Scott had to admit to himself, at least, that his mother was creative.  He had thought that after eight years of on-and-off shrinking and being held in the palm of someone’s hand at the height of half a thumb that he was slowly but surely building up an immunity to fear.

            By the time he was eighteen, his greatest concern at suddenly being zapped down to a size more suitable to snuggle between someone’s toes was the sheer embarrassment of it rather than the physical risk.  He wasn’t sure if it was just apathy, or at least the assumption that the women in his life had had enough practice at it to reliably not splatter him while standing on top of him, but regardless, after so long, he’d managed to build up a shell.

            As his mother now pinched him gingerly between her thumb and index finger like a Sour Patch Kid mere inches from her gently parted lips, preparing to insert him into the blackness and heat atop her slithering tongue, he realized that shell of false confidence was about to be cracked asunder in a single instant.

            In this moment, as he gazed as far as he could into the moist darkness he was about to find himself immersed in between Judy’s cheeks, he realized he wasn’t the same headstrong twenty-one-year-old with a penchant for play over work and a tendency to ignore authority.  He was that same thirteen-year-old who first watched himself reducing into a pile of clothes and witnessing his mother becoming a statuesque goddess before him by default.

            He was truly afraid.  And it hurt.

            Scott had had a number of bad dreams about what could happen when he shrunk, and they had exponentially increased during his house arrest, but none unsettled him quite like the recurring one where he found himself being placed into his mother’s mouth, either on accident or, perhaps even worse, with Judy’s full intention and a smile on her face.

            It was sobering like nothing else, believing that the woman that had given birth to him and raised him was so willing to stick him atop her writhing tongue and swallow him for sustenance, but they had always just been nightmares that left him with nothing more than a cold sweat and heaving breathing when he awoke.

            But not this time.

            “It’s only for a few minutes, honey.  Then I’ll get you right out and we’ll wash you off,” Judy reassured calmly, careful not to speak too quickly as she exhaled warm gusts onto her tiny son perched between the soft pads of her fingers.  All Scott could do was shiver and try not to look down at the hopelessly winding drop below him to avoid nausea.  “And… I know you don’t like it when I say things like this, but, well… you’re just as cute as a button right now.”

            “Uh-huh,” he mumbled under his breath, too low even for Judy to hear.

            “Hold out your hands now,” she said at length, biting the side of her lip gently in thought.  This sight alone was enough to make Scott wince for reasons he couldn’t understand.

            Blinking away a few anxious tears that had pooled in his eyes, he looked down just enough to see Judy’s free hand rising into view below him, a glob of the cream dabbed onto her extended pointer finger, which stopped just short of Scott’s face.  Hesitant to take some for fear of speeding up this process more than necessary, he scooped some of the translucent goop into his hands.

            “Good boy,” Judy commented.

            It was thick between his fingers, like partially hardened Jell-O, and it was easy enough to hang onto.  The smell was unpleasant and reminded Scott of nontoxic glue, but he suspected this scent would soon be radically overpowered by a hot haze of leftover citrus fruit and cool mint toothpaste once he was inside his final destination.

            “Now,” the titanic woman sighed.  “The molar on the right side of my mouth, the furthest one in the back.  You should be able to find it pretty easily, and I’ll keep my mouth open as long as I can.”

            “As long… as you can?” squeaked Scott, rattled into coherence briefly.

            “Well, yes.  It’s probably going to get sore after a couple minutes of just holding open,” Judy explained logically, clearly not at all bothered by her son’s concerns.  “Don’t worry, I’ll wait until you’ve found the tooth and gotten the hang of it before I close my lips.  You’ll be able to do it with your eyes shut anyway.”

            “That’s the plan,” gulped Scott.

            “Don’t be nervous.  Besides, once you’ve done this the first time, it’ll get so much easier afterward.  Now just hold still for me, honey.”

            Once?  Afterward?  First time?

            Scott resolved to quickly put this startling utterance of Judy’s out of his mind in the interest of not giving into the nausea from the combination of everything happening around him and instead took a deep, barely-calming inhalation.

            Judy’s pink lips parted the rest of the way until the cavernous sanctum of her jaws was fully illuminated.  Her teeth, freshly polished and perfectly straight, glistened in the light of the bedroom.  The tongue wriggled at its full revelation, the taste buds visibly undulating with anticipation of their newest acquisition, though the whole monster quickly settled down into the base of Judy’s mouth to receive.  Her uvula, bulbous and gleaming with saliva, danced in the rush of hot air.  A low rumble emanated from the back of Judy’s throat and eventually climbed to a higher pitch.

            “Ahhhh…” the woman droned as though at a doctor’s appointment as her fingers finally drew closer to her lips, taking their time in order to get Scott as used to the idea as possible, though both knew no such thing would really make a difference.

            Despite all his preparation of having his arm sucked and his face licked by the heinously slimy beast of a muscle, Scott still couldn’t help but announce his arrival onto the dripping expanse of his mother’s tongue with a cringe and a yelp.  Her fingers parted away from his sides and exited her jaws as soon as he had taken a balanced position in the center of his mother’s tongue where he wouldn’t slip off to the side and onto her teeth.

            He could hear the briefest musical note of a giggle echoing up from Judy’s throat, but it was quickly silenced again just before he could get the full effect of its vibration down the length of her tongue.

            For a few seconds he just settled in, willing himself to crawl to his feet, but the sight before him was just a little too humbling to make wobbling up to his feet a very inviting prospect.  He was staring down the length of his mother’s ribbed hovel of a mouth, and with her jaws widened all the way, he wasn’t even sure he touch the roof of it if he stood up on his tiptoes.  The real paralyzer was the well-lit visage of Judy’s throat, gated by her dangling uvula.  A single tip of her red organ at the wrong angle would send the young man careening along his mother’s tongue like an organic slip n’ slide and down her slender gullet.

            A gentle yet firmly motivational prod from Judy’s index finger suddenly against his back that slid him forward a fraction of an inch along the gummy surface with a sticky smack of rubber-on-spit forced Scott to focus again.

            “Okay… okay…” Scott mouthed to himself as he clenched his eyes shut and tried to stand up.  It was a shaky process, though easier than he’d thought it would be because of the traction provided by his mother’s taste buds, and because Judy actually seemed to be making an effort to keep her tongue perfectly still.

            Because there was a slight decline in her tongue as she clasped it to the floor of her mouth, though, Scott had a small inch-long ascent to make.  Balancing the globule of balm in one hand, he managed to work his way up on his forearms and shins using his mother’s taste buds as grip support.  The journey was shorter than he’d expected from the view outside, though that didn’t make it any easier, and the longer Scott muddled in the gooey slog of Judy’s mouth, the more he felt claustrophobia settling in.

            He wondered how it could be possible to fear something for its massive and omnipotent presentation from the outside, yet feel he was being closed in on from the moist walls of Judy’s cheeks once inside.  Whatever the explanation, it was hitting his heart rate fast and hard, and he gasped to keep himself in check as he lithely slipped off the side of Judy’s pink animal and wriggled his way into the expanding crevice between her jawline and tongue, which she helpfully parted further to make room once he’d arrived.  The molar had no immediately apparent markings that would indicate pain was being induced, though Scott wasn’t going to be one to question his mother’s judgments, particularly when she had him neatly tucked away an inch or so away from a hole that would make him into an instant snack.

            “No big deal.  No big deal,” Scott whispered to himself, repeating his mother’s somewhat empty words from earlier, as he rubbed the balm between his hands to work it into a smoother texture.  So far, his tactile fears had just proved mental, as his face had yet to make contact with anything that made him quite as wet as when Judy had straight-up licked him across the face for a full minute.  Of course, the entire hot, frothy atmosphere itself was far scarier to the young man than any amount of his mother’s slobber he might find coating his skin.  “Just a couple minutes.  Just a tooth.  Just a tongue.  Just a mouth.  Mommy’s… mouth.”

            Scott set his medicated hands as lightly as he could onto the problem molar and began to massage back and forth with enough delicacy that he could’ve been laying his hands on a slumbering rhino and not shaken it.  In fact, he wondered if this was going to be doing anything at all to help the issue, but ultimately he decided that anything he could do to prevent Judy from jerking her head around in pain while he sat so close to her throat would be a well-advised move.

            A soft moan of discomfort gurgled from the back of Judy’s throat.  The young man stopped moving his hands for a moment to let the moment pass, terrified a twitch was about to rattle through Judy’s teeth that would send him flying across the slimy alley, but nothing happened.  Taking a deep breath, he got back into it, applying the goop as far as he could reach around the whole pulverizing mound, finding it unsettlingly easy to get his fingers even in between the crevice next to a smaller tooth.

            “Mom’s.  Mom’s mouth,” Scott added to himself with a start under his breath after a long delay, though somehow, this correction didn’t do much to help make matters less stressful.

            Nor, indeed, did the sight of the light fading rapidly that had previously washed over the soggy pink walls of his mother’s enormous maw as Judy closed her lips and sealed her son inside the dank and citrusy prison.