In the hills of Ireland, Colleen woke up and yawned widely at her bedside table mirror, looking into her own mouth with a certain fascination at what might be placed inside it at a later date. She ate her breakfast, put on a white dress with one inch eliptical blue patterns on it, and walked through a field and into a small meadow which looked out at the countryside below.

She got down on her hands and knees and began crawling through the meadow, looking around as she did so.

“Have you lost something?” asked a voice.

Colleen looked up into a handsome face with friendly sensitive eyes.

“Well I wouldn’t say that I’ve exactly lost something, but I am trying to find something,” she replied, “I’m Colleen, and pleased to meet you.”

“I’m Stanley. So what are you looking for?”

“A leprechaun,” said Colleen.

“I suppose that’s one way to find a pot of gold,” said Stanley, “Would you like me to help?”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Colleen, as he crouched down to join her, “It’s not that I’m after any gold. I only want to catch a leprechaun and swallow him.”

“Do you mean…well…that you want to eat one?” asked Stanley.

“That’s right. I’d be very gentle about it, and be sure to gulp him down intact and unharmed by my teeth. It wouldn’t have to be a leprechaun. It could be a pixie, a fairy, a goblin, or any kind of the little folk. If any of the legends are true, then a leprechaun would be the most likely one I could find and catch in this country.”

“Well what can I do to help?”

“If you stay here, and I’ll crawl around and search through this flower patch from the far side, then if either of us chases one, he can be herded towards the other for certain capture.”

“I’m not sure how the leprechaun would feel about it, but I’ll give you all the help I can,” said Stanley.

“I’m grateful. The trouble is that they may not exist at all, and if they do, they’ll never make it easy for me to spot them and snatch one up.”

They attempted this gambit in several parts of the meadow for the rest of the morning, and then Colleen said that it was time to go home and make the most of her usual lunch options.

“Would you like to go to a restaurant in the village down there this evening?” he asked.

“That would be nice,” said Colleen, “I live in the house up there. You could come for me with a lantern at six, if it’s suitable for you.”

“I’ll see you then,” he said.

Colleen went home, opened a tin of ham, and took something out of the utensils drawer in the kitchen. It was a metal frame which she used for making gingerbread men. In this case, she also applied it in another way. Pressing it down on the ham, she fashioned a tiny pork man, and then took it to the table, picked it up and put it into her mouth. She savoured the taste, imagining for as long as she could, that it was a leprechaun, and then devoured it, before moving on to some salad. When the meal was over, she spent the afternoon reading from a book of adult fairytales focussed on little folk, and found nothing that fully catered for her own quest.

Stanley arrived at around five minutes to six, looking immaculately dressed, and presented her with a bouquet of flowers with a foil wrapped candy man tied to one of the stems with a ribbon.

“It was the best I could do,” he said.

“It’s as thoughtful a gift as I’ve ever had,” she said, “Would you like to watch me eating it, before we set out?”

“Sure,” said Stanley.

She unwrapped the tiny sugary man and opened her mouth wide and put out her tongue, and licked some icing sugar from it.”

“It’s very sweetly coated,” she said, and then extended her tongue again, tilted her head back and popped the candy man into her mouth.

When she had finished eating it, she licked her lips from side to side a few times, to be sure that all of the icing was removed, and then stepped out the door with him and offered him her hand.

He held the lantern in his free hand and walked her down the hill and into the village, where they came to a restaurant and had dinner together. After dessert he took a sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to her.

“I wrote this in the afternoon,” he said.

“You have been busy,” she said, and unfolded the page and looked at it.

Atop the green and pleasant hill,

There lived a maid, who sought to fill

Her mouth and tummy, one fine morn,

By capturing a leprechaun.

She crouched upon her hands and knees,

And crawled about the flowers and trees,

Until she spied a tiny mite,

So small she wouldn’t need to bite.

She introduced herself and told

Him of her plans, and said, “Be bold.

You’ll go down whole. Don’t be distraught;

But rest assured you will be caught.”

He tried to run, but she could crawl,

With greater speed, while towering tall.

She brought her dainty opening hand

Towards him, just as she had planned.

Her palm soon cut off his escape.

The leprechaun could only gape

In awe, as he was lifted high,

Towards her lovely staring eye.

While he could think of no good tricks,

She gave him several sparkling licks.

Her tongue was just as long and wide

As his whole self. He looked inside.

When many licks had been dispensed,

She smiled, and then the small one sensed,

That he was out of time and hope.

He’d simply have to somehow cope.

She opened wide, and let him see

Her inner mouth, where he would be,

And slowly slid him on her lip.

He had no choice, but make the trip.

She let him lie on sparkling path,

And contemplate the aftermath.

Her tongue was like a soft pink moat,

And then she drew him to her throat.

He struggled there, and tried to stick,

And wondered if he’d make her sick.

But then she gulped with so much strength,

He slid right down her neck’s full length.

He reached her tummy, now quite sure,

That he could not undo her vore.

The meadow had been lost to him,

To satisfy her fondest whim.

“This is the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me,” said Colleen.

“I’d do anything for you. I love you,” he said.

“I feel the same way,” said Colleen.

Some soft folk music had started to play, and Stanley asked her to dance with him. They got up from the table and slow danced, arm in arm for nearly two hours.

“I suppose I had best get started on walking you home,” he said at last.

When they reached her house, she invited him in and sat down on the couch with him. They talked for a few minutes, and then she saw that he was moving his face towards her to kiss her. She put her own mouth up as well and slowly closed her eyes.

They kissed for some time, and then Colleen gave a wide yawn.

“If only a leprechaun had seen that, he’d have a preview of his interim destination,” she said.

Stanley yawned too.

“You’re as tired as me, and it’s really too late for you to be going out in the night again now. Why don’t you take this couch, and in the morning we can try again for a leprechaun in the meadow?”

“Do you think you’ll ever snare one?” asked Stanley.

“I do have a secondary game plan to draw one out,” said Colleen, “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

She fetched him a blanket and pillow, and he found the couch as wide and comfortable as his own single bed. He pulled the blanket over his head and soon dropped off.

Colleen walked quietly across the carpet and into another room, and then wheeled something mechanical into the lounge room, where Stanley was out like a light. She pressed some switches on the mechanical object and watched it working.

“This might just help us in the meadow tomorrow,” she whispered to herself, and turned the device off.

Colleen went to her bedroom and slept. In the morning, she returned to the lounge room and sat by the couch, waiting for Stanley to awaken. Half an hour later, she saw him remove the blanket from his eyes and look up, to realise that both he and the couch had been reduced to tiny size by the device that she had used the night before.

“I created this reducing machine very recently, and you seemed the ideal person to test it on,” she said, “At that size you could enter the meadow, without frightening any leprechauns away. Once you’d drawn one out, it would be much easier for me to charge in and catch him. Would you be willing to give it a try?”

“Of course I would. If it works, and I lure one out for you, would you give me a kiss with your lovely full sized lips?”

“You can have one anyway, right now,” she said, and lifted him off the couch and pressed her lips to his face.

“Thank you so much. That was lovely,” he said.

She put him on the table while she ate her breakfast and gave him abundant portions of the best food in her fridge, at negligible cost to her supplies, and then took out a picnic basket, and put a rug and some other items inside it. She carried the basket in one hand and held him gently in the other.

“I guess leprechaun hunting season is now officially open,” he said.

Colleen gave a slight laugh.

“I think it’s been open for some time, but now the huntress has some suitable bait to work with,” she said.

After she had crossed her own lawn, she asked if he was comfortable.

“Well I’m having to adjust to your hand swinging by your side while you walk,” he said, “But there’s nothing you can really do about that.”

“Would you like to ride in the basket?” she asked.

“I guess it would be more comfortable, even if I couldn’t feel your soft fingers holding me anymore.”

“You’re so sweet,” she said, and kissed him again.

She lowered him onto the blanket. He could either look out between the strands of the basket, or look up at her beautiful high face as she walked all the way to the meadow, and decided to do a bit of both.

This time she stopped at the edge of the meadow and crouched down straight away, and put the basket beside her. She took Stanley out and set him down gently on the ground.

“If you head in first, I’ll slowly crawl around, keeping an eye on you without giving my presence away. If you meet a leprechaun, do your best to keep him distracted, until I can lunge in and snatch him up from behind. If there is one there, I might well have him in my tummy by mid afternoon.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Stanley.

“I know you will,” she said, smiling kindly at him.

She watched him pass between flowers which were now taller than him, and kept as low and out of sight as she could, using bushes on the outer edge of the flower patch to conceal her.  Stanley’s thoughts oscillated between consideration for the plight he would be helping to inflict on any leprechaun he found and his desire to make Colleen happy. Most likely they would never find one, and the matter would remain academic. He could still look forward to more huge kisses each day that he helped her with her hunting expeditions.

Colleen kept her eye on Stanley, and briefly lost sight of him at one point, when the foliage was so thick, that his progress was completely concealed. She could still hear him stepping on dry leaves and rustling them with his feet. This enabled her to approximate his position and direction and continue to follow from a distance.

Eventually she saw him again. He looked up at her, and waved. Her blue eye winked at him encouragingly and smiled her appreciation of his enthusiasm.

Later, they came to a point where the flower bed was very open and bushes were sparse. She crawled out away a little, and took a wider loop, but was able to travel faster because of her full size, and came out at the opening at the end of that flower bed, and crouched between that patch and the next, waiting to see if Stanley would be likely to bring a leprechaun in that direction, where she would already be in a position to surprise him.

It took the entire morning, but they managed to make their way through the entire meadow in this tandem approach, but Stanley didn’t come across any leprechauns.

Colleen picked him up at the far side, and rose to her full height and walked back to the picnic basket, and placed him down beside it on the ground.

“I’m sorry we didn’t find any,” he said.

“You did all that anyone could, your very best; and I was fairly sure we wouldn’t find one. I’ve always known that it’s highly unlikely that leprechauns and their overseas counterparts are anything more than legends. It was worth using you at that size to confirm that theory, and now that you’re here this way, the machine will still have served the more likely purpose for which I built it.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well it’s reduced you to that size. I did say ANY kind of little folk would do,” she said, taking the rug from the basket.

“Do….you mean…. me?” he asked, as she stood up and unfolded the rug and spread it on the grass.

“That’s why I built the machine. The only solution to my quest was to make a representative of the little folk. You’re already a representative of folk in general. All I needed to do was make you little.”

She sat down on the rug and pulled the basket onto it. Then she clasped him in her hand and placed him on the rug in front of her.

“Well the only problem is … How can I put this politely? … How would you go about retrieving me from your tummy after you’ve swallowed me?”

“I thought you asked the question very eloquently, and to answer it in the same way, I don’t think that being eaten involves any kind of retrieval process afterwards. Once I’ve eaten you, I will have at last fulfilled my quest, and that will be the end of the matter, except that I’ll always have the happy memories of doing it.”

She placed him in the lap of her dress.

“But what about last night? I gave you the flowers, the candy man, a nice dinner, and we had a very special time together. We said we love eachother.”

“I’ll always remember that too. When I first looked up and saw you here yesterday, I knew that you were the one I’d been waiting for when I built the machine. I was hoping all afternoon yesterday, that you’d be watching me while I was eating the dinner you bought me at the restaurant. Then when you gave me the candy man, it was even better opportunity to show you what being eaten would look like.”

“It looked amazing, Colleen. Every movement of your tongue was thrilling, like the way you licked your lips afterwards too.”

“Thank you,” she said, and picked him up and licked her lips from side to side in front of him, and swished the side of her tongue against his face as she did so.

He felt her soft moist tongue sliding against his cheeks and his forehead and his neck in slow sweeping movements, while his eyes couldn’t help be excited by the point blank visual appeal of it as well. He thought about the fact that he now realised that she had been planning to eat him from the moment she first saw him. The hunting expedition had been merely a last attempt to explore the possibility of using him to catch a leprechaun as an alternative that would have presented a reason to presumably restore his size and continue being his girlfriend.

“That felt even better than the kisses, and I imagine that being in your mouth would feel even better, but you’re talking about doing something I never imagined, when I asked you out to dinner.”

“Well you imagined that I would do it with a leprechaun, and you did say that you’d do anything for me.”

“I meant that I’d do anything to help you to catch a leprechaun, and I was uneasy about that too. I went along with the hunting today, because I’m so completely in love with you.”

“Is my plan for you going to reduce those feelings?”

“No, I’m sure it wouldn’t,” he said, “It’s only my size that you’ve reduced.”

“Then why not make the most of it, as a way of expressing it? I’m going to do it anyway, although I don’t mind anything you say in the meantime. Your poem has given me a marvelous blueprint for how to proceed with enjoying this meal too. You really have an incredible talent with words and imagery.”

“I…I guess it’s worth saying that you have quite a talent for inventing too. Did you ever discuss your machine with anyone else?”

“No. In fact I never discussed my leprechaun eating quest with anyone either. Nobody else knows that you and I are here, with you reduced to your current size. You’ll be sliding down my throat with only the two of us to know about it.”

“I don’t suppose you can see any leprechauns now from up here,” he asked, “Your eyes are so much bigger than mine now. They’d have more range.”

“No, and I don’t think the non-existent results of years of searching are going to change now. If I’m going to eat one of the little folk, and I most certainly am, then it’s going to be you. Let’s have another look at this poem.”

She took his poem out of the basket and read it through again aloud.

“Do you think you might try to struggle and stick in my throat for a while?” she asked.

“I guess there’s always a chance, if I try.”

“Yes, but it will only be a chance to delay the inevitable. Whatever you do in my mouth or in my throat, I will gulp you down to my tummy. I’ve been working towards this for all the years it took me to design and build the reducing machine. So I don’t want to leave you with any false hopes that I might change my mind, because of our love affair, when I’ve got you halfway down my throat. When we started the hunt, I said that I might have a leprechaun in my tummy by mid afternoon. It was an almost 100% unlikely outcome, but I did feel certain that I would have someone else in my tummy by mid afternoon. I’m going to gobble you all up.”

“I know, and I am doing my best to come to terms with it,” he said, “Do you want to know a secret?”

“I’d love to,” she said.

“When I first woke up this morning, and saw my new size, I had a few moments of thinking that this was what you had in mind.”

“I wondered if you would.”

“Then you told me of your hunting tactics, and I spent the whole morning thinking I wasn’t in any personal risk. I did wonder about my contribution to the plight of a leprechaun though.”

“Did you ever change your mind about helping me?”

“No, but if I’d known what was coming, I guess I would have used those flower patches to run for a good hiding spot.”

“You wouldn’t have gotten away.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“We were there alone, with all of the size advantages in my favour.”

“But the concealment advantages were all in mine,” he said, with the glimmering of an idea.

“I’d still have caught you in the end.”

“Not if I’d stayed hidden until sundown.”

“You didn’t have a chance.”

“I think I did. Why don’t we put it to the test?”

“You’re not going to goad me into giving you a chance to escape.”

“You just said twice, that I didn’t have any chance of getting away.”

“And you didn’t.”

“Well if you’re so sure of that, why not recreate the situation, but this time with me aware of my fate if I don’t elude you?”

She looked up, deep in thought, for several moments. He looked at her elegant eyes and waited.

“Alright, but you’ll see I’m right. Your chances of escaping me at that size are almost as negligible as your chances of getting out of my mouth, once I’ve closed it.”

She took him to another part of the meadow, away from their starting point that morning, and set him down on the ground, just next to the flower bed.

 “There are narrow pathways in that flower bed. I’ll be able to walk along them easily, and look down on you from above. Try to avoid being within my reach for as long as you can, by running away from whichever path I’m on. I won’t need to run at my size. So I’ll relax and stick to walking. You’ll have time to turn your head and keep an eye on me, when I’m near you. I’ll walk over to the far side of the garden and wait, while you get a good head start. Do you have any questions, before we start?”

She stood towering in front of him, while she spoke all these instructions. He looked up at her beautiful clothes and her high face above. It was nice to see her with a friendly demeanour again, even though it was a far more relaxing and pleasant experience for her than for him.

 “I guess I’d better think on that for a moment,” he said, “It’s important for me to be sure of my options and the rules of the chase, since there won’t be any chance to do it over again, once you’ve caught me.”

 “Take your time,” she said, “We’ve got all afternoon.”

 “Sure, and thank you for your consideration,” he said.

 “You can have half an hour for either thinking or asking me questions,” she said.

 “I did just think of a question. Once we start up again, how long a head start will you be giving me, before you come over and start chasing me?”

 “Well obviously it can’t be too long. I don’t want you to be out of the meadow and into the forest, before I’ve even begun to pursue you,” said Colleen, “But I won’t get much enjoyment out of chasing you, if I give you so little time to prepare, that I just walk over and snatch you up in the first minute of the chase. I was going to suggest a time limit of about 10 minutes. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

 “Within the parameters of YOUR objectives, I suppose it’s fairly reasonable.”

 “You were very diplomatic with your answer,” she said, smiling in a friendly but dignified manner.

 “Could we make it 15 minutes?” he asked.

 “I’ll agree to that,” said Colleen.

He took the rest of the half an hour reprieve to try to think of ways to escape. By the end of it, he was resigned to the fact that he would have to try to find some concealment, as well as just running from her approaching giant legs. If he kept that up all afternoon, he would become exhausted, but Colleen wouldn’t.

 “Are you ready to start the head start?” she asked.

 “As ready as I can be,” he said.

She took him over, set him down.

 “Can you really appreciate the kind of inevitability I was talking about now?” asked Colleen.

 “I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” he said.

 “I’d like to tell you a little bit more, to help you understand, before I let you run off,” she said, “Have a real think about this. I know I’m safely full-sized, no matter what happens. I’m sure that I’m going to catch you today. You have some small hope in your mind that you’ll get away. It’s obviously very slender. The only small chance you have of changing that outcome depends on how well you perform in this exercise. Doesn’t that knowledge make this very exciting for you?”

 “It does, Colleen. I think you’re the most exciting girl I’ve ever met.”

 “That’s one of the best compliments I’ve ever had Stanley. I’m very proud of you for taking what I’ve said into your considerations. I think we should start now, don’t you?”

 “Yes Colleen.”

Colleen walked away, with her back to him, and then turned around.

 “Run for your life,” she called, “I’m in a good position to keep my eyes on you.”

He darted into the flower patch, ran as far away from the side he’d entered as possible, and came to one of the paths she’d mentioned. He estimated he’d used about 8 of his 15 minutes. It would be worth heading into the next flower patch. He wouldn’t outdistance her. Yet it would make it harder for her to guess which direction he was heading in. He looked back at her.

 “I can still see you,” she called, “You’ve got 6 minutes left.”

He ran in and turned to the right and kept running.

 “I’m coming over to start chasing you now,” she called.

He turned to see Colleen begin walking across the grassy part of the meadow. To her it was a pleasant walk, with an enjoyable exercise ahead of her, and nothing at all at stake.

She made her way around the first section of the meadow and onto the natural pathway. He saw her walking along it, and he turned and ran deeper into the second flower patch, and kept her at a safe distance. His only advantage was that Colleen had to walk around the flower patches on the makeshift paths, and could only reach for him when he was near one of the paths. He would have to try to head for the middle of any garden section, equidistant from both paths, whenever she was getting close.

He applied this tactic for nearly an hour, stopping to get his breath now and then. He had moved further and further away from the original position, and the day was moving on. He began to see that he just might get out of that garden altogether. He looked back to see that she still had him in her eyesight. He would have to find somewhere that would either conceal or protect him, once he reached the edge of the garden. Failing that, he could double back and hope to keep the process up until the sun went down.

He ran through the last flower patch, as Colleen paced after him. Then he heard her getting close. He headed for the other side, but realised that this end of this flower patch was narrower!

He turned and looked back as she approached. He panicked, wondering what to do. She could reach in and grab him, no matter where he went now. He couldn’t run to the wider part that he’d just come from, or he would be heading towards her. He backed away in shock, as he saw Colleen walk over and stop.

 “I think you can see that it’s been every bit as exciting for you as I promised,” said Colleen.

She reached into the flowerbed. He saw her pinkish white hand opening. It looked soft and pleasant. Yet it was inescapable now.

Colleen’s fingers closed around him and lifted him up.

 “Thank you, Stanley. That was a very interesting chase. You did very well.”

 “It’s ironic, Colleen. I’m far more tired from the chase than you are. But you’re the one about to have your energy replenished with food.”

She laughed.

 “Let’s go back to the picnic rug,” she said, “I’d like to be comfortable, while I’m doing this.”

She was thinking of her own comfort at a time like this.

She sat down and held him, with her hands resting in her lap. He looked up at her beautiful towering form and saw her satisfaction. She had enjoyed the chase, and even expressed her gratitude to him for it. Now she would enjoy the final part of their shared adventure: the part which would be the final part of everything for him.

Colleen lifted him up.

 “Well Stanley, I’ve won the chase and caught you. In a short while, you’ll be trapped inside my stomach, with no way out of me, forever. Would you mind sharing a little with me, about how you’re feeling?”

 “Still in love with you, and grateful at least that you gave me the chance to try.”

“Well I told you I’d catch you.”

“It was worth a try,” he said.

“Now let’s look at your poetic outline of what’s next,” said Colleen, and read the latter verses again, “… Very well put. I think I can do all that.”

She put out her tongue right in front of him. It extended right to his feet. She licked his shoulders and face slowly, and drew her tongue into her mouth slowly, so that he could look at it.

Then she repeated the licking process this way for a few minutes.

Then she swished the sides of her tongue against his face in turn.

“How’s that so far?” she asked.

“This part of it’s fantastic!” he admitted.

“See, it’s worth making the most of it, like I said.”

Again and again her incredible taste buds slid over him. It was surreal to think that he was in the process of actually being eaten, and yet that the early steps were all beautiful and thrilling beyond his wildest dreams. The final certainty of his fate seemed to have the strange side effect of removing all his anxieties. As there was nothing to be done, there was no need to stress. He wondered if, given the chance, he would have traded the previous night’s romantic experiences for an absence of his current situation, and was still trying to decide this academic consideration, when she spoke again.

“Alright, I’m going to put you into my mouth now. I’ll give you plenty of time on my tongue, before I draw you into my throat, and then you can make your attempt to stay there, before I overpower you with a final deep gulp, just like it says in your brilliant poem. I’m going to keep that and treasure it forever.”

“I always wanted to win a girl over with a poem,” he said, “Now I have.”

“You won me over, when you offered to help me yesterday. The poem is just icing on the candy man. Do you have anything you’d like to say before I pop you in?”

“I was thinking, while you were licking me, trying to work out if not having met you in the first place would have been better. I still couldn’t decide until now. But I actually prefer the way it turned out, except that I wish I’d had all these licks before we did our flower bed chase, and then managed to get away after that?”

“What would you have done if you had? Nobody else could restore your size.”

“So the machine does reverse the process.”

“Yes, but that’s just hypothetical, since you know I never will.”

“I guess I’m ready to go in then.”

She kissed him goodbye, and slid him across her lower lip and into her mouth, left it open for a while, and laughed from down in her throat, as she felt him sliding around to face the front of her mouth. He lay on her tongue, saw her mouth close, and lay there in comfort in the darkness, until he felt her draw him into her throat.

He pushed himself into a sideways position that gave him less room, and stayed in her throat and wondered if it was good enough to resist the gulping pressure that would soon come.

Then she suddenly gulped so powerfully that all of his efforts were as nothing at all, and drew him down, down, down, into her tummy.

Colleen stood up folded the rug, packed it away in the basket, carried everything home, had a shower, climbed into bed with no food, and read his poem again, before lying down to start enjoying pleasant dreams about the day’s events.

All of this had happened during a school holiday period. Colleen was a science and English teacher at the school in the village, and had used her advanced knowledge of science to build the reducing machine.

School went back, and Colleen, whose last name was Balfour, decided to confide in her best friend Frances Woodfield, who was a mathematics and cooking teacher at the school. They went to a far part of a playground and sat on a seat near the bushes, and Colleen told Frances everything that had happened.

One of her year 7 students named Henry was already playing hide and seek, and had chosen the very bushes near their seat to hide in. He heard the entire conversation and could hardly believe his ears.

“You actually ate him!” said Frances, “It’s amazing, and your secret’s safe with me.”

“That’s taken as read,” said Colleen, and raised a strawberry to her opening mouth.

Henry watched as her tongue extended far out of her mouth, saw her lower the strawberry onto it and draw it into her mouth. It was the most exciting thing he had ever seen, when combined with the revelation that she had done the same thing to a shrunken person.

After school that day, he secretly followed her home from school at a distance, to learn where Miss Balfour lived, and presumably, learn the location of her machine.

Months later, when the next school holiday period started, he bought a bottle of hair dye, and changed the colour of his hair, and fashioned a simple lock pick from a piece of wire, having seen a fictional character on television do something similar once.

When nightfall came, he made his way to Colleen’s house and lay down on the lawn outside in the dark, until he awoke in the middle of the night, certain that she had now fallen asleep. He quietly went to work on one of her door locks, and was able to gain entry to the house. There was a full moon that night. So he could do everything he needed in the house, relying only on the moonlight shining through the windows. There was no need to turn a light on. He looked in 2 rooms, before he found her machine. After experimenting with the buttons for a few minutes, he was able to operate it reliably. He took some string from his pocket and tied pieces to the on and off switches, and then held them both and pulled the on switch. It reduced him, but reduced the string as well, so that he was lifted off the ground and up to the switches, by the time he was sufficiently reduced. So he simply turned the off switch manually. Then he pulled the string off, climbed back down to the carpet, and hid the string under the couch.

"She's never been able to catch a leprechaun before, and had to settle for eating her shrunken boyfriend. If she catches me too easily, she might guess what I've done," he thought, "I want to make her believe that I am a Leprechaun. Since I'm tired now anyway, I can fall asleep on the carpet in the lounge room. Then when she arrives, she will think that I am a sleeping Leprechaun, and believe that it was her first opportunity to catch one."

He lay down on the soft thick carpet, and dozed off into a deep sleep.

He awoke to the feeling of her fingers as she picked him up. It felt lovely.

"Strictly speaking, you're trespassing in my house," said Miss Balfour in a friendly voice, which made him feel so excited and thrilled, as he already knew what she was going to do with him, "However, I will not be reporting you. I'm very pleased to find you actually. Are you a fairly young Leprechaun?"

"Yes. I'm just a boy," he answered, pleased that his tiny face with dyed hair seemed to be no longer familiar to her full sized eyes.

"Did you sneak out of the Leprechaun Kingdom in the night?"

"I snuck out late last night," he said truthfully.

"I suppose the other Leprechauns haven't told you about me so far. My name is Miss Balfour, and I have been trying to catch one of you little Leprechauns for most of the time I’ve had this house."

He realized that he needed to stay in character.

"What for?" he asked.

"To eat," she replied, "I'm going to have the most precious meal of my life, when I'm eating you. I can imagine how you must be feeling about that. However, your apprehensions will make no difference to my intentions. I don't mean to dwell on the helplessness of your position. I'm sure you're a nice little person. So I don't mean to be impolite or unpleasant. I am only trying to save us both a lot of unnecessary discussion, which cannot alter your situation."

"I think I understand, Miss Balfour. I promise I won't argue with you about this at all," he responded.

"Thank you. I think that shows a very wise young mind," she said, "Since you have accepted the situation, I would like to tell you about the good side of things. I am going to use my tongue both for licking your tasty young limbs, and for swallowing you whole. So you don't need to feel any pain from being bitten."

"Thank you, Miss Balfour. You're a lot kinder to me than a cat would be to a mouse," said Henry.

"You're welcome, little Leprechaun. Under the circumstances, I think you have been extremely polite and well-mannered. Now I won't be able to eat you today.”

Miss Balfour took down a cage from the top of a cupboard.

"I've been saving it all this time. Now that you're here, I'll have to put you inside it. I'll put some comfortable furniture from my old dolls house into the cage, while we're waiting. You'll need a bed for tonight."

"I'll be alright then," he said, "You're looking after me well, Miss Balfour."

"Well I would like to be friends with you, little Leprechaun. It's a pity that fulfilling my latest aspiration is going to demand such a costly contribution from you, and I'm very grateful that you're being so charitable and amicable about it.”

"Well I think there's something very nice about you, Miss Balfour, regardless of what you're going to do to me."

"I try to be nice to everyone," she said, "I've taught many children, without using a harsh word. I use pleasant phrases in my English classes, and ask the students to do the same. I'd like to make your time here as nice as I can as well. So how long have you been in my house?"

"Since about 11:30pm," he answered.

"I'll go upstairs and lie down on the bed. You can rest beside me on the pillow, and we shall talk some more."

She took him up and placed the furnished cage on her bedside table. Then she put Henry on the pillow beside her face.

"Don't worry. I won't ask you any more difficult questions ... Henry," she said.

"You know! I thought I was too small to be seen clearly. When did you recognize me?"

"When I brought you close to my face. You don’t look quite like a Leprechaun. You’re thinner and sweeter. I looked closely at your facial features and recognized you.”

“Are you disappointed that I played this trick on you?” he asked.

“No, little darling. I’m not disappointed at all. I just wonder how you knew about my leprechaun quest and the machine. You must have overheard me talking to Miss Woodfield about it at school.”

“I hadn’t set out to eavesdrop. I was playing hide and seek in the bushes, and you both came and sat just near me.”

"Little boy, I think it's immeasurably kind of you to go to all this trouble for me, but haven't you thought the way it will turn out? When I gulp you down, you'll be on a one way journey to my stomach. You'll be part of me forever. What makes a little boy brave enough to volunteer for such a thing?"

"There are three reasons," said Henry, "The first one is to make you happy. You have waited so long for this. The second reason is that you said you only wanted to eat one Leprechaun. This way I have saved them all from being hunted by you in the future, if they do exist. The last reason is that your tongue looked so nice, when you were eating your strawberries that day when I was hiding in the bushes. I have been looking forward to being a tasty treat for your tongue. I think that your wish will be my most thrilling experience too. The last reason is that I’m in love with you, Miss Balfour."

"You’re very kind and sweet to say such things. I'm honoured," she said.

"Are you still going to eat me then?"

She put the front of her tongue out of her mouth and pressed his face against it.

"Of course I'm going to eat you," she said, "You taste very nice, and I'm sure you'll be as lovely to eat as any little Leprechaun. I'm just a little sorry that you're not one of the Leprechaun people. I’ll put the cage away too. Since you don't want to escape, I might as well give you the maximum comfort and freedom in the house," said Miss Balfour.

The doorbell rang. She went and let in a friend of hers.

It was Miss Woodfield, the only other person who knew of Miss Balfour’s quest for a Leprechaun. 

The two ladies sat at the table. Miss Balfour placed Henry on the table.

"You caught one! Isn't he handsome!" said Miss Woodfield, "I wouldn't have the heart to gobble one up, but would you mind if I licked him?"

"If he doesn't object," said Miss Balfour, "Would you like Miss Woodfield to lick you, little Leprechaun?"

"Well probably. Miss Woodfield, could you please let me have a look at your tongue, before I decide?"

"I'd be delighted," said Miss Woodfield.

She put out her tongue and Henry looked at it.

"You would be most welcome to lick me, Miss Woodfield. Your tongue looks as nice as your beautiful face."

"Thank you!" He's certainly a charming little thing, isn't he?" said Miss Woodfield.

She picked Henry up and licked him.

"He's delicious! You must be feeling very happy about it. How did you catch him, after all this time with no luck?" asked Miss Woodfield.

"I caught him sleeping on my carpet. The rest was easy."

They went on talking for a while.

"Well I won't be eating you today. There's no time. We’re going out shopping together," said Miss Balfour, “I shall take you upstairs now.”

She carried him up the stairs, and put him down on a carpeted floor inside one of the rooms.

"You can make yourself at home in the spare room. I'll come back and eat you tomorrow. Here's some food supplies too," said Miss Balfour quietly, so that Miss Woodfield would not be aware that she was leaving him on the floor, with no cage to contain him. They had kept up the masquerade that he was a Leprechaun, whom she had caught and would be eating without his permission.

Henry went to the window, which reached to the floor. He looked out, and soon saw Miss Balfour and Miss Woodfield walking across the front lawn and away. They both looked lovely.

Henry ate some of the food for a while. Then he lay down to go to sleep.

For the next two hours he thought about Miss Balfour coming to eat him, with thrilling anticipation. He was so excited. He could hardly believe it was going to come to pass.

Henry awoke the following morning, and heard the sound of the front gate, and ran to the window. Looking out, he saw Miss Balfour walking over the front lawn towards the house!

"She's come to eat me!" he thought.

She came up and greeted him with some news.

"I have thought of an enjoyable game for both of us," she said, "Here's what we'll do. It's not gone midday yet. So we've plenty of time. I'll turn you loose in the central downstairs room of the house. I'll go upstairs for five minutes. It's up to you to find your way to a door, slip under it and escape outside before I count the five minutes and come looking for you. We shall then return to this table, and you shall be my most delicious lunch."

"I'll enjoy that game very much," he answered.

"I thought you would."

She carried him to the middle of the central room, and placed him on the carpet.

"Alright, your five minutes commences when I reach the room in which you were hiding upstairs. I will use its clock to count the time."

She went upstairs.

He ran for the back room, which used most of his five minutes. He was just slipping under the door, when he heard her shoe on the top of the stairs.

"She'll be out here in no time," he thought, "I'll never cross the open lawn in time.”

He darted into the flowerbed in front of the back wall, and heard her walking towards the door. Hiding behind a mushroom, he saw her open the door and step out. She ran straight across the lawn and looked at the distant garden. Seeing nobody, she stood up and walked back. He noticed that there was no garden on the other side of the back door.

"She's guessed I'm in here," he thought.

He kept moving towards the side of the house, under the cover of several flower petals. She came and towered in front of the garden.

"There's no room to slide out under the front door. So you're either in the house, or here," she said, "If you're inside, you'll have to come out eventually, or take the risk of being caught inside. I'll start looking for you here."

She began brushing petals with her fingers, to check where he might be hiding. He reached a fully grown lettuce and thought, "She's searching the garden faster than I can run through it unseen. She'll catch up to me for sure at this rate. I'll have to hide in this lettuce."

He pushed his way between the outer leaves of the lettuce, and poked a tiny peep hole with his finger. Looking out, he watched the lovely looking Miss Balfour searching under every flower until she came to the lettuce. She then searched under every remaining flower as well.

Finally she stopped moving and said aloud, "Well, if I have to search inside for him, I might as well have some salad first."

She picked his lettuce and took it to the kitchen bench, broke off the outer two leaves (with Henry still hidden between them), and placed them into a bowl. She fetched cucumber slices, capsicum, onion rings, and baby tomatoes. She took a spoon, and carried the bowl to the front room, sat on the couch by the window, and ate.

Looking through his peephole, he stared up at her, as her pretty mouth consumed the tomatoes and then the cucumber.

"Hey, why isn't she keeping an eye on the floor?" he thought, "She's looking up all the time. If I were on the floor, she would be increasing my chances of eluding her. She doesn't seem to care. How ironic it would be, if she's given up the chase, and then eats enough of this salad to find me."
As he watched her eating the salad which covered part of his lettuce leaves, the suspense was driving him to despair. 

"I hadn't thought of serving you with salad," she said suddenly, "It's a novel idea, but I'll finish the salad now, clean you up, and save you for tomorrow's lunch.”

She continued spooning cucumber into her mouth.

"She knew I was in here all along!" he thought, amazed that she had finally outwitted him for the last time, "She picked the lettuce to have another thrilling game with me. She's been eating the salad calmly keeping secret the fact that she'd already found me."
"The bulge between the lettuce leaves gave you away in the garden," she said, "I thought we'd both have a more interesting time, if I didn't tell you."

There was no further sense in remaining under the top leaf. He pushed it off him, and looked up as she reached for the lettuce and said, "Thank you."

As she used her fingers to assist with eating it, he looked up in awe and said, "You truly are brilliant, Miss Balfour. You deduced exactly which door I would run towards, and you had plans for the other possibilities anyway. You even managed to find my hiding spot and serve it in a bowl, without letting me know that you knew I was there. You're a very clever and lovely lady. You've caught me, and I'm yours to eat."

"I'm grateful for the compliments, but my intelligence has had many more years to develop than yours."

She finished the last piece of lettuce and carried the bowl to the kitchen.

"You have some salad juice on you," she said.

She picked him up.

"The critical moment for you in my mouth will be in a day's time, as I said. This is just to clean you up now."

She put him into her mouth and slid him around on her tongue. Then she took him out, drank a glass of water, and put him back in her mouth. When she removed him a second time, he was perfectly clean.

"All this time you wanted to eat a Leprechaun. Now it looks like you'll be having a garden gnome instead."

She smiled.

"You're a very special boy," she said, and took him back to the couch, where she placed him in her lap and began reading a book. He watched her fingers turning pages, the times she looked up from the book, the times she licked her lips, and the softness of her neck.

"What have you been thinking about?" she asked at last.

"You. I thought of myself only as a lunch for you to enjoy eating. I kept all my attention on you, and watched everything about the lady who has become the ultimate destiny for me. I even thought of a poem:
            Her beauty, in full size, has greater appeal,

            Especially her tongue, since I'll be her next meal.

I know it's not quite right, because you'll have dinner and breakfast before you eat me. I'm too young to write a full proper poem like your boyfriend did."

She picked him up and held him to her cheek.

"Darling little boy, it's the most poetic verse I have ever heard in years of reading and teaching English," she said.

Then she sat down on the bed with a pen and paper and wrote. In a few minutes, she said, "I've been studying poetry more closely since my boyfriend left me the poem he’d written. So I’ve written you a poem too:

            Of you I need to make the most:

            Perhaps a salad, or a roast.

            With cream, you'd make a nice dessert,

            And gulping you down whole won't hurt.

            But when I lick you clean, I think

            I won't need any food or drink,

            Or other treats, like caviar.

            You'll taste delicious as you are.

            As surely as the sun will shine,

            Tomorrow, I shall come to dine,

            Without the need for spice or sauce;

            And you shall make a nice main course.

He heard the poem and said, "It's very good."

"I’m going to leave your dolls house bed on the dining table, when I go to bed tonight. When you wake up in the morning, you'll be able to imagine the final scenes in advance," she said.

She carried the tiny bed to the dining table.

“Sleep well, my dear little boy. It's been a privilege to meet you."

She left the room.

The enormity of what he’d exposed himself to began to register significantly on his mind. His beautiful teacher was going to swallow him like a piece of food, for that matter AS a piece of food. When school resumed, she would be continuing to teach all the other students, who would be none the wiser about what she had done. She may well stay there until she retired from teaching altogether, with him as part of her stomach from the next morning onwards.

He thought about it for a while, and then fell asleep.

All of his dreams were about her. He did not once dream of Miss Woodfield. He was enjoying a dream, when a branch fell from a tree outside and woke him at 5am. He saw a glimmer of daylight breaking through the darkness outside.

"I'll stay awake and watch my last sunrise now," he decided.

The colours were beautiful, as they gradually filled the sky outside the dining room window. However, they were not as beautiful as Miss Balfour's pink tongue.

Henry pictured her at this moment, still dreaming peacefully in bed, either about eating him or about the further joys that life had in store for her. She would wake up without a care in the world, and spend the morning looking forward to the moment which would make him a part of her stomach forever.

She was contented, perhaps more so than she had been the day she had eaten her boyfriend. Henry’s compliments would have made her feel even better. Since Miss Woodfield was the only other person who knew of her quest, she would be enjoying a secret anticipation which even her family did not know of. He suddenly felt very special.

He was her best kept secret, and soon to be the greatest pleasure for the tongue which had captivated his eyes. He ate his breakfast, which she had also put out on the table the night before, and awaited her arrival. There were times when he replayed in his mind, the night he had snuck in and reduced himself. The more he dwelled on all of these things, the more one fact became clearer in his mind: A special bond had formed between him and Miss Balfour. Most or all of that bonding had taken place after he had reduced himself.

And she was coming to eat him for her morning meal.

At 7am, he heard her footsteps. Then Colleen walked into the dining room.

"Hello little friend," she said.

Soon she was seated at the table, and she placed him onto a plate. He looked across at her stomach, imagining how it would be to be inside it. Then he looked up further, to her long towering neck, and thought about being gulped down inside it. His eyes continued to roam upwards, to her full smiling lips outlining the beautiful mouth which awaited him, and then looked further still to the elegance in her eyes.

"Obviously, we now know that you taste as delicious as I'd hoped any Leprechaun to be. Reducing yourself only helped me to discover it sooner. Are you ready then?"

"I'm yours to eat."

She picked him up and brought him to her mouth. He awaited its opening, but instead he saw and felt her pressing her lips to his entire face at once.

“That’s for not changing your mind,” she said, “I felt sure that you would by now.”

“Would you have restored my size?” he asked.

“No. I was happy to have eaten only my boyfriend until I found you here. You’ve awakened a new pleasure, and I’d have satisfied it regardless of any change of heart you might have had. And now I shall," she said, and picked him up and licked him enthusiastically for a minute, then rubbed her fingertips across her lower lip, then returned to licking him. A few minutes later, she drew her tongue back into her mouth.

"This is the moment of truth. Goodbye little boy," she said.

She opened her mouth, placed him inside it.

The feel of her tongue below him was all that he had longed for and more. He decided to show her that even now, he hadn’t changed his mind. After lying there for some time, he eased his way into her throat himself, and felt himself sliding down slowly, until he reached her stomach.

Colleen thought about this last act of devotion and smiled warmly.

Colleen went on a sabbattical from teaching, with her tenure secured at the school, and decided to devote more time to science and inventing, which would give her an ostensible reason for posting the following job advertisement:

PERSONAL ASSISTANT – TEMP

Company director needs a personal

assistant to help with all kinds of

work around the premises. Apply, in

the first instance to:

Colleen Balfour

T/A Reduced Interest Co,

using the address or telephone number

at the bottom of this advertisement.

The only respondent to the advertisement was a young man had finished school, and put together a resume. Since he’d only who had short term part time jobs on top of his time at school, the resume looked rather light at a glance.  He consoled himself with the thought that this would have been the case for anyone who had just graduated. It was hardly cause to think that an employer would not give him a chance. Besides, he had found a job that seemed to be tailored to his limited experience. He looked over the advertisement once more, as he thought about the questions he might be asked at the interview:

“It sounds like a financial loan company,” he thought, “I haven’t had any experience in that area. Let’s hope it’s an entry level position. I don’t think the mock interviews I did at the Careers Reference seminars we had in uni are going to help me much with this job.”

He put on the suit he had saved up for, and his best tie, and went to the premises that Colleen had opened in the village.

“I’m Patrick O’Murphy. I have an interview for the temporary personal assistant position,” he said.

“I’m Colleen Balfour. If you fill out this application for employment form, I will see you soon,” said Colleen.

Patrick sat on one of the velvet covered chairs and took the pen from the top of the clipboard. He had soon completed the form.

“Patrick,” she said, “Come on through.”

Colleen showed him into her office and closed the door.

She sat down, and took his resume in her hands, having prepared for the interview by having it on her desk with certain lines highlighted in pink.

“You wouldn’t be working for this office,” she said, “This is just my public front, which turns over enough consolidated loan interest to keep anyone from wondering about my more private business. I’ve just taken over the business from my retired father. Reduced interest is a play on words, which also reflects the research which has my main attention. If you get the position, I’ll be pretending to have hired nobody. Then I can start you at my private office at home. I have set up as a private scientist. There’ll be no suspicion, when you disappear that way.”

“Disappear?” he asked, “In what way, exactly.”

She turned to a cabinet beside her desk. There was a fish tank on the cabinet, and a short rod with a small net attachment beside the tank. She picked this tool up, dipped it in the tank, and moved it about.

Most of the fish were able to elude the net, but she looked eagerly at them, relentlessly pursuing them. She seemed to be enjoying the fact that the fish had no way out of the tank, and could ultimately not escape the net forever either.

In less than two minutes, Colleen had snared one of the fish.

“How long do you think these fish are?” she asked.

“From head to tail, I’d say about two inches,” he said.

“Just under two inches,” said Colleen, “Left here long enough, this fish would die without water, but I’d like him to be alive and aware of what will happen to him next.”

Colleen’s fingers manoeuvred close to the fish, until she had secured a reasonably firm grip. She brought the fish to her mouth, which opened wide.

Patrick watched, strangely caught up in the sight of her mouth, as he saw the fish sliding across Colleen’s tongue. On this occasion, she kept her mouth open, so that he could see the fish sliding out of sight and into her throat.

He watched her gulping. The movements of her neck were something he’d never considered before, when watching a woman eat, but she had drawn his attention to the fish’s perspective on its journey.

“Do you wonder what sensations the fish would be having as it reaches my stomach?” she asked.

“It may not even realise it’s done for,” he said.

“You’ve identified one of the two things that make the fish different from a human being,” said Colleen, “If a human man were the size of that fish, he would be fully cognitive of his situation and its implications. Not only that, but he might find it enjoyable.”

“Being eaten?” asked Patrick.

“Don’t dismiss it straight away,” she said, “Think of it as an Employee In-Placement Scheme.”

He checked his reaction, realising that his future career, and possibly some other rewards could depend on impressing this beautiful woman.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Think how a man dreams of getting close to a woman’s body. It becomes all he can do to stop dreaming of her, dreaming of touching her and forgetting all about the rest of the world. Would not the ability to go inside a woman’s tummy be in fact the most definitive encounter of all?”

“I never thought of it like that,” he said.

“Experiences are about excitement,” said Colleen, “So many men leave their girlfriends, and some even leave their wives, because they grow bored with their conquests, and want to find out what else is in store for them. Don’t you think this is the wrong way to treat women?”

“I have thought about that, after the books I’ve read at school,” said Patrick.

“Well wouldn’t being swallowed alive by a woman be the most exciting experience of all?” asked Colleen, “Surely after one has had that, one wouldn’t need to go in pursuit of anything else.”

“I can see your point, in a way,” said Patrick.

“So the only thing to add to the excitement for the man would be his knowledge that he couldn’t get out of the woman’s body,” said Colleen, “Would you find that exciting, Patrick?”

“It would be very exciting, I’m sure,” said Patrick, “But what would the woman do to further her excitement?”

“She would relish the feeling of having the man inside her, of knowing that all he could do was to wait to become a part of her stomach as he was added to her inner nutrients. It’s how I’ve felt about it since I was a young girl. Since the man is the one who would be converted to food, the woman would no doubt enjoy the advantages of her own situation.”

“I guess she might enjoy the taste of the man,” he said.

The employer had spent a long time discussing an unusual fantasy. It had certainly loosened up his nerves for his first major job interview. However, now that she had done this, he wondered how long she would take to get onto the usual procedure of outlining the job specification and matching the skills of his resume to the requirements of the job.

“So what do you think of the idea of a woman swallowing a man whole then?” she asked, apparently not ready to change the subject.

“It’s quite an idea on paper,” he said, “But she’d have to find a way to get him down to the size of that fish first.”

“It’s good to see such a pragmatic attitude,” she said, “I’ve been doing that research at home. I’ve created a machine that works on inorganic matter. I’ve managed to reduce plastics, wood and other materials. I believe, that with further experimentation it will work on living human tissue. So I need a test subject, who’s willing to see the whole process through. That’s why I’ve advertised this position. Most of the men I’ve interviewed are not suitable for my choices. The few who were suitable have been unwilling to take on the responsibility. So I haven’t even outlined this part of the role of being my assistant. You’re the first one I’ve told.”

What Colleen was not telling the boy is that she already had the machine fully developed and had eaten Stanley and Henry already. Colleen had merely thought that she could temporarily lead Patrick into thinking that she was still working on some shrinking technology. It would make for a greater dramatic effect later

“So you want to hire someone as a test subject for each modification you make on your reducing machine. Now I understand the pun on the Reduced Interest name of your company,” he said.

“The test subject for the reducing effect would also have to be the subject for the swallowing I plan to do as well,” said Colleen, “I’m sure that it would only take a few months of experimentation to achieve a reduction of a man to a height of less than two inches. I’d be willing to pay you ten times the award wage in the meantime. You could live extravagantly and do everything that took your fancy during that period. You wouldn’t have to save any of it up, nor any need to pay off a mortgage with it. Once we’ve achieved a full scale reduction, I can finally go ahead and eat you, whole naturally.”

Her beauty had been distracting him from realising the full implications of her explanation of his duties. Now he understood that the preamble with the fish tank was in fact the primary purpose of the job interview. This woman was actually offering to hire a man for some undetermined period of time, while she would experiment on reducing his size until he was small enough to fit into her mouth. Then, if it turned out that she could actually achieve her goal, she expected to eat him!

“It seems as though this whole job is about me helping you to become a cannibal,” he said.

“I was hoping, after I’d given you such a graphic explanation, that you wouldn’t have come to such a narrow understanding of my expectations, Patrick. Cannibalism is just the vulgar consumption of a person who’s been killed before he can have any awareness of the process of being eaten. I’m trying to create an experience where a man can savour every second of the process of being eaten alive by a woman. Do you think I’m a beautiful woman, Patrick? I won’t consider it sexual harassment, if you tell me, “The sexual harrassment laws are misused left, right and center anyway, to the point that nobody feels safe to ask anyone out. People are doing themselves out of relationships, because they’re afraid of being unjustly sued or dismissed for harmless initial first time approaches to someone they like.”

“Yes, I do think so,” said Patrick, “I mean, I think you’re beautiful, and I never agreed with some of the case precedents where those laws get misused either.”

“Good. At least we’ve come to that understanding,” said Colleen, “I’m offering you the chance to earn a lot of money in what would become your last days outside my stomach, and then to be used by me in a way that would gratify you as well, more than any man has ever been gratified before.”

“It still seems like it would be a rather one sided employment contract,” said Patrick.

“I can see your perspective,” said Colleen, and got up out of her seat, and walked around the desk to stand beside him.

Colleen drew closer and sat down on his knees and upper legs. She put her hands around his upper arms to steady him.

“I’d still like to complete the screening process of your interview,” she said, “I couldn’t even offer the position to someone who didn’t meet all the requirements of the task specifications.”

“What else are you looking for in the successful applicant?” asked Patrick, “Apart from a willingness to be reduced and eaten, that is.”

“However unusual it may be for you, this is still a job interview,” said Colleen, “You could at least show me enough respect to refrain from outbursts of cynicism.”

“I’m sorry,” said Patrick, wondering why he had jeopardised this wonderful physical contact by demeaning the woman’s quest to consume him.

“It’s alright,” said Colleen, “I respond to most comments on my vore ventures, as long as the comments are interesting. If I were hiring a secretary, I’d give you a typing test. In this case, I need to find out how delicious you are.”

“Oh.”

Colleen’s face drew close to his cheek, and then he felt the wildest sensation of his life. The tip of her tongue came out and gently sampled the taste of his flesh.

“I’m glad you shaved for this interview,” she said, “It’s more important than ever, when you’re going for a job like this one, but I’ll be feeding you a chemical that I’ve invented to halt the growth of facial and body hair anyway. Your scalp will be unaffected.”

“Most interviews don’t place such a high importance on the employee’s last opportunity to attend a luncheon … or dinner,” he said.

“Well I like what I’ve tried so far,” she said, “Let’s examine your credentials with a little more direct staff interaction.”

This time he felt Colleen’s entire tongue sliding from the bottom of his cheek, up the side of his face, to the top. She moved a little, found a dry patch of skin, and repeated the test.

“I’m very satisfied, Patrick; and surely you must have gotten a lot more out of this than you would have gained from a typing test.”

“It was … very … enjoyable,” he said.

“Well what I’m offering is just an extension of that, on a different scale, with a journey down my throat added at the end. Think about it, Patrick. Can you imagine yourself easing gently down inside my neck, and then coming to rest inside my stomach, with the most incredibly arousing physical contact then behind you, fresh in your memory, with your whole body still moist from its contact with my tongue? Think what it would be like, settling down in my stomach, knowing that my body was going to absorb you, forever. No man has ever known such a mixture of excitement and ecstasy before. When you watch a serial cliff hanger, you know that the drama will be resolved by the end of the film’s last chapter. You know that there will be a regular predictable ending. In my stomach you’d be a pioneer, with an amazing destiny ahead of you.”

“I know, but you can’t seriously expect to find anyone who wants to be eaten by you, no matter how many people you interview.”

“Maybe, and maybe not,” she said, “But I will continue my interviews until I find someone who does, and then I will continue my experiments. I will eventually reduce a man and eat him. You can pass up this opportunity, but I know you enjoyed the touch of my tongue licking your cheeks just now. I know it’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to you. I know you’ll be imagining what it’s like for the applicant who takes the job on. You won’t forget the feel of my tongue, or the sight of that fish going to its destiny. You won’t ever forget the opportunity you’re throwing away. Some people apply all sorts of misconstrued Freudian interpretations to the vore fantasy I’m trying to realise. I don’t go in for any of that nonsense. I just want to eat someone, and draw the process out a long time, so that I can really go to town, once the little man is in my mouth. But you go back to your search for a suitable career, Patrick. When you’ve been unable to secure any significant career opening as a raw school graduate, you can spend three years at university. After that, you can work hard for years and put lots of effort into courting someone, all for the limited experiences you can have in a regular relationship. You could have surpassed all of that in a few months, but I respect your decision to decline.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry if I offended you,” he said, as he got up, and walked towards the door.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, “I’ll hire a suitable visionary eventually. Although you were at the top of my SHORT LIST.”

“Believe it or not, I wish you the best with your screening process,” he said, “I’ll let myself out of the office.”

“It’s a shame you won’t accept the job offer,” she said, “I think you would most likely turn out to be by far the tastiest applicant I screen.”

Patrick went home. He could still feel the wet sensuous touch of Colleen’s tongue on his cheek in his memory. He began to wonder if his cheek had showed any moisture, when he had walked back out into the village street.

He thought about the clear sight of her tongue, before she pushed the fish onto it. Then something suddenly occurred to him. He had not been thinking of being kissed, not even by Colleen. At the moment, he had been thinking of being eaten by Colleen in exactly the way she had explained that she intended to eat someone.

Patrick realised that, as a fantasy, the thought of being eaten like that; being licked by a full sized tongue after being reduced, and being swallowed to a stomach was far more arousing than anything else could ever have been.

Had Colleen known he would feel this way?

The thrill didn’t end there. He was even aroused at the thought of sitting in her stomach, knowing she was as free as before, with him now captive inside her.

He wondered what could make a man feel like this. What could make a woman feel inclined to bring about such a thing?

For the rest of the afternoon, Patrick spent hours creating all sorts of scenarios in his mind. At the end of every scenario, he ended up sliding off the back of Colleen’s tongue, down her throat, and into her stomach, excited even more by the knowledge that Colleen enjoyed every second of it. He imagined himself encircled by Colleen’s feminine fingers, with her mouth open in front of him, slowly easing him into it, with the view of her pink tongue just below him, then touching him, touching his whole face at once. He imagined her fingers releasing him, and her lips slowly closing behind him. He imagined her tongue about to send him into her throat.

Over the next few days, he repeated this exercise again and again, creating new tales in his mind to feed the desire in different ways. In the past, he had varied the girls and ladies who had been on his mind during these moments. However, he now only thought of one woman each time: Colleen.

Patrick eventually came to accept something: It was just a fantasy like this. Done this way, it would forever remain an unfulfilled fantasy. Unless Colleen had found an employee at last, it would remain the same for her: unfulfilled.

Patrick knew what it would cost him to have his fantasy realised. He didn’t even know whether Colleen would ever be able to realise the technological development necessary to make the fantasy a reality. He just knew that he could not get over his urge to entrust his future to her attempts.

If it worked, she would enjoy dining on him, just as she had done with the fish, and he would be leaving his old life in a way that thrilled him beyond any of his wildest previous expectations.

There was no sense or rationality to it. Yet she had awakened something in Patrick which drew him to his telephone with no regard for the consequences.

He dialled the number he had been given, when she had first contacted him for an interview.

“Colleen speaking,” said Colleen.

“I’ve been thinking about reconsidering,” said Patrick.

“I don’t tend to talk specifics of business over the telephone,” said Colleen.

“Sorry,” said Patrick, as he realised that what he contemplated would need to be kept secret, out of consideration for her.

“I can see you at 3:00 today,” said Colleen.

“I’ll come in by 2:45,” said Patrick.

                                    *******************************

Colleen looked enticing, as she opened the door to her office once more, and showed him to the couch this time. She closed the door and sat beside him.

“Now, tell me about your ruminations,” she said.

He told her, with decreasing embarrassment as she made every effort to reassure him that she appreciated his confidences of how much he had thought of her.

“So you’re finding it hard to put it out of your thoughts,” she said.

“Yes, it started that way.”

“Well I’m very flattered. Even though you’re not willing to take it on, you’ve shown you’re as enticed by the idea as I am. I never judged you for not wanting to go the final distance in reality. I’m aware of the greater benefits open to me, from such an exchange. What can I do for you, now that you’re here?”

Patrick had a thought, which had only just come to him.

“When you did the screening test, you used my left cheek,” he said.

“I remember.”

“Could you do the other one?”

She drew him closer and put her tongue to work.

“Have you found anyone else to take on the task?” he asked.

“You remember the confidentiality clause you signed on the application form?”

“The one where I agreed not to discuss the interview with anyone?”

“Yes.”

“It’s become even more important lately. I’ve run out of applicants from running the advertisement in the newspapers. I’ve had to outsource more applicants from employment agencies and consultants. You were right, when you pointed out that nobody would be likely to agree to be reduced and eaten.”

“I meant that then, but Colleen, I’ve reached the point where I’d find it harder not to.”

“Have you really?” she asked.

“Yes. Do you think there’s a real chance you’ll have the reduction problem licked?”

She laughed.

“Was that pun intended?” she asked.

“Oh, ‘licked’. No, I didn’t think that way,” he said, smiling at his own choice of words.

“Yes Patrick. I’m confidant I can do it. It might have to be done in several stages. You could end up spending a while as a midget, albeit a slimmer than usual midget, before I can get you down to less than two inches in height, but it should be possible.”

“I’d like to accept the position,” he said.

Colleen touched his cheeks, this time with her hands, and kissed him.

“You should have the chance to try that too,” she said, “You won’t be able to do so with anyone else, when this works.”

“I won’t want to,” he said, “And thank you so much, Colleen.”

“Obviously, we can’t keep a written record of an employment contract spelling out your undertaking to be reduced to miniature size and eaten by me,” said Colleen, “I would be willing to accept a handshake agreement, if you would.”

“I think it would be poetic if you licked your fingers, before we shook hands,” said Patrick.

Colleen smiled at the suitability of his suggestion. He watched, as she put out her tongue, and extended each finger in turn and licked it. Then she shook hands with him. He felt the moisture of her fingers against his hand.

“Would you mind if we finalized the deal in another way?” he asked.

“What do you suggest?”

“Could I put my fingers in your mouth?” he asked.

“Surely! I’d enjoy feeling you doing it,” said Colleen.

He took turns putting one or two of his fingers into her mouth, running them firmly against her tongue, sliding them right to the back of her mouth. She giggled encouragingly.

“Just wait for the real thing,” she said, “I’ll give you the address of my research mansion now. You can report there for work first thing on Monday morning. I’ll advise the agency to cancel any future interviews, and say that I’ve decided not to proceed with filling the vacancy.”

She gave him her home address in the hills above the meadows.

Patrick had no idea whether or not she would ever find a way to shrink him. She tried weeks and weeks of tests with no success (mainly because she had temporarily removed a working part from the machine). He grew used to being surrounded by a beam of coloured light, and waiting for it to clear, once again revealing that he was full sized as usual.

The wages were phenomenal, and he enjoyed using them, and was pleased that Colleen responded to all his invitations out on dates. 

She knew that all of his buttons responded to her desire to eat him.

He was now well settled into the routine of turning up to work, and doing a day as a guinea pig for the woman who had captured his heart. He had no reason to believe that such a scientifically outlandish fantasy would ever be made more than the ridiculous mental indulgence that it was.

However, what mattered most was the fact that he simply adored Colleen for having her fantasy and awakening its reciprocal counterpart in him. He loved Colleen, and wanted to be with her forever. There was still a way to do that. He would ask her to be his steady girlfriend.

Today he spent the time contemplating the best way to ask her. Would she say yes to a man she still hoped to invent the means to reduce and eat?

She did seem to respond lovingly to his advances.

Once more the light ray surrounded him, as his mind began silently reciting all sorts of romantic speeches. Patrick’s nerves were getting worse, as he knew that the day’s testing was coming to an end. He would soon have to tell her the full extent of his feelings for her. Could he go through with it? How could he build up his confidence in the few minutes which remained?

“It can’t be that hard really?” he thought, “Guys have always asked girls to go steady with them. If anything was unusually difficult, it was her task of asking me to be experimented upon, reduced and eaten. Yet she found the confidence to do it quite coldly and objectively. But then she had an advantage. She dressed the whole request up as a job interview. I can’t think of a suitable gimmick to aid me in delivering my own proposition. What does she like about me? What has she always liked about me? Of course! My sense of humour. I just need to work some into a romantic speech. How about this: Do you, Colleen, take this man, to have and to hold, until you find a way to reduce his size and eat him, and then enjoy the memory of a delicious meal, for as long as you shall go on living without him?”

He felt elated at the newfound confidence which accompanied this idea, and watched the visual distortion effect of the surrounding light begin to clear. He would take her in his arms, guide her to the couch and declare his undying love for her.

Patrick noticed two tall pillars in front of him. They stood on black platforms.

Had she been moving the furniture, while he was in the path of the light beam?

Then he looked more closely at the platforms.

They were shoes!

He followed the pillars with his eyes, and focussed more clearly on them.

They were Colleen’s legs!

His head stood level with the first visible parts of the legs, just above the shoes. He was one and a half inches tall.

He looked up further, to where her long skirt covered her knees and the top half of her shins. It was like looking at the top of a house, in terms of how far he had to crane his head back.

He looked a little more, leaning right back, and stepping back as well, and saw the line of the skirt going up to her waist, bordered on each side by her unbuttoned lab coat.

Her hands were in the pockets of the lab coat. He looked beyond the waist, and saw her blouse covering her immense stomach.

The implications were not lost on him.

Still surprised by the sudden success of this latest test, he looked up at her blouse and saw her firm breasts pushing against the top of the blouse.

High in the distance, he could see her soft neck, which decorated the throat which had longed to swallow him.

Looking up still further, he saw her face: her beautiful lips, her rich cheeks, and her powerful eyes. Her towering hair fell adorably about this magnificently large face.

He concentrated on the lips, and saw them smiling at her success.

Colleen slowly took her hands out of her pockets, and knelt down enough to be able to reach him. 

He saw her hand coming towards him. It looked more arousing than it ever had before.

AT THIS POINT THE WORD COUNT HAS BEEN REPEATEDLY CHECKED AT 508 WORDS AND YET GIANTESSWORLD KEEPS RETURNING THE “FAILED TO MEET THE MINIMUM WORD COUNT OF 500” MESSAGE. SO I WILL USE THIS PARAGRAPH TO BOOST THE WORD COUNT AND SEE IF THAT BYPASSES THE MALFUNCTIONING ONLINE SOFTWARE.

He stepped towards her hand.

“It’s alright. Let me do it for you,” she said calmly, and enclosed him in her fingers.

He thought back to the first time he had fantasized about this in his bed, and enjoyed the feel of those fingers, with their puffy white segments pressing against his own flesh. He had no idea that Colleen could have shrunken him at any time during their days and weeks of testing. She had let the suspense build up. He was driven wild with the realisations of all that this meant. There seemed little or no point in mentioning his desire to go steady now. The dynamics of their relationship had just changed, as no relationship’s dynamics had ever been altered before.

“I’ll get back up slowly,” she said, “Let me know if you feel any vertigo.”

He never even thought to look down. All of her most engaging features (and the promises they represented for his future) were all in positions which involved the need for him to look upwards.

“It’s OK so far,” he said, as she slowly rose to her feet. Now she was holding him in her hand, and it was held out in front of her body. He was roughly level with the bottom of her breasts.

She began to raise her hand some more. He stared in wonder, as the top of her breasts came slowly into view. She had been wearing old fashioned dresses of centuries past in the privacy of her mansion, as he had responded with many compliments to the first one she’d worn for him.

Now he saw her radiant cleavage spread before him like a human mountain which simply must be climbed.

“You’ve done it!” he said, “Colleen, you’re absolutely wonderfully brilliant! You’re the most amazing woman in the world!”

“Thank you, Patrick. We’ll get to the final aspects of your job description in due course, but would you like to get comfortable in that area of me you’ve just been watching closely?”

“Yes please!” said Patrick, “I’d love to!”

She walked to the large couch, sat on it, and put him gently onto her right breast.

He climbed down between them, and felt the pressure of both breasts pressing against him.

“Is this nice for you too?” he asked.

“It is actually. I wondered what it would be like. You’re really quite stimulating, Patrick.”

She’d never thought to do this with Stanley, and Henry would have been too young.

He climbed up onto her left breast, and lay down on it.

“We’ve already talked about your downward journey on the inside of me,” said Colleen, “Would you like to make an upward climb on the outside?”

“It would be marvellous,” said Patrick, and began slowly crawling up her well exposed neckline, until he reached the base of her neck. She leaned back on the couch, lying down with her head resting against the side of it. He climbed slowly up her neck, rubbing his whole body against the smooth flesh which covered the tunnel to her stomach.”

He stopped halfway up her neck.

“I know you don’t have anything in your mouth right now, but could you do some gulping anyway?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Thanks,” said Patrick, “It will give me a chance to know how it looks and feels from this side.

He felt her flesh moving against him, as her throat undulated with every arousing movement she made. He looked down at the base of her neck, and imagined himself sliding down inside it, to her stomach.

It was no longer an idle speculation or an unfulfilled fantasy, which could only be simulated in his mind. Now it was the reality of his future. That neck would gulp him down.

He reached the top of her neck, and she leaned back further, so that her head rested horizontally, allowing him to climb up onto her chin. He sat on it and stroked her lower lip in admiration.

“It’s an incredibly beautiful view to see you like this, and the feel of you as a giant is so wonderful,” he said.

“You’ve become quite a convert,” said Colleen, “I haven’t forgotten your initial reaction to this.”

“I’d be missing this now, if you’d found someone else first,” he said, “When will we be doing the final parts of the job specification?” 

“Not tonight, Patrick. I’m sure you’d like a night in bed with me at that size, before I start the Corporate Restructure.”

“It would be even better if you turned on the central heating, and gave me a night ON the bed with you at this size,” he said.

“I’m sure I can manage that,” said Colleen, “We can continue this physical development then if you like.”

She took him for a walk in the garden, as the sun began to set. They had spent the morning doing all the usual adjustments and recalibrations of the machine actually amounted to nothing but a floorshow for his benefit, and then begun the lengthy test. All of her pretence of working on the machine had created a lot of suspense in the boy, who believed he had been working towards a scientific discovery, with a possibility of being eaten, when in fact she had guaranteed the likelihood of it before they’d even met.

She sat on a hammock on the veranda, and let him rest gently in the palm of her hand, which rested in her lap, while she rocked in the hammock. They both looked out at the garden.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes. We’re usually too busy to spend any time out here in the afternoons.”

“I’ll have lots more time for that now,” she said.

Something about that last sentence had a sobering effect on him, for the first time since he had left her first interview and found himself lost in fantasy at the back of the train carriage.

He went over those last words in his mind: “I’ll have lots more time for that now… I’ll have lots more time… I’ll … I’ll … I’ll!”

He turned his head from the garden and looked up at her high face. There was a new contentment in her eyes. She had completed the pinnacle of her lengthy research. He was now successfully reduced. She had no more anxieties about perfecting the machine. She was going to eat him, and spend more time on that hammock alone, recollecting the pleasure he had finally been small enough to afford her.

And he wouldn’t!

It was mind boggling, to say the least!

Yet this was what he had waited for. This was what he had come to realise after weeks of solo fantasy without her. What made the fantasy and all of the physical manifestations (now possible at this size) so arousing was the knowledge that she was going to permanently eat him. She was going to derive a pleasing delicious meal, with all of her previously enjoyed wealth still available to her after the experience had concluded. She was going to continue as a successful company director living in the comforts with which she had surrounded herself.

And he was not!

The look of satisfaction on her face showed a complete detachment from the significant changes for him, involved in his impending situation. Yet it also showed an awareness of the inevitability of these changes. Knowing that all of these thoughts were factored into her contented look somehow aroused Patrick even more than before.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“It would be so much more arousing to hear you tell me about what you’re going to do with me all over again, but now that I’m at this size. It has so much more significance, now that it’s not just a distant possibility dependant on the outcome of tests.”

“Alright then,” said Colleen, and sat him on her breasts and smiled down at him, “At dinner time tomorrow, I’m going to present you on my dining table, where you’ve sat with me many times for meals we’ve BOTH enjoyed together. I’m going to pick you up and lick you many times. Then I’m going to put you inside my mouth. I’m going to close my mouth and let you get familiar with the fact that you’re on a one way trip. After you’ve rolled around on my tongue for a while, I’m going to slide you into my throat. Then, as you look up at the last vestige of light, thinking of my continued existence in the world outside, I’m going to concentrate on your own thoughts, as you face the very real and certain prospect of being gulped down into my stomach forever. Then I am going to carry out that promise and swallow you whole. I will revel in the fact that you have given yourself to my experiments with a distant surreal consideration of this possibility and now come to see it as an imminent reality. Eventually, I will remind myself of the most defining moment of my triumph: namely the look on your face, when you saw that it had finally worked this afternoon.”

“Oh Colleen, you’re driving me off the scale.”

That night, he watched every arousing aspect of Colleen serving and eating dinner, from his new dramatically different vantage point on the dining table itself. Every movement of her tongue, her lips, her hands, her neck, her occasionally heaving breasts’ and her stomach at his own eye level added to his excitement. It all contributed to the ultimate preview for what she would be doing to him the following night.

She took him to bed early that night, so that they would not fall asleep until they had indulged in each other’s presence for a long time.

He resumed his position on her breasts, this time as she lay on her back on the bed, and enjoyed the heaving of the huge spheres of her magnificent bosom below his body. Then he made the horizontal journey to her neck and onto her chin again. He again stroked her lower lip, and enjoyed looking down into her mouth as she spoke.

Then Colleen lay with her head on her side and he lay on her cheek and looked down at her lips, and at her body. Then she lay back again, facing the ceiling. He lay on her lower lip. Occasionally, she would slightly open her mouth, being careful not to shake him off. He felt her tongue coming up and rubbing against his side and the side of his face.

“I’m honoured as always,” she said, and he jumped down onto the pillow beside her head. She moved her lips closer to him and gave him a long and satisfying giant kiss.

“We can talk ourselves to sleep now,” she said.

She left the reading lamp on for the night, and he enjoyed watching every movement of her lips and neck as she spoke. When she pronounced the rounder vowels of certain words, he stared in at her tongue in admiration of its plans for him.

They fell asleep for a few hours. He awoke to see that it was 12:40 in the middle of the night.

“I’ve been awake for about 10 minutes myself,” said Colleen.

“Darling, could you do something for me?” he asked.

“What?”

“Do you think you’d be able to stay awake for half an hour, so I could climb into your mouth and lie against your tongue for a while?”

“I’d love to,” she said.

He slid across her lower lip, and felt the touch of her tongue against his whole body this time. It was amazing, being inside that mouth, looking out at the pillow and bedroom when she sometimes parted her lips and teeth, and thinking of the throat which awaited behind him during her next evening meal.

He eventually waited for the next time her mouth opened, and called out, “Can you keep your teeth apart now, so I can climb out?”

She could not answer the question, with him on her tongue corrupting her speech patterns, but he saw her mouth opening wide around him. Her tongue pushed against the inside of her lower lip, so that he would not have to slide over her teeth. He slid himself slowly out onto the pillow.

“That was lovely!” he said.

“You’re welcome. It was quite a way to whet my appetite for tomorrow night too,” she said.

He lay against her neck this time, and they talked again, until they both fell asleep.

In the morning, she slept in. Without being able to talk to her, he could only daydream.

He thought of the dinner plans which awaited him, the new destiny inside her stomach, and the life she would continue to lead later.

And then he remembered his original plan of going steady with her.

He climbed up and pulled at her cheek.

“Oh,” she stirred, “Did you want something, Patrick?”

“In all the excitement I forgot to tell you something. I was planning to ask you to go steady with me yesterday afternoon.”

“Really? That was very sweet of you.”

“I’d still like you to keep the memories of our dates, even after I’m gone,” he said.

“Thank you. I will. I’ll always treasure them, Patrick.”

They were both silent for a few minutes.

“Colleen?” he said at last.

“Yes Patrick.”

“Do you think you’ll go out with anyone after this?”

“Does that have any importance to you? You’ll be playing an entirely different role, Patrick.”

“I’m just curious, I guess.”

“Well I might.”

“Would you have accepted my invitation, if yesterday’s test hadn’t worked?”

She turned her head in the bed, looking up at the ceiling, so that her cheek was now visible to him, and rubbed the top of her head, stroking hair out of the way on the back of the pillow.

“I’d have accepted, but we’d have had to keep extending the arrangement until the experiment testing successfully reduced your size. I have had boyfriends before. How about you?”

“There was never anyone before you.”

“That’s good, Patrick,” she said, turning her head back to kiss him affectionately, “I will feel much happier, to be sure of that, when I’m gobbling you down tonight. I don’t know why I never thought to ask it before.”

Colleen drew her head back a few inches and yawned widely in front of him. It gave him a new arousing view of her tongue, with her lips stretched out in the yawning position. He could well have dived into her mouth right then.

“I’m still so drowsy, darling. We’ve got all day until it’s time to do it. Just make yourself comfortable, while I get some more sleep.”

Patrick was far too hyped up to possibly drop off again now. He lay awake on the bed and began to process everything she had said. It was the first chance he’d had to think, without communicating with her wakening self. He realised that she had returned his affections, and so cultivated an even greater willingness in him to submit to her tests, the eventual successful reduction and the dinner engagement which awaited him that evening.

He had certainly connected with her purely in the context of the wild fantasy she had aroused in him. But he had also fixed his affections on her in a permanent way. She had just expressed the fact that she would have humoured every desire of his, and enjoyed doing so. On top of the unique and costly pleasure she would gain from him, she would have all of the normal aspects of a long life to look forward to. 

She had asked him at the first interview, if he had found her beautiful. He had confirmed it. Since then, she had played on his affections to guarantee his willingness to play the role that she had sought from someone. That very night she was going to go through with it, and she had not even been concerned with sparing his feelings about the likelihood of her giving her affections to someone else, without exacting the same costly commitment from that someone else.

He reviewed all these facts in his mind again, sometimes looking at her beautiful sleeping form to complement the growing awareness of the inner workings of her mind, and at other times closing his eyes and recalling the gorgeous radiant beauty of her relaxed expression on the hammock the day before, again with his new understanding of her thought processes combined in his mind with that image.

“It’s not fair,” he suddenly realised, “She knew I couldn’t help but be lured by the whole thing, and yet she never even considered me as being a long-term boyfriend for her. She knew I was just a boy a few months ago. She dressed this dinner arrangement up as the ultimate thrill, and it certainly is. But I’ve grown up a lot in the last few months. I want more. I want some way to have this thrill, and yet still survive to convince her to stay with me after the thrill has been enjoyed. There’s no way I can think of to do that now, but I have to delay our dinner date, until I can think of such a way.”

He looked across at her sleeping form again.

Colleen had planned all of this for many years, and dedicated years of scientific research to making it possible.

She would never give him what he wanted, even if it became possible somehow. For her, a significant part of the encounter (in fact the same significant part that aroused him for so long) was the inescapable nature of the dinner date that she had prepared him for. The more he wanted to escape, the more she would want him to be inside her stomach facing the fact that he would not be able to avoid it.

He knew what he was walking away from, knew it far more clearly than he had known when he had walked out of the first interview. Yet he had to walk away. His only chance was while she slept.

He slid gently off the pillow, being sure not to wake her, and walked to the edge of the bed. He looked down at the floor. The fall was nothing trivial.

He stared down, trying to think of a way to get down without becoming a human splat.

“Trying to give reign to your second thoughts?” came her voice behind him.

He spun around and saw her fingers approaching.

“Keep back!” he said.

She stopped advancing her hand, but did not withdraw it.

“There’s no way down the side of the bed,” she said, “The sheets are tucked in tightly. So is the blanket. I thought you’d begun to take in the full significance of this, when you were so silent on the hammock for a while yesterday. I was sure, when you asked me about going steady. There’s no resignation from this employment, Patrick. You have the rest of the day to remain in anticipation of the fact that you’re going to be my dinner.”

“Get your hand back, or I’ll jump off!”

“And hit the ground?” she laughed, “You won’t survive that.”

“I won’t survive forever in your stomach either, but I now fully understand how much you’ve been looking forward to having me in there aware of that fact. If I go over, you lose that privilege forever.”

“You’re right,” she sighed, as her shapely shoulders shrugged beside the straps of her nightie, “So what’s the answer to this little stand-off?”

“I won’t jump, if you give me your word to give me a chance to get out and run for it.”

“You gave me YOUR word to complete the job I hired you for,” she said.

“So sue me.”

“I’d prefer to swallow you,” she said.

He thought about the height of everything in the room.

“Get out of the bed!” he said, “On the other side, of course.”

She moved away from him, and climbed out of the bed.

“What now?” she asked.

“Walk over to the window that’s on my side of the room, but don’t come near me.”

She did so.

“Good. Now open the window.”

She unlocked it and slid it up.

“Very well done, Colleen. Now walk back around to the far side of the bed.”

She made her way. She looked so adorable in her nightie. He felt a brief pang of guilt about turning on her like this. However, he had to think of his own continued existence.

“Now push the bed, until the pillow is as close to the window ledge as possible,” he said.

“Oh no,” she mused, “You don’t really think I’ll allow you to make a career change like that, do you?”

“Push, or I’ll jump!” he said, and made ready to do so.

He was bluffing, and didn’t know what he’d do if she wasn’t willing to yield. He would never kill himself in such a way as to miss out on the enjoyable aspects of the fate she wanted to inflict on him. He had to count on her immediate fear of losing that aspect of the encounter.

“Alright,” she said, “But you’ll be shaken off. Move in just a little bit, not nearly far enough for me to reach you, but just enough to make sure you don’t get knocked off.”

“Thanks for that,” he said, and did so.

As she began to push, he realised that the wall would cut off his suicide opportunity.

He ran past the pillow to the back of the bed, and looked through the posts. There would still be a chance to convince her he could kill himself, if she made it necessary.

He watched her powerful body pushing the bed. When it was up against the wall, he saw that the pillow was still six inches from the edge of the bed and the window ledge.

“Now stay out of the bed, but lean over and push the pillow right up against the wall,” he said.

Colleen complied.

“Good! Now keep back,” he said, and climbed up onto the pillow.

“You’re quite a little engineer of sorts,” she said, “But what now?”

He was now easily able to climb from the pillow onto the window ledge and repeat his threat to jump, only out the window this time.

He quickly pivoted his head, looked out the window, and then turned back to make sure that Colleen hadn’t moved.

He was strangely enjoying the way he was commanding this full sized woman in her own house, where she theoretically had all the advantages. She was so close, almost within striking distance of him, and yet he was using himself as a hostage to keep her in line. He hoped he would live to restore his size and write about this experience. It could sell as the most original cliff hanger scene.

“Hadn’t really thought that far, had you?” she said.

“I have now,” said Patrick. He moved across to the outside window ledge, and got as far from the pillow end as possible.

“Now, Colleen, very slowly and carefully, I want you to lie on the bed, on your stomach, to limit your movements as much as possible. Pull the pillowslip off the pillow. Then dangle it out of the pillow’s end of the window. I’ll be watching you closely. If you make the slightest move to grab me, I’ll jump off. Close the window, so that the pillowslip is jammed in it at your end. Lock the window. Once I’ve seen you do that, I want to look through the pane and see you move to the far side of the room. Only then will I slide down the pillowslip and onto the garden bed and run for my life.”

“You’re reneging on a contract,” she said, “We shook hands, even fingers and tongue, remember?”

“I did civics at school,” he answered, “Unconscionable contracts are not legally binding.”

“You still gave me your word,” she said.

“Which you got me to do after creating a situation where I couldn’t possibly think clearly,” he said.

“An engineer and a lawyer!” she marvelled, “I do admire you all the more for this, but you know I have to make sure you can never develop either of those careers, Patrick. Alright, I’ll give you the chance you’ve succeeded in forcing from me. Once you’ve descended that pillow case, you will have neutralized your own threat to jump. I’ll be outside looking for you in no time. I will catch you, and I will swallow you whole for my dinner tonight, Patrick!”

“You look so thrilling, when you assert yourself, Colleen.”

“Enjoy it while you can, my crafty little friend.”

He positioned himself on the outside location of best advantage, and watched Colleen edge across the bed. He looked at her breasts and neck as she lay on her stomach in her nightie. It was almost a sight sufficient to entice him to stay and await his original fate.

“What are you going to do about your size?” she asked, “I won’t let you get near the machine.”

“I don’t know. The first thing is to get away.”

“Do you think you’ll meet someone who’ll love you at that size?”

“Would you, if it was the only way to keep me from jumping?”

“You know you can’t trust my word, now that you’ve broken yours.”

“True. I doubt I’ll get over you any time soon, but I have to try to escape. What else have I got otherwise except the shortest and greatest thrill of all?”

“Well good luck,” she said, as she positioned the pillowslip, “I don’t think I’m going to need it. I won’t punish you, when I catch you. I’m going to enjoy eating you all the more, knowing the lengths you’d use to avoid it.”

“May the best man or woman win,” he said.

She closed the window on the top of the pillowslip, and he looked up at her locking the window from the inside. Then she turned and walked away. He ran along the window ledge, and saw her standing on the far side of the room.

She waved adorably at him. It was a thrilling gesture at least. He slid down the pillowslip and ran into the undergrowth.

In less than half a minute, Colleen stepped out of the house, onto a path and headed in his direction. He used the larger plants for cover, and kept running.

He eluded her until he came to the lawn, and was delighted at what he saw on the other side. There was another hammock. Its legs met at the top, which almost touched the fence which separated her property from the open hillside. There were several holes for bolts all the way up the legs, holes which hadn’t been used, he remembered in the hammock he had been riding on in her hand the day before. Maybe there would be in this one too.

He had to cross the lawn, climb the holes like a ladder, and get onto the fence. Maybe then he could find something on the other side to aid his safe descent to the village.

Running straight across the lawn was out of the question. She would bridge the distance in a matter of seconds. He ran to the nearest flowerbed, and darted between flowers, heading for the next pathway.

He managed to stay out of sight, while Colleen continued searching garden beds in vain for him, until he finally reached the second hammock. He started climbing the hammock on the outside of the leg.

He was almost at the top, when he saw Colleen stand up and stretch her arms. He made it to the top, while she was not looking his way, and lay down flat on the top. He saw Colleen look around the garden, and then walk over to his hammock and sit down on it.

She looked out at the garden.

“I think this is a comfortable vantage point,” she said, “You’ve had me ferreting around in my plants for quite a while. It occurs to me, that you need to head in this direction, away from the house, to get away from me altogether. I doubt you’ll be able to do that without me spotting you from here eventually. But let’s continue as we are.”

Her body looked even more arousing in the night dress than it had looked on the other hammock in her laboratory clothes the day before.

He turned around and looked at the top of the fence. It was almost touching the hammock. He could easily take a running sideways jump and reach it. However, there was nothing to convey him to the ground on the other side.

He looked all around the hillside. A lemon tree reached the top of the fence.

If he could walk along the fence, he’d make it to the tree and climb down to the ground. He couldn’t do it until Colleen had given up and gone inside, or at least gone back on all fours to resume her search of the gardens. Otherwise she would see him before he could get to the lemon tree.

He lay down on his side and looked over the edge, peeking down at Colleen’s beautiful body. Her breasts were just below him. They would have broken his fall in the most erotic fashion, but subsequent developments would negate the value of that approach.

He could only wait.

Colleen decided to swing, and suddenly pushed back on the hammock. The unexpected movement jolted Patrick off the top of the hammock, and he fell down. When her breasts moved backwards with her swinging body, the lap of her long nightdress took the place of her breasts, and caught him like a safety net.

 “The best meals always land in your lap,” said Colleen, “Now that you’ve come from up there, it’s clear how you got as far as you did.”

She made no move to get up and carry him inside.

She stopped the movement of the hammock and sat in the same position as she had done the day before on the other hammock, and held him again in her hands, facing the house.

This time there was not only the contentment on her face, but also a satisfied look of conquest. She had hunted him and caught him by default.

“Are you really not angry with me at all?” he asked.

“Are you kidding? That chase you gave me was so much fun. I’ve planned this day many times, and I’d never thought to include it.”

“I guess you’re welcome,” he said.

“Your little escape attempt has not worked. I’ve caught you, and I’m going to swallow you down my throat and leave you to contemplate your time in my stomach. You’ve lost your willingness to comply with it, but I’m going to eat you all up anyway, Patrick! Let’s find out what you think of that,” she said.

He turned again and faced her stomach.

Eventually she took him inside for lunch, and then placed him on her laboratory desk. He watched her write up the records of the final successful test experiment, which again was merely a performance on her part. Then she went and sat in a window bay, let him rest between her breasts, and they watched the sun go down together.

“You’ll have to wait while I get dressed at last in one of those revealing period costumes you like so much,” she said, “And I know just the place for you to wait.”

She went to the pantry with him, took a large oval shaped serving plate, and set him gently down upon it. Then she picked up the plate in one hand and an even larger oval shaped glass dinner cover in her other hand. She took both to the dining room, and put the plate in her place at the table. She lowered the dinner dish slowly, saying, “See you soon, Patrick. There’s plenty of oxygen for you until I return. Just don’t use it up trying to lift the dish. You won’t budge it.”

As the glass dish surrounded him, he realised that he would never see her in that nightdress again. She walked away like a vision of mixed fantasy, destiny and danger.

He looked around the room. It was a very romantic setting. He had enjoyed so many meals there with her after work, never fully absorbing the fact that he would one day become her most significant meal.

He thought back over his entire life, spending only four minutes on the many years before he met her, and then another 12 minutes on the time he had spent with her.

Then he heard footsteps, and knew that she was coming. He prepared to enjoy the view of her walking towards him for the last time.

Into the room stepped Colleen, her magnificent body clad in a marvellous dress, which revealed so much up top, and only her lower legs and shoes at the bottom. She walked into the room, turned around in a slow full pirouette for him, allowing him to admire it from every angle.

Then she walked slowly to the table, and lifted the glass cover, and let it down on the space behind his dish.

“Do you like the dress?” she asked.

“It makes you look truly ravishing,” he said, “I can’t think of any more beautiful vision by whom I’d rather be eaten.”

“It cost a thousand dollars,” she said, “I bought it as soon as I learned you preferred me in these outfits. I saved it for tonight.”

“You bought it back then? You must have been very sure you’d reduce me eventually.”

“I told you that at the job interview. You should have had more confidence in me yourself, Patrick.”

“I’m sorry. I meant no aspersions on your brilliance, darling. You must be a successful inventor, to afford such dresses. I just find your early confidence even more thrilling, knowing that you went out and bought that dress just to make this night as special as possible for me.”

“I’m glad to do it, Patrick.”

She sat down at the table. Her torso towered in front of him. Her breasts were more inviting than ever. Yet he knew that he was headed elsewhere.

“Seeing you like this has just changed what I wish I could do,” he said.

“Tell me,” said Colleen, with renewed interest.

“Since this morning, I wished I could get my size back and be with you like that. Now I wish I could merely change your mind about eating me, but not get my size back. My greatest dream come true now would be to be your true love for the rest of our lives at this size. You look so breathtaking as a towering full sized woman.”

“That is truly a compliment, Patrick. You’ll get half your wish anyway. You’ll be able to be my true love at that size for a little while. You like window ledges. Why don’t you start on the middle floor’s window ledge? You can work your way up to the penthouse in a while.”

She placed him onto her left breast, and let him climb around on both of her breasts and lie on them, looking up at her neck and mouth and eyes for quite some time, as they talked together.

“Is that enough for your last time?” she asked.

“With you in this dress, I couldn’t improve on that, even if I could do it a million times,” he said.

“I’m glad you feel that way. The same applies to the rest of your job description. That’s what I told you the day we met,” she said.

“I know. It’s just not as easy to accept from my perspective.”

“I understand. That’s what makes this all the more exciting, for both of us. We’re going to start the main event now, Patrick.”

Her adorable fingers came close and lifted him from her breast up towards her mouth.

“When you’re crawling around in my stomach, when you’re thinking back over every moment we’ve shared together, Patrick … remember this kiss,” she said, and gave him a long slow and thrilling kiss.

Her lower lip was pressed against his entire face. He turned his cheeks in turn, to fully enjoy it, while he rested the palms of his hands against the reachable parts of her cheeks. 

“Thank you … Colleen,” he said, when she finally removed her lips and licked them.

“You are welcome,” she said at last, “And now comes the culinary part of our encounter.”

Colleen’s tongue came out of her mouth slowly, and extended fully in front of him and began to lick his body. It was like being enveloped by an exciting part of her which was at least as large as his entire body. She let the tongue protrude in front of him.

“You can give my tongue a hug if you like,” she said, and then extended it again.

“I’d like that very much,” said Patrick.

“Don’t worry. I’ve never dropped you, have I?” she said, “My hands will steady your feet.”

He wrapped his arms around her tongue, and pulled his face and body towards it.

After a minute of this, the tongue suddenly slid over his upper body and back into her mouth.

“Don’t worry. You’ll soon be in there with it,” she said.

That was the first thing she had said to savour her triumph, since the romantic dinner date had started.

“I know you want to enjoy my helplessness now,” he said, “I thought about trying to be as brave as possible, so that you don’t get that satisfaction, but (1) I’d be feigning courage, and you’d see straight through it, and (2) you’ve done so much to make this as enjoyable as possible for me, that the least I can do is let you know how fearful I am of the inevitable final outcome.”

“You don’t need to let me know,” she said, “I already know.”

Stanley’s reaction had awakened this aspect of enjoyment within her.

“As worried as I am, it doesn’t change the one constant factor in all this. I’m wildly in love with you, Colleen, and a large part of the abnormal extent of my feelings come from this very thing you’re going to do to me. It’s almost an ironic contradiction, isn’t it?”

“It makes sense to me,” said Colleen, “Everyone I interviewed said I was beautiful. All the others wrote me off as a nutjob. You’re the only one who loved me and gave me a chance to convince you otherwise. Knowing that makes me very fond of you too, but of course you know it won’t help you in the least.”

“It helps to be loved,” he said.

“I’m going to put you into my mouth now,” she said, “And I’ll give you plenty of time to lie on my tongue. When I do gulp you down, it will be without any warning. But while you’re lying there, try to visualize this: Think of me in 30 or 40 years time. Imagine me sitting out on one of those hammocks, looking back at the long life I’ve had. When you’ve got that scenario in your mind, concentrate on the knowledge, that whenever such a day comes, I will be looking back on tonight, and fondly recalling what I’m about to do to you. Think of me, contented, peaceful, remembering what I’ve done with you. Think of me having no regrets. Picture me there, with a few lines on my face, but with the same lips smiling at the recollections of tonight. Then picture me enjoying the recollections of all the intervening years to come, with an awareness of my having consigned you to my stomach, and with nothing but a greater contentment for having done so.”

Then she kissed him again.

“That’s for proving you weren’t merely pretending to want this as much as you could, while going along with the early terms of your employment.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Well remember that image of my future self on the hammock, and I’ll say goodbye now, Patrick. Hold on tight, while you can. The ride’s just beginning.”

“Goodbye, Colleen. Could you yawn, as you put me into your mouth? It looked so fantastic in the bed, I just wanted to dive in there and then, in spite of everything.”

“I’ll enjoy it just as much. Alright then. This really is the last farewell, Patrick.”

“Thank you, and my last farewell, with all my love, Colleen.”

She opened her mouth in a wide silent yawn, and placed him onto her awaiting tongue.

He felt its sensuous moist form beneath him.

He turned over and over, and then settled on his stomach, facing the front of her mouth. He recalled her instruction, chose to honour it and envisioned the much older Colleen celebrating this night, many times in the future, seated on her hammock.

He lay like that for 35 minutes, although he was not able to count the time himself.

Suddenly her tongue arched upwards, and he could do nothing but slide down backwards into her throat. He stopped part of the way down, and then she performed as many movements as were necessary to complete his journey.

Colleen felt Patrick standing up on the fleshy interior of her stomach. She felt him take a few steps. She pictured his thoughts.

She imagined him recalling how close he had come to escaping her in the garden. She thought of him coming to terms with the fact that he was inside a woman’s stomach. She thought of him facing the fact that he could not possibly jump back up into the throat. She felt him pressing his hands against the inner wall of her stomach, and accurately guessed that he was satisfying himself that there was no possible escape through the pores of her skin. She felt him lie down to make himself as comfortable as possible. She accurately guessed that he was thinking: “This is it. There is simply no way out of here. She’s eaten me, and there’s no way to reverse it, no way to get out.”

“I’m sorry little meal,” she thought to herself, “but you’ll have to lie on the side of my stomach now, not the bottom.”

She went to her bedroom, and was about to push the bed back into place.

“On second thoughts,” she mused, “I think I’ll keep it in this position always from now on. It’s nice to have the pillow by the window, and it will forever remind me of his escape attempt.”

He had felt a bit of movement, and then remembered she had once told him she’d complete her enjoyment of having swallowed him, by going to her bedroom.

“I don’t know if you’ve worked out that we’ve changed rooms,” she thought, “But you’ll feel your world turning side on, until you adjust. I’ll be as slow and gentle about it as I can.”

She stood with her back to the bed at first, and sat back slowly on it. Then she began to gradually lean backwards, bracing herself with her arms resting on the bed.

She finally reached the horizontal position. Inside her, Patrick surmised what had happened, and lay down on the back wall of her stomach. She adjusted her direction in the bed, so that she now lay in the usual sleeping position, with her head on the pillow. Then she reached out and turned off the reading light. She had plunged herself into the same darkness which he had been facing for nearly an hour.

He felt strangely wonderful, to be lying down inside her, in her bed, only inches from the breasts he had lain on the night before, yet in a drastically different situation. In a way, it felt lovely to know that she was lying in her bed, aware of having just eaten him, aware of the life she still had ahead of her, outside of her own stomach, and no doubt stimulating her mind with these thoughts as well as with the feeling of his presence in her stomach. If only he could still talk to her, to tell her how he felt.

Then he realised he could.

He began tapping on the back wall of her stomach, in Morse code, using soft taps for dots and hard taps for dashes.

“If you can understand Morse code this way, pat your stomach once for yes.”

She received his message, going even wilder still with the news.

She patted her stomach. He felt the movement.

“You can do two pats for no, if I have any more yes/no questions,” he signalled, “You won’t have to imagine how it feels now, darling. I can tell you. It’s amazing. I’m here, inside you. You’ve eaten me, and you don’t mind. It’s driving me wild. I’m going to lie here and think of your future celebrations and recollections as you asked me to. I feel so happy at least, that you’re always going to remember eating me tonight and celebrate this event. By the way, I still love you even now, Colleen. You’ve done everything you said you would, forced specific performance of my employment contract. Are you going to stay awake for a while?”

She patted her stomach twice.

“It’s OK,” he said, “You’ll wake up in the morning after having dreams about tonight’s dinner, I suppose. I’m sure that will make you very happy.”

She patted her stomach once.

“Are you really enjoying this?”

She patted her stomach once.

“I am too now. I really don’t want to go on now, if it would have meant missing this. Are you disappointed that I’m not worried anymore?”

She patted her stomach twice.

“Are you happy, because you got to enjoy my worries and fear before?”

She patted her stomach once.

“Goodbye once more, my darling Colleen.”

“I didn’t even have to pay him any superannuation,” she thought, and smiled privately in the darkness.

She rolled over to the other side of the bed and lay awake in mental ecstasy for twenty minutes, before she fell asleep.

Colleen still wished very much, that she could have found and eaten a leprechaun. However, she found that she had greatly enjoyed the verbal reactions from Stanley and Patrick, when each of them had realised that there was nothing they could do to avoid what she had in mind for them Henry’s actions had also stimulated some thinking about what might happen in the future. He had been able to break into her house and discover her machine. The fact that its existence remained a secret kept from all but Frances Woodfield was due entirely to Henry’s willing use of the machine on himself to facilitate his voluntary journey to Colleen’s tummy. The other practical problem Colleen faced was the need to invite everyone she shrank to her home, in order to do it. Eventually, this pattern might well bring her under suspicion.

So, ever since she had swallowed Patrick, she had set about dealing with these concerns. Most of the machine’s apparent bulk was actually not in the mechanics of the machine itself, but upon the wheeled platform with which she had moved it from room to room. Now Colleen detached the unit from the platform, so that it was the size of a paperback novel, and adjusted the wiring, soldered some battery terminals to it, and inserted some rechargeable batteries. She would now be able to take the reducing machine with her in her handbag, and shrink anyone who took her fancy, at an appropriate time of privacy between her and the gentleman concerned. She could then either dine out in a secluded picnic location or bring her usually reluctant meals home and eat them in the confines and luxury of her own dining room.

While this had been happening, Frances Woodfield had continued teaching at the school, where she and Colleen had been colleagues and friends for years. One day after school, all of her year 10 students headed home, except for one, a 16 year old named Nathaniel. He had always been the best behaved person in the class, and gotten good marks in his three stronger subjects and done his best with the other three.

Nathaniel walked over and stood at her desk.

“Miss Woodfield, would you like to go for a picnic lunch with me on Saturday?”

“Are you asking me out on a date?”

“Yes, if it’s alright to ask that.”

“Where did you have in mind?”

“Do you have any favourite locations?”

“There’s a meadow up in the hills,” said Miss Woodfield, “If I draw you a little map now, could you meet me there at around 11:30?”

“Sure. I’ll bring everything. I’ve been saving up for this for months.”

Elsewhere, the school volleyball club were playing on a court after school. One of its players, Connor, had been doing his best to play well for the team captain Edith Kelson, since he’d been nursing a crush on her for a long time, and was having more of a struggle than Nathaniel to find a way to bring the subject up. She was tall and fast and consistently saved the scene, whenever he fumbled a shot or couldn’t reach in time. Connor didn’t feel demeaned, only all the more admiring of her.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it,” she called again, and darted in and slammed the ball over the net with a speed and force which took their opponents by surprise. They won the game and were heading back across the lawn to their separate change rooms, when Connor said, “Edith, would you like to go out with me?”

“I think I’d have more fun with my boyfriend,” she said, “But thanks for asking.”

She was soon striding ahead on her own and leaving him to ruminate.

How did she have a boyfriend, when he’d never seen her with anyone? It must have been someone who didn’t go to the same school. Oh well, at least he’d tried. Better to have asked and been turned down, than never to have asked and never to have known.

Frances headed out early in the morning on Saturday, and went through the meadow and up to visit Colleen. She told her about her date with Nathaniel, and they spent most of the morning together. When the time came, she walked down to the meadow, and saw that Nathaniel had already arrived, spread a rug, and put out some plates, cups and an assortment of food.

They ate and talked for some time, and eventually she saw Nathaniel leaning in to kiss her.

Frances withdrew her own head a little.

“I’m sorry,” he said, taken aback, “Was that a little more than you wanted?”

“No, it’s actually less than I wanted. Are you open to talking about it in absolute confidence?”

“I wouldn’t tell anyone anything you said. I’m so glad that you went on this date with me.”

“There are rumours, probably unfounded, that leprechauns live in this meadow, which is why I chose this spot. If you could become a leprechaun, or at least become the size of a leprechaun, and live with me forever at that size, I could lick your face and shoulders like a lollipop whenever I wanted, and nobody would know. Before I let you kiss me, I would like to know whether you would be happy to consent to such a development. Before you answer, I need your answer to be based not on an unlikely scenario but on the expectation that it could be a very real possibility.”

“It’s quite a matter to think about,” he said.

“Would you like to enjoy the scenery with me, while you’re thinking?”

“I would.”

“I’ll be silent until you’re ready to talk about it,” said Frances.

“Would you put your tongue out, so that I can have an idea what it would look like?”

“I’d be happy to,” she said in a friendly way, and did so.

“Can I touch it?”

“Of course you can.”

He slid two of his fingers over her tongue, as soon as she’d stretched it out again for him, and ran his fingers deep into her mouth. It was a wonderful sensation.

“Thank you. I guess I’ll start thinking about it then.”

They looked at the hills rising up behind them, and stretching down below them, the meadow in the immediate vicinity, the forest in the distance, and the fact that the village was not in view from up there. Nathaniel considered what it would be like, unable to explore such places at full size anymore, and yet having a whole adventurous life with Frances to explore, if he were to be reduced forever.

“I have thought it all through a lot,” said Nathaniel at last, “It all amounts to the fact that I would like to be with you under whatever circumstances would make you happy, under any circumstances, and I’ll never tell anyone you asked me this. I’ve been an orphan in the boarding house attached to the school, and I’ve had a crush on you since the first day I saw you. I don’t know how such a thing could ever be made possible, but I’m sure that I would go along with it, should that day ever come. I do think it would be nice to go on several kissing and cuddling dates with you at normal size first, maybe for a few weeks, from the moment that we knew it was possible.”

“It’s already possible,” said Frances, “I won’t tell you how until the time comes, but if you’re committed to this as a way forward for us both, with a scheduled reduction in your size to take place in three weeks, then I should enjoy it very much if you were to kiss me now.”

Nathaniel leaned in again. Frances smiled warmly and leaned towards him too this time, and their lips met. He imagined what it would be like to be pressed against those lips after he had been reduced in size dramatically. He thought she was the most exciting lady imaginable to have suggested this lifestyle for them both.

Their next date was a night walk through the public gardens in the village. When they reached the most scenic spot in the centre, he took her in his arms and hugged her tight and kissed her again. Then he turned his cheek and rested it against hers for a lengthy embrace, thinking how haunting it was to be doing this with a lady who would, in the near future, be holding his entire body in her hand. Every familiar aspect about the life he’d known, and every new thrill of dating her at his full size would all soon be a thing of the past, never to be repeated, replaced by an amazingly different dynamic.

On a Saturday three weeks after their first date, she invited him to meet her in the meadow, and said that she’d bring everything this time, as it would be the day that he undertook his reduction in size. The night before (Friday), they danced to music in Frances’ living room, first some fast paced disco tunes, and then some soft slow music to accommodate snuggling and kissing. He held her in his arms, knowing that this was apparently to be his last night at full size. He had no idea how she would accomplish what she had stated as her long term plan for him, but he believed her and would happily go along with it.

He kissed her goodnight at the end, and left, and went back to the boarding house and dreamt of the next morning.

He awoke the next day and walked up to the meadow. Frances took his hand and led him further up the hill until she came to Colleen’s house and knocked on the door.

“Miss Balfour!” said Nathaniel, remembering the teacher who had gone on sabbatical, “So this is your house.”

“She’s going to help with your transition.”

Frances had recalled the time she had licked Stanley a lot, and had begun thinking about it with greater frequency and intensity of emotion, from the moment that Nathaniel had first asked her on a date. By the time she’d arrived at that first picnic, she had been set on a course which prompted only one response to his first attempt to kiss her.

Colleen closed the front door, showed them both into the lounge, and drew the curtains.

“It’s time to reduce you now,” said Frances, “Is there anything you’d like to say or do, beforehand?”

“I guess just to tell you that I’ve enjoyed the last few weeks very much, and I’m every bit as excited about what’s to come.”

“Let’s have one last full sized hug,” said Frances, and wrapped her arms tightly around him, “…Are you ready then?”

“Yes my love.”

“Thank you, darling.”

“If you just stand in the middle of the carpet and leave the rest to me,” said Colleen, “I’ll show you how it works.”

Frances stepped back, and Colleen picked up the portable reducing machine from a small table, and pointed it at Nathaniel. He watched as she pressed the switch, and a beam of light came and enveloped him. Slowly his perspective altered, as his eyes were no longer level with her face, and the room seemed, by comparison, to be growing larger and larger, as did Miss Balfour. When he was no higher than the base of her ankles, Colleen turned off the machine.

“Pick him up and see if he’s as small as you wanted,” she said.

Nathaniel heard Miss Woodfield’s footsteps on the carpet, and turned around to look up at her towering approaching form. She stooped down and picked him up.

“Do you need a ruler?” asked Colleen.

“I think there’s only one way to measure his height that really matters,” said Frances, and put out her tongue and pressed him against it, “He’s just a little shorter than what can be seen of my tongue. You got it right the first time.”

The feel of that tongue was the wildest thrill that Nathaniel had ever experienced in his life. To think that he would be feeling it countless times in the years ahead. It still came as quite a significant surprise to see that this had actually happened, even with all of the preamble with which Frances had assured him of it in the preceding weeks. However, he felt no shock or regret, only elation at being there in this way.”

“I’m like a lollipop and a doll in one!” he said, “Your tongue feels incredible!”

“A doll and a lollipop. I think I’ll call you Dollipop from now on, if it’s alright with you,” said Frances.

“It’s a great name,” said Nathaniel, “Have you used this device on anyone else, Miss Balfour?”

“You might have heard of Henry’s disappearance from school,” said Colleen.

“Wow! You shrank him and kept him here as your own Dollipop?”

“Actually he followed me home from school, snuck in here and shrank himself. He heard us talking about the machine one day at school.”

“Well I guess it won’t hurt for you to say hello to him from me,” said Nathaniel.

“It wouldn’t, but he wouldn’t hear. He wanted me to eat him, and the idea certainly appealed to me too.”

Miss Balfour pointed to her stomach.

Nathaniel gaped in surprise and turned to Frances.

“Are you going to eat me one day?”

“No, darling. I want you with me as you are, always.”

“Since you won’t be telling anyone, there are two others who’ve been reduced by this machine, but they’re not from your school,” said Colleen, and told him all about Stanley and Patrick.

“Boy am I lucky you gave me to Miss Woodfield then!” said Nathaniel.

“You do look nice and mouth watering, but Miss Woodfield and I are best friends. I did this for her. But you certainly are lucky. Well Frances, I guess we’ll have some lunch here, and then you’d like to be taking him home with you then.”

“Yes, and thank you again,” she said.

Nathaniel sat on the table and ate generous portions of food while looking up at the two ladies gulping down mouthfuls of food at least as large as himself. He could only guess at what it had been like for Stanley and Patrick.

Frances carried him out of the house after lunch and let him ride on her shoulder, holding onto her hair for stability and comfort, while they descended the hillside.

“I asked her if she’d do this for us on the morning of our first picnic date,” said Frances, “She agreed straightaway. Do you think any less of me for being her friend, knowing about the others?”

“It never occurred to me.”

“I believe you,” she said, and stopped for a moment and turned her head to kiss him.

The feel of her gigantic lips was the sweetest thing he’d ever known.

When they reached the far end of the forest, she concealed him in her dress pocket, so that she could head home without anyone seeing a tiny boy perched on her shoulder. Once inside she took him out and talked with him on the couch for some time. After dinner, she took him to her bedroom and sat up in bed and asked, “May I lick you now?”

“Oh yes. I loved it before.”

She slid her huge perfect tongue over his shoulders and face a number of times and then left the moisture on him, while she lay down.

“Are you chilly at all? Do you want me to dry it off now?” she asked, reaching for a box of tissues.

“No, it feels nice to have your tongue water still on me,” he said, and snuggled against her cheek on the pillow.

They talked eachother to sleep, and awoke the next morning and spent the Sunday playing board games, with Nathaniel acting as one of his own pieces in each game. That night, in the bedroom, he climbed onto her face, while she was on the pillow, and lay down on her chin and lower lip.

“When I had Miss Balfour for science, she showed us a cutaway diagram of the human head and neck. The tongue actually starts down in the throat, but the lower part of it can’t be seen, only what’s in the mouth. Could I climb into your mouth and slide down into the top of your throat and lie there against the concealed part of your tongue for tonight’s sleep?”

“Oh Dollipop, aren’t you sweet to ask! I’d adore that!”

She opened her mouth, making sure that her lower lip reached further than her teeth. He started sliding over her lip and into her mouth, until the top half of his body was resting against her tongue. Then he put his hands against her lips again and pulled himself back out.

“You don’t have to do it, if you’ve changed your mind. Our original agreement was only for licking.”

“I can’t wait to do it. I just realised it would be easier to let myself down into your mouth, right side up,” he said, and lay on her chin and lower lip, facing towards her tummy. He eased himself backwards, into her mouth, and slid slowly over her tongue and then into a horizontal position at the top of her throat. Holding tightly to her back lower teeth, he was able to look out at her tongue, still lit up by her bedside lamp, looking resplendent above him, and then her lips slowly closed, and he was in darkness.

If she wanted to, she could sit up and swallow him with one deliberate gulp, and there’d be nothing he could have done about it, he thought, as he recalled Miss Balfour’s stories about Patrick, Henry, and Stanley. He wondered if she might even swallow him with an accidental gulp, but he trusted her judgement, and was happy to take the risk for the sheer thrill and comfort of being in there. Even if she did accidentally swallow him, he had already enjoyed so much happiness with her. He would take this risk as often as Miss Woodfield wanted him in there.

He lay there, with the feel of her soft moist tongue pressed against his face and shoulders, and slowly dropped off to sleep.

After a few nights of this, he awoke one night to a slight movement of her throat. Then he suddenly felt a tremendous movement which altered the angle of her throat, and then a huge movement which drew him deep down her throat and into the top of her stomach! Had she had a sudden change of heart and decided to imitate Miss Balfour’s actions with her shrunken boyfriends? Then suddenly everything turned upside down, and he slipped back into the bottom of her throat, and felt a massive heaving coughing pressure, taking him down further, until he reached her mouth, and found it wide open. He slid out along her tongue and onto the bedroom floor, to find that she was leaning over the side of the bed, with her head near the floor.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, “I partly woke up, when I felt the need to cough, but was not fully conscious enough to remember that you were in there until after I gagged and coughed and felt you falling down my throat.”

“It’s alright. You sure got me out with quick thinking.”

“We can’t count on that again. I’m sure Colleen would shrink someone else for me, if I did swallow you permanently, but they might not want to be shrunken, and I only want to be with you. I guess you’ll have to sleep on the outside of me from now on. I’ll miss having you in there, but you’ll still be right beside my cheek or on my neck.”

After days of exploring the house, he asked her to cut him a piece of fishing line.

“That’s a good idea. It will make it easier for you to climb things when I’m not home,” she said, and gave him a long piece.

He climbed onto the bed with it, while she was reading in another room after dinner, and formed a lasso of sorts, which was knotted such that the size of the loop could be altered, just by pulling on the appropriate part of the line. He slipped it under the pillow and waited until Frances came to join him in the bed. Then he asked her to turn her head away, as he wanted to surprise her.

She pivotted her head on the pillow, so he could only see her hair at the back. Then he pulled out the lasso end of the line, slipped it over his waist like a harness, and then asked her to turn her head back to facing the roof and lift him onto her chin.

She did so, and said, “What have you got there?”

“It’s a safety harness I made with the fishing line. I can put it on each night, just before I climb into your mouth, then tie the other end around one of your lower back teeth and lie in your throat for the night, with no risk of being swallowed, no matter what happens in there.”

“You’re a genius, Dollipop! I love you,” she said, and pressed her lips to his face.

“It might be easier going in with you in a sitting up position, so I can lie on the top end of your tongue beside your teeth, while I’m tying the line on, and the same for when I’m untying it in the morning. Then I can slid into your throat in the vertical position, supported by the harness, and you can lie down after that.”

“That’s all fine with me. Let’s try it now.”

After that, no abseiler ever had it so good.

Henry’s  mother had been at a loss to understand his mysterious disappearance. She sought out the one private investigator in the village, who was just at the outset of his career, young, fresh with ideas, and affordable.

Richard “Dick” Flanigin showed her into his waiting room, and then heard his phone ring. As he could not afford a receptionist, he said, “I’ll just take that in my office.”

He went in, closed the door, and picked up the phone.

“Dick Flanigin, Private Investigator,” he said.

“It’s Brenda Leesil,” said the voice at the other end.

Brenda had been his second case since he opened for business. She was a beautiful widow, somewhat older than Richard. Her last surviving parent, her mother, had died, and other relatives had attempted to swindle her out of a significant portion of her inheritance. Dick had solved the case and secured her rightful legacy entitlement, and been handsomely paid from the proceeds. When she had paid him, he had slipped a note under the receipt he’d handed her:

Dear Brenda,

There’s no pressure here, and I’m happy to take other assignments from you in the future, no matter what you say, but would you like to go out for dinner with me some time, and shall we say, see how the case progresses?

Love,

Dick.

Now she had called him back!

“Hello!” he said keenly.

“Thank you for your offer, but I’m not interested,” said Brenda, “I will call you if I need your services again though.”

“Okay then,” said Dick, “No hard feelings, but I’d better go now actually. I had a client waiting in the reception area when you called.”

Henry’s mother told him of the way her son had simply disappeared with no warning or explanation, not even any signs of discontentment at home. She said that she suspected some sort of foul play, and that he would not have stayed away willingly.

“Well I’m happy to take the case, but I’ll need to cover all ground, in order to be as effective for you as possible. Will you allow me to search his room?”

“Of course, but I’d rather you didn’t tell me what you found in there. If I do get him back, I don’t want him to think I’ve intruded on his privacy.”

“If I find anything pertinent to the investigation of his disappearance, I’ll use it, but if I need to make you aware of it in order to make good use of it, do you still not want to be told?”

“Well only if it’s going to affect the outcome,” she replied.

She led him back to her home, and did housework while he searched through Henry’s room, including his school bag.

“I may have something,” he told her at last, “Would you mind if I borrowed this school lessons timetable book to photocopy one of the pages, and then returned it to you?”

“There’s a photocopier in the house,” she said, “You can use that while you’re here.”

“Even better,” said Dick, “I won’t need to give away any of Henry’s privacy, but from what I’ve learned here today, I have reason to think that this might cross over with another case I’m working on. This may just help me to solve both.”

He took the photocopy back to his office, started a file for Henry, and then took out another file, that of another disappearance which had been reported to him by an apartment body corporate chairman, whose strata rates had not been paid recently. The chairman had become Dick’s client and also given permission for a search, in this case of the entire apartment belonging to a man named Patrick.

Dick spread both files on his desk, and looked at the most recently dated piece of paper prior to Patrick’s disappearance. It was a newspaper with a circle drawn around a job advertisement:

PERSONAL ASSISTANT – TEMP

Company director needs a personal

assistant to help with all kinds of

work around the premises. Apply, in

the first instance to:

Colleen Balfour

T/A Reduced Interest Co,

using the address or telephone number

at the bottom of this advertisement.

Now he looked again at the photocopy of Henry’s school lessons timetable. The first page listed each subject, and the name of Henry’s teacher for that subject. Beside English and Science was the name Miss Balfour.

Dick went to the school and made enquiries with other staff, to learn that Colleen had been still teaching at the school at the time of Henry’s disappearance, but had gone on a sabbatical starting shortly before Patrick’s disappearance.

Dick found her address in the telephone book, and decided to do some covert reconnaissance. That night, he took his flashlight with him, walked up to Colleen’s house, and used a professional lock pick tool to open the door which Henry had once picked with a piece of twisted wire. He let himself in silently, turned the flashlight onto its dimmest setting, and began to look around the lounge room. He presumed that her bedroom was upstairs, and that she couldn’t see any light directly beneath her, even if she woke up.

He wondered what to look for. What could the connection be between a year 7 schoolboy and a young adult looking for a job? Probably none at all, as they had both no doubt encounted Colleen Balfour in different contexts. So what then, was he looking for? What evidence would justify a midnight felony for the downmarket fees he’d opened his business by charging?

Suddenly the light was turned on, and he saw a lady holding the light switch on the opposite side of the room, right next to a doorway. She was holding some small contraption in her other hand.

“Colleen Balfour, I presume,” said Dick.

“And you would be Dick Flanigin. Pleased to eat you,” said Colleen.

“I think you left out an m,” said Dick, putting his flashlight into his trenchcoat pocket.

“I was saving it up for the word ‘mouth’,” said Colleen, “That’s where you’ll be going at lunch time tomorrow. My friend at the school called me this afternoon, to let me know about your enquiries concerning my sabbatical dates. I’d have caught you anyway. A few weeks ago, I was concerned at how easily someone else broke into this place. So I made a point of setting up a video camera arrangement which trips a silent alarm connected to an alternate on switch for my bedside lamp. I’d have caught you anyway, even if my friend hadn’t given me reason to expect an uninvited guest.”

“Were Henry and Patrick uninvited too?”

“Henry was, but he was very welcome.”

“And where are they now?”

“In here, in some form or another,” she said, removing her hand from the light switch to pat her stomach.

“Do you mean to tell me you’re a cannibal? They were a schoolboy and a late teenager, woman! When I first got in here, I was concerned about the legalities of this exercise, but after what you’ve just said, I can see it was justified. How could you go about butchering and consuming two kids like that?”

“I didn’t say anything about butchering them,” said Colleen, and fired the reducing machine at Dick until he was 1.5 inches tall.

“Oh my goodness! Do you mean that you…This is too much.”

“For my lunch tomorrow, it’s just about the right amount,” said Colleen, walking over and picking him up.

She put him into a cage, padlocked it tight, left the key on a high table, and the cage on the carpet.

“I think you’ve solved your cases, but you might find it a little hard to collect your fees. We’ll talk tomorrow, at least until lunch time. Good night, little housebreaker.”

She turned off the light and went back upstairs to bed.

Dick took his flashlight out of his pocket, reached through the bars of the cage and decided not to turn it on. If it tripped that video camera alarm again, even though its light potential was diminished by the reducing machine, then she would kow what he was doing. Feeling about in the dark, he used the tiny flashlight as a lock pick. The professional tool, which had used to break into the house, was now too small to serve the purpose. His deft manipulation of the flashlight had soon opened the lock. He pulled it off, with all his strength, opened the door and ran for the front door. He slipped under it, ran out of the house and down the hill as fast as he could go, covering as much ground as he could before she awoke in the morning.

The sun was just rising, when he reached the forest. He headed in a little way, and then concealed himself in some bushes and collapsed in exhaustion, and slept until late morning. He awoke and found some berries and ate until he was full, and then thought what to do next.

His only chance was to get back to Henry’s mother and get her help to get hold of Colleen’s machine and restore his size, if it even had a reverse setting. Fearing that Colleen would be down to search the forest for him, he stayed off the paths, and walked through the bushes, until he came to the sight of Brenda Leesil sitting on a log, just about to open a lunch box. He told her what had happened, knowing that her help would be invaluable at a practical level, regardless of her romantic disinterest in him.

“I understand your predicament,” said Brenda, stooping forwards to pick him up and place him in the lap of her dress, “But I can see why she did it. I’d like to have you for lunch too.”

“Does that mean you’re going to?”

She looked down at him and closed her lunch box and put it to one side.

“I don’t think I’ll be needing that now,” she said.

“But you said you weren’t even interested in me! And now this?”

“I think you’re too young to date, but you’re a very nice tender age to eat.”

She looked up and out at the surrounding foliage. The look in her eyes, while they were not pointing in his direction, was strangely arousing. He took in the fact that he had gone from being beneath her interest to being beneath her height, and the fact that he was now the subject of her interest, regardless of his personal objections to the nature of her interest. Her high neck looked so elegant, that he would have loved to kiss it. Now he could imagine it being used in the way she had just outlined…

“Please, I need your help!”

“You need someone else’s help, but I don’t see anyone else around,” said Brenda, raising him to her mouth, “Under the circumstances, I should thank you more directly for your dating invitation though.”

She puckered her lips and pressed them to his face.

“Wow!” he said.

“I haven’t had this woman’s dining experience, but I should think that trenchcoats tend to stifle the taste of a shrunken meal,” said Brenda, as she pulled his coat off him with her finger and thumb, “And this tie’s not helping either. It’s too small for me to get a controlling grip on it. Do you mind taking it off and loosening your shirt for me?”

“What on earth do you think I am? I’m not going to help you do this to me!”

“Fair enough, but let’s just hope I can be careful with my teeth then,” she said, and brought him towards her mouth.

She carefully positioned her teeth near his neck, and bit off most of the visible part of the tie, and let it fall from her mouth. Her red tongue brushed against his face as she instinctively licked her lips. Then her teeth drew close again, and he felt a slight jarring pressure as her mouth tried to get a grip on the remainder of the tie.

“Alright! I’ll undo it!” he said.

“Thank you. I am appreciative,” she said, and waited while he undid the tie and discarded it.

Dick loosened his shirt too, undoing the top buttons. She pushed it down, so that his shoulders were now in sight.

“You won’t find another P.I. in the village, you know,” he said.

“I think I’ll manage,” said Brenda and opened her mouth wide, moving him towards it in her hand.

He saw her tongue behind her lips as he was forced into her mouth and onto her tongue. Before even closing her mouth, she tilted her head back, and he felt and saw himself sliding forward into her throat. Having not attended Colleen Balfour’s science class, he was surprised to find that her tongue was still a sliding pathway for him, once he was in her throat, until he slid below it and slowly slid all the way down to her stomach.

Brenda decided to take his tiny trenchcoat home as a souvenir.

Colleen went to the public gardens in the village to have lunch, and sat on a seat and slowly took out her food. She was just getting started, when she saw a young man walk into the gardens. She noticed that she had caught his eye, and wasn’t surprised when he sat on a nearby seat, facing her direction. Nor was she surprised to see that he pretended to be looking away, but never took the corner of his eye off her.  When she had eaten her main course, she reached into her handbag and took out the reducing machine, fired it at the young man and reduced him to tiny size. She walked over, picked him up and resumed her seat, placing him into her dessert bowl of jelly and fruit.

“I could see that you liked me,” she said, “I’ll take you home with me, so that you can snuggle against my cheek tonight. I’ll take a walk in the meadow near my home tomorrow morning. Have as much fruit or jelly as you like, while you’re in there, and watch me eating the rest of it. You’ll have a much better view than you did from that seat over there, and you’ll have a better idea of what to expect at lunch time tomorrow. When I return from my walk, my next lunch will be the one who was watching me eat today’s lunch just now.”

“Hey you can’t be serious! I’m sorry if I offended you. I was only looking at you, because I like you, and I couldn’t think of a way to approach a complete stranger.”

“Well now you don’t have to. You’ve caught my interest too.”

“As your next meal?”

“Not at all,” she said, as he relaxed for a moment, “I’ll be having dinner and breakfast before then. You can watch those too. It’ll be good training for you, so you’ll be ready to be a good lunch.”

“You can’t do this! Make me big again!”

“I’ll be eating you. So there!” she said, and stuck out her tongue with a stunningly mischievous look in her eyes, “I’ll gobble you all down my throat and into my tummy, and you’ll never come out again.”

“I could still tell you my name,” he said, “I’m Tarquin.”

“It’s lovely to meet you, Tarquin. I’m Colleen.”

He watched her spooning fruit and jelly onto her tongue and into her mouth, watched her gulping it down, and watched her licking her lips as the whole process of eating her dessert went on for several minutes.

“Are you getting a better understanding of your role in tomorrow’s repeat performance?” she asked.

“It’s easy to understand, but not easy to accept.”

She removed the batteries from the machine, and slipped them into her blouse pocket, and then placed him into her handbag beside the machine.

“There’s nothing you can do, little man.”

Colleen zipped up her handbag, stood up and went on her way.

That night, she gave him several kisses and snuggled him against her cheek. She told him all about Frances and Nathaniel, and how they had engaged in such intimacy every night and would continue to indefinitely.

“I’d love that,” said Tarquin, “With you, I mean.”

“Nathaniel hasn’t been eaten, because it’s not what Frances wants. You’re in a very different situation.”

She went on to tell him about her initial quest for leprechauns, and how she had made substitutes by shrinking Stanley and Patrick, and how Henry had snuck in and reduced himself to volunteer for the same culinary role in her happiness.

She licked his face and then took him down to the kitchen. She put him into the cage and then remembered Dick Flanigin’s escape. She locked the cage and put the key on the table in the lounge room, and left Tarquin’s cage on the high kitchen bench. Even if he somehow found a way to open the lock, he’d never get down to the floor.

“I’ll see you in the morning, sweet admirer,” she said, and walked off up to bed.

The next morning, Colleen came downstairs and found that he was gone. She checked all of her circuits and saw that the video cameras had been operating, but that the alarm circuit had been disconnected, preventing her from being woken up.

She suspected that Dick Flanigin had come back, trying to restore his size, and rescued Tarquin somehow, but she wanted to watch the video to make sure.

She checked the playback closely and was surprised at what she saw. It was not a video of Dick Flanigin, whom readers of previous chapters will remember had been gobbled whole by his former client Brenda Leesil.

The video circuit had been activated by two small beings suddenly popping into visibility with lanterns in their hands. Once visible, they had tripped the video record circuit with their presence, and popped in and out of visibility while using some tiny ropes they’d brought with them, to get up onto the kitchen bench with the key they’d found and unlock the cage. The camera had recorded them telling quite a story.

They were in fact real live leprechauns, whose kingdom was directly beneath the very meadow in which she’d been hunting for them. The legends were true, except that the ground had formed caverns as it had grown over  their kingdom after soil erosion of centuries ago. They had learned to live with lanterns and small tunnels that only they could fit through, which led them in and out of the kingdom.

They had seen everything that had transpired between Colleen and Stanley, while remaining invisible in the meadow, and after Stanley had been eaten, they had felt a sense of indirect responsibility for his plight. After all, Colleen had used him as a substitute for one of them. They had decided to keep an eye on Colleen and try to rescue anyone else she shrank. She guessed that they hadn’t known about Henry and Patrick, whom she’d met away from the meadow, but had later started to monitor her house anyway, and saw her arriving and taking Tarquin out of her handbag.

They had told Tarquin that they had no way to undo the shrinking process that Colleen had inflicted, but could let him live with them in their lamplit underground leprechaun kingdom. Tarquin had accepted, and been taken safely back there in the middle of the night.

So there were leprechauns, and they had even been in her house the night before, and disconnected her alarm circuit, so that she had lost both Tarquin and any chance of catching them in her kitchen.

A few days later, Tarquin was invited by the leprechaun princess to the ball at the leprechaun palace. She was very keen on him, and asked him to dance at the ball. It would have been daytime in the world above, but since they lived by lamplight all the time, it made no difference. He was dancing with the princess, who was rather pretty. However all of his thoughts were still on his infatuation with Colleen. He knew that he could never go back and see her again, unless he wanted to see the inside of her mouth immediately before being despatched by it. Yet still he couldn’t help thinking of her.

The dancing was accompanied by leprechaun musicians playing live instrumental tunes, as they had no electricity down there. They had gotten what they needed from the earth to make their lanterns and other facilities function, and the lantern lit palace looked spectacular.

During one of the tunes in the second bracket of dancing, they heard an earthquake above them.

“Don’t worry, it’s for the best,” said the prince of leprechauns, “Any further soil movement can only serve to conceal and reinforce our kingdom all the more.”

The loud noise came again, and the musicians took a break, deciding to wait out the disturbance until it could no longer interfere with their tunes.

Suddenly the cavern roof was lifted up by something, which turned out to be a shovel, and tossed away above them. Looking up from the palace courtyard, Tarquin saw that Colleen was digging into their kingdom.

“She must have snuck back down and overheard you rescuing me last night,” he said, unaware of her video and alarm system, “She only let us go, so that she could come here and surprise all of us today!”

“Everyone turn invisible!” called the prince.

“You’d better hide deep in the palace,” said the princess, knowing that Tarquin didn’t have their power of invisibility.

Tarquin went and hid behind a curtain just inside the palace’s upper room, and peeked out at Colleen. He couldn’t help looking at her, fascinated with her towering beauty, as she scooped away the last of the roof soil and put down the shovel. Then he saw her squat down and reach for something beside her. It wasn’t the reducing machine, as they were already tiny enough. It was some sort of container with a nozzle. Was she going to try to smoke them out with tear gas or something? Would the leprechauns be susceptible?

Colleen pointed her new piece of equipment into the cavern and squeezed the trigger.

A pink substance sprayed out in each direction, falling onto the leprechauns and remaining on them, leaving all of them as visible as Tarquin would have been, had he stayed out on the palace courtyard.

“Run and hide. She’s sprayed us with dye!” called the prince.

“Actually I thought food colouring seemed the most appropriate thing to use,” said Colleen, “Two of you came into my home last night. So I thought I’d return the favour.”

She reached into the cavern and snatched up a leprechaun and lifted him out of sight. One after another, many of them were caught and taken from the cavern. Some fled to the tunnels, and others darted back into the palace. When Colleen had caught as many of the outdoor leprechauns as she could find, she stepped down into the cavern, so that her knees were now level with what had been the base of the roof soil. Then she squatted down and put her hands around the palace. She pulled with all her strength and lifted the palace up, out of the cavern and set it down on the grass beside a large picnic basket, in which she had already placed the leprechauns that she had captured.

“I know that some of them got away into the tunnels. I might find them another day, but the rest of you in that palace can save us all a lot of needless effort, if you come out and surrender to me now. That includes you too, Tarquin,” said Colleen.

She was drop dead gorgeous with that stern look of determination on her face, and Tarquin was transfixed with a mixture of shock and excitement.

Nobody moved.

“Alright. We’ll do this the hard way then,” said Colleen.

She put four fingers through one window opening and the other four through a doorway at the opposite end, and pulled the walls and roof off the palace. Tarquin darted to the stairway, just as she tossed the roof aside, and narrowly avoided being caught. Colleen snatched some of the leprechauns up and put them in the picnic basket, and then lay down and peeked into the lower room, where Tarquin and 3 others were now hiding.

“Do we really have to do all that again?” she asked, “It seems a waste of time, when we all know that you’re all going to wind up in my tummy at some point.”

The three leprechauns were too frightened to move. Tarquin had weighed the situation up, and could see that there was no avoiding the accuracy of her summation.

“I’ll come out,” he said.

“Thank you, my little darling,” said Colleen.

He stepped out where she could pick him up, and she placed him just behind her necklace, which he’d not seen her wearing before.

“Now you can watch while I fetch out the rest of them,” she said.

She reached through the window with her hand and lunged for one of the leprechauns, caught him and put him in the basket. She had to tear the ceiling and walls off to get at the rest, and soon had them all trapped in the picnic basket.

“I wish you’d all been more logical instead of making me break your little palace,” she said, staring down at them, “I could have kept it for its design quality alone. It would have made a uniquely artistic dolls house.”

“Well forgive us for trying to avoid being eaten,” said the leprechaun prince.

“Nothing to forgive. I just thought that you’d have been more realistic about the inevitability of it, and surrendered yourselves without sustaining any property damage,” said Colleen.

She took a large carry-bag out of the basket and dropped all of the palace’s remains into it, and then knotted its carry straps around the handle of the shovel. She stood up, took the basket by the handle in one hand and the shovel in her other hand, and walked back up through the meadow to her house. The caverns were exposed, but looked largely like soil erosion damage combined with a few children’s toys now, and wouldn’t arouse the suspicion of anyone else who came through the meadow.

Colleen came to her house and opened a large high cabinet in an upstairs room, which had a glass door. She took each of the leprechauns out of the basket and placed them all into the cabinet, amongst the dolls furniture it already contained.

“You can all make yourselves comfortable and expect food supplies from me each day for those of you I haven’t eaten yet,” said Colleen, “And of course you can all expect to be eaten eventually. You’ll find that I already left food in there this morning, before I started my gardening project in the meadow. There’s one other thing. Are the two leprechauns who visited me and freed Tarquin last night here or back in the tunnels?”

One leprechaun stepped forward.

“I saw the other one make it to a tunnel, just before you caught me,” he said, “But I was one of them.”

“Well may I offer you my sincere thanks,” said Colleen, “If you hadn’t played the feature roles in a candid camera video film you set off, I’d never have even known for sure that your kingdom existed, let alone caught enough of you to be tasty treats for several weeks at least. If I’m even luckier, the ones in the tunnels might even come here to attempt a rescue of the rest of you, and I’ll be ready for them too. Now whom shall I start with?”

She snatched up the nearest leprechaun, despite a collective retreat by all of them, and took him to the kitchen, sprinkled some seasoning on him, and placed him onto a baking tray.

“I’ve prepared this kitchen for a day like this some time ago,” she said, turning the oven on, “I’ve put the oven on a low setting, but there’s a button inside it, near where I’ll place your tray. Once you’re cooked well enough, press the button before you start to burn. Even if I don’t hear the buzzer, the button also turns the oven off. So you can’t be burned. I’ll be back to serve you at the table in a while.

She put the shovel away, emptied the broken palace remains into the backyard incinerator to be burnt up at a later date, and then put Tarquin on a cupboard top in her bedroom, while she showered off and changed into a nice clean dress.

Then she took Tarquin back down to the kitchen, placed him on the table, and saw that the oven was off. She took out the tray, lowered her mouth and touched the leprechaun’s face with the tip of her tongue.

“You don’t seem to have cooled down, which is good. How long was it since you turned it off?”

“About a minute and a half,” said the leprechaun.

She took him off the baking tray, put him on a plate, and took him to the table, and sat down.

Colleen picked up the leprechaun, licked him several times, and swallowed him whole in front of Tarquin’s gaping eyes.

“That could have been me!” he thought, “And it will be the rest of them.”

“That was lovely,” said Colleen, “Now what would you like?”

He chose a prawn and enjoyed the most unlimited helping of prawn meat he’d ever had.

“Shall we head for bed then?” asked Colleen.

“Sure,” said Tarquin.

She took him upstairs and climbed into bed and sat up.

“Could I have some licks?” he asked, recalling how amazing it had looked watching her lick the leprechaun dinner she’d just had.

“Why not?” said Colleen, and lifted him towards her mouth and licked his face more times than he could keep count.

They she lay down and placed him beside her face on the pillow. He lay sideways, so that their eyes were level.

“It was quite a surprise when I looked up at the last of the cavern roof and saw you with the shovel,” he said.

“I’ll bet it was.”

“I feel sorry for the leprechauns, but at least there’s one good thing that’s come out of you catching them. Now you don’t have to make do with substitutes.”

“Do you really think so?” asked Colleen, “I’ve come to rather like the substitutes just as much in their own way, a fact of which your last request has reminded me.”

Her beautiful lips smiled right in front of him.

He suddenly went speechless.

“I’ll save you until the leprechauns are all gone,” she said, “And you can watch me eating each one of them in a series of sneak previews for you. I think I’ll give you your turn with the buzzer button in the oven too, when the time comes. I haven’t cooked any of the other substitutes. You’ll be the first.”

“That means I can look out of the oven at you preparing things in the kitchen, while I’m cooking.”

“I hope you’ll enjoy the view as much as the one you had in the gardens at your full size,” she said.

For weeks he watched her nightly leprechaun dinners going into her mouth and being gulped down by her slightly bulging neck, thinking of what he’d feel when his turn came.

“That was the last of them,” she said, after gulping yet another one down, “We’re alone in the house now.”

“And soon I’ll be alone in your tummy.”

“That you will. Let’s enjoy our last night with you outside of it.”

The next evening, she took him to the kitchen and asked him, “Do you want to suggest anything for your own recipe?”

“That pavlova I saw you unpacking after you went shopping would be nice to look up at you from within, and you could add some whipped cream and strawberries.”

“That’s an excellent suggestion. I’ll warm you up in the oven as planned first.”

She placed him on the baking tray and slid it into the oven and peeked in.

“Now there’s the buzzer and off switch,” she said, pointing to it, “You can watch me whipping the cream and pouring it over the pavlova and adding the strawberries, while you’re warming up.”

She blew him a kiss and closed the oven door. 

He looked out through its glass window front and watched her whipping the cream, licking the spoon, pouring it onto the pavlova and placing the strawberries on top. He saw her licker her finger a few times too, and couldn’t help admiring the sight of that tongue and looking forward to the early parts of her plans for this dinner date.

She still had half the strawberries to go, when he felt the need to press the buzzer.

She stopped and came over and took him out and lowered him gently into the pavlova at a point where there was no cream or strawberries in the very centre of the circle. Then he looked up at her towering beautful face and watched her dainty fingers placing the remaining strawberries in suitable positions.

“This is the first time I’ve had my meat and dessert combined, and yet I think it’s going to be very nice. It was a very good suggestion you made,” she said.

She took it to the dining table, where she’d already laid a spoon and sat down.

He watched her spooning pavlova and fruit into her mouth several times and licking the spoon clean, until there was only the small amount of it which still surrounded him.

“If I slide the spoon over gently, can you sit down and lie back on it?” she asked.

“I think so,” said Tarquin and saw the spoon approach.

She raised the spoon to her mouth.

“You look luscious!” she said.

“Couldn’t we just go on like Frances and Nathaniel?” he asked.

“I can’t blame you for asking, but I’ve been doing this for a while now, and you know the way it always ends,” said Colleen.

She spooned him into her open mouth. He lay on her tongue, as she swished and rolled him around on it, drawing almost all of the pavlova off him. Then she opened her mouth again and took him out with he finger and thumb.

Had his last appeal finally persuaded her of the benefits of keeping him uneaten?

“That’s most of the pavlova gone,” she said, “Let’s see what I can do to clean off the rest.”

She put out her tongue and licked him several times, turning him with her finger and thumb until she’d cleaned it all from him, and then passed him into her other hand. From the palm of her other hand, he watched her licking her first hand’s finger and thumb clean too.

“There, you’re sparkling clean and ready to be swallowed,” she said, “I’m so glad I caught your eye in the public gardens that day. I’ve enjoyed these last few weeks with you more than any of my other adventures with leprechaun substitutes. You’ve made me very happy, and I’ll always remember your fond affections for me. I’m very fond of you too.”

She rubbed him against her dress to dry off the tongue water, and gave him a long slow kiss.

“I even felt them, when you were snatching up the leprechauns from the cavern. I couldn’t help peeking out from behind the palace window curtain at your beautiful face and the look of triumph in your eyes.”

“So that’s why you barely made it out of the upstairs room when I pulled the roof off. You’re so sweet to tell me that, and to stay there watching me. And now I’m going to gobble you all up. Goodbye, little darling.”

She licked him a few times more, then placed him gently into her mouth, slid him around on her tongue for a while, then drew him into her throat and waited until he stopped part way down.

They all like to stick a little, she thought.

Tarquin felt the inside of her throat all around him and wondered if he could yet have appealed to her to go on romancing him. Suddenly she began gulping him further down her throat with tremendous heaving pressure. He reached her tummy and knew that there was no changing her mind.

Colleen had eaten almost an entire kingdom of leprechauns, and four shrunken humans too. She would put her mind to work on how to catch the ones who had fled into the underground tunnels too small for her to access. She wondered if she should have attacked the tunnels with the shovel, but eventually thought that it might have damaged her potential food. As it was, she had invalidated their invisibility with food colouring and swallowed well over half of them. She had subsequently decided that her sabbatical was over, and returned to teaching at the school.  

One day after school, Connor was about to walk home, when Edith Kelson walked up and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Hi Connor!” she said, “How would you like to hang out with me on a little adventure, this afternoon?”

“Sure,” said Connor, “Like a date?”

“Not exactly that, but it’ll be fun. You know how Miss Balfour went away on that sabbatical?”

“Yes, she was gone for months.”

“She’s a bit of an inventor as well as a science and English teacher. Don’t you ever wonder if she’s got any inventions stashed away in the science lab?”

“I guess she could have, especially if she used the school’s equipment for some of her research,” said Connor.

“Well why don’t we sneak into the lab and have a look?”

“But the doors to the lab are locked until she opens them to start classes.”

“I know, but I just had her for science in last period. I sat in the back row, behind everyone else, so that nobody could see me. While she was writing on the blackboard, I turned the window handle just enough to unlock it without it showing. She’s in a staff meeting now, so all we have to do is climb up the tree outside and sneak in through the window.”

Connor was thinking about it all the time that Edith had been talking. He could show her that spending time with him could be fun too. He knew that she had a boyfriend, but she had come to him, and maybe even left her boyfriend by now. It was possible that she’d only made the invitation because she needed someone from her own school, which her boyfriend was not. Or maybe she had been thinking about him since he first asked her out.

“Sure, it sounds like fun,” he said, remembering her initial reason given for declining him.

Either way, he wuld show her that he knew how to have fun.

They walked around to the tree, checked that nobody was looking, and were soon out of sight within its branches. Edith reached the window first and climbed in, and then stood on the classroom floor to help Connor through the window. They searched the laboratory cupboards methodically, as fast as they could, but found nothing. Connor was looking in her desk.

“Look what I found in her handbag,” said Edith, “She must have been coming back here after the meeting. That means we’ve got less than half an hour left. I wonder what it does.”

Edith pressed a button and a beam of light came from the device in her hand and reduced a chair and desk to tiny size.

“She’s invented an amazing machine!” said Edith, “You’d better hide those now tiny pieces of furniture in the cupboard, or she might guess that someone’s been in here.”

Connor picked up the miniaturized chair and desk and walked over to a cupboard, put the furniture in, and pushed it to the back, and then slid some beakers and stands in front them to hide them. He turned to see Edith pointing the device in his direction.

He stepped to one side

Edith moved her hand, so that the device was pointing in his direction again.

“It’s probably better if we don’t fool around with that thing,” said Connor, “Imagine what could happen to me if you accidentally pressed that switch, while it was pointing this way.”

“I’m more interested in what could happen to you if I deliberately pressed it,” said Edith, smiling.

“Hey, I came along to win you over, and I like the fun of sneaking in here, but let’s not get carried away.”

“I think you’ll be carried away in my coat pocket soon enough. I do have a boyfriend, remember, but you’d go down my throat smoothly and whole, if you were the size of that little chair you just put away.”

He couldn’t believe it.

He started running towards her, ready to reach out and snatch the device. Edith pressed the switch and smiled with great amusement as he dwindled down to tiny size. She knelt down and picked him up, with her laughing eyes beaming down at him, lifted him up and held him right in front of her big lips and perfect smiling teeth.

“Edith, please make me big again. You can be happy with your boyfriend, and at least I might have a chance with someone else one day.”

“I can be happy with my boyfriend anyway, and he’ll never know how much fun I’m going to have with you after all,” said Edith, “I think we’re out of time.”

She slipped him into her coat pocket, put the machine back into Colleen’s handbag and zipped it up, opened the science classroom door from the inside, reset the lock, stepped out and pulled it shut and walked to the students’ staircase.

Colleen soon came up the staff staircase, entered the room and collected her bag and locked and left the room. She was halfway down the hall, when she turned around and came back and had a good look at the room. There was a chair and a desk missing.

She went to the cupboards, took out some powder and a small brush and then managed to take her device out of her handbag, without touching the places it was usually held by. She dusted them and found a mixture of her own fingerprints and someone else’s. She searched every cupboard in the room and eventually found the reduced chair and desk. Then she checked the windows and found that one had not been locked properly.

She knew that someone had set the classroom up, so that they could sneak in after school, and that someone had taken the machine out of her bag and used it on the furniture and then tried to cover their tracks. From now on, she would check that all of the windows were locked before leaving the room, and she would always carry her bag with her.

Edith walked out of the school grounds with Connor in her coat pocket, which was level with her chest.

“I hope you’re comfortable in there,” she said quietly, “It’s not far from your upcoming new address.”

She meant her stomach.

When she reached her home, she went up to her bedroom, opened the top drawer of her wardrobe, and put him on a pile of neatly folded clean handkerchiefs.

“They’ll be your bed for the night. I’ll bring you some dinner first though,” she said, “Now I must be doing my homework. We spent some time on that adventure.”

He sat up on the mattress of handkerchiefs and watched her walk over and sit at her desk and do her homework, occasionally putting her pen handle to her lip while she thought.

Then she went down to dinner, and came back an hour later with a single dried apricot larger than his head, and a small piece of ham which would fill him to capacity.

“You’ll enjoy that. The ham’s almost as good as you will be.”

“How do you know how good I’ll be?” he asked.

“Well you sure look good enough to gobble down right now,” she said, and lifted him out of the wardrobe.

She put out her tongue in a slightly angular direction and slid it across his face.

“It’s official. You’re extremely appetising,” she said, and opened her mouth wide and popped him into it!

He waited for the inevitable gulp to follow, as he gaped down her throat, feeling strangely thankful that she had left her mouth open to let in enough light.

Then she reached in and took him out of her mouth again.

“Second impressions are great too. You’ll make a terrific snack.”

“When are you planning to… do it?” he asked.

“I might as well skip basketball tomorrow after school. We’d be down one player anyway,” she laughed, “I’ll come straight home and have you for afternoon tea up here, before I get started on my homework.”

He ate his dinner, while she read a book, and then she said it was time to turn in.

“Would you like me to kiss you goodnight?” she asked.

“I’d like you to kiss me for any reason,” he said.

She picked him up again and touched her lips to his face. It was only for a few seconds, but as far as first kisses go, it was fabulous.

“Your lips are amazing!” he said.

“Goodnight, Connor,” she said and turned and switched on her bedside table lamp, turned off the main light, and then climbed into bed and turned off the lamp.

Connor knew that his only chance was to escape from her and get back to the school and ask Miss Balfour to restore him to normal size, if the device even had that ability. Then he had another thought. He remembered a student named Henry who had gone missing. It was back before Miss Balfour had gone on her sabbatical! Could Miss Balfour have shrunken him?

Then Connor had another significant recollection. Another boy named Nathaniel had also gone missing, while Miss Balfour had been away. So it was unlikely that she and her shrinking device could have been responsible for both disappearances, but he couldn’t take the risk. He realised that he could think of no other reason for Miss Balfour to have invented the device than for shrinking people. Since Henry had not returned, and for that matter since he had often seen Miss Balfour and Miss Woodfield having lunch together, it was likely that they were collectively responsible for shrinking and abducting the two missing boys. Could they have done it for the same reason that Edith had reduced and kidnapped him?

It was unfathomable, but could well be true. Miss Woodfield had probably eaten Nathaniel, and Miss Balfour had probably eaten Henry.

Connor didn’t know that both students had volunteered for the reduction process, and that Nathaniel was enjoying his nightly facial licks from Miss Woodfield.

There was no point in going to Miss Balfour for help. He’d have been better off being eaten by the girl he adored, than by his science and English teacher.

He would have to simply go on the run and live out the rest of his life at tiny size, unless he could find someone else capable of reverse engineering Miss Balfour’s device to restore him. Yes, that was it. He’d been shrunken as a result of sneaking into the science classroom with Edith. He would need to find another girl who would sneak in there with his shrunken self, the next time Miss Balfour was at a staff meeting and hopefully still leaving her bag in the science classroom until the end of the day.

Connor began to open up the handkerchiefs and to knot the corner of each one with the corner of the next one. When it was all done, he tied the opposite corner of the first handkerchief to the handle of the drawer he was in, and then let the rest fall to reach to the carpet below. With nothing more than moonlight to aid him, he climbed slowly down the chain of handkerchiefs until he reached the floor. He turned and looked to see that Edith was still sleeping peacefully, since no lights had been turned on. He looked at the way the moonlight shone in from the window and fell on her beautiful face. How he would have loved to climb up there and snuggle against her cheek.

The window was open, but he was in an upstairs room at reduced size. There was no way of retrieving his chain of handkerchiefs, while it was still tied to the wardrobe handle. Apart from that, it would not reach nearly far enough to get him safely to the ground. He walked around the room and found a ball of wool under the bed. Now at last he had a gameplan. He tied one end of the ball to the leg of the bed, and then unrolled it as far as the base of the window curtain, and then took hold of a part of the unravelled wool in his hand and loosely tied it around his arm.

Connor climbed up the curtain and then untied himself, and continued to pull on the wool until it had all unravelled. He fed the entire section over the window ledge and down onto the lawn below. He started climbing down the wool. He could see that there was an overhang at the downstairs end of the string, but he could make it the rest of the way without a wall to touch.

He used his feet to abseil down the outside wall of Edith’s bedroom, until he got to the start of the overhang. He kicked out with his legs, to push him away from the bottom of the wall, and then slid down a little further, to see that Edith was standing on the porch below with her arms folded, smiling at him.

“I had my eyes open just a tiny crack the whole time,” she said, “I can see that I picked the right person to join me in climbing that tree to the science room window. That stunt with my handkerchiefs was very good. You’d have made a great double for someone. But when I saw you heading out the window, I thought I’d better come down quietly and show you that you can’t pull the wool over my eyes.”

He couldn’t help laughing at her pun.

She took him back up to her bedroom, pulled the wool up, untied it, closed the window, and put him on her bed. She went and fetched the chain of handkerchiefs from the wardrobe and sat in front of him on the bed and untied each handkerchief and folded it again.

“I can see that there’s only one place I can leave you tonight,” she said, and popped him into her mouth without another word.

This was it. She wasn’t going to take a chance on him getting away while she was at school…

He felt her lying down and gulping just slightly to draw him into her throat, but no further. As he was horizontal, he would remain in that position. She must have decided to sleep the rest of the night with him lying in her throat. All he could do was make himself comfortable and go to sleep.

When morning came, she took him to school in her breast pocket and kept him there all day, until school was over, and then came home and locked herself in her bedroom and sat down on her bed, taking her coat off and putting it on the back of her desk chair.

“It’s afternoon tea time,” she said.

“I suspect I’m not the first actually,” said Connor.

“How do you mean?”

“I’ve was thinking about it, while I was planning my escape last night.”

“You mean your escape attempt.”

“Yes… Well Miss Balfour invented the device. Henry and Nathaniel both went missing, and what else would Miss Balfour had wanted a device like that except to shrink people for herself and her friend Miss Woodfield to eat?”

“I think you’re probably right.”

“Well then hadn’t we better get hold of that device again, before she shrinks anyone else? What if she uses it on you?”

“She won’t. Both of the disappearing students were boys. I guess if any more go missing, at least I’ll know the solution to the mystery. I can hardly hold it against her, given that she’s made today’s afternoon tea possible.”

“So you’re just going to go ahead with this then?”

“Well I do have homework to get on with. I’ll start on my maths while you’re in my mouth. You’ll know I’ve finished all my homework when you feel the gulp. Goodbye Connor.”

She placed him into her mouth and left him in darkness, with her moist tongue below him like a mattress which ironically felt softer than the pile of handkerchiefs. He kept trying to think of a way to reason with her, to persuade her of some benefit of sparing him, even if he couldn’t be with her in a romantic relationship. If he could only think of something, he could still call out to her to open her mouth and listen to what he had to say. He couldn’t keep track of time in there, but after a long time, he felt her drawing him towards her throat.

“No, no, no. It’s not fair!” he called.

She probably heard his protests, but paid them no heed, as she gulped him deeper into her throat, and then down into her stomach.

Colleen went to a dance in the community hall in the village, on a Friday night. She saw a familiar face from years earlier, and walked over to the drinks table to talk to him.

“You won’t really know me, may not even remember me, but we were at the same university together. I was studying to be a teacher and a scientist. I’m Colleen Balfour.”

“Sure I remember you. We never actually got a chance to speak to eachother, but I saw you at the cafeteria during most lunch hours for my entire first year. Then you were gone. I’m Kenneth Sington.”

“I’d been doing my study part time, so that I could work on my science projects at home part time too. So it took several years, especially to finish a double science and teaching degree. I’m an English and science teacher at a high school in this village. Your first year was my last one. Then I started teaching, and largely stuck with it, except for a sabbatical recently.”

“Would you like to dance?”

“Yes,” she said.

They walked out onto the floor, and he put his arm around her waist, and held her hand with his other hand.

“So I guess that science was your main interest, and you just added the English to your degree to give you another subject for a teaching job,” said Kenneth.

“I have spent more time on science out of school, but I’ve also been working on a short story, which may even develop into a novel. It’s over 60 pages long now. It’s a bit of a mixture of science fiction and fantasy. Knowing science fact may help a bit in the writing of it. I haven’t shown it to anyone yet, but I’d like to know your thoughts.”

“I’d be happy to read it right through and tell you,” he said, “It’s so nice to see you again. I always wished I hadn’t been so shy of approaching you in that year at university.”

“How would you like to come over for lunch tomorrow? I’ll make us a hearty meal, and then let you read the manuscript of what I’ve done so far, while I’m working on the next few chapters?... That’s if you’re free tomorrow afternoon.”

Kenneth decided that he had suddenly become extremely free that coming Saturday afternoon. She gave him directions to her house, and they danced some more.

He got to her place at noon the next day, and enjoyed sliced ham, an assortment of salads, and some fruit. Then she gave him the manuscript. Only she knew that it was an account of all of her leprechaun and shrunken gobbling conquests. She had changed the names, and changed the vocation of the character based on herself, and set the location in another country, but everything else was word for word.

It took him until around four o’clock to finish reading it right through on the couch, while she sat at a table in another part of the room writing away, until she had another 2 pages done. When he was done, she came and sat beside him on the couch.

“Do you think it has potential?” she asked.

“Well it’s pure fantasy, which tends to have unlimited potential, as you can write about anything, where leprechauns are concerned. It’s the dynamics with of relationships that the leading lady has with each of the fellows she shrinks that kept me fascinated. The one who shrank himself and set himself up to be eaten by her is hard to believe, but the others seem to respond in an understandable way. You never finished the storyline of that private investigator. He gets away, but the story doesn’t say what happens to him after that.”

“I must have been dealing with so many characters, that tying up his plot line slipped my mind,” said Colleen, who’d actually written no more about Dick Flanigin P.I., because she didn’t know that he’d been found by his former client Brenda Leesil and eaten by her soonafter he’d escaped from Colleen, “I’ll have to work that into future chapters.”

In fact Colleen didn’t know that at least two other people, namely Brenda and Edith, shared her desire to eat shrunken young men whole.

“It’s an original story about shrinking and an original story about leprechauns, and that should make it more marketable, if the unsual content takes with the reading public.”

Colleen had no intention of showing it to a publisher, but had written it as a disguised diary of her own personal memoirs, for her own reading pleasure in the future, as a way of recollecting her happy conquests.

“What are your favourite scenes?”

“I like the surprise that the latest shrunken guy got, when he saw that the earthquake turned out to be the woman digging up the leprechaun kingdom, but I guess the most dramatic surprise, and hence my favourite scene, would have been when the first guy had spent the morning trying to lure a leprechaun out for her at his tiny size in the meadow, and she casually told him that it didn’t matter, because she was planning to eat him all up instead.”

“So would that picnic lunch she made of him be your favourite of the actual eating scenes?”

“I think the pavlova in the kitchen at the end with the last guy was the best of them. If he had to be surrounded by food, pavlova looks and feels the cleanest, even moreseo when accompanied by strawberries, and he had a nice dining room setting to look up at her for the last time, as he met his fate. Obviously nobody wants to be eaten like that year seven kid in your story did, but the pavlova was probably the best way for any reluctant victim to go.”

“Well thank you for your feedback? I’m going to put a pot of tea on. Would you like me to bring you a cup?”

“Do you have any fruity herbal tea?”

“I do keep a peach flavoured one. Will you have that?”

“Yes, thank you.”

While they were drinking their tea, they continued to talk.

“English was never my strong point. I wish I could have given you more ideas to work with on your story,” he said.

“Not at all. You’ve given me some valuable insights. I appreciate your taking the time to read it.”

“I’m interested in anything you do,” he said.

“That’s a nice thing to say to a lady.”

He put his arm around her and snuggled his cheek against hers.

Then they kissed eachother and snuggled again, and he fell asleep in her arms.

He awoke at least two hours later and saw that he was surrounded by pavlova and strawberries, on a huge dining table, or at least relatively huge, because he’d been shrunken somehow, and was not able to see the seat he was facing, because there were four candlesticks positioned in front of his plate. Each candlestick had a page of writing attached to it with sticky tape. It was Colleen’s handwriting, and on the same paper that had been used for the rest of the manuscript. It was all true somehow, and she had reduced him and put up the new chapter for him to read, presumably before she came back to give him the ‘actual eating’ scene that he had chosen as his favourite in his appraisal of the novel.

He recalled her reference to ‘valuable insights’ and realised that she had given him the book, disguised as a work of fiction, in order to have him help to determine the way he would make his own contribution. Rather than read the entire four pages, he speed scanned them, jumping through and skipping the bits that told of what he already clearly remembered, like his meeting her at the dance the night before and coming over to read the manuscript. She must have written those, while he’d been reading those 60 pages that afternoon. Now he jumped ahead to see what she really had in mind for the ending, although he guessed that she would be eating him from the pavlova soon enough.

He heard a shower start running upstairs, and guessed that he had the duration of her shower and changing to go, before she came down and enacted his final part in the story.

“Don’t worry. We’re going to get you out of here,” said a voice.

“Who was that?” he asked, and then remembered the invisible leprechauns in the story, “Are the leprechauns she wrote about real too?”

“Yes, but I’m glad she didn’t shrink anyone else before the food colouring wore off, or we couldn’t have come in to rescue you. This time we pulled the wires out of both her alarm circuits and her video camera circuits first. She won’t see or know anything, even when she finishes her shower and gets back to her room. But we do have to get you out of here fast. She can’t see us, but you’re a very visible target, and she may still have some of that food colouring to spray about in the hopes of catching us. With her great size advantage, she’ll be on you in no time, if we’re still in the house when she gets back down here,” said a second leprechaun, “Climb out of that and get to the rope and hook we used to get up here.”

The leprechauns led her back to the tunnels and a deeper cavern, where they had been living ever since Colleen had dug up their kingdom and eaten most of their population. They welcomed Kenneth as a refugee to their kingdom and held a meeting to decide what to do about Colleen.

“She has gained more and more advantages, and basically can’t be stopped,” said Kenneth, who had learned everything by reading her manuscript, “She can take that portable reducing machine anywhere and surprise anyone with it. Before they know what to do, she can have them reduced and gobbled down at the venue of her choice.”

“Our only hope is to reverse those advantages, said the princess leprechaun, “As the surviving sovereign, I can authorize a journey to the deepest caverns to obtain the Ring of Reversal, but I can not instruct anyone to come with me. Whoever uses it will retain full memory of how it was used and why. Anyone who doesn’t will remain oblivious to a lot of things.”

“Could I come too?” asked Kenneth.

“You’d be most welcome,” said the princess.

They put fresh wicks in their lanterns after a long sleep, lit them, and the princess led Kenneth and five other leprechauns to the deepest caverns, where they found a large ring resting on a rock in a cavern that had its own unique light source.

“Most surface people think that we leprechauns are merely legends,” said the princess, “However, the Ring of Reversal is a legend well grounded in truth and known only to our people, and now to you, Kenneth.”

“How will it reverse her advantages?” asked Kenneth.

“To do that directly is beyond even the powers of the Ring,” said the princess, “It can only aid us by reversing the passing of time which has occurred since Colleen acquired all these advantages. Our kingdom would never have been found and dug up. The young men she shrank and ate will never have been shrunken and eaten, and everyone’s memory will work only as far as that point in time to which the flow has regressed. We know that she first perfected her non-portable version of the reducing machine and ate Stanley less than two years ago. So we will reverse the flow of time by two years. The memories of anyone touching the ring will remain unreversed. We will know everything that has happened in the last two years.”

“Before you do that, can I ask a special favour? I know you’ve done so much for me already,” said Kenneth, “But can I reverse things more than two years from my own perspective, and then you can all just go back the two years you want to?”

“You’re welcome to make the attempt,” said the princess, “But we do not know how a human being would be affected by the ring. Your memory may or may not remain unchanged as ours will. If it does change, you will have forgotten as many years as you end up reversing with the Ring.”

“It’s worth the risk, as I’d like to do some things over differently,” said Kenneth, looking at the Ring again.

To his tiny self it was the size of a large hoop, like the ones that people played with for exercise. Now he was holding something like that, but with vastly different attributes.

“Well you just touch the ring with both hands, and let your thoughts direct the flow of time as far back as you want to go. Then you’ll disappear from here and be wherever you were in the past.”

 “Thank you for letting me do this, and for saving me from Colleen’s tummy,” said Kenneth.

 “We were happy to do so,” said the princess, “She has eaten most of our people, all of them gone just like that, while she enjoyed them as a series of meals without feeling the slightest sense of discomfort herself. You may use the Ring as you see best now. Once you have vanished from this timeline, we shall use it ourselves.”

Kenneth held the ring with both of his hands and concentrated all of his will on having his timeline reversed back much further than the last two years, all the way back to a point when he was a junior high school year 8 student, the year that he estimated that Colleen would have been just starting her double degree at the university. This time he would meet her before he even left school, and he would tell her he loved her. It would be easy, knowing that she had let him kiss her in their reunion part of the original timeline. He would have years with her, before she perfected her reducing device and became a danger to him. After that, if he hadn’t found a way to sabotage her progress in designing and making the reducing machine, he would suddenly emigrate without a word and without a trace. She would never find him. He might even get a shot at removing her machine, if she didn’t know that he was aware of her intentions by having lived a previous timeline and read her manuscript.

The leprechauns watched Kenneth fade from sight, and then set about turning their timeline back two years only. They found themselves reappearing in their kingdom, with the cavern’s soil roof intact, the palace still there, and nobody from above aware of them. Colleen herself might well have been picnicing in the meadow, but had no idea that the objects of her mouth’s desire were living right under her.

The leprechauns who had used the ring retained their memory of the previous timeline, but were glad to see the prince and all the others still there, uneaten, and unaware.

The princess went to the prince and explained everything that had happened in the previous timeline, and the way that they had used the Ring of Reversal.

“If things go on the way they did before, then all we’ve done is buy ourselves back those two years,” said the princess, “Then she’ll find this place and eat most of us again, or even all of us this time.”

“We need to warn the people we know she shrank last time and will again this time, and we need to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes that confirmed our existence to her and led her to find and dig up our kingdom,” said the prince, “The first one we can help is Stanley, when she first meets him in the meadow.”

Years further back in time, Kenneth found himself in a forest. The only one he recalled ever having been to back in year 8 was the one halfway or so between the meadow and the village, and yet he must have forgotten his way. He’d just have to keep walking until he got to either the village or the lower hill. If it was the lower hill, he’d turn around and walk back to the village.

When he finally came to a clearing and looked out, he saw that he was not in the forest, but in the public gardens in the village. It had seemed like a forest, because he had not returned to the size he had been as a year 8 student, but remained shrunken.

He recalled what the princess had said, about the Ring’s effects on a human user being unknown. It had not removed his memory of the intervening years, as she had feared it might, but had in fact not removed the reduction of his size either. Yet one thing was missing. By the time he’d awoken in the pavlova, he’d developed a five o’clock shadow, since he had not shaved since early on the Saturday morning, as part of his preparations for going to read Colleen’s manuscript.

Now he had no stubble at all. It was simply not growing at all. So he had been reversed back to the age of a year 8 high school student. Everything had been reversed, as a result of his amateur use of the Ring of Reversal as a human, everything except his memory and his size.

He couldn’t go to the university and court Colleen Balfour now. Nor could he return to school at that size. The only thing that he could do would be to hide out in the public garden and depend on the kindness of any ladies or girls he saw coming into the gardens alone, and maybe even find one who would love him as a tiny boy.

As it turned out, many a secretary from the village would at some point come to eat her lunch in the gardens. He would reveal himself and ask for food, and then, before they had to return to their afternoon’s work in the village, he would ask for a kiss. With the legends of leprechauns well known, he was always mistaken for one, and every secretary was happy to give him a kiss. However, none showed any interest in further romantic involvement.

On one particularly cloudy day, there were no secretaries coming to the public gardens to eat their lunches. He made do with berries from the gardens, as he had been used to doing on weekends anyway, and sat amongst the flowers, looking out at the gardens, wondering if it would rain. He had used a small hollow log for shelter on rainy occasions, and had made a bed of leaves and petals to sleep on every night, keeping it concealed in the log.

He noticed how dark the clouds were becoming, without actually shedding any rain, when he saw a girl walk into the gardens with an umbrella raised, as though she was expecting it to rain any moment.

As she walked, she had to lower the umbrella forward to avoid it continuing to bump against low branches of trees, and so her face was concealed by the umbrella. When she was almost to his section of the gardens, she saw that there were no more branches to worry about, and raised the umbrella to full height. He was 13, and she looked to be around 18 or 19, and stunningly beautiful. He was absolutely sure that she was Colleen Balfour.

He stepped back in surprise, as she continued to approach. He wondered if she’d seen him. She stepped closer and closer and stopped right at the edge of the flowerbed and stared in, downwards. Then she bent down and reached in with her lovely fingers and lifted him out of the flowerbed, and held him up in front of her, as rain began to fall onto the umbrella which now protected them both. He was about level with her upper chest, and tilted his head back to look up at her neck and face.

“Hello,” she said, “It’s just started raining.”

To her, they’d never met. She would assume that he was one of the leprechauns that she’d been seeking all her life. Even if he told her his fantastic story, it would make no difference to her intentions.

“It’s kind of you to shelter me,” he said.

“I like walking in the rain, and I’ve always found these gardens beautiful. I’m studying to be a teacher, and I’m on midsemester break in the first half of my first year,” she said.

It occurred to him that his best chance of escaping her lay in letting her think that he didn’t want to. Since she had no memory of her future self’s meetings with him in the altenate timeline, she didn’t know that he was aware of her plan to gobble him whole. He had to act, before she announced it.

“You look like a very beautiful lady, and you have a very beautiful mouth indeed,” he said, “Would you mind if I had a look inside it?”

“It would be my pleasure,” she said, pouting at his compliment, and lifted him higher.

As she raised him towards her mouth, he passed her neck and realised how important it was to avoid ending up on a downward slide from the inside of it.

She opened her palm a little and let him sit on the front of it while leaning against her fingers bent upwards like the back of an armchair.

“Are you comfortable?” she asked.

“Yes, very,” he said.

“I’ll open my mouth for you,” she said, and opened it wide.

He looked in at her radiant sparkling tongue.

“I’ll take you over to the gazebo,” she said, “The rain’s getting stronger.”

She carried him over to the gazebo, sat down on the chair and held him near her mouth again.

“Could I climb inside there for a while?” he asked.

That in itself would be pleasurable for him anyway, and would add credence to the role he was playing.

“You’re very welcome in there,” she said, and opened her mouth wide again.

He slid in over her lower lip and onto her tongue and lay down there for several minutes. She left her mouth open. So he slid around to face the front of it, and looked out at the rain falling heavily on the gardens. The sparkling raindrops looked beautiful as they fell on red rose petals, but her sparkling tongue looked so much more beautiful in her mouth.

He reached for her lower lip again and started to pull himself out, as she brought her hand back to receive him. She dried him on the top of her pullover and then held him again.

“You have such a beautiful mouth, and such a long lovely neck, and your tummy looked soft and wonderful when you first picked me up. It would be so exciting to go into all of them. Is there any chance you would be prepared to swallow me?”

“I’ve wanted to swallow a leprechaun for some time,” she said.

Colleen pressed her lips to his face and kissed him slowly for nearly a minute.

“I won’t do it today though. I’ve just had a large lunch in a restaurant in the village out there. I’ll take you home with me, and you can keep me company for a day or two.”

Colleen slipped him between the base of her own neck and the top of the pullover’s neck, so that nobody would see him when she left the gardens. She walked out of the village and through to the forest, and up the hills, though the meadow, further up the hills, all with the rain pitter pattering on her umbrella. It felt very romantic, despite the enormity of his keeping up the pretence of having offered to be eaten. This way she would not take steps to keep him from escaping. She took him into the house and put away her umbrella.

She sat on the couch and held him up in front of her mouth again.

He ran his hand from side to side over her lower lip, rubbing it affectionately.

“I’ve met lots of ladies in those gardens, and none of them had any interest in eating me,” he said, “If you hadn’t come along, I’d never have had the chance. Even if they had been interested, they aren’t as beautiful as you, especially your lips and your tongue. It was lovely in there, back at the gazebo.”

“I love you,” said Colleen and kissed him again.

His next question was a calculated risk.

“When are you going to eat me?” he asked.

“Well it would be nice if you could keep me company tonight. Tomorrow I might go for another walk, and then come back and have you for lunch. I need to visit a friend anyway, and I can’t tell her about you or take you with me.”

This would give him the whole morning to escape, while she was out, and still give him the optimum romantic opportunity with her for the evening. He was pleased at how things had worked out. Every lady he’d befriended at tiny size in the public gardens had been a substitute for his original goal of reversing time to be with Colleen at full size. Now that he had experienced her kisses while still shrunken himself, he felt that he had missed nothing.

He watched her eating her dinner in front of him in the dining room. It was almost like a continuation of the scene in which her alternate future self had left him waiting to be eaten in the pavlova.

Then she filled a small bowl with tap water, and let him use it as a bath in the kitchen, while she went upstairs and had a shower. He wondered if there were any chance of escape now, and whether he might be passing it up by staying the night. However, he couldn’t think of anything. So he just let himself and his clothing, which was something akin to a Tarzan outfit, get washed in the bowl, and then stepped out, reached for a napkin she’d left as a towel, dried his body off and waited for the shorts to dry out too.

Colleen returned to the kitchen in a beautiful nightgown and took him up to her bedside table and placed him on it. She slowly slid into bed, pulled the sheet and blanket over herself and sat up, leaning against two pillows.

“Come here, little darling,” she said, and enclosed him gently in her hands.

She brought him towards her and said, “Rub my mouth again, like you did before.”

He slid his hand over her lower lip, genuinely enjoying every moment of their interaction. Then he reached out with both arms, embraced her cheeks and pressed his lips to her lower lip.

“I love you too,” he said, “And I did just as much, back when you said it.”

“I’m going to lie down now. I’ll let you rest against my cheek on the pillow.”

She did so, and they talked for a few minutes.

“Colleen, could I lie on your neck instead? It excites me to know that I’ll be inside it at lunch time tomorrow.”

“It would give me the same anticipation,” she said, and lifted him gently into place.

Having her soft neck below him, feeling its occasional breathing movements and guessing at its gulping power excited him so much that he could hardly sleep. It took him longer than her to drop off, and he awoke in the morning feeling more tired than she seemed to be. He hoped he could think straight to plan an escape, the moment she’d left the house.

They had breakfast together, and then she took him to the lounge room and put him on the ground.

“Is there anything you’d like, to keep you from being bored until I get back?”

“Just some photos of your face close up, if you have any, so that I can look at them and think about being eaten by your beautiful mouth, Colleen.”

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?”

He said nothing, understanding now, why she had suddenly come running back to the house.

“Well I imagine you’re hiding,” she said.

Colleen began crawling around on the carpet, looking under the couch and under every other piece of furniture. She stood up and went out and searched the other rooms, and then returned to the lounge room.

She looked around the room slowly, and then her vision rested on the ventilation opening. With a stern look, she walked slowly towards it, until she was right in front of it, but a little below it. She walked away, out of the room.

He realised how close he had come to being discovered. If her lovely face had been the height of the opening, she would have seen him for sure. All he could do now was wait for his chance to get away, and be sure not to make any mistakes.

Colleen came back into the room with a small stool, and placed it on the floor and stood up and stared in at him. Her face looked beautiful beyond his wildest dreams, and yet he well knew by now the ramifications of it being there at that particular time, having discovered not only his intent to escape or hide from her, but also the means by which he had attempted it. The stern set of her full lips was arousing beyond his ability to express it, and yet the sight of her neck not far below them stirred a mixture of excitement and anxiety too.

“Now I can see why you acted the way you did,” she said, “There’s no escape, little darling.”

Her hand reached in and clasped him and removed him. She stepped down off the stool and took him to the dining table and sat down. Her face towered above him and showed a look of haughtiness at her advantage.

“Little darling, I’m going to gobble you all up,” she said.

“I know, but I do want you to know one thing. I wasn’t playacting about loving you, or even about how beautiful your mouth is. I really did enjoy it in there.”

“I know that. But I am curious as to where you’ve seen me before. I haven’t been into those gardens in my school days. I decided to explore them for my first time yesterday for a rain walk.”

“It wasn’t in the gardens. I first saw you at your university,” he said truthfully.

“I didn’t see you, but I did talk about eating leprechauns with one friend there, who was also in my teaching classes. So you were planning to get away by letting me think that being eaten was your own idea.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for last night, little darling, and for yesterday in the gardens.”

“It was lovely for me too,” he said.

“Well it looks like you’ll have a chance to make use of that memory of the outside of my neck from last night’s sleeping experience now. Goodbye, little darling.”

He tried running across the table, but her hand blocked his path in no time. She picked him up and licked him like an ice cream a few times, and then placed him into her mouth and gulped.

In the time only two years before the Ring of Reversal had been used, Colleen met Stanley in the meadow, looking for what, in this timeline, would be her second leprechaun. She was more convinced than ever of their existence now. Stanley invited her on the date again and agreed to come for her that evening.  (The events of chapter 1 are now being altered in this new timeline). Colleen went up to her house, and Stanley walked out of the meadow, when he was approached by the leprechaun princess.

 “You can’t keep your date with Colleen,” she said, “She has been after us for years, but she only ever caught one of us in the gardens in the village, as far as we know. She’s invented a machine for reducing the size of her boyfriends. She’s going to eat you in a day or two.”

The princess explained what had happened in the previous timeline.

Stanley thanked her for the warning and headed down into the village to buy the candy man and the flowers, and to write his poem. The warning was nothing trivial, but neither was his love for Colleen. He would simply not go into her house on any dates, so that she never had the chance to aim her reducing machine at him. He thought about everything that the princess had told him. He was flabberghasted at the way Colleen, in the previous timeline, had set up a leprechaun hunt using him as bait, only to announce at the end, that she had planned to make him the main meal all along.

He took her to the restaurant, and invited him back to his own home to kiss her instead. He went on several more dates with her, but kept finding excuses not to accept her invitations to her own home, where she kept the reducing machine. One day she invited him on a picnic in the meadow, and turned up with everything she needed, and took out a small device.

The leprechauns were watching invisibly.

“She’s adapted it into a portable version earlier in this timeline,” whispered the prince, “She must have done it because Stanley wouldn’t go into her house. We don’t even have time to warn him.”

Colleen shrank Stanley to tiny size and used him to search the meadow for leprechauns, just as she had done in the previous timeline. For Stanley, the difference was in knowing what she was going to say and do, when the leprechaun hunt proved fruitless. He tried to sneak out of sight, as they combed the meadow, but she was too alert, fast and attentive for him.

Then he saw a leprechaun pop into visibility under a flower that concealed the leprechaun from Colleen.

“Pretend you’re chasing me,” said the leprechaun, “Don’t worry about me. I can turn invisible again before SHE gets me. If I get the chance to lead her away, you make a break for it, without letting her know that you’re trying to get away from her. Get to our tunnel to the underground kingdom.”

Stanley chased the leprechaun towards Colleen, and then saw Colleen crawl into view and sit towering above the leprechaun.

“You’ve done well, Stanley,” she said.

“Has he indeed?” called the leprechaun and ducked under a flower, and then turned invisible.

Colleen reached for the flower, while the leprechaun invisibly ran to the far side of the flower patch, then turned visible and called again.

“I don’t know how you got past my scrutiny that well, but here I come to get you. I’ll have you in my stomach yet. You can be sure of that,” said Colleen.

She pursued the leprechaun, who kept playing the same trick, every time a suitable flower came along to conceal the sight of her turning invisible.

Stanley took his opportunity and ran away through the meadow in the opposite direction, where another invisible leprechaun took his hand and led him to the tunnel. Colleen was unable to capture the first leprechaun and wondered where Stanley had gone to. She called for him and searched for him until the sun went down, and then had to return home in the dark.

It began to dawn on her that she’d been tricked, but how? Had Stanley guessed what she’d been planning to do with him?

Stanley went to live with the leprechauns in their kingdom under the meadow, and never stopped thinking of Colleen. 

Colleen set her year 7 English students a homework assignment to write a short story for about leprechauns, with the intention of reading every submission slowly and deciding on which was her favorite. When they were completed, she took them all into her science laboratory and locked the door, in order to read them undisturbed. Most of the stories were about the typical legends, pots of gold, riches and wish fulfilment and adventure. However, the fifth one she read captured her interest so much, that the rest that followed all seemed empty and completely boring by comparison.

THE TINY TRESPASSER

Miss Frobual was a teacher, who was walking through her school grounds one day after classes had ended, when she saw a tiny creature in the school gardens. The little fellow saw her and turned and ran.

“Oh no you don’t!” she called, and gave chase.

Miss Frobual ran around the path, to the other side of the garden, and cut off his escape. She bent down and snatched him up out of the flowers.

“Now I’ve caught you, little leprechaun. I’ll teach you to trespass in this school!” she said sternly, “I’m going to take you home and have you for my dinner!”

She put him into her handbag and walked home.

When she got to her house, she took him out of the bag and sat down to read a book, leaving him on the table beside her. He watched as she licked her fingers every now and then to turn the pages more easily. The view of her tongue was like a prelude for her eating plans.

When it was night time, Miss Frobual turned the next page of her book, and then picked him up and opened her mouth wide in front of him. She put him inside and then started reading again.

“Please wait! I have to tell you something!” came his voice from inside her mouth.

Miss Frobual opened her mouth and extended her tongue, letting him slide along it onto her hand.

“Well then, what do you have to say for yourself?” she asked.

“You won’t believe me unless you just look more closely,” he said, “Can you hold me up to your eye?”

She lifted him right in front of her eye and looked closely at him. It was Rhyen, one of the boys from the school, except that he had been turned into a leprechaun.

“The Leprechauns really did trespass here, and the Queen of the Leprechauns turned me into one, so that I could marry her daughter, but I didn’t want to. So they left without me. Then you thought I was trespassing and chased me.”

“I didn’t know it was you, but why didn’t you marry the leprechaun girl?”

“Because I’ve been in love with you.”

Miss Frobual gave him a big kiss, and took him to the dining room.

She fetched some food from the kitchen, gave him small portions and ate with him. He looked up at her eating and thought, “That could have been me.”

Colleen continued reading the story.

After dinner, she put him in the dolls house and then lifted it up off the ground and put it on her bedside table. The dolls house mattress on the bed was just the right size for him. She left the wall lamp above her bed on, and it illuminated part of the dolls house too. He pushed the bed close to the dolls house window, so that he could look out at her.

“Thank you so much for that lovely kiss, Miss Frobual.”

“Well knowing how you feel about me, and how I misjudged you, I thought it was the least I could do,” she said, and then yawned on the pillow, showing him her wide open mouth.

He looked inside again and thought about what it would have been like in there, if she hadn’t finally recognized him. She had such a nice looking mouth. No wonder he was in love with her.

“I think you’re the most beautiful lady ever,” he said.

“Thank you, little boy.”

“I’m sorry I ran away too. I’ve always been in love with you, but when I first saw you, I didn’t know what to do.”

“It’s alright. I understand completely,” said Miss Frobual.

“I’m so happy that it was you who found me.”

“So am I.”

“Thank you for giving me the nice big dolls house to live in. I’ll always be happy here with you.”

“I think you might be getting the wrong idea, little boy.”
“Don’t you love me too?” he asked.

“I love you very much,” said Miss Frobual, “But I still have a dinner plan to reschedule, and you’re forgetting that you’ll have an important part to play in it. It’ll probably be tomorrow night. It was lovely spending this evening with you though, and I’m very flattered by your feelings for me.”

“But you know I’m not a trespasser now.”

“Of course I do. We won’t say any more about that. But I’m sure you’ll still make a delicious dinner. Don’t worry, I’ll be very gentle with you, and by this time tomorrow night it will all be over.”

“But I could have escaped with the leprechauns. I only stayed behind, because I’m in love with you.”

“That’s why I gave you the kiss. I’ll give you some more tomorrow, when I get home from school. Then I’ll gobble you down at dinner time.”

“Miss Frobual, I don’t want to be gobbled down.”

“Well you’re going to be. Now let’s not keep going around in circles about it. You can stay in the dolls house tonight and tomorrow. The tomorrow night, I’m going to eat you for my dinner. Right now we need some sleep.”

Rhyen thought about it until he fell asleep. In the morning, Miss Frobual woke up, gave him some breakfast, and took him back to the dolls house. She gave him a goodbye kiss and then went to school. Later she came home and kissed him again a lot. Then she sat at the dinner table and ate him all up.

The End.

Colleen could see that Frobual was an anagram of Balfour, and from that she deduced that Rhyen was an anagram of Henry, who had written the story. She asked him to see her after school about it.

When everyone else had left the classroom and gone home, she came over and sat at the desk next to his.

“I’m sorry that it wasn’t really about a leprechaun, most of the time,” he said, “I mean, that the main one turned out to be a boy. I’ll rewrite it differently tonight, after I’ve done the rest of my homework.”

“I don’t want you to rewrite it,” said Colleen, “It’s by far the very best of all the stories in the class. And I have noticed that the names of the characters are anagrams. I’ve given you full marks. You’re the only one, and if you see me on the last day of term, there might be a surprise for you.”

Henry, whose previous timeline self had learned of her machine when she told Frances Woodfield about eating Stanley, and had then snuck into her house and willingly shrunken himself for gobbling, was elated. Miss Balfour liked his story. In this timeline he didn’t know just exactly why she liked it so much, but whatever she was going to give him, he would treasure it always.

On the last day of school term, he stayed behind again in the classroom.

“I’ll give you your surprise in a little while,” she said, “I’ll meet you in the clearing at the end of the short walking track behind the school, the track that looks out on the valley. I’ll be there in about 15 minutes.”

Henry made his way down there, and was soon joined by Miss Balfour.

She sat on a raised section of grass, and said, “Would you like to have a cuddle?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Come on then,” she beckoned, and he sat on her lap and snuggled against her.

“Since Rhyen and Miss Frobual were based on us, I suppose it wouldn’t be presumptuous of me to surmise that you are in love with me too.”

“Yes, it’s true,” he said.

She kissed his cheek and then snuggled her own against his.

“I love you very much,” he said.

“I love you very much too,” said Colleen.

“This is a very nice surprise you’ve given me, just like you said you would.”

“This isn’t the surprise,” said Colleen, and he felt one of her hands releasing its embrace of him, “This is.”

She held a small device in front of him.

“Is that what you’re giving me? I don’t know what it is.”

“I’m not exactly giving it to you,” she said, and pressed the switch.

Henry shrank to tiny size, his arms slipping off her as he did so, and he ended up in the lap of her dress.

“This is incredible!” said Henry.

“I gave you all that story writing assignment, so that I could choose the best story, and you’re the winner. I know you wrote it from the heart.”

“All except for Rhyen wanting to stay with her without being eaten. I’d love to be eaten by you, Miss Balfour.”

“I knew that too, and you’re going to be,” she said.

He looked up at her beautiful smiling face, ecstatic beyond his wildest dreams that she had brought his fantasy to life.

“Oh wow! It’s so nice of you to make this machine, just to make the best parts of my story come true.”

“I made it before I ever read your story. It’s been my plan to use the machine this way for some time. When I read your story, I decided to use it on you. There’s another part of your story that I’ll make come true first.”

She brought him to her lips and gave him huge kisses.

“I love that too!”

“Would you like me to take you home and show you my kitchen and dining room now?”

“I think it’s really nice here. We’re all by ourselves. Nobody knows we’re here, and I love looking up at your nice mouth. Would you eat me right here?”

“I’d love to …. Little boy,” she said, recalling his frequent use of that phrase as a term of endearment in his story.

“I love you even more than before,” he said, “I’m so happy you’re going to swallow me down to your nice soft tummy.”
“I was going to choose the best story and make an end of term afternoon treat of the author anyway, but it’s so sweet and adorable of you to want me to do it. When would you like me to start?”

“About an hour before sunset, so I’ll still have a clear view of your tongue, and you’ll still have time to walk back to the school with some daylight.”

“That sounds fine. What would you like to do in the meantime? We’ve got an hour or so, I’d say.”

“Could you sit me on your shoulder and snuggle your cheek against me?”

“What a lovely idea?”

When she had him in position, they were both looking out at the valley. He remembered the times he’d walked down here by himself, and took in all the sights for the last time.

“I sat here when I wrote the story,” he said, “I did it in a lunch hour.”

“Really? That makes it extra special. Little did you know that your story would be brought to life on this very spot.”

“I didn’t know that you were going to eat one of us, no matter what. It’s really thrilling to know that now.”

“I think you’ll taste at least as nice as a leprechaun,” she said.

“How will you know?”

“I’ve eaten one,” she said, and told him about the captive from her first year of teaching studies, whom she didn’t know had been Kenneth, a fellow student from her final year in the previous timeline.

“It’s just as well you worked all that out, when he called you by name and got back in time to make sure he didn’t get away,” said Henry.

She told him about Stanley too.

“So I’m not the first boy you’ve ever shrunken, but I will be the first one you’ve eaten.”

“Yes,” she said, “And I think I’ll have to do it again, although I don’t expect to find someone so willing in the future. You’re a very special boy.”

“Well by then I’ll be part of your tummy. So I won’t have to be jealous of the others.”

She turned her face to him and kissed him again, and then looked at her watch.

“It’s 4:25 and the sun’s going down,” she added, “We’d better get started, unless you’d like to come home to my dining room instead.”

“I’m really very much ready now,” he said.

“Thank you, little boy. So am I then,” said Colleen.

She clasped him gently in her hand and licked his face several times. It was all of his wildest dreams come true.

“That was the very best thing ever!” he said.

“I hope you’ll still like the rest, although I’ll be doing it anyway, even if you change your mind.”

“Lovely beautiful Miss Balfour, I would never change my mind about this, not for anything!”

Her lovely lips smiled affectionately right in front of him.

“I believe you. I’ll pop you in now. You can move around and when you’re comfortable and ready for the gobbling process, just tap on my tongue twice with your hand, and then expect some big developments. Do you have any questions about it?”

“Will the gobbling process be just like in my story?”

“Of course, you couldn’t have put it better when you wrote that.”

“So you’ll be swallowing me whole?”

“Of course, little boy. That’s one of the main benefits of reducing you.”

“I love you. I love you. I really really love you! You can put me into your mouth now.”

“Farewell then, and have an enjoyable trip down,” she said.

She opened her mouth, and put out her tongue, placed him onto the front, and drew him into her mouth along with her retracting tongue. He slid around for a little while, and lay down flat. Then he lay there for a little longer, and then tapped her tongue twice. He felt her tongue moving, and felt himself sliding into the top of her throat. Then he felt the most incredibly powerful gulp, and he dropped a little down. Then came another gulp, and he was carried right down to her stomach.

In this timeline, Colleen again told Frances about Stanley and Henry. Nathaniel again asked Miss Frances Woodfield on a date, and events concerning both of them proceeded in exactly the same way as the previous timeline, with Nathaniel reduced and renamed Dollipop, and secretly licked on his face at her home where he lived from then on. The only difference was that Miss Woodfield’s decision to have Nathaniel reduced to the size of a lickable lollipop was based only on what Colleen had told her. In the previous timeline, she’d been given the chance to lick Henry a few times, before Colleen ate him.

Colleen had gone on her same sabbatical and employed and reduced Patrick, albeit with the already portable reducing machine, and eaten him in the office where she’d hired him, rather than at her home. So the leprechauns never caught up with that aspect of the timeline, and had no knowledge that the need to warn him had arrived.

There had effectively been the same two disappearances of Henry and Patrick, from the perspectives of those who had reported them to Dick Flanigin, Private Investigator. His events repeated themselves from the previous timeline, right down to Brenda Leesil eating him in the forest.

Since Edith’s experience with Connor had occurred at the school and her house in the previous timeline, and neither the leprechauns nor Colleen had known what she had done anyway, the same scenarios played out, right down to the inside of Edith’s stomach.

Stanley was still living with the leprechauns and pining for his full sized romance with Colleen. A simple butterfly effect result on this timeline, which flowed from the existing changes, meant that Tarquin was never in the public gardens to stare at Colleen the day she was eating her lunch there, and was thus never reduced and eaten.  This one the leprechauns had seen coming and considered it an unqualified success. With the foreknowledge from the previous timeline, the leprechauns were careful to stay invisible in Colleen’s house, and to remember the need to disconnect all video and alarm wires before attempting to rescue shrunken young men from her clutches.

Brent was another student at the school where Colleen was a teacher. As another schoolday came to an end, he packed his schoolbag and headed through the school grounds on his way home. He lived in the valley which, like Colleen’s house in the hills, was accessed by walking through the forest and taking a different turn. When he was part of the way through the forest, he suddenly began to dwindle to tiny size. Then he heard footsteps behind him and turned around to see that Miss Balfour had been following him, and was holding a device in her hand.

“This is what reduced your size,” she said.

“I never knew that such technology was possible.”

“It’s only possible for its inventor, namely me.”

“Can it be reversed?”

“There is a reverse setting, but I’ve never had reason to use it.”

“Well, I guess you’ve got a good reason to test that setting now.”

“I don’t think so,” said Colleen, “I must be getting home.”

She turned to walk away.

“Miss Balfour! You can’t just leave me like this.”

“Can’t I?” she called, and walked off through the forest.

He tried running after her, but she had outdistanced him in very little time and was soon out of sight.

Then he heard another set of footsteps approaching from behind, and turned around again, to see that it was lovely Miss Woodfield walking through the forest this time. She stopped when she reached his position. He’d adored her for a long time, but he’d never seen her from this angle. She looked spectacularly beautiful.

“Oh thank goodness you’re here, Miss Woodfield. I’ve been shrunken by Miss Balfour.”

“I know,” said Miss Woodfield, “I asked her to do it.”

She picked him up and put him into her handbag and started walking again. Brent lay inside the dark bag and wondered why his lovely teacher had orchestrated such an outcome for him. After about half an hour, he saw the light coming in, as she unzipped the top of the bag. Miss Woodfield took him out and set him down on the carpet. She sat down in front of him.

“Were you waiting long, after Miss Balfour reduced you?”

“No. She was barely gone when you arrived.”

“That’s good. We timed it that way intentionally.”

“Why did you two want to do this?”

“Do you remember another boy named Henry?”

“Yes. I don’t know why he left the school.”

“I’ll tell you. He liked me, and he asked me out on a date. Miss Balfour and I have been friends for a long time. Both she and Henry agreed that she would reduce Henry to the size you now have, so that Henry could be both my boyfriend and my little Dollipop. It’s a word I made up that combines doll and lollipop. I kept him upstairs, and would lick his tiny face many times, and enjoyed it very much. I gave him kisses and we were very much in love. In the school holidays, I took him on a camping trip one day, with my sleeping bag rolled up and packed in my backpack, on top of the food supplies.”

Brent listened to all of this and thought that Henry had been very fortunate to have his affections reciprocated, and that he would have benefited from Miss Woodfield’s licks as much as she did.

“I walked up into the hills and far beyond Miss Balfour’s hillside house and off to a spot by the lake. I unrolled the sleeping bag, and got into it and snuggled Henry beside my cheek, just like we did every night here.”

“It sounds romantic,” said Brent.

“It was. We slept under the stars, neither of us wanting to eat anything, as we felt that digesting food would have made it harder to sleep without the usual luxuries of my bed at home. The next morning, we woke up and looked at the lake. It was a beautiful sight. I decided to get our breakfast out of the backpack and then take my empty water bottle down to the lake, fill it up first and then have a swim before breakfast. It was then that I discovered that the sharp edge of a can must have worn a hole in the bottom of the bag. Our food must have fallen out and gotten lost back when I’d been walking here. Henry had been riding on my shoulder with some of my hair in his hands to hold onto, and hadn’t noticed the food falling out behind us either. So there we were with empty stomachs all night, counting on revitalising ourselves with breakfast and no food at all to eat.”

“What did you do?” asked Brent.

“I told Henry I could still fill the water bottle from the lake, but wouldn’t find the walk all the way back home easy on an empty stomach, and that I’d have to eat the only food available.”

“But there wasn’t any.”

“There was one piece of meat that hadn’t been in the backpack when the hole developed, because it had been on my shoulder.”

“Henry!”

“It was the only thing I could think of to solve my problem. I told him that we didn’t have any other options. He reminded me that, when Miss Balfour had first reduced him, she had told him about eating leprechauns and perhaps the odd shrunken boy too, and that I’d said I had no interest in eating Henry. I explained to Henry, that when I had said that, I was talking about not feeling Miss Balfour’s desire to eat a reduced boy for the pure pleasure of it. I told him, that in this case, I needed to do it in order to relieve a pressing hunger, before embarking on the return home. I tried reasoning with him in every way I could think of, but he still didn’t want me to do it. In the end, I told him that he would simply have to get used to the idea, while I took a swim. I took off my skirt and pullover and carried him down to the lake in my bikini. I set him comfortably on a rock, where he could watch me swim, but he wouldn’t be able to climb down from it.”

At this point, Brent was feeling a sense of suspense which was more than that of every fictional cliffhanger he’d ever read or seen all combined into one story.

Miss Woodfield continued.

“I imagined he would have been thinking of running away, in spite of his undying love for me. Then I walked around the rocks to a position, where he could see me standing almost front on, and dived into the lake. I swam underwater for quite a length, and then surfaced a couple of meters in front of Henry’s rock and gulped in some air. I walked and waded around for a while, and then came back and collected Henry and the bottle I’d left beside him. I filled up the bottle and carried him back to the sleeping bag. I took out my towel, dried myself off.

I told Henry that I might as well have breakfast before I took off my wet bikini and put my skirt and pullover on. When I’d planned the trip, I had originally intended to put him into the pouch of the backpack while I changed, but since he would be in my tummy by the time I did it now, there would be no need for the pouch.

I sat down and told him how much I’d enjoyed being with him all that time, and that I it was a shame that we didn’t see eye to eye about the food shortage, but that I still loved him just as much. Then I gave him a goodbye kiss. He said that he wouldn’t have missed out on all our time together, even if he’d known that this was going to happen. I kissed him again, and said that I really couldn’t wait any longer. I gave him a final round of licks, then opened my mouth wide and placed him gently inside it, and gulped quickly.”

“Didn’t you want to leave him in your mouth for a while?”

“We’d done that many times, and he’d even slept whole nights in my throat, with a fishing line harness attached to my teeth at one end and his waist at the other.”

“Wow!”

“In this case, I needed him in my tummy as soon as possible, and I can imagine, that by then he wanted it over and done with too, since he knew that he would be unable to talk me out of eating him. Then I put on my skirt and pullover again and came back home. I told Miss Balfour about it, and she offered to make me a new Dollipop if I found someone I liked. I’ve noticed the way you look at me at school. It’s hard for shy teenagers to hide their feelings from a perceptive lady, no matter how shy and reclusive they are. So I arranged for her to follow you part of the way home and reduce you at a place where nobody else would see her doing it.”

The fact that she hadn’t sought his agreement first was not lost on him, but then he realised that she ultimately hadn’t gained Henry’s position for her final act of involvement with him either. Brent knew that he was reduced to stay reduced, and that he was happy to be with Miss Woodfield in any way… except one.

“I like you very much, Miss Woodfield, and I’d love to be your new Dollipop. I was just wondering if… you could make sure that you never get caught without any other food again.”

“I’ll do my best to anticipate and prepare for every eventuality,” she said, “It’s not a guarantee that nothing will ever take us by surprise, but it’s unlikely to happen. If it does, I guess you’ll just have to make the best of it like Henry did. You’ll be my contingency plan.”

What a situation, he thought.

That night he settled down to an evening of kissing, snuggling and licking from Miss Woodfield, the first of many to come.

“Sleep well, Dollipop II,” she said, and closed her eyes.

Edith had a friend in the volleyball club named Denny, who was often telling her about his crushes on adult ladies. He’d fallen for a shop assistant, a librarian, a waitress, and a few others. Yet he’d never thought to ask one of them on a date, as boys at that age simply didn’t know what to do about their feelings. One day, after the volleyball game, Edith showed him a photograph of a very beautiful adult woman.

“Do you like her?” asked Edith.

“Do I ever!” said Denny.

“I can take a photo of you and show it to her. If she likes it, I’ll introduce you to her.”

“Yes, please do!” said Denny.

A week later, Edith told Denny that the woman was very keen to meet him for a date.

“Her name’s Moynie. I’ll walk you over to her place on Saturday. It’s a bit of a hike, but she’d love to see you.”

“I won’t mind the hike at all,” said Denny.

“Can you meet me at the near end of the forest at around eight in the morning?”

“I’ll leave home with time to spare,” said Denny.

They made their rendezvous as planned. Edith led Denny through the forest and then through the meadow, up into the hills and into a larger version of the forest, which stretched for countless miles. Deep into the high forest they walked, until they came to a point where Edith suddenly stopped. She led him into some thick bush area.

“The way to Moynie’s garden is just around here somewhere. Hold my hand, so we don’t get separated,” said Edith.

After they’d walked a little way, Denny suddenly found that the forest seemed to vanish from around them, and they were now on an open stretch of grass. There was a house in the distance, but something about it didn’t make sense to Denny. It was as if the angle of its perspective didn’t look correct, or something. He didn’t have the words to explain it.

The front door opened and a woman stepped out.

“Here’s Moynie now,” said Edith.

They waited as the woman drew closer, and then Denny saw that it was not just the house that looked out of perspective, but also the woman. She approached them with graceful strides, and he suddenly worked out what the visual perspective issue was. Both the house and Moynie were gigantic in size.

“She’s a giant, like this whole garden!” said Denny.

“The portal we just went through is invisible, and not on the main path in our high forest on earth. That’s why I always have to feel about until I pass through it,” said Edith.

Moynie drew closer and then sat down in front of them.

“This is Denny,” said Edith.

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” said Moynie.

“Me too,” said Denny.

“Well I’m glad you’re pleased to meet yourself,” said Edith.

“I know what he means,” said Moynie, laughing at Denny’s demonstration of nervous shyness, which had already been described for her by Edith, “Denny, I own a number of houses in this land. One of my others is within easy walking distance from this one… easy walking distance for me, I mean. Edith discovered this garden while walking in the forest, and she told me all about your world. I said that she could have this house as a gift from me, if she introduced me to a boy your size, just so long as I could still use this garden as a meeting place with the boy. This is the only place that links our two lands, as far as we know.”

“I’m glad she did,” said Denny, “Thank you Edith.”

“I had my own reasons,” said Edith, “But I’m glad you like her.”

“The house is yours, Edith,” said Moynie.

“Thank you. I’ll leave you two to get acquainted,” said Edith

She walked back to the portal and headed back through the high forest, and down the hill, until she saw a familiar lady hanging her washing out on the line in her garden. It was Miss Balfour. She remembered the way that she had snuck into the laboratory and used Miss Balfour’s reducing machine on Connor and eaten him. She didn’t want to own up to that little adventure, but it did give her an idea.

For the next few months, Denny would get up before the sunrise every Saturday and go to visit Moynie. She would meet him at the portal opening in Edith’s garden and take him back to her nearby house for a picnic on the lawn. They would talk for hours and get to know eachother very well. They learned that she was his first girlfriend. He was not her first boyfriend, as she had dated someone her own size for many years before they decided upon the parting of their ways. However, Denny was certainly her first boyfriend of his size. Her kisses far surpassed anything he could have hoped for from the shop assistant or the waitress or the librarian, who were all his own size and not quite as stunning as Moynie.

He enjoyed the sight of Moynie licking her lips when she ate, and sometimes when she talked. Her huge tongue was as large as his entire body, probably even a little bit larger, and he wished that he could touch it. He didn’t want to tell her of this longing, in case she thought him a little strange. So one day, he staged an accident, where he fell into a bowl of punch that she’d brought to their picnic.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I guess you were leaning over too far to fill up the tiny cup you brought. It was too big for me to hold it in my hand. So I had to let you fill it up yourself.”

He trod punch to stay afloat, and said, “Well now that I’m in here, it feels like a nice opportunity to have a swim.”

“A pool is one thing this house doesn’t have. Edith’s got one on the property I gave her. You can stay in there and swim. I’m just going to fill my cup up with the ladle. So don’t swim in that direction.”

He watched her scoop up the punch and ladle it into her cup.

“It’s caught some of the small pieces of fruit too,” she said, “They’re great for flavour, but I can’t seem to get them out of the cup, when I’m drinking it, no matter how hard I tilt the cup.”

He watched her drink the cup dry in one gulp, as her neck showed more distinctly while she was tilting her head back.

“Those pieces of fruit are still there. Oh well, time for more food.”

He watched her eating, while he enjoyed swimming around in the punch bowl. Then she was ready to fill up her cup again.

He swam towards the ladle, and into it, as she submerged most of it.

“I have an idea,” he said, “Scoop me up into the cup too.”

“Alright,” she said, with a look of curiosity.

Once she had ladled him into the cup, he stood up, so that his head and the top of his neck were not covered. The pieces of fruit were floating on top of the punch beside him.

“Could you hold the cup close to your mouth?” he asked.

“Will this do?” she asked.

“Yes, I think so. I’ve solved your problem,” he said, “Can you open your mouth now?”

She did so, and he lifted a piece of pineapple in his hand and reached out of the cup and across Moynie’s lower lip and placed it into her mouth. He managed to slide his hand across the top of her tongue as he withdrew it, which was as close as he’d gotten to touching her tongue at last.

He watched her swallow it.

“Very enterprising,” she said, “And very thoughtful of you too.”

He did the same exercise with the remaining pieces of accumulated fruit.

“I’ll sit back in the cup, as you tilt it to drink the rest,” he said, I can put my arm in the handle to hold onto, since it’s a thick plastic cup with a hollow handle. That way I won’t fall into your mouth.”

“Alright. Hold on tight then,” she said, and tilted the cup slowly forward, as he sat back and watched the liquid flowing past him and into her enormous open mouth.

He watched her tongue swish from side to side as she licked her lips afterwards. It was so near, yet so far from any opportunity to touch it.

When she’d finished, she let him crawl out onto her other hand.

“That was very considerate of you, Denny. And now my punch has made you all sticky, after you’ve helped me enjoy it all the more.”

Then Denny saw his opportunity.

“Maybe you could clean me up right here, if you were to lick the punch juice from my face.”

“It may not do any good, since I already have a lot of it on my tongue, but I’ll try,” she said.

Then came the moment for which he’d staged the fall into her punch bowl.

Her tongue came right out of her mouth and slid over him, pressing and sliding against his face, making him far more ecstatic than he’d ever been before.

She had been right though, he reflected a few minutes later, although not for the reasons that she had been thinking of. The presence of the punch on both her tongue and himself had taken a lot away from the feeling he had hoped to attain from being licked by her tongue with no intervening liquid present. If only he could find a way to prompt her to do that, without sounding like a juvenile child with an unexplained urge.

He loved her. She was kind and considerate at all times, and took care of him on every one of his visits.

Apart from that, he found Moynie’s conversations with him flowed naturally, as he told her one day, while they were having a celebration picnic, to commemorate six months since the day Edith had first introduced them to eachother.

“I always find everything you say so interesting,” said Denny.

“That’s one thing that makes you so nice,” said Moynie, “You listen to what I say, and then weeks later you’ll tell me something yourself, that was sparked off by what I’d said to you. It shows that you’ve taken an interest in everything I’ve told you about myself.”

“You’ve been so nice to me too,” said Denny, “You’ve always come over to Edith’s house to collect me, and brought the rug and all the food. I’ve never had so much of the best food before, and not had to eat it sparingly.”

“That’s why I asked you what your favourite foods were at our first picnic, so that I could always be sure to bring them for you,” said Moynie.

“Well it’s very kind of you. I’m too small to be able to bring you anything nice to eat.”

“I don’t think you’re too small,” said Moynie, “I have my birthday dinner coming up in a few weeks’ time. Your size is perfect for me to gobble you down whole.”

“Do you mean, like … you’d eat me for your birthday dinner?” he asked.

“Exactly. You were very nice to lick that day, when you had the punch on you. Thank you for suggesting that back then. This time, I can lick you while you’re already clean, enjoy the taste, and then put you into my mouth and swallow you.”

For weeks and weeks, he’d wondered how he’d have the chance to touch her tongue while it was completely clean, and now she had just announced her desire to give him an exceptionally good chance to experience that … and significantly more.

“So you’re really going to eat me.”

“Yes, for sure. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and waiting for a suitable special occasion. My birthday dinner will be an ideal one.”

“It will be so special for me too. I’ve been trying to think of a way to touch your tongue, ever since I first saw you eat something on our first picnic. I actually only pretended to fall into the punch bowl, so that I could have an excuse to ask you to lick me, and then I thought of helping to put the fruit pieces in your mouth afterwards.”

“You should have said something.”

“Well it’s going to work out well now anyway.”

“You can stay here with me until my birthday,” she said.

“I’d love that very much,” said Denny.

It didn’t trouble him at all, that she had simply announced her plan without seeking his approval, because he was so elated. As far as he was concerned, she was doing something wonderful for him, because she thought it was wonderful herself.

That night, she took him to her bedroom with her and let him lie on her stomach.

“I’m pleased that my punch stunt worked out as I’d planned, and gave you the idea of eating me as well,” said Denny.

“I’d been thinking about it long before that. When I first met Edith, she told me that she had snuck into your school’s science classroom with a boy named Connor after school one day, and found that the teacher Miss Balfour had a reducing device in her handbag, which she’d left on the classroom desk, while she had gone to attend a teachers staff meeting. Edith had reduced Connor with it, taken him home and eaten him. So I made an offer to Edith, that she could have the house if she brought me a boy from your world, so that I could go on lots of dates with him and then eat him up one day. It’s worked out well for Edith and me, and for you too.”

Denny was stunned to learn that Miss Balfour had invented a reducing machine, and that Edith had used it on Connor. If he’d known about that back then, he might have been able to pursuade Miss Balfour to reduce him and give him to the librarian, the shop assistant, or the waitress, so that he could have touched their tongues. However, this was a better experience with a lady he liked more than any of the other three, and this world was a fantasy realm in real life, which only he and Edith knew about. He was amazed at the way that Edith and Moynie had arranged this outcome for him.

“This is a nice big soft stomach that you have,” he said.

“In a few weeks you’ll be inside it,” said Moynie, in the same friendly voice which made it all sound so natural and wonderful.

“It’s interesting to think that your dinner is being digested only a couple of feet for me, a couple of inches for you, below me.”

“You’re mixing up the two sections of my tummy,” said Moynie, “The food is being digested in the rear compartment of my tummy. There’s a wall of tummy flesh between that and the front compartment you’re lying on now, which is as thick as the space between where you are and the front compartment. There’s no digestive pathways in the front compartment. It’s just like a soft little cave.”

“Do mean that I won’t be digested then?” he asked, amazed again.

“Of course not. You’ll stay in the front compartment, so I can always feel you moving around, and you can feel the movements of my big tummy around you too.”

“I’ve learnt about the human body from cutaway diagrams in Miss Balfour’s science classes. We don’t have those compartments. Connor would have been completely digested by Edith.”

“In a way that’s an even greater difference between our people, than our comparitive sizes,” said Moynie.

“This means we’ll always be together. Although I suppose that Connor and Edith are always together too, in a very different way.”

The next day she took him for a long walk around the giant countryside, which was even more solitary and peaceful and scenic than any of the attributes of the Irish countryside from whence he had come. At one point, she took him into a small isolated shop, which had a sign on the front saying ‘Mrs Timsum’s Mixed Wares’.

They looked at some things inside, and Moynie asked him to climb into a small model boat, to see how well he fit. To him it was about halfway between the size of a kayak and the size of a rowboat, but he could sit comfortably in it.

“Would you like me to buy it for you?” she asked, “I know where you could enjoy riding in it.”

“Yes, thank you,” he replied.

She carried the boat home in one hand, while he rode on her shoulder, and then put the boat on the bathroom bench, beside the bath, and sat him in it. She turned the bath on to start filling up, and left the room.

In a few minutes, she returned, wearing a bikini, looked at the water level, and turned the tap off. Moynie stepped into the bath, and sat down, leaning against the back of the tub. She lifted the boat up, with Denny seated in it, and placed it gently into the water in front of her, gave it a little push with her hand, and watched it float to the other end of the bath. It soon floated back to her, and they talked the whole time.

“We can do it every night until the birthday dinner, if you like,” she said later in the bedroom.

“I thought it was a great way to travel with no destination in mind,” he said, “Except your tummy eventually. But we won’t need a boat for that.”

The next day she took him to a third house she owned, which did have a pool, and they went indoors. She left him and the boat in the lounge room, while she changed into a bikini. Then she carried the boat out to the side edge of the pool and left it there with him inside it.

“I’ll come and get you, after the water settles down,” she said.

He watched her stride gracefully over to the far end of the pool, climb the small ladder to the diving board, and then walk slowly along it. Every move she made excited him immensely, and every move she made took on a new dimension, when he looked at her tummy, knowing of the life that awaited him inside it. It was a beautiful compartment separating the two pieces of her bikini and it seemed just made to accommodate him perfectly.

Denny had never been able to dive himself, had tried to learn to do it at swimming lessons, but had never been able to talk his feet into leaving the ground and kicking out while he leaned over. Several attempts had ended up with him either going in feet first or bellyflopping. It had always turned him on to see older girls diving into the school pool so confidently, when he couldn’t do it himself. Now he stood and watched in exponential awe, as this beautiful giantess bent her legs a little, and launched herself off the board, into the air, and down into the clear water. He watched her gigantic body gliding under the surface, and treated the whole experience as a rapture of unparalleled proportions.

She broke the surface after she had passed him and reached the other end of the pool, opposite the diving board, and then swam back to his position at the side, this time, moving her arm and legs above the surface. He had always thought it foolish the way some boys at school referred to women as goddesses. However, he saw no harm at all in thinking of Moynie as the most beautiful of giantesses.

She reached him and stood up.

“You looked amazing, doing all that,” he said.

“Thank you.”

Her tummy was right at his eye level, and continued to fill him with a mixture of fascination and ecstacy.

She put the boat in the pool and let him float, while she swam around.

When they had both had enough, she put the boat and Denny on the side of the pool again, and climbed up the ladder, looking resplendant in her bikini. She picked him up and went and lay down on the lawn and placed him on top of her tummy again.

“I like all these sporty things we do together,” he said.

“What sports do you have in your world?”

“I used to play volleyball with Edith,” he said, and described the game, “And I loved exercising on one of the school trampolines.”

“What’s a trampoline?”

He explained.

“We’ve never had one of those here, but I think I can improvise,” she said.

He felt her breathing in deeply, as her tummy moved below him.

Then she suddenly exhaled and heaved her tummy upward. It catapulted him into the air. He twisted in mid air and landed on his feet and jumped up and down. She gave him further boosts of heaving support, whenever he ran out of momentum, and watched as he jumped up and down. When he was tired, he lay down and caught his breath.

“I really like your tummypoline,” he said.

“Do you have any other sports to tell me about?” she asked, “I’d like to know as much as I can about you and your land, while you’re still out here where I can talk to you.”

“Well we did play chasings and hide and seek a lot in the lunch hours.”

“How do you play them?”

“We could play both at once,” he said and jumped off her tummy to land on the lawn,      “Find me and catch me.”

He darted into the bushes beside her and ran for all he was worth. She sat up and came crawling through the bushes in search of him. It was then that he realised that, if he hadn’t been so thrilled at her birthday dinner announcement, and assuming that she would have still gone ahead with it anyway, this then would be the test of whether he could have escaped her. Not that he wanted to.

He kept looking back, to keep an eye on her movements, and stayed out of sight as best he could, until she finally closed in on him and snatched him up.

“You won the game!” he said, “It’s more fun playing with a giantess, except that I don’t know how I’d ever catch you.”

“Well I don’t think I’d be able to hide from you,” she said, “The smaller one has all the concealment advantages. I did enjoy the game though. Thank you for teaching me.”

“Shall we play again? You can just give me a headstart, or close your eyes and count to twenty.”

She went for the second option, and they played a few more rounds, each of which ended with her finding and catching him in the end.

When the three weeks of being completely together in her giant homes were over, and her birthday rolled around, she took him to the room beside her bedroom, and placed him on a mantlepiece.

“I thought we’d have a little fashion parade this afternoon, and you can choose the outfit that you’d like me to wear while I’m eating you,” she said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes with the first one.”

One by one, she tried on each of several elegant outfits, walking back into the room to show him. After he’d seen eighteen of them, she asked which was his favourite.

“Well they’re all very attractive, but I guess I’ll choose the eighth one,” he said.

She took him downstairs and put him on the dining table.

“I’ll be back wearing number eight shortly. See you soon.”

Even having seen the dress on her before did not prepare him for the thrilling vision of elegance and beauty which was Moynie as she entered the room for the purpose of eating him all up for her dinner that night. He watched her slowly walk into the room, pull the chair back a little, and sit down in front of him.

“You look incredible!” he said.

She smiled down at him.

“It’s been quite a period of anticipation for both of us, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, as she licked her lips in the most exciting way.

“How are you feeling then?” she asked.

“More thrilled than ever, each time I see your tongue do what you just did with it,” he said.

“I feel a thrill every time I look down at your sweet little face,” she said, “Soon I’ll have all of you in my tummy.”

“And even sooner than that, I’ll have the perfect licks with no punch in the way.”

“I took steps to make sure of that,” she said, and poured herself a glass of water from the jug, “Here’s to the next chapter of our relationship.”

“And here’s to the biggest and most beautiful sparkling tongue I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing and touching.”

She drank it down, and then leaned forward.

“No punch this time. See,” she said.

She put out her tongue.

“What a magnificent sight!” he said.

She brought her hand close, as she sat upright again, and he watched her fingers enclose him and lift him up. She held him in front of her mouth and put out her tongue again and gave him the first lick.

“Did you like that?”

“More than anything,” he said.

She licked him again and again, and then withdrew her tongue at last.

“The rest will happen fairly quickly,” she said, “But don’t worry about ending up in the back compartment. I have total control of my swallowing techniques. I will gulp you into the front part of my tummy, I promise. Are you ready to go down then?”

“Yes, beautiful Moynie.”

“Then have a nice ride, little Denny.”

She opened wide, tilted her head, and he saw her tongue coming out just below him. She lowered him onto it, and then he was drawn into her mouth and into her throat, in fairly quick succession. He felt himself being gulped and swallowed, down, down, further down, until he landed in the soft compartment at the front of her tummy. He recalled the night he had been lying on it, while they had been talking about the specifics of eating him, only half a day or so after she had told him of her birthday dinner plans. Now he was on the other side of her tummy wall, on the inside, and the excitement of it all remained with him. He lay down and made himself comfortable.

All in all, it had been the most successful example of photographic matchmaking he could ever have imagined.

Edith Kelson and Miss Colleen Balfour had both seen eachother, as Edith had been heading past her house, back on the day that Edith had introduced Denny to Moynie.

“Hello Miss Balfour!” said Edith.

“I didn’t know you lived up this way,” said Colleen.

“I live down in the village. I’ve been taking long walks in the high forest. You wouldn’t believe what I found up there,” said Edith, seeing an opportunity to seek some assistance from Miss Balfour, without letting on that she had already made an unauthorized use of Miss Balfour’s reducing machine.

“Tell me,” said Miss Balfour.

“Deep in the high forest, there’s some kind of portal into a giant garden. I made friends with a giant lady who owns lots of houses, including the one attached to the giant garden where the portal comes out. She’s actually given me that house as my very own. I can come and go there whenever I like.”

“Except that it would be too big for you to live in and use,” said Miss Balfour.

“That’s been the only problem. So I keep living at home in the village and take walks up there to see it.”

“I think I could have a solution to your conundrum, and I would like to see this giant realm. It might interest me some day,” said Miss Balfour, “Could you take me there tomorrow morning?”

“Sure,” said Edith, “Shall I come over at around nine am?”

“I’ll expect you,” said Miss Balfour.

The next day Edith took Colleen to the giant garden and they both went into the giant house and looked around.

“How soon would you move in here, if you could become a giantess?” asked Miss Balfour.

“Well I’d just have to let my boyfriend know where to find me,” said Edith.

“If you give me his address, or the address of his school, I could tell him for you,” said Colleen.

“I guess I could move in right now,” said Edith, “If I could become a giant, I’d have to leave earth behind sooner or later.”

This was what she’d hoped for. Miss Balfour was going to offer to enlarge her, without ever knowing that Edith had once helped herself to the machine the day she’d told Connor that she was going to reduce him and eat him.

“Well I can make that happen this very minute, if you’re sure,” said Colleen.

She was sure alright. She’d been planning this, since she’d first seen Colleen hanging out her washing. She’d have probably thought of it anyway, but having to explain her own presence on the hill outside Colleen’s property was a perfect lead-in.

“I know I’m sure,” said Edith.

“We could collect some things from your home. I have a way to make them small enough to carry here all at once, and then make them large enough to be suitable for this house.”

“Moynie gave me everything that comes with this house anyway. It’s more than enough,” said Edith.

“Well stand back and prepare to be a growing girl,” said Colleen, and took the reducing machine out of her bag.

She adjusted the setting and pointed it at Edith, until Edith grew to the size of a giantess.

“This is… Thank you, Miss Balfour. What prompted you to design such an amazing thing?”

Colleen told her everything about the shrunken meals she’d had, and the leprechaun hunts.

“Can I keep my giant size if I tell you something about me that you might not like?” asked Edith.

“We’re friends and allies forever now. You can keep your size and keep my secret, and I’ll keep yours.”

Edith told him about the Connor and the day she’d snuck into the science classroom.

“I guess we both liked eating reduced boys,” Edith concluded, “That’s why I asked for your help. I was going to just come to you at school and ask for a science teacher’s ideas about how I could be in this house, but I was always hoping that you’d use the reverse setting on me.”

“I was an adventurous teenager once too,” said Colleen, “It’s fine, and I hope you enjoyed Connor. Could you take me on a walk around this area?”

Edith did so, and showed her the neighbouring block of land, which was not that far from the portal, even to a normal sized person. It was unowned and empty, like many examples of the abundance of unused land in the giant realm.

Later, Edith dictated her boyfriend’s name and address to Colleen, who took a notepad and pen from her handbag. She wrote it down, and assured Edith that she would explain the situation to her boyfriend and to show him the forest entrance to the portal.

Colleen returned home and made a point of keeping watch on Edith’s boyfriend Eddie’s house. When he was sure to be there alone, she went and introduced herself, told Eddie the whole story, and arranged a date to show him the way to the portal.

Eddie stepped through by himself, as Colleen wanted to return home, and went to Edith’s giant front door. He saw that she had tied a long piece of string to the handle which would ring the old fashioned outdoor bell. The string reached down to the doorstep.

She had written on the step in chalk: “Pull the string whenever you like, Eddie.”

Eddie gave it a good tug now, and heard the bell sound loudly above him. Edith came out to greet him and took him inside.

“So what do you think?” she asked.

“It’s sure going to be different having a giant girlfriend,” said Eddie, “Unless your teacher wants to give me the same treatment you’ve had.”

“I’ve asked her not to,” said Edith, “After all, there doesn’t seem to be any point in being a giant, unless you’re giant sized compared to somebody else. But you are certainly welcome to be the someone else.”

“Eddie and Edie, It always sounded good, and now it makes us boyfriend and girlfriend of two worlds or realms or lands or whatever this place really is,” said Eddie, “I guess it’s a new angle on our relationship.”

“Well if you’re willing to just go with it, then we can stay together,” said Edith.

“Of course. It’s done now, anyway. You’re a giantess.”

“Miss Balfour could reduce me, but she knows I want to stay this way.”

“I think I’’m already beginning to like you being that way,” said Eddie.

Stanley had been living with the leprechauns, ever since they had rescued him from Colleen’s attempt to eat him. He finally came to a decision.

“Even if I can’t be with Colleen, because of the dangers of her reducing machine, I still need to be back at my full size, living among my own people,” he told them, “Couldn’t we sneak into her house and use her machine to restore my size while she’s asleep? A few of you turned invisible could search the whole house undetected, before she awakens, and even put the alarms out of action first if she’s reset them.”

“We’d be happy to try for you, but the first time she saw you in the village, you’d be in danger of being reduced all over again.”

“Not if I took the machine after we’d used it on me,” said Stanley.

So it came to pass, that a small group of leprechauns and Stanley snuck into Colleen’s house in the night. There was no point in trying while she was out in the daytime, as she’d have taken the machine with her everywhere she went. Nor could they try in the daytime while she was home and awake to catch at least Stanley at it. It took most of the night before one of the leprechauns located the machine, but they used its reverse setting successfully on Stanley, and then snuck off back to their kingdom.

Stanley let himself out and took the machine with him. When he reached the village, he felt that there was something in the pocket of his coat. It was a piece of gold, with a note from one of the leprechauns.

Dear Stanley,

This stuff is of no use to us, although we have plenty of it down in our cabins. Take it as our gift for being such a good citizen.

The Stanley of this timeline didn’t know that his previous timeline’s self had been willing to lead the leprechauns into capture and consumption by Colleen, in order to win her greater affections. The leprechaun who had given him the gift of gold had not been informed of this by the leprechauns who had used the Ring of Reversal to turn back time by two years.

But notwithstanding all those factors, Stanley was still deeply touched. After all, what had he ever done for them? They had rescued him. Now all that remained was to destroy the machine, but not immediately.
Stanley took it home and put the small piece of gold on the floor of his shed. The machine was still set for enlargement. Stanley turned it on the gold, until he had enough gold to almost entirely fill the room. He would learn how to cut bits off, even how to melt it down, and how to find the right markets for it later. It was not stolen, but he would have had quite a time explaining how he came about it.

Then Stanley went outside with the machine, put it on firm ground, stepped on it several times, until it was destroyed beyond all hope of repair. Then to make sure that nobody could ever reverse engineer it, he took a walk through the village, dropping parts of the shattered machine into one garbage bin after another, until each part had been well and truly separated from the others.

It felt so good to be back to normal size, that he decided to go on a holiday around the world. He cut some of the gold loose, was able to sell it discretely, and booked his passage on the first cruise boat that he could organise.

He was away for the best part of a year, seeing the world with all of the best things that his gold revenue could buy to be enjoyed on the way.

He didn’t know how he felt about Colleen. His infatuation was stronger than ever, but he knew, that if she had succeeded, she would have swallowed him whole without the slightest regret. He had been reduced in size against his will and forced into a life of underground seclusion for months, thinking it would always be that way. He had never stopped pining over his massive crush on her, and yet been acutely aware the whole time that he was on the run from her.

When the cruise was over, he had seen the best that the whole world had to offer, but he still felt empty inside. He decided that there was only one thing to do. He had to see her.

Stanley returned to his home, and walked out of the village, through the low forest, up the hills, through the meadow, up the hills further and came to Colleen’s property.

He was too late. Her house was gone, and the land overgrown with long grass.  His only hope now was to go and see her at the school. She had told him where she taught. He went in on Monday, arrived shortly before lunch break, and asked if he could be directed to her classroom and wait outside for her, so that he could talk to her during her lunch break, explaining that he was an old boyfriend who wanted to catch up.

He was told that she hadn’t worked at the school for some time.

No wonder she had moved away, he thought. He had just travelled the world, and she could be living anywhere in it. All of the gold in his shed wouldn’t have paid for an effective way to find her. He realised just how much of her happiness in the meadow and surrounding area had depended on having her machine, the machine that he had destroyed beyond repair.

He knew he wanted to be with her, knew that she had wanted to swallow him whole, knew that he could never hope to find her, and yet still he couldn’t help thinking about her. He realised why that was the case. When someone found out that a crush wasn’t reciprocated, he’d purge the woman from his life quickly and get on with looking to the future.

Colleen HAD reciprocated his feelings. The only problem was that she had done it with another hidden agenda that definitely didn’t work in his favour. That didn’t alter the fact that she was as infatuated with him as he was with her. She’d always been interested in eating leprechauns and reduced humans, but as well as that she still had the same passion for him that he had for her, and he’d never be able to share that passion with her again, not even now that it was finally safe to do so.

He walked out of the staff room and wandered across the school grounds. Noticing a bush track, and keen to stay anywhere that reminded him of Colleen, he walked along the track and came to the very place where he didn’t know that Colleen had eaten Henry.

He heard the sounds of the students making their usual playground noise during the lunch hour and it was all hollow and meaningless in his ears. When school resumed after lunch, he left the grounds unnoticed and went home.

In the months ahead, the bush track became his nostalgia place, the last place he’d been to that had any association with Colleen, being a part of her former vocational school’s grounds. Every Saturday, when the school was deserted, he would go through the grounds and along the bush track, and think about whatever was going on in his life: the selling of the gold, the things he would spend some of it on, and whatever else kept his mind active. He began to explore the pathways which ran from the rock through the valley beyond, and managed to go a slightly different way almost every Saturday, until the day he went further than ever before. While he was walking, the valley’s trees suddenly disappeared. He was in a completely different form of countryside. All of the foliage seemed to be gigantic.

Was he having a relapse from the process of having been shrunken and enlarged all those months ago? He stepped backwards, and found that the valley woods had reappeared. Then he stepped forward and found that the gigantic garden had reappeared.

It must be a portal to a giant land, he thought. He imagined that he would be as small to the inhabitants of this world as he had been to the inhabitants of earth during his time as a reduced man. He decided to explore the giant garden and make it an extension of what the valley behind the school had been as his nostalgia place. He made his way through a huge flowerbed, marvelling at the beauty of petals which were so large. He’d never had time to appreciate the flowers in the meadow, when he’d had to spend all his time hiding underground.

Darkness seemed to descend overhead, and he looked up to see if the giant sky was likely to deliver a lot of rain onto his head. However, the shadow was not caused by clouds, but by a giant long skirt. He looked upwards further, until his eyes fell upon the face of a giant lady staring down at him. It was Colleen.

They looked at eachother in silence for several moments.

“I guess you know I had to destroy your machine,” he said.

“I assumed as much. I still had the designs. I built another one and had my friend Frances Woodfield use it on me, before I gave it to her,” said Colleen.

“I did try to find you again. I’ve been to your house, but it was gone. The school told me you’d left your job there. In the end, I never thought I’d see you again, and now…”

She stooped down and picked him up and carried him away.

There was a stern look of conquest in her eyes, although they were not looking down at him, until she eventually turned her hand around and said, “Have a look.”

He looked in surprise.

“You’ve had a gigantic replica of your house made!”

“Not a replica,” she said, “And I didn’t demolish the old one. You found a vacant lot, on my old property, because I shrank the entire house to the size I’d once shrunken you, contents and all, and then carried it through the portal here with Frances Woodfield. Then I used the reverse setting and kept it on long enough to enlarge the house not just to its full size, but this giant size. Moving house was never simpler.”

“It’s an original approach,” said Stanley.

“My manuscript was still in the house when it was enlarged too. I think that tonight would be a good time to enact some final chapters,” she said.

“Could we enact some kissing scenes in the afternoon then?” he asked.

“I think that could be arranged,” said Colleen, “Have you had lunch yet?”

“No.”

“Neither have I, but don’t worry. You can’t be my lunch, if you’re going to be my dinner.”

She fed them both more than adequately and then took him into her bedroom and sat up in bed and kissed him several times.

“Oh I’ve missed you,” he said, “It feels so good to see you again, even…”

“I know,” said Colleen gently, and lay down and snuggled him to her cheek, “What have you been up to, since you got your size back?”

He told her about his use of her machine to enlarge a tiny piece of gold he’d acquired, about his world trip and the emptiness that it all seemed to amount to without her in his life.

“How about you?” he asked.

She told him about Edith’s discovery of the other portal, and the arrangements that Edith had made with Moynie, Denny, Eddie and Colleen herself.

“I still don’t understand how you got off my table,” she said, “I’m guessing that you must have hidden in the house until you had a chance to get at my machine unsupervised, and then restored your size and took the machine.”

He didn’t want her to know that the leprechauns had been involved both times and that he’d spent most of the time away from the house in their underground kingdom. He didn’t know if Colleen’s friend Miss Woodfield might then go after the leprechauns, or what else might happen. They had done so much for him, and he owed them the favour of keeping their existence and location a secret.

“I’ll have to keep you guessing on that one,” he said.

“It won’t matter after tonight anyway. I’m touched that you kept me in your thoughts and tried so hard to find me.”

“I didn’t know if you’d want to see me after I took your machine.”

“I would have, and I do. I’m every bit as in love with you as you’ve been in love with me. It’s just that I love you in more ways than you’d like me to.”

“There’s something about this afternoon that’s still so much better than the emptiness of all those months alone.”

“Well despite all the abundance of giant food in this land, my stomach has felt an emptiness without you too. It’ll soon be time to do something about it.”

She took him down to the kitchen and placed him on the kitchen bench, and squatted down on the floor and began rummaging around amongst the crockery on the shelves.

“There’s a baking dish in here somewhere,” she said, “Although you might have to wait to be cooked. I don’t want to use a metal one, as it would heat up too much and too fast and burn you before you could be gently warmed up. I’m trying to find the porcelain one, but I’ll have to rearrange a lot of this in the process, I think.”

Stanley had noticed that the window was open behind the bench, when she’d first brought him into the kitchen, but he hadn’t seen any benefit in that with her standing right there towering over him. Now she was almost on the floor and as out of sight to him as he must therefore be to her. He saw a rack of serviettes, and took one, held onto its four corners and stood at the edge of the window ledge. He jumped, and let the serviette slow his fall, just as a parachute would have done. He reached the garden bed and started running.

The portal was a long way off, and he still had an hour of daylight. He was almost to the flowerbed, when he heard her calling through the window.

“You really do put me to an awful lot of trouble, Stanley. Here I come.”

He reached the flowerbed, and looked back, just as she opened the back door. He backed into it, watching her cross the lawn in much less time than it had taken him, while he kept edging backwards, using what cover he could and looking for the invisible portal. He looked up at her towering form, beautiful but to be escaped if at all possible. He didn’t know how he could ever hope to come back and be with her again, if he did get away, but the important thing to do now was make it safely back to earth.

“You won’t escape me again this time, Stanley. I’ll find you and catch you and eat you all up!”

He came to a thick dense group of bushes, and darted in, turning his back and running. With any luck, it would come out in a position where he could double around and sneak back to the portal. He ran with all his strength, and then the bushes thinned out, and he came to another garden bed, although here  the plants were a little taller, impossible to see over. He ran and ran and then stopped to catch his breath.

Suddenly Colleen came bursting through the plants in front of him, crawling on hands and knees. She had broken off the chase behind him, doubled around quietly and crawled through to ambush him.

“What would you have done anyway, gone back to that emptiness you spent the afternoon telling me about?”

“I didn’t fully know. I had to escape, before I could think that through. You know it doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

“And you know that this doesn’t mean that I don’t love you, but you can’t escape. I found the right baking dish, before I looked up and saw you out here. I’m going to take you back to the kitchen, cook you in my oven and gobble you all up.”

She looked stern, yet obviously pleased to have recaptured him. He looked into her lovely beautiful eyes and was reminded anew about what he’d been missing for so long. He gazed at her beautiful mouth, as she spoke the words that reassured him of the inevitability of his fate, and he knew that he would never have missed out on the afternoon that they had just shared together, not even to have escaped what was to come.

“Maybe you’re right about the emptiness. At least that will be gone now.”

Colleen took him back to the kitchen and took a pavlova down from the bench.

“It’s a good thing I kept making them. This was your favourite eating scene when you first read my manuscript,” she said, and gently placed him into it. She put him into the oven and turned it on low, and walked out of the room.

She soon returned wearing a clean dress after their chase through the garden, and sat down on a chair and looked in through the oven window.  Soon she opened the oven, took the pavlova out and placed it on the bench. She stood towering in front of him, while she placed strawberries on the pavlova, and then added whipped cream. He looked up, as she licked her finger and then carried the pavlova to the dining room table. It looked exactly as it had done at normal size when he’d been tiny sized, except that the manuscript pages were not stuck to candlesticks in front of him this time. She sat at the table and gave him a clear view of her, and picked up the spoon.

“You’ll be the last mouthful to go in,” she said, “I’ll eat all the rest of this dish first, so you  can watch the rest going in.”

The movements of her tongue, the dainty way her hand gripped the spoon, the gulping of her neck, and the look in her eyes were all awesome sights.

Finally she passed the spoon under him, drew it up to her face, and then put out her tongue and licked him until he was almost clean.

Then she took him in finger and thumb and cleaned his face completely.

She took him in her clean finger and thumb, and held him there, while he watched her licking her other finger and thumb clean. Then she drank a glass of water and opened her mouth wide.

“Does it look clean and ready for you?” she asked.

“It seems to be,” said Stanley.

She stuck out her tongue at him, then withdrew it and smiled.

“This is it this time. Here we go,” she said.

“Goodbye, my darling,” said Stanley.

Colleen licked him several times, while he savoured the view, making the most of an impossible situation.

Then she slid him over her lower lip and onto her tongue. He lay there for a very long time. He wondered if she were thinking over everything he had said about how much she had meant to him, and about her own declaration that she loved him just as much.

Then she raised the front of her tongue, slid him into her throat and gulped relentlessly. Even as he reached her tummy, he was still madly in love with her.

Two more years went by, and Denny had enjoyed all his days in the front compartment of Moynie’s stomach. He had absorbed all he needed through some form of osmosis that came from the dividing wall between the two compartments of her stomach. It seemed to process part of what she had digested in the rear compartment, and use it to sustain Denny in the front compartment.

One day he felt what he could only describe as a tummy quake. Her stomach heaved and shook around him, and then he felt himself forced upwards, until he was in her throat. Then she coughed and coughed, until he reached her mouth. Finally she opened her mouth, and slid him out along her tongue and into her hand.

“Denny!” she said, “How have you been?”
“Very good, thank you.”

“I brought you back out again. I’d like to go on some more dates with you. I can gulp you down again later.”

For their first new date, she took him to see Edith. Another time, she took him to a lake, and put him into her mouth while she gulped in air and swam across to the other side. Then she took him for a walk on the other side, and eventually reversed the process to get them home again.

One night at home, she invited him to sit or lie on her chin and massage hre lips with his hands. He found this very enjoyable.

“Before you go back down to my tummy, I was wondering if you’d like to take me on a date in your land,” said Moynie.

“Sure, but you wouldn’t fit through the portal.”

“Edith introduced me to Colleen Balfour, who’s now living nearby at my size. She could ask her friend Miss Frances Woodfield to reduce me to your size for a day, as she now owns the machine,” said Moynie.

“I’d have to be careful not to be seen though. I would have been missing from school for the three years I was in your tummy. We’d have to stay out of the village, but there’s lots of nice places to explore in the countryside. It might be worth bringing some food through the portal with us though.”

So he took her on a long date and showed her what he could of his world. As he held her hand and walked through the countryside, he thought of the surprise he’d first had when he had learnt that she was going to have him for ther birthday dinner, and the second surprise when he’d learnt about the front compartment of her tummy. He had spent three years in there and was now back in his own country.

When they reached the meadow, she put her arms around him and kissed him.

“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to do that with you,” she said.

“Your giant kisses were so lovely. I remembered them every day in your tummy.”

“When I told you I was going to eat you back then, I had already made up my mind. You reacted so lovingly, but I would have done it regardless. The reason I really came here today was to give you the choice. I’ve loved you all the time you were in my tummy and all of the two times you were out of it. I’d like you to go back in there, but you don’t have to now. You could stay here, where I couldn’t reach you.”

He walked with her in silence, holding hands while he thought.

“If you couldn’t reach me, I couldn’t reach you either,” he said, “Darling, I want to go back to the giant land and back to your tummy… until the next time you want to cough me up for another date anyway.”

He kissed her and felt her arms embracing him tightly.

“Thank you!” she said.

A few weeks later he was back in her tummy.

When Timothy was in fourth year high school, he went for a walk through the valley behind his school on a Saturday, until he accidentally passed throug the portal. He seemed to be in a giant garden. There were lots of ladies’ clothes on the washing line. So he assumed that a woman lived there. He walked over to the gigantic front door a long way from where he’d first emerged. The door had a bell cord which reached right down to the ground. Timothy pulled the cord, and was surprised by the lady who opened the door. It was Miss Balfour. He hadn’t seen her in over three years. She was now a giant. She stood there towering in front of him. Timothy looked up past her long dress to her high face.

“Timothy!” she said, “I haven’t seen you for a while.”

“Miss Balfour! How did you become a giant?”

“Oh don’t worry about that. Why don’t you come in for lunch?”

“Thank you. I’d like that after my long walk and climb,” he said, and watched her giant hand reach down to pick him up.

Once they were in her kitchen, she put him onto the table and said "I don't have any small plates. I think I shall just put you onto a plate of my food and let you help yourself. We will eat with our fingers."

She prepared a large plate of ham, salad and bread, and gently positioned Timothy in amongst the salad. He moved around the plate, helping himself to relatively negligible amounts of the giant's food, while looking up at the beautiful lady consuming mouthfuls of food that were larger than he was.

High above him, Miss Balfour's long neck gulped down the food.

He thought of how Miss Balfour was a giant now and had no real need for him as a school student.

She finished the meal and wiped her hands and mouth on a serviette the size of a parachute.

"Did you like it, little Timothy?"

"Yes thank you. I did get rather messy in it, but I think I would probably drown in your bathtub. I had better bathe in a saucer."

"Don't worry" she said, lifting him towards her face, "I'll have you sparkling clean in no time."

She drank a glass of water from the table and then put out her tongue and licked his face and hands until they were fully clean.

"There you are" she said, putting him down on the table "I shall let you rest on my dolls house, while I take a nap on her bed. The dolls house is on the bedside table. I shall take you in to the dolls house now."

"Miss Balfour, could you please put me down on the floor and let me walk in myself? I haven't really had any exercise, with giant hands giving me such nice rides everywhere."

"No I suppose you haven't....there you are," she said lowering him gently to the floor and releasing her fingers. She rose to her full height again, looking down at him.

"Shall I lead the way?"

"Could we just stand here like this for a while?"

"Sure, if you like."

"Thank you. This makes me respect what a big tall giant lady you are. So how do you feel to have somebody so small staring up at you?"

"I'm proud and pleased to have you as my visitor, little boy. You're one friend that I never expected to see again."

"My whole house wouldn't even come up to your knee now. I like being your guest, but I'm sure you'd never be able to be mine. I would have no room to welcome you, even if we could ever get back to earth."

"That does not matter. I would not try to squeeze into your tiny house, but you do not take up too much space here."

"Good. I am ready to follow you now.”

“Alright. I shall try to walk slowly" she said, "Otherwise you will not even be able to run the distance in the time that I shall take to walk it."

She led him into her dolls house room, picked him up and lowered him into the open roofed dolls house with an upstairs bedroom waiting for him. The window looked out onto the bed beside the table on which the dolls house stood. His own tiny bed was beside the window. He got onto it and looked out as she climbed into the giant bed. It would be nice to sleep so comfortably in this giant place knowing that an old friend had become a giantess and could look after him.

"I hope you sleep well, little Timothy."

"Thank you giant Miss Balfour. I hope that I can be useful to you sometime."

"Oh you will," she said smiling adorably, "I have decided to have you for dinner tonight."

"Dinner! But why?" he exclaimed.

"Because you are a delicious little boy. Sleep nicely, little Timothy," she said casually.

"But I'll be terrified!"

"I know that, and it does not make any difference to me how terrified you are. I know that from your perspective, you have everything to lose by this development; which for me will have all the relaxing atmosphere of a calm evening meal. The reality is, that while you’ll be counting down the time until it happens (nervously coming to terms with an approaching fate you’d rather avoid), I shall be enjoying myself and eagerly looking forward to bringing that fate about for you. If you’ve understood that, there’s no point in trying to talk me into another course of action, is there?”

"But I shall still be in your stomach trapped forever."
"There's nothing you can do about that, and you can say nothing to discourage me from having you for dinner."

“As pleasant as you’re able to make it, I guess I don’t want to meet with such a final outcome,” he said.

“I was quite sure you wouldn’t,” she said, maintaining her alluring sweet manner for him, “That’s why I have to leave you trapped in this room. I’ll look after you, without letting you sneak away.”

"But I have my whole life in front of me."

"You have your whole life inside of me. I’m going to do it soon."

"I think you're a wonderful teacher, and I'd like to be friends with you, but I really don't want to be eaten."

"Well you’re certainly going to be!" she said confidently.

"It's not fair."

"That's your perspective, because you're the one who'll be eaten. Think how happy I will be. It certainly won't seem unfair to me."

"But Miss Balfour, I thought that we were friends."

"I'd love to eat a little friend.  I am big enough now that I can easily swallow you whole. We had better get some rest now," she said, settling her face on her pillow.

"But Miss Balfour, I don't want to be eaten."

"Well you will be, Timothy. You cannot escape, and I see no reason to let you go. If you like, you may continue to think of me as your teacher, but I am going to think of you as a piece of luscious food and have you for dinner without sympathy or mercy. The gobbling of you shall not frighten me in the least, and there is nothing you can possibly say or offer me that would persuade me to change my mind and spare you. It would be quite natural for a big giantess like me to eat a tiny little boy like you for my lunch. So there!"

She poked out her tongue, teasing him.

"I hope that you were watching my tongue, Timothy, because you will be placed upon it at dinner time. Now I shall open my mouth wide in front of your little window. Have a look inside it, since you will be inside it yourself when I do the gobbling."

She opened her mouth and he stared past her huge lower lip in at her big sparkling tongue and the distant throat that awaited him. It was like a terrifying tunnel down to her stomach of no return.

"So what do you think about that, little Timothy? Would it help you to prepare yourself for tomorrow, if you climbed into my mouth for a few minutes now? I shall keep my teeth apart. You will not get hurt."

"I shall try" he said.

She opened her mouth. He sat on the window ledge, climbed over her lip, and lay down on her tongue, with his face and arms resting on her lip, looking out at her dress as she sat back in her bed. After a few minutes he called out to her.

"Can I come out now, please Miss Balfour?"

She brought her mouth back to the dolls house window, and he climbed back to his bed.

"I don't mind going into your mouth Miss Balfour. I could do it every day without being scared, if you like the taste of me. I just worry about going into your stomach."

"Are you saying that I don't have a nice stomach?" she asked with an air of being offended by his remark.

"No, but I don't want to live in it."

"Well you had better change your mind, because you are going to be in it for a very long time. It will not matter to me what you think of it. I will continue enjoying my happy long life long after I have swallowed you down."

"But don't you think it is unfair to keep me there all of my life, just so that you can enjoy one meal?"

"You will just have to face up to it. I am not going to allow you any way out of this. It will not be frightening for me, when I am eating you. I am looking forward to it. You will have to be brave. Now if you wake up before I do, have a look at me while I am asleep, so that you can prepare yourself to be kept inside me."

"Why should you have so much fun eating me, while I go through such terror?"

"For one thing, I am big enough to eat you, and for another, you know that my stomach will be soft and comfortable."

"And impossible to get out of."

"Timothy, I gave you lunch, washed you with my tongue and let you sleep here this afternoon. Don't I deserve a special reward?"

"I am very grateful, and I would do anything for you except being your dinner."

"You will have to let me eat you for my dinner, little Timothy. I will not accept any other reward for all the kindness that I have shown you. I am not going to listen to any more of your objections. Go to sleep and think of yourself as a piece of food for me to enjoy eating. You will understand the situation much better, if you do that, little Timothy."

For the next few minutes she noticed a real state of melancholy in him. She could see the complete absence of hope in his demeanour now. She felt an extra comfort inside, knowing that he had reached this complete and total focus on the inviolate future he was facing.

She soon fell asleep.

So did Timothy.

He awoke in the latter half of the afternoon to see that Miss Balfour was still asleep, but he was in desperate need of a way to escape from her.

He went downstairs and out of the dolls house. He found a small nail file on the table beside a wall. He lifted it, jumped to Miss Balfour's pillow and crept over to a part of her hair that was not held in place and weighted down by her sleeping head. He filed off a few strands, which were as dense as rope to him, snuck over to the bedpost, tied Miss Balfour's hair strands to the post and slid down them to the floor, only to feel her hand clasping him from behind. She had awoken and reached down for him.

He was soon surrounded by her giant fingers and unable to see out of her closed hand.

When he had been released by her fingers, he instantly fell into some sticky substance, and heard a door close. He struggled to the surface and looked around. He seemed to be in a dark room. However, there was light behind him. He turned around, and was shocked to find himself in a piece of pavlova warming up in an oven which must have been turned down low so as not to burn him.

He looked through the glass at a giant unoccupied kitchen, and recognised it as Miss Balfour's. Soon she came back into the room, opened the oven door and leaned down to look in at him. She smiled at him, closed the oven door and began setting the table, and soon came and sat on a chair in front of the oven door, beaming in at him, licking her lips with glee.

Miss Balfour had won.

She looked big beyond compare, and she was now going to eat him for her dinner. She opened the door, dipped her finger in the pavlova and licked it.

"I think you are ready to be gobbled now."

She took out the pavlova, with him still inside it, placed it at the table, and sat down towering over him.

"Do you want to say anything before I start, Timothy? I will not be able to talk to you with my mouth full, especially when it is full of you."

"No Miss Balfour. I know it won't help at all to beg for mercy."

"Good. Then without further ado, little Timothy, I shall proceed to eat you."

She ate the pavlova around him, using her fingers.

Then she picked him up and licked off the close bits of pavlova from him.

She held him in front of her face and laughed at him.

Then she opened her mouth, placed him inside it and closed it, rolling him around on her tongue.

"I know what I should have said. I will try to get out and ask her" he thought "If I can just-"

She drew him suddenly into her throat.

He struggled to keep from falling down further as she started gulping with tremendous pressure in an attempt to fully swallow him.

Suddenly she coughed him back up into her mouth and out onto her hand.

"Little Timothy, you are being naughty again. You must stay still in my throat, so that I can gulp you down. If you struggle again, I shall have to swallow you head first. I do not think that you could struggle then. However you will be rather frightened. You will taste just as nice to me, whether you go down head first or not."

"I will be good Miss Balfour, but can I please say one thing after all? I thought of it while I was in your mouth. I would like to ask for it, before you gobble me down."
"What is it?" she asked with a surprised interest.

"Can I please have a kiss from you?"
"I am sure that I can manage that, but if you are trying to trick my mouth somehow, let me assure you that it will not work. Why do you want a kiss  from me?"

"Because I love you so much Miss Balfour.”

"You should have told me this before, Timothy. You would still make a very tasty meal for me, but I simply cannot eat up a chance for true love and happiness.”

"Do you mean that you will let me be your boyfriend instead of your lunch?"

AT THIS POINT THE WORD COUNT HAS BEEN REPEATEDLY CHECKED AT MORE THAN 500 WORDS AND YET GIANTESSWORLD KEEPS RETURNING THE “FAILED TO MEET THE MINIMUM WORD COUNT OF 500” MESSAGE. SO I WILL USE THIS PARAGRAPH TO BOOST THE WORD COUNT AND SEE IF THAT BYPASSES THE MALFUNCTIONING ONLINE SOFTWARE.

"Yes little Timothy," she said smiling at him "You are very lucky. If you hadn't been coughed up and confessed your love for me, I would have gobbled you down by now, and you would be inside my tummy. Why didn't you tell me before?"
"I didn't know if you'd still like me or not. I thought you might laugh at me now that you're bigger than me."

"I certainly laughed at your attempt to escape."

"I know. I was going to take my time about telling you. When you said you were going to eat me, I thought we'd never be together happily."

"That was very nearly the case. I guess we'll have to remain different sizes, but you had better have that kiss you requested now. It will be the first of many."

Miss Balfour kissed him with her enormous lips.

"Thank you giant Miss Balfour. That was lovely."

"Would you like to kiss the outside of my neck, now that you are not going to be on the inside of it anymore?"
She held him in front of her neck.

He hugged it affectionately and kissed it.

*          *          *          *

After many weeks together, she found him amusing himself one day in the garden.

"Oh there you are Timothy. I have been looking and calling for you for hours. It's half past five. I have to go and get ready. I have some big surprises for you tonight."

She picked him up.

Miss Balfour took a plastic cup and half filled it with whipped cream from a spray can. Then she sprinkled it with chocolate shavings and small lollies. She picked Timothy up and gently lowered him into it and then spoke down to him:

"Timothy, I have a few things to do. I am going to take you somewhere for the first surprise. I mixed this up to give you something to enjoy while you're waiting. I'm going to put the lid on; so that you won't see me again until we are at the place of your first surprise."
"I'll look forward to it Miss Balfour, and thank you for this."

She put the plastic lid on the cup. Now he felt about for chocolate and lollies in the dark cup until over an hour later, when he felt the cup move.

Miss Balfour was taking him out.

Later still he saw the lid being removed from the top of the cup.

Miss Balfour dipped her fingers in the cream and licked them, doing this several times until all the cream was gone. Then she put her lips to the top of the cup and spoke.

"Timothy, I will pour you into my mouth and use my tongue to clean all that cream off you now. When I open my mouth, you may climb out onto my hand and see your first surprise by facing me."

Timothy was swished around on her tongue for about a minute. Then her mouth opened, and he saw that her hand was held open with the palm ready to receive him, and the fingers at right angles, pointing upward, so that he could not yet see where they were.

He climbed onto her hand and looked at the first surprise.

"Do you like my new dress?" she said.

"It's lovely Miss Balfour."

It was an old fashioned dress that left most of her shoulders bare.

"Your second surprise is to see where we are."

She unfolded her fingers, and he saw that she sat in the box seat high above the rest of the audience at a theatre.

"We're going to see a play."
"This is the best view of all" he said.

"It must be extra high for you."
"Yes. Can I sit on your shoulder and lean against the side of your neck?"

"I'm sure you'll be comfortable like that" she said and put him on her shoulder.

They saw the first half of the play and then there was an intermission.

Miss Balfour lowered Timothy onto the edge of the box and looked down at him.

"I'm going to tell you about your next surprise" she said "I feel that I have already had enough romance to last me the rest of my life."

"Don't think like that Miss Balfour. You may be older than me, but we've still got decades to go."

"Yes but the excitement of falling in love with you is over now, and I need to come up with something as enjoyable for me."

"What do you have in mind?"

"Well Timothy, I was thinking of that day after we first met. I can't help thinking that I might have been denied something, because you saved yourself from being eaten."

"And our romance has been much more fun."
"Yes it has up until now. However, I have thought this through, and I have made up my mind. If I keep on letting you talk me out of gulping you down and keeping you there, I will continue to feel as though I am missing out on that. The only solution is to gobble you down once and for all and leave you inside my stomach. You have managed to avoid it so far, but you are not going to delay it anymore. You are destined to be gobbled up, and this time nothing is going to dissuade me from doing the gobbling. You may think of tonight's treat here as a reward for the nice meal that you will finally make. Tonight, after the play has finished, I am going to take you home and eat you for my supper."
"Is there any chance that I could try talking you out of it?" he stammered.

"When you next wake up you will be in my stomach, a captive forever. Hush now, the play is going to start up again."

She sat back up and watched the curtain open.

Timothy stared off the edge of the box and wondered if he could chance a jump to the lap of a lady far below in the audience. No. It would hurt him badly.

"You can't escape" said Miss Balfour.

She had lowered her face to just behind him. She picked him up and sat upright.

"You know you are better than an after dinner mint, Timothy. So you can watch the rest of the play like this."

She put him into her mouth and lay him on her tongue with his neck resting on her lower lip.

Keeping her mouth open, she watched the play, leaving him to do the same.

When it was over, she removed him from her mouth.

"Timothy, you will have no chance to call from concealment for help between here and my kitchen. I shall carry you out of here gently in my hand, which will completely hide you. If you try to struggle or make a sound, I shall tighten my grip and muffle your voice. I hope that you can be cooperative enough to save me the trouble."

"I won't do anything Miss Balfour. I have never truly escaped you in the past. You've just chosen to spare me before, but that did not change the fact that you always won in the end. I will accept the fact that you have won now."

"That is very sensible. Of course you could be pretending to be cooperative in the hope of tricking your way out of this, but you will not succeed if that is what you are up to."

She kissed him.

"I promise that I am not planning any tricks Miss Balfour, because I cannot think of any."

"Good boy darling. I still love you just as much, you know. I am just long overdue to gobble you all up. How are you feeling?"

"Very frightened."
"I can understand that" she laughed "and I do not expect you to be brave, just delicious. This will be the greatest gobbling in the history of eating!"
"You planned it all well. I would never have guessed that this was my last surprise."

"Thank you and I am ready to go home."

Her fingers enclosed him and he did not see anything until they were in Miss Balfour's garden.

She opened her hand.

"We're nearly home."

She took him to her kitchen, put him on a plate and took it to the dining room. She sat down, but not at the table.

"Do you have any final messages for me?"
"I know you would not listen to any pleadings for mercy."

The plate was in her lap.

"I'd listen to them and then gobble you whole."

"No! Please!" he said and ran off the plate. She seized him and burst out laughing,

Colleen’s tongue came out of her mouth slowly in front of him. She was deliberately doing it in slow motion, to draw out the suspense of the taste test. He was able to look at a protrusion which was longer and wider than his entire body. It had two sides, but no apparent separation in the middle, just a slight dip where the two sides met. The moist fleshy sparkling appearance of her tongue was the most beautiful thrilling sight he had ever laid eyes on. In mere seconds he would actually feel the touch of it.

She moved him closer and slid her tongue over him. It felt every bit as nice as he’d hoped and more so, particularly as its soft moist taste buds ran over his facial cheeks. 

With those strangely stimulating ramifications still in his mind, he watched her tongue come out and lick him again and again. Being played with like a morsel of food by her beautiful mouth, without her having a care in the world was an experience that trivialised anything that had happened in his own personal past.

She put him between her finger and thumb, tilted her head back, put out her tongue.

She eased him gently into her mouth and found that her tongue could still perceive his dichotomy of reactions as they were manifesting physically in the movements of his tiny body. This pleased her immensely.

She drew him into her throat and considered his thoughts at that point.

“He’s at the top of my neck now. As soon as I start gulping, I can imagine every last wishful thought vanishing from his mind at once,” she thought, and did the gulp.

Little by little he lost more ground and sank lower into her gulping throat, and eventually reached her stomach.

She licked her lips with satisfaction and said aloud

"Delicious and gobbled up at last."

She went into her bedroom, changed to her nightdress, got into bed and lay awake thinking that she was still happily a giantess, and looking forward to enjoying the rest of her life, with her captive finally accepting that he would not escape her stomach. She was his destiny.

One Saturday afternoon Harold went for a walk into the high forest, and passed through the portal into Edith’s garden. Then he saw Edith walking through her garden, now a giantess, and the sight amazed him. He’d always admired her at school, but had heard that she had a boyfriend.

She drew closer and looked around, apparently choosing a good place to sit down and read the book that she was carrying.

He ran towards her, calling “Edith, I’m here!”
“Hello!” she said, and sat down beside him, “It’s good to see you again.”

“There’s a lot more of you to see,” said Harold.

“Would you like to climb into my mouth, so that I’ll have something to taste, while I read my book?” she asked.

“Oh wow!” he thought, “I’ll be sitting on that beautiful tongue of hers!”

He nodded his head, and she picked him up gently. She put him into her mouth and closed it.

He was now sitting on Edith’s tongue. He lay down on his stomach, and rested his head on the back of her tongue. It was the most arousing thing he’d ever felt in his life. Even though she had a boyfriend, it was worth doing what she wanted to have this experience. She was the fulfilment of all his dreams at this size, and she seemed to be reading his mind and doing all of the things, which aroused him.

After ten minutes, Edith opened her mouth wide and yawned. It let in the light, and he could see the lovely tongue all around and beneath him. Then he sat up and turned around and lay down facing the front of her mouth, to look out at her lower lip and the garden beyond.

Soon Edith closed her mouth again. He lay on her tongue, grateful to her for allowing him to gain such a lengthy pleasure. For over an hour he lay comfortably on her tongue, even drifting off to sleep with pleasant dreams of the experience for 14 minutes. 

Outside, Edith had read several chapters of her book, and was enjoying the feel of Harold on her tongue. He lay there and rested his arms in front of his head, and enjoyed the feel.

Suddenly Edith arched her tongue upwards a bit, which caused him to slide into her throat. He got into a horizontal position to stop himself from falling down any further. He estimated he was halfway down her neck.

“Quickly lie down, so gravity will help me to climb back out of here,” he called, wishing she hadn’t made such a careless reflex action with her tongue, while he was still in her mouth.

Then he felt her throat moving with incredible pressure. Edith was gulping! He suddenly realised that his fall into her throat had not been an accident. She hadn’t put him into her mouth to please him, but to enjoy the taste of him before she gobbled him down.

Even if he could get back up into her mouth, and out of it, he wondered what chance he stood against a huge relative giantess of a woman. The pressure of her gulping was incredible. His greatly reduced leg muscles were having trouble standing against it.

Edith gulped even more strongly, and he slid further down her throat, and lost his position. Edith gulped him down inside her, and he was gone. He felt movement and guessed that she must be standing up and walking back through the garden to her giant house. It was all over, just like that, not for her, but for him.  

Colleen had told Frances that she could assume ownership of the vacant lot which had been Colleen’s home in the hills. Frances had had a model house built with timber and cement, and then taken it to the vacant lot, used the reverse setting of the reducer to enlarge the model house to the size of a real house. Then she’d simply had electricians install power points connected to the power supply, and asked plumbers to do the same for the water supply. She now had a holiday house in the hills. Today, however, Frances Woodfield was running late for one of her visits to Colleen in the giant world. Since eating Stanley, Colleen had told Frances about the portal which linked Colleen’s garden to the valley woods behind the school, and let her leave by that portal, so that she would emerge in the valley woods and know where the portal was on that side in the future. She would not need to go all the way up to the high forest and then use the portal that only took her as far as Edith’s garden anymore. However, she had been occupied with Dollipop II, and gotten so carried away that she’d delayed herself. She dropped the reducing machine into her backpack, along with a water bottle and a camera, so that she could take some pictures of the giant land, while Colleen took her on a walk and then have a drink before heading back to the village.

She put Dollipop II in her dress pocket, until she’d reached the woods behind the school, and then took him out and set him on her shoulder, while she made her way to the portal and met up with Colleen. They went for a long walk on Colleen’s shoulder, and the size comparison between Dollipop II and Colleen was mind boggling to Dollipop II, who was only tiny sized compared to the normal sized Frances Woodfield.

As they were returning from their walk, they stopped for a rest. Frances reached into the bag for her drink bottle, and then noticed that the reducer seemed to be missing.

“Oh no!” she said, “I was in such a hurry, that I’ve used the backpack with the hole in it, that cost me all my food the time I had to eat Nathaniel the first Dollipop on that camping holiday we took. The machine must have fallen out in the forest. I’ll have to head back as soon as possible and retrace my steps to find it.”

“I thought you were going to take special care, so that you wouldn’t need to eat me in a hunger driven emergency,” said Dollipop II.

“I meant to find time to sew up the hole,” said Frances, “I did tell you to be prepared for the fact that I couldn’t anticipate every eventuality.”

“Well I can give you plenty of food for the trip back, even though you weren’t planning to eat until you got home,” said Colleen, “I’ll quickly sew up your backpack with a giant needle and thread, which should work on a normal sized backpack.”

“Okay, then we’d better be going,” said Frances, “I’ll have to search those woods well.”

But the reducer hadn’t taken that long to fall out through the hole in the bottom of the backpack. It had actually slipped out, while Frances had been crossing the school grounds to get to the first walking track that led eventually to the woods.

Ellie Blish was an 18 year old girl from the school, who often came in on Saturdays to take walks through the grounds. So it was that she found the fallen reducer machine and wondered what it was. After experimenting with the default setting buttons, she saw it reduce a fallen branch to the size of a stick, and then to the size of a twig as she kept pressing the button.

She practiced on some other objects and learned to control the extent of the reduction, by turning it off sooner when needed. Ellie had no idea where the device had come from, but she saw the potential for having a lot of fun with it.

Her own walk to school took her through the public gardens in the village. So on Monday morning, she happened to be on her way, when she saw someone sitting and reading a book. He was wearing a university jacket. She didn’t know that he was from the same university that Colleen Balfour had attended, although not at the same time. So the student and Colleen had never met each other.

The young man had not seen Ellie. So she hid in the bushes, and pointed the reducing machine through an opening she made by parting some leaves with her free hand, and aimed it right at the student. She pressed the button until both he and his book had dwindled to the size of one of the leprechauns.

She withdrew the machine and let the leaves cover her presence completely, while she looked at the shrunken student’s attempts to make sense of his situation. She giggled quietly to herself and then backed out through the other side of the bushes, put the machine into her school bag and headed for school.

The student began walking through the public gardens, and took the whole morning to get to the other end, where he saw a lady sitting and eating her lunch. She looked elegant and attractive, and somewhat older than him, and seemed to be the most likely person for him to approach for help. He walked over and stood in front of her and introduced himself. The lady leaned forward, picked him up and sat him in the palm of her hand.

“There was a light from the bushes, at least I think it was from the bushes,” he continued, “And the next thing I knew I was tiny.”

“Were you on your way to school?” she asked.

“No, I finished last year. I was studying a book before heading to university for the day.”

“I like walking through that university. My Bridge club rents one of the classrooms every Monday night, to play our card games. What course were you studying?”

“Journalism,” he said, while she finished the last of her lunch and wiped her lips with a disposable napkin, “I guess I’d have quite a story if I told my own memoirs after this. I don’t know how to play Bridge.”

“It’s a very complicated game to learn. It can take months to really master it, but the rewards are a far more interesting game to play. It remains interesting, week after week, and no two games ever play the same way,” she said

He wondered if he could join the club and play the game with her, if and when he worked out what had happened to him and how to undo it.

“It sounds like it would be a lot of fun, if I could get the hang of it.”

“Well I must be on my way in a few minutes. It’s been nice to meet you,” she said, and put him into her opening mouth and closed it.

He was lying on her tongue after the brief views he’d had of it. He began to guess at the ramifications, and remembered one of her first questions, that hadn’t sounded as though it had been ideally worded, in terms of semantics.

She had asked him, “What course WERE you studying?”

He’d have expected the wording to be “What course ARE you studying.”

Her question had assumed that his days as a university student were over. At the time, he’d assumed that she was simply referring to his reduced size making university participation prohibitive. In fact she had already decided to eat him.

He remembered the sight of her sitting in the gardens eating her lunch when he’d arrived. He could picture her still there now, apparently at ease with what she was doing to him. She knew that he was not some sort of legendary leprechaun, but someone from her own people, who’d had the misfortune to lose most of his size, and was not influenced by this knowledge at all. He was trapped in her mouth, wondering how much time he had left (which would not have been more than the ‘few minutes’ she had mentioned just before popping him inside, and knowing that there was nothing he could do to get out or to appeal to her to look at it from his perspective.

He felt her soft moist tongue below him, and recalled the one second glimpse he’d had of her gaping maw, in that moment when she’d surprised him with what for her had been a simple gesture of her hand and mouth combined.

All of a sudden, she moved her mouth dramatically and swallowed him so rapidly, that he reached her stomach almost as quickly as he’d reached her mouth.

He felt her stomach begin to bounce a little, and guessed that she must have gotten up and started walking out of the gardens.

As she reached the street, Brenda Leesil felt as though she had overeaten a little, but that the taste of the last mouthful had made it well and truly worthwhile.

Dollipop II had been profoundly affected by the carefree attitude that Miss Woodfield was taking with his well-being. He thought back to when they were returning from their visit to Colleen’s house, and remembered the exchange of words which had passed between them:

“I’d feel a lot happier about our relationship, if I knew you wanted to take a lot more care to make sure that you won’t need to eat me one day,” he said, as a way of directly raising the subject.

“I can’t be worrying about that all the time,” said Frances, “I was able to replace Nathaniel with you, and lots of boys have crushes on me. If I need to, I can easily replace you with someone else, although I’ll have to ask Colleen to make me another machine, or perhaps instruct me on how to make one, while she supervises with a giant magnifying glass, since her hands will be too big to do the task herself.”

From that moment on, he had decided that he needed to escape her. He’d never thought of a way to do it before. However, that was probably because his heart simply wasn’t in it. She had left for school, and he was up in her bedroom, sitting on her bedside table next to the window, looking at the birthday card that she had given him. She had opened it for him, as it was full sized, on the day that she had presented it to him.

Dollipop II folded it into the shape of a hang-glider and used her nail file to poke two hand holds into it. He dragged it to the window ledge, and then pressed the electronic window switch to the open position. The window began to open. He waited until it had fully opened. Then he knew he had to time things well, if he wanted to gain the maximum advantage from his desperate gambit.

He pressed the button to the close position. The window began to close, and would not stop moving until it was shut.

He quickly launched himself out of the window, while he still had enough space for the hang-glider to make it through, and flew from Colleen’s upstairs window, over her garden, and up into the air further, as a sudden wind gust carried him higher. He did his best to take advantage of it, knowing that he would be much further from Miss Woodfield’s house than he’d expected, before he started to drop.

He flew and glided on the wind current until he came to the public gardens, which seemed like the best place to land, as he was finally losing a lot of height. He made a gradual descent into garden, and stepped out to gain his bearings.

A lady walked into view and picked him up and swallowed him without a word. It had all happened in a few seconds. First he’d been on the path. Then he’d been sliding and sliding down her throat, and he was now in her stomach.

Brenda Leesil couldn’t help wondering what had been causing all these reductions in young men’s sizes.