, glistening, and spongy, the interior of Judy’s mouth positively radiated muggy heat and the secondhand scent of tangerines from breakfast, though this was a small comfort to Scott in the face of so much darkness and visibly trickling moisture.

            “In… side…” Scott gaped hollowly, unable to tear his vision from the horrifying inner sanctum of his mother’s jowls.  Even at his maximum size, he knew he could fit his entire head between them without Judy even needing to fully open.

            This couldn’t be what it was starting to look like.  It couldn’t be.  It had to be a disgusting practical joke.  A new scare tactic on his mother’s part.  She had plenty of those up her sleeves.  Every other week she came up with something new to toss him an emotional curveball.  Why couldn’t this be one too?

            At his diminished size, his mother had only ever allowed herself and her younger children to handle Scott in their hands and feet with reasonable caution.

            But this?  This was something wild and new and acidic in the pit of his stomach.

            Her mouth.

            His mother’s mouth.

            She was going to put him.  Into.  Her mouth.

            “That’s right, honey,” Judy reassured warmly with a steady nod of her head, at long last closing her lips again.  “Don’t be nervous.  It’s nothing to be worried about.

            “W-W-Why… why would y-you…”

            “My back molar,” she answered simply with a grimace.  “It’s got a huge ache, the dentist is booked up until next week, and what with the party coming up soon… well…”

            “So what am I supposed to do, though?” Scott wheezed breathlessly, steadily making his way into a muted panic mode.

            “This medicated balm I picked up is supposed to help.  I only need a bit, but it has to be worked into the tooth to do any good.  It has to be done for several minutes continuously, and my brush and my fingers just sting too much.  It’s very sensitive right now,” Judy explained as logically as possible, brushing a hand through her blonde tresses.  “So I need a gentler touch to make it work.”

            “H-H-How would I f-fit?” Scott gasped desperately, knowing full well how foolish his question was as each word fumbled its way between his lips.

            “You’re so silly sometimes, honey,” Judy snickered adoringly.  “I’ll have to make you smaller first.”

            “How… m-much sm-”

            “An inch, of course.”

            Scott’s stomach began churning so hard at this point he was almost sure it was going to back up.  It was making him work up a sweat just gazing into his mother’s mouth at his maximum height.  But he wasn’t going in like that.

            He was going in at a twelfth of that.

            He was going in at the size of a popcorn cluster.

            His mother was going to make him crawl atop the slimy red carpet of her tongue and perform a delicate massaging procedure on the tooth in the furthest reach of her warm cavern as he could go without tripping down her gullet.

            “Mom,” Scott swallowed, fighting back the quaver of oncoming dry sobbing in his throat.  “I’m… I’m not r-ready for this.  I’m not.”

            “Don’t be like that, honey.  I have all the faith in the world in you,” Judy insisted as she rose back from her haunches to her full height, whereupon she made her way back to the dresser to retrieve a small bottle half the size of a toothpaste tube, which she pocketed.

            “It’s just… I d-don’t know if I’m, like… qualified to-”

            “You’re scared,” Judy commented bluntly as she returned to the bedside and leaned back over it in the same manner, this time close enough that her face was a mere six inches away from the seated form of her dumbfounded oldest offspring.  “And that’s okay.  I get it.  I know you don’t want to do it.”

            “P-Please, Mom,” Scott whimpered, feeling at his lowliest but no longer caring due to the impending episode he could see threatening to literally swallow up any sense of security he’d have for the remainder of the month at least.  “Please don’t…”

            “Scott,” Judy repeated calmly, extending a hand gently toward her son and lightly gripping his rubber-clad hand between her fingertips as though to comfort him.  “Just think about it for a second.  It’s really not a big deal.  I got you this suit so you wouldn’t even feel it on most of your body.  Except your, well…”

            “My head,” he gulped, now unable to keep back a few tremors running through his limbs at Judy’s contact.

            “Don’t shake, honey.  It’s okay.  Mommy’s got you.  I’m going to help you get used to it first.  Now just hold still for me,” the woman instructed sweetly with the friendliest smile she could possibly muster, a twinkle in her eye as she leaned her head in even closer toward her cowering son.

            “Get used to…” Scott peeped, but felt his words quickly shriveling in his throat as he watched his mother’s lips unfurling again and the shining visage of her muscular tongue emerging in a fresh coat of saliva, proceeding toward his face without any hesitation.

            Judy wasn’t exaggerating about her intent to acclimate Scott to the sensation of being her in mouth.  At first, she only licked along his face with the tip of her tongue, giving him a chance to get used to the rubbery texture of the muscle and the ridged surface of taste buds.  Scott tried to lean back instinctively to avoid the moist onslaught, but quickly found his mother’s right hand behind his back cupping him closer toward her mouth.

            She quickly moved on to more aggressive slurps that introduced him to the sides of her tongue as they massaged under his chin, along his ears, and the top of his head.  Soon she was fully lapping his face with deeper caresses of her sopping pink organ, again and again until the frothy gloss glistened between every hair and on each cheek.

            A low groan of satisfaction gurgled from the back of the forty-four-year-old’s throat as she molded her son’s face into the deepest valley of her tongue without activating her gag reflex before finally retracting it back between her lips in a mist of spittle.

            “Feeling all right, honey?” Judy questioned with quiet concern as she wiped the back of her wrist across her damp lips.

            “M-M-M…” Scott chimed under his breath, mouth agape in shock, as he fought to exhale the stray drops of his mother’s gooey saliva that had made their way into his nostrils.

            “I know you can handle it.  It’s only for a few minutes, and now that you know what it’ll feel like… I think you’ll be fine.  In fact, it’ll be easier than that, because all you have to do is climb back to my molar,” Judy said glowingly as she rose from the bed, leaving Scott to flop backwards onto his back in a prone state of defeated terror while her saliva congealed on his face.

            “Uh…”

            “No more excuses, honey,” the woman snapped sweetly as she returned to the bedspread with the PMRD already partially out of its case.  She had it booting up and set to the correct settings in under ten seconds, and an instant afterward was crouching above her sprawled son on the bed like a cat over wounded prey, aiming the barrel of the device at him and his suit to shrink them in tandem before squeezing the trigger.  “Just be the brave little boy I know you are.”

            Perhaps experiencing what was the least brave moment of his entire life, Scott trembled from his feet to his neck as he blinked in the familiar green flash and rode out the ripple of telltale ice cold under his skin.

            He couldn’t even summon the courage to open his mouth in dread as he reduced into the landscape of the bed and watched as his mother’s now-colossal outstretched fingers delicately advanced on his inch-tall body to pluck him up like a dropped crumb, swallowing him up in their mere shadow.