Murray Jensen was 26, when he commenced working as a legal clerk for a solicitor in the Irish village, who had been one of the first professionals to open for business in the village after the problems of dimension shifting into various time zones of the giant land had been solved two years earlier. Murray himself lived in the neighbouring village, and would ride his pushbike along the paths to work each day.

The solicitor, Norman Tesoriero, had been employing a secretary named Kayla, who had proved to be unreliable in her work attendance. When challenged to improve her performance, Kayla had agreed at the time. However, the following morning, she had telephoned Norman and resigned without even giving two weeks notice, and then left for parts unknown. It was only after Norman had instructed Murray to prepare a lease using the template file, that a further problem was discovered. It seemed that Kayla was rather vindictive, and as a parting shot at Norman, she had moved the lease template file into an encrypted folder.

“Here’s where you get your money’s worth,” said Murray, “I’ve been an I.T. graduate for two and a half years now, but couldn’t find work in my own village or this one.”

“Well the villages would have been economically disadvantaged by all the supernatural upheaval in the area,” said Norman.

“I think I can decrypt your lease file for you, if you give me a few hours on it,” said Murray.

“I’d be very grateful,” said Norman, “I paid Kayla a lot of work hours wages to type that lease template up. It’s the largest template for any bit of legal work we do. Then she just gives notice and nicks off. Without it, there’s a whole group of some of my best clients I can’t help.”

Murray applied a series of decryption techniques, until he finally managed to open the encrypted folder. The first thing on his mind at that point was to create a new accessible folder on the hard drive of the computer, and immediately move all the files from the encrypted folder to the accessible one. He named the folder ‘Leases’ and then used the ‘select all’ option to move all the files into it.

Norman was elated, and said, “If we weren’t behind schedule in doing the lease that led to the discovery of this problem, I’d give you the afternoon off. But you can expect a good bonus in your first paycheck this week.”

Murray put Norman’s dictophone tape back into the player, slipped the headphones over his ears, and used the foot pedal to play the tape. Following Norman’s dictated instructions, he filled in the lease details, using a duplicate file he’d made from the template and named it after the leasing client. When the job was finished, he worked on a few probate and conveyancing letters and documents (which Norman had been dictating, while he’d been recovering and making use of the lease). They were far less complicated.

This saw him through most of the afternoon, leaving him half an hour to sort out the other files that he’d moved from the recovered folder.

He didn’t say anything to Norman about them, but they were copies of Kayla’s personal files, that she had left on the office computer. She had presumably wanted to make use of them in the workplace for her own ends, while Norman wasn’t aware that she hadn’t always been working on the job tasks he’d given her. So she would still have her own copies of the files at home. She must have moved the lease into the encrypted folder at the end of the day she’d been challenged about her performance, perhaps as an attempt to get control over Norman and force him to ease up on her work requirements. Then having resigned over the phone, in a subsequent decision the next morning, and never having come back into the office, she would have had no chance to remove her personal files, and had counted on the encrypted folder to protect them from discovery.

The only thing Kayla hadn’t factored into her cryptic legacy was Murray.

Having looked at Kayla’s personal files, he saw one entitled ‘Time Class lecture notes’.

He opened the file and saw that the contents page included a list of chapters on various methods of time travel.

Murray’s work day was running out of time. So he quickly copied all of Kayla’s personal files onto a disc, and then deleted them from Norman Tesoriero’s clerk’s office computer. When he got home, he copied them onto his own laptop, and spent the entire evening reading through her journal. Years ago she had been one of the students of an elite time travel education class, run by a former teacher in the village named Sandra Corlani. Most of the students had been male, but Kayla had been the one female with a strong interest in the subject. It crossed Murray’s mind that males tended to exponentially outnumber females in the market for certain aspects of science fiction. Apparently time travel was one of them, with Kayla’s female colleagues being more interested in romance.

For the moment, Murray found that her journal (being something of a digital diary) interested him more than studying the actual time travel techniques. He read on and learned that all of the male students had mysteriously disappeared. Kayla had concluded that there must have been some fatal flaws in the time travel techniques, and had resolved never to make use of them. What she couldn’t have known was that all of the male students had been fascinated with the idea of travelling into the past, and had used their time travel methods to do so. This had taken them through the area of the time stream affected by the interaction between the Leprechaun’s use of the Ring of Reversal and the residual reduction radiation created by the many uses of Colleen Balfour’s shrinking devices during the period of time that the Leprechauns had chosen to reverse.

So all of the male students had been eaten by beautiful women at various points in the past.

However, in reading Kayla’s journal, Murray only knew that the other students had all disappeared without a word of explanation. He was not aware of their final fates.

The next morning Murray rode his bike from his own village to the more infamous one and passed a newsagent on the way. The headline on the stand out the front said, “local found dead in meadow”. To Murray’s surprise, the photograph of the victim clearly identified her as Kayla, whose personal files had included a number of photographs of herself. It occurred to him that she would have taken her knowledge of time travel to the grave, if Murray hadn’t decrypted the folder containing the office computer copies of her personal files. His first conclusion was that Kayla had changed her mind, and decided to use one of her time travel techniques for some reason, and that it had caused her death. Perhaps she had travelled a few days or weeks into the past, and died upon reaching the past. After that, she would have existed for a few days or weeks in two aspects, both going about her life alive up until the point that she decided to time travel, and lying dead in the meadow after having time travelled.

Murray saw no point in sharing his speculations with anyone. Kayla was dead, and no revelation of the time travel techniques would bring her back, unless somebody were to risk their own life to go back in time to save her, which could well just cause the subsequent time traveller to die for the same reasons .... if time travel was even the definite cause of her death. As things stood, Murray was sitting on multiple methods of the greatest scientific breakthrough of the century, and yet they were apparently too unsafe to attempt. He decided to study the entire Time Class Lecture Notes file and see if he could work out what might have caused the unexplained disappearances of the male students, and possibly the death of Kayla. Night after night, he read the entire file through at home after work, until he had memorized the contents well enough to have scored 100% in any exam that Sandra might have given her students on the course content.

He decided that time travel was not worth risking until he had learned the answer, and put it out of his thoughts. From then on, he would come home from a day of legal clerical work, and spend his evenings reading books, or watching movies on videos. During the course of his working experiences, he began to make a number of observations about Norman Tesoriero’s interactions with his clients. One morning, Murray was called into Norman’s office to witness the signing of an elderly lady’s will. He knew he was not imagining the fact that Norman’s verbal and body language towards the woman was conveying a strong sense of Norman seeing her as a silly old lady.

It was unlikely that this poorly treated lady would recommend to her friends that they have their wills prepared by Norman Tesoriero. Another client kept phoning the office while Norman was on his way to and from court appearances and property settlements, unable to get through to Norman himself. Murray found himself taking messages from an increasingly angry client, who eventually said, ‘Maybe I should rethink who I’m dealing with’.

It seemed that Norman was extremely reluctant to invest in a mobile phone.

Another client was in conflict with his own sisters about an inheritance, and was keen to take them to court. Norman felt that this was not a wise course of action. Murray did not have the legal knowledge to know whether Norman or the client had the best perspective on the situation. All he knew was that Norman insulted the client both in telephone conversations with the client and in the file notes that he dictated for Murray to type up. A fourth incident came to light when the newly opened village branch of the bank offered to refer their loan clients to Norman, to have him explain their complex mortgage clauses in layman’s language.

“I’ll take as many of those clients as I can get,” said Norman to the bank manager.

And so the first bank loan client was booked for an appointment with Norman.

Sitting at his own desk, trying to concentrate on the dictophone instructions for his own work, Murray could distinctly hear every word of what Norman practically shouted to the client, even with Norman’s office door closed. He spent more time berating the client’s limited intelligence, than he spent on effectively explaining the mortgage clause. One particular outburst included, “You need someone to explain this to you in simple words that even you can understand.”

Murray found himself thinking, “That’s the job you’re supposed to be doing yourself right here and now.”

He overheard the client’s parting words as the office door was opened, “I’ve dealt with lots of people in life over the years. Some are smarter than others, but most of them have been polite and helpful.”

The bank didn’t send Norman any more of those clients. However, Murray began to see why the bank manager had once seen fit to try to boost Norman’s business. Over the next few months, every time Murray went to the bank to cash his paycheck, there was a delay, while the teller sought the manager’s approval to draw the cash from Norman’s business account in order to pay Murray.

Murray deduced that Norman, as a sole practitioner, was having trouble wearing too many hats. He had to be business manager, solicitor, and have the good personal relations skills to keep the clients coming back for more business with him. Norman’s legal knowledge as a solicitor was flawless, but the other two requirements were beyond him to the point that he wasn’t even aware of that.

Murray knew that his time in that job was running out.

One day the office was visited by the bank manager and his assistant, for a closed meeting in Norman’s office. Murray had been running out of work, with Norman having few clients for whom to dictate instructions for Murray to type. He was spending more and more of his time going through the old files and deciding what could be shredded, and what had to be kept.

After the bank staff had departed, Norman called Murray into his office and said, “I regret to advise you that I have to put you off. As you can see, the phones aren’t ringing much, and the bank wants me to cut my costs in order to clear my debt with them. My wife has agreed to learn your job from you over the next two weeks. So she’ll be sitting with you tomorrow morning onwards, so that I can eliminate my clerical wages costs.”

“Will you be able to get enough business to keep going on that basis?” asked Murray.

“Well that will be the rub,” said Norman, “But you’ll have full severance pay. The bank won’t even run the usual check with the manager before you cash it. You’ve been here exactly six months, and I’ll give you a good reference.”

Weeks after he’d finished there, Murray wondered if he should have gone through all his observations of Norman’s unique P.R. approach with his clients, in order to throw some light on why the phones hadn’t been ringing with new business. It would have been too late to save Murray’s own job, and Norman might have told Murray that it was no business of his to comment on his former employer’s work practices. He decided to let sleeping dogs lie.

While looking for new jobs, he found himself with more time to spare and bought videos to watch during the longer periods of down time. There were two that particularly caught his eye in the shop. One was called “A Mountains Family Reunion”. The other was “A Mountains Family Easter Special.”

Murray remembered that, when he’d been aged five to fourteen, he’d seen the long running television series “Mountains Family” listed in the local television guide that came in the newspapers. It was filmed in the mountains which were located further on from his own village, in the opposite direction to the infamous village where he had recently been employed as a legal clerk. Murray had never watched “Mountains Family” as a child, because he’d been mainly interested in super hero cartoons. However, as an adult, he thought that a family drama series filmed and set not far from his own home would be very appealing. 

“A Mountains Family Easter Special” had aired when he’d been five years old, at some point in the first season of the regular show. “A Mountains Family Reunion”, according to the label on the back of the video case, had only been filmed the year before Murray had started working for Norman Tesoriero.  If Murray hadn’t seen the video release nearly two years later, he wouldn’t have known that a reunion movie had even been made.

Murray watched the Easter Special first, and saw that one of the teenage girls in the family had been played by a beautiful then fifteen year old girl whose name on the credits was Trudi Northumberland. She played the role with a sense of mischief and typical teenage teasing, sticking her tongue out at her character’s boyfriend in one scene. Murray could see that she was very pretty, but by watching the program only a few months away from turning 27 himself, he didn’t feel romantically inclined towards the teenage footage of Trudi.

Hoping that she was in the recent Reunion movie, he decided to binge watch that one straight after the Easter Special ended. Trudi Northumberland’s character didn’t have many scenes in the movie, which seemed to focus mainly on other characters. However, from what he could see of her, she looked stunningly beautiful as a 35 year old woman appearing in a movie made when Murray had been 25.

Keen to know more, he looked her up on the internet and found a brief biography. She had married in her late teens, divorced two years later, presumably a result of having married at an age too young to choose the right person to be a lifelong partner. This had been in the middle of the “Mountains Family” original decade long run. She had played the last four seasons as a young married woman in her character, but as a divorcee in real life. After the show had ended, she had moved from Ireland to America in an attempt to further her career with the larger television and movie market for relatively young stars. She had only revisited Ireland to feature in the Reunion movie, before returning to America once it was completed.

The rest of the series had not been released on video. So he had seen all he could of Trudi Northumberland.

Murray decided to get more exercise, now that he wasn’t riding his pushbike between villages to get to and from work each day. He had exhausted the appeal of the area immediately surrounding his own village. So he began taking walks in the forest above the meadow, and the forest behind Norman’s village. One day he was on one of those walks, when he caught up to a woman who seemed to have started out ahead of him on one of the walking tracks. She was five foot five, and being four inches taller than Murray, she would have had shorter legs. So it was natural that he would have caught up to her and run into her at one point.

He decided to overtake her and push on ahead, so that he could continue thinking up new strategies to find another job, without being distracted by the sound of someone else’s footsteps and the awareness that she was not far behind him. He had always made a point of using this approach when on the footpaths in the village, as his mind was not good at focussing on two things at once.

Now, for the first time, he had to use the same tactic in the bush.

As he was about to pass the woman, he saw something that changed his mind. She was Trudi Northumberland, large as life, 37 years old, and for some reason back over from America.

“Sorry, I was just going to get ahead of you and be on my way, but it’s not every day one meets the star of ‘Mountains Family’ only one village away from its old location. I’m Murray.”

“Pleased to meet a fan,” said Trudi, “Although I wasn’t really the star sometimes, just played a regular supporting character. Were you watching the show for a long time?”

“Well this is a bit embarrassing, after what I just said, but I was mainly into cartoons as a kid. I’m 27 now. But I found the Easter Special and the Reunion movie on video a few weeks ago, and saw you in both,” said Murray.

“Yes, they were recently released. I’m spending my royalties on a holiday back here in the home country. The regular show’s been off the air for thirteen years, but people around here might have seen the videos. I didn’t want to be too conspicuous in the village where I grew up, which is near the old filming location. So I’ve been enjoying the bushwalks near yours instead,” said Trudi.

“Actually I’ve always lived in your old village too. A few months back, I was retrenched from work. So each week, when I’ve exhausted all avenues for job applications, I’m either watching videos or running into my favourite stars on bushwalks,” said Murray.

Trudi smiled in appreciation.

“They didn’t use my character much in the reunion movie.”

“That’s what disappointed me,” said Murray, “I watched them both in one afternoon, and was hoping for more of you in the recent one. Talking in person is like making up for lost screen time.”

They continued walking, and talked about scenes and storylines from the Easter Special and the Reunion movie. Murray gave the go ahead for her to give as many spoilers as she liked, so that she could tell him about other story arcs which had occurred in the show’s original run.

After nearly an hour, Trudi suddenly interrupted her own account of a blooper that had occurred in one episode, and asked, “What’s that light up ahead?”

“I’m marginally short sighted. But I don’t want to ruin my looks with glasses. So I can’t see it yet, until we get closer,” said Murray.

“You won’t ruin your looks,” said Trudi, “But let’s have a look.”

Less than a minute later, they came to what long term readers will remember was one of the forest portals that were originally used to access the giant land in the days before Dimension Shift started occurring. Trudi and Murray were unaware of this, but they stepped through to explore whatever lay on the other side. They were walking for a while, before they realised that the plants around them were not just unusual, but actually the natural flowers and bushes in a land populated by giants.

It was not long before Trudi and Murray were both found and captured by a giant widow in her forties and kept in her house as pets to amuse her. They made many attempts to escape, but were always recaptured before they could get far enough away from the widow’s house. After two years, the widow decided to put an end to their runaway escapades, by purchasing a cage and keeping them inside it most of the time, unless she was around in person to keep an eye on them.

One day after a few more months, the widow went out for a long walk, planning to have a picnic lunch by herself. Towards the end of the day, the widow came home and took Trudi and Murray out of the cage.

“Let me tell you about my day,” said the widow, “In the morning, I caught another little woman your size, and put her in my knapsack to bring her home and keep us all company. I took her out and sat her down on the grass while I prepared to eat my picnic sandwich. I raised the sandwich to my mouth, about to bite into it, when she turned and ran away. I caught her soon enough, but dropped my sandwich onto the grass where I’d been walking just before lunch time, while I was chasing her. Since she’d made my lunch too dirty to eat without risking making myself sick, I told her that it was only fair that she should relieve my hunger in person. Unlike my sandwich, which was made of bread and whatever vegetables and meat had spilled out of it, I was able to wash the young woman in the nearby lake. So I swallowed her whole, and made my way home.”

“Oh my goodness!” said Trudi, “The poor woman.”

“Well she not only saved me from hunger pains that she would have caused in the first place by running off. She also made me aware of something about you two. It’s quite a revelation to learn only today, that the two little captives I’ve entertained in my home for the last two years...”

“Entertained is one way to put it,” interrupted Trudi in a caustic tone of voice.

“...that the two little captives I’ve entertained in my home for the last two years,” said the widow, raising her voice just a little, in order to regain control of the conversation, “would both make an unquestionably scrumptious evening meal for me as well.”

“Do you mean you’re going to eat us too?” asked Trudi.

“You get the general idea,” said the widow.

“But you’re not even hungry now. There’s plenty of clean food in your house.”

“And every night I choose whatever I feel like the most from the refridgerator or the pantry for dinner. Tonight, what I feel most like eating is the two of you, after I put you in the oven to warm you both up a little. Don’t worry. I’ll have you out again long before you could burn to a crisp.”

The widow placed them both on a baking dish, and slid it into the oven. They looked out at her walking around the kitchen licking her lips in anticipation of eating them.

“There’s no way out for us,” said Trudi, “In a few minutes she’ll open that oven door and take us out and eat us all up. You’ve been such a good friend to me since we got stranded here. Now I’m 39 and you’re 29, and we’re about to be the evening meal of a fifty year old giantess.”

“There’s no way out for the current us, as things are,” said Murray, “But there may be a way to stop things from turning out as they are.”

“What do you mean?” asked Trudi.

“I don’t have long to explain, but put simply, I found a file full of time travel methods left in an encrypted folder by my old boss’s former employee on the office computer. There was also a journal, in which the owner hypothesized that all of her fellow time travel students had vanished without explanation because of flaws in the time travel methods. So I’ve never taken the risk of attempting any of the techniques I learned from repeatedly studying the file. However, it’s no mere risk that we’ll soon be in that widow’s tummy, if I don’t make the attempt now,” said Murray

“I agree with you about the relative risks concerned, but how can we possibly make a time machine in this oven in the next few minutes?” asked Trudi.

“We can’t. However, there is one method in the file that doesn’t require the use of a machine to time travel. It involves a mental technique which enables me to send my conscious mind back into the body of my y0ounger self at some point in the past. If I can inhabit the body of the younger me, back before we found the portal into this land in the first place, and if I can find your younger self too, then I can talk her out of ever coming to this giant land and getting caught by the widow with me,” said Murray.

“If that really works, just go back to the day we first met in the bush and tell me then,” said Trudi.

Looking through the oven door window, they saw the widow walk out of the kitchen.

“She’s given me a bit more time to run another idea past you,” said Murray, “How soon after filming the last episode of the original run of “Mountains Family” did you move to America?

“About two months, I’d say.”

“And where was your exact home address in our village?”

“You want to find me back then?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said shyly, “I looked you up on the internet, and so I’ve always known that you’d been divorced for a few years by then. It would give me a clear window of opportunity in time, with which to court you and romance you, which we certainly won’t have in the widow’s tummy.”

“My husband used me and left me for another woman,” said Trudi, “I was always off before the crack of dawn to get to the “Mountains Family” location, filming for long days, and home in the middle of the evening. It kept me from being seen in public by any local fans throughout the decade long run of the show. After that, I had to stay at home as much as possible, to avoid being recognised and overwhelmed by local fans during those two months. Then I made the move to Hollywood, until my agent called me for the Reunion movie.”

“Did you have a boyfriend then?” asked Murray.

“Not until I was 33. I met my current companion in America when I was 32. He was working as a movie producer at the time I took my trip to Ireland two years ago and made friends with you. He won’t know what has happened to me,” said Trudi.

“So you were available, and no longer filming ‘Mountains Family’ either from age 24 to 31 at least,” said Murray, “If the time travel works, I’ll be in the body of my 14 to 21 year old self back then. What was your exact address?”

“I’d moved into my own place, doing well from my television career,” said Trudi, and told him the address.

He committed it to memory, and they saw the widow walking back into the room.

She was headed straight towards the oven.

“But if you were only 14, how will you be able to move to America with my 24 year old self?” asked Trudi.

The widow bent down, smiled through the oven door window, licked her lips from side to side and reached for the door handle.

“There’s no time to work that out. I’ve got to go now, if I’m going to save us. I promise I’ll break up with your younger self when we’re 21 and 31. I’ll even tell her about this timeline, so that she never takes the bushwalk that got you stranded here, and also so that she understands why she has to be free to meet the companion she had from age 33 onwards to preserve that aspect of the original timeline,” said Murray.

They watched the oven door opening, and Murray saw the widow’s hand reaching for Trudi.

He closed his eyes to concentrate on the mental time travel method.

“You might as well watch closely, because you’re going down next” said the widow. She sat back on the oven stool and placed Trudi into her mouth.

He opened his eyes and watched her gulping Trudi down, and then tried his best to focus on time travelling, as the widow bent down again and picked him up.

Suddenly the widow was not there anymore. Neither was her kitchen. He found himself in his own childhood schoolyard in his own village. There was just one thing odd about the whole scenario. The schoolyard and the girls sitting talking under a nearby tree all seemed to have become as giant sized as the widow and her giant land.

Murray tried to make sense of it, and remembered the Dimension Shift of the other village. Had his attempts to time travel somehow caused the destination time and place school to Dimension Shift into the giant land and enlarge?

He then realised that this was the least credible explanation, because there had been no such incidents recorded in Kayla’s journal, which covered a period before the start of the other village’s Dimension Shift. If time travelling caused Dimension Shift, then it would have happened back in the days when all of those students had disappeared.

The only other logical explanation was that time travelling seemed to cause a person to reduce dramatically in size.

Murray had reached the correct conclusion, but did not know that it only happened to people who time travelled through the period of time which had been affected by the Ring of Reversal’s interaction with residual radiation from Colleen Balfour’s use of her shrinking devices. As far as Murray knew, he had just discovered the reason for the disappearances of Sandra Corlani’s other Time Class students. Perhaps they had come across the legendary leprechauns of the meadow and become honorary citizens amongst them, being unable to restore their sizes and return to their own times either. Some of the leprechauns had the power to turn invisible, while others were as unable to perform such a feat as Murray himself.

Murray thought about attempting to reverse the process part of the way. If he could send his consciousness forward in time only thirteen years instead of fifteen, then he would not be in the widow’s oven, but be able to go with Trudi’s original suggestion to inhabit his body at the time of their bushwalk towards the portal to giant land and talk her out of it.

He tried to do it, but apparently the journey was a one way trip. There was no way to mentally go forward in time, and hence no way to be back in a full sized body. Murray was now tiny sized for the rest of his life.

He still had one strong hope to hold out for though. He was in love with Trudi Northumberland, knew her address, and had seven available years of her being single, with which to explore the possibility of her allowing herself to be romanced by a shrunken fan.

The most immediate pressing problem was how to get to her house. He was stuck in a schoolyard watching girls talking after school under a tree. He couldn’t do anything without asking somebody for help. He walked over to the girls and explained that he was one of their fellow students, shrunken as a side effect of an experiment he’d been doing for homework for his science class. He asked if one of the girls would be willing to take him home on her own way home from school. The girl agreed to help and asked for his address.

And he gave her the address that Trudi had told him about, while the he and Trudi had been trapped in the giant widow’s oven and planning his preventative escape through time.

The girl concealed Murray under the high neckline of her school shirt until she reached Trudi’s address, (thinking that it was Murray’s) and then placed him just inside the front fence at his request, before heading on her way.

Trudi’s property had the size and grandeur of the Hollywood mansions he’d seen in magazines. There was something to be said for the wages of one of the stars of a long running television show. It took him half an hour just to walk to the front doorstep of her huge house. He could see no way to ring the bell from the ground, and the door left no space at all between the base of it and the floor. He could not slip under it.

Murray walked slowly around to the back of the property, intending to try the back door. Then he saw Trudi come out wearing a beautiful dress and walk across the lawn.

She saw him and sat down on a large log beside a small pond and looked at him with interest.

“You must be one of the leprechauns I’ve heard tell of in these parts,” said Trudi, “I guess I’ve just become a believer.”

Murray decided to simplify the explanation for the moment, lest he overload her with information which might be almost impossible for her to believe.

“Actually I’m a fan of ‘Mountains Family’. I was trying to do a science experiment this afternoon, but I don’t think the teacher had any idea that my attempt would lead to my accidentally shrinking myself,” said Murray.

“Well does your teacher know what’s happened?” asked Trudi.

“No,” said Murray.

“Did she teach you anything that could help to make you full sized again?” asked Trudi.

“I can’t remember anything. I don’t think that there is any way of reversing this condition. It looks like I’ll be this size forever. Luckily, I found my way into your back garden and recognised you from the show,” said Murray, “I was hoping you might take me in.”

“Let’s go inside and see what we can do,” said Trudi.

She picked him up and took him to the back verandah, and stood him on the verandah wall.

“You have a lovely home here,” said Murray.

“I’ve been thinking while we walked over here, and I won’t send you away. I can’t appease all my fans in person, but you’re a special case. My mouth will be glad to take you in, and after that, so will my tummy.”

“Then I’d like to thank your mouth and your tummy for letting me live here in the privacy of your nice house,” he said, not sure what to make of something in the connotations of her last remark.

“That’s not really what I said,” said Trudi, folding her arms and smiling with the same mischievous look in her eyes that her fifteen year old self had used in the Easter Special.

“Well you expressed it in such an unusual way, that it was hard to know exactly what you mean,” said Murray.

“I meant that you’ll soon be living in my tummy for as long as you’ll remain aware of it,” said Trudi, “I’ve given a lot to my viewers on screen, and been well paid. Tonight, I’ll get back something extra from one of them. You’ll be able to participate in a celebrity dining event in a way that nobody else has ever participated before.”

Her face beamed with amusement. The look in her eyes was more arousing than anything he’d seen her do in the Easter Special or the Reunion movie.

He was startled beyond belief. The 37-39 year old Trudi had spent two years with him as his friend and fellow captive in the giant widow’s kitchen, had experienced the threat and eventual fate of being eaten by a giantess herself. Yet this past 24 year old Trudi was willing to eat a known shrunken fan for her own dinner enjoyment and amusement.

He had to remember that 24 year old Trudi had never met him before. She knew nothing of the history he had shared with her in the other timeline, and didn’t even know that he had brought his mind back from 15 years in their future. She wasn’t aware of the giant land or the threat of being caught and eaten by a giantess. To her, she was the only one in the situation who would ever have a major size advantage, and she saw every reason to make use of it. He looked across at her folded arms in front of her chest, tilted his head back a little and looked up at her grand elegant neck, which would soon be gulping him down, and then up to her highly amused facial features.

Then he turned and leaped blindly off the verandah wall.

In the few seconds that he was in free fall, he looked down and saw a lot of high long leaves, the height of reeds, but wider and stronger, below him. He didn’t know the name of  these plants, but had seen them in the school gardens and his own home as well. He grabbed onto the nearest one as he fell.

It bent a little, as it slowed his fall, and he landed on the garden bed and started running.

He soon saw Trudi running around the long way, using the veranda steps, and then darting across the lawn in his direction. She closed in on him and cut off his escape, reached down and snatched him out of the garden, and took him inside.

She sat down on her bed and opened the palm of her other hand in her lap and placed him into it.

“You’re not a very devoted fan, are you? Fancy trying to cheat me out of a nice dinner!” she teased.

“I’m not even as much of a fan as you thought, because I never had the chance,” he said, “My mind is from the future. It time travelled fifteen years into the past and into the body of my 14 year old self. The only flaw in the time travelling process is that it made me shrink too.”

“Why on earth would you do something like that?” asked Trudi.

“To save us both,” said Murray.

“From what, and how exactly by shrinking?” asked Trudi.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen. I didn’t know it would. I saw the Easter Special and ....” he began, and then realised that he couldn’t tell her about the Reunion movie, which she wouldn’t learn of for another decade, “one other episode of the show, that I watched nearly thirteen years into your future. I really liked you in both of them, and then I met you not that long afterwards on a bushwalk. We found a portal and went into a giant land, where we were captured by a giantess. She kept us as pets for over two years, and then caught another woman and ate her for a picnic lunch, after the woman’s escape attempt caused the giantess to drop and dirty her sandwich. After that, she knew she’d like the taste of you and me as well. So she put us in her oven to cook us and eat us. I asked future 39 year old you for your present day address, and then sent my mind back to my 14 year old body, only to find out that the process had reduced me in size. The plan was to tell you not to enter that portal in 13 years time or ever at any time. That way you wouldn’t be trapped in the giant land,” said Murray.

“Why didn’t you just go back to a few minutes before you and future me went through that portal?” asked Trudy.

“That’s what she suggested, but as I told her, I wanted to meet you when you were single again, straight after you stopped being busy with the show,” said Murray.

“So you came to save me from the giantess, and to ask me out as well,” said Trudi.

“More or less,” said Murray, not mentioning what she already knew, that it was also to save himself from being eaten by the giantess.

“I’m sorry I said you weren’t very devoted,” said Trudi, “Nobody could possibly have been more devoted than you have.”

She lifted him up to her mouth and kissed him.

“This is even better than the kisses I imagined and hoped I might be having from you at my normal size,” said Murray.

“I don’t suppose you know anything ... I mean, I don’t suppose that older me told you anything about my love life in the interim between now and then,” said Trudi.

“I can tell you that you were single until you met your next companion at age 32 in the original timeline,” said Murray, “In fact, while we were in the giantess’s oven, I promised you that I would break up with you and explain everything when you turn 31. The way things have worked out, I’ve told you today. So you’ve got seven clear years, and it would be my fondest desire to secretly spend them here with you.”

“I’m going to be moving back to America in less than two months’ time,” said Trudi.

“I know. You told me that as well. I didn’t know how I’d be able to come with you as a fourteen year old kid stuck living here in Ireland. But we were running out of time to think things through, when we saw the giantess approaching the oven to take us out and eat us. I told you I’d have to work out the fine details once I got back into my younger self. Now that it’s done, my shrinking may turn out to be the best possible outcome. Since I can’t let anyone else know of my tiny size anyway, I might as well be a secret part of your luggage when you fly out to the States,” said Murray.

“I suppose you’re too young to have had any metallic surgical implants,” said Trudi.

“All I’ve ever had done is my appendix being taken out,” said Murray.

“That means you won’t set off any detectors at the airport,” said Trudi, “I’ll be sure never to walk through that portal if I still take those bushwalks in 13 years time.”

“You will,” he said, “You told me you came back to visit Ireland, but took walks in the forests around the neighbouring village, so that you’d have a bit more privacy away from any fans who remembered you from the show and whatever shows you do after that.”

He couldn’t tell her about the ‘Mountains Family’ reunion movie, and she would discover the rest of her career for herself in the years to come.

Trudi kissed him again and took him to the kitchen. She prepared a nice meal, and placed small portions for him onto a saucer. Then she took everything to the dining room table, sat down and ate and talked with him. After that, she partly filled the bathroom basin up with water, and let him bathe in it, while she took a shower. She changed into an evening gown, collected him from the bathroom after he’d climbed out of the basin onto its soap rack and dried off with the clean handkerchief she’d folded into a small towel for him.

They started watching a television show together, and then came the first commercial break.

“What did you mean by not being that much of a fan?” she asked.

“Well I’d only watched cartoons as a kid. I discovered the Easter Special and one other episode, the only two to be released on video in fact, when I was almost 27. I watched them both, and had no chance to see the original series in full. Then I met you, and we were stuck in the giant land for two years.”

The advertisements came to an end again, and she turned her head back to the screen while he sat comfortably on her shoulder.

When the program was finished, she carried him up to her bedroom and climbed into bed, placing him gently beside her.

Murray snuggled against Trudi’s soft upper arms, just below her shoulders, and talked happily with her until they fell asleep.

She woke up once in the night to go the bathroom, and when she returned to the bed. He climbed up onto the pillow and snuggled against her neck for half an hour, talking with her again. He remembered how hauntingly beautiful her neck had looked, when he had been staring at it on the verandah and contemplating her earlier plans to swallow him whole.

“It feels nice having you there,” she murmured, “But the only thing is that I’m a bit of a light sleeper. I can’t seem to drop off, with you resting on my neck.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and climbed off her neck and into a position that would enable him to rest against her soft white cheek, “Is that better?”

“It is. Thank you, little cutey.”

They talked again, and eventually dropped off in turn.

In the morning, the rays of sunshine beaming into the room soon awakened them both. He watched her beautiful upper features as she sat up in bed.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked.

“I took a little longer than you to drop off, both times, which is probably why I woke up after you this morning. I wasn’t worried about the temporary insomnia though. It was lovely to be snuggled against your cheek and looking at your beautiful face in the moonlight.”

“What a delightful compliment to wake up to,” said Trudi.

“I’ll try to think of a different one every day for the next nine years,” said Murray.

“Maybe you won’t need to,” said Trudi, “This has been a unique romantic experience for me. I won’t deny that. But I don’t see myself in a relationship with a shrunken fan for all those years. I must have done alright by myself in the original timeline, and so I will again in this one.”

“Oh .... It’s not just that I’m heartbroken all of a sudden. There’s the practical consideration too. I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t take me with you to America.”

“I will take you with me, but I won’t continue being your girlfriend. I think one night of that was enough to satisfy my curiosity about what it would be like,” said Trudi.

“Well you won’t be able to take me onto the set of future TV shows or movies. I guess I’ll have a lot of days of waiting at home for you to come in from a job and look after me,” said Murray.

“You won’t have to worry about that either,” said Trudi, “I changed my dinner plans last night, in order to accommodate what’s turned out to be our one night stand. The simplest way to tie up all these loose ends is to pick up where I left off with tonight’s dinner.”

“Do you mean ... eat me?” he asked, incredulous that the past self of this woman he’d saved from a similar fate in giant land was now willing to enact that fate for him.

“I sure do,” said Trudi, “You may not be an actor, but you’ve had quite a number of roles in such a short period. Time traveller one day, boyfriend that night, and main course the following night. It’s a shame I can’t put you up for an Oscar nomination. Unfortunately, they don’t present them to candidates who have taken up residence as part of another star’s stomach.”

“We shared all that adventure together in the other timeline, and then I came back and saved you. If it weren’t for me, you would have been eaten yourself,” said Murray.

“Well I won’t go through that portal now. So there’s no risk of that happening. You’ve given me the dining opportunity of a lifetime, and I can’t see any reason for me to turn it down. Can you?” she said.

“Only the fact that it’s so unfair to me,” said Murray.

“Well you can’t complain too much. After all, you’ve had a rare night of passionate snuggling and kisses with me, and you had the chance to enjoy it without having to think and worry about being eaten a day later, since I only decided to do that after I woke up this morning. Being gobbled whole doesn’t take very long, and you won’t be facing two years of captivity after that. I can’t believe that giantess did that to you and other me, and I won’t be doing that to you. You can rest assured that you’ll be in my stomach by the end of today,” said Trudi.

“Oh thanks!” said Murray, “I feel so priveleged to be the beneficiary of such kindness and consideration.”

“There’s no point in behaving like that,” said Trudi, matter of factly, “It won’t get you out of this situation. I’ve got the commencement of another romance in eight years time to look forward to and the culinary conclusion of this one to enjoy today. You’ll just have to face your fate and try to spare a moment to stop and think of the enjoyment that it will be giving me.”

“I ... just remembered the way you stuck out your tongue in one of the scenes in that Easter Special,” said Murray, “It wasn’t that close to the camera, but it looked exciting nonetheless.”

“Well there you go. You’ll have a much closer view of it tonight, won’t you? I’ll try to make it as exciting for you as possible.”

“I’m sure you won’t disappoint me in that,” said Murray, and noticed that she was staring at him with a look of admiration.

“I think I know why I fell for you for one night,” said Trudi, “Visually and physically, you look like a shrunken 14 year old boy. But it’s the way you talk. It sounds so mature and romantic. I guess I hadn’t fully taken in all the ramifications of your 29 year old mind and all its memories of my 37-39 year old self being contained within that 14 year old body of yours. You made me feel very special in a way that no amount of fame and screen time could ever have done.”

She lifted him up and kissed him slowly for over a minute, before withdrawing her lower lip.

“So ... is it too much to ask why that special feeling I gave you can’t be maintained for longer?” asked Murray.

She sighed.

“I guess I just came back to earth and remembered how much I’d been looking forward to eating you on the verandah, how relieved I was when I caught you in the garden bed, and how unique a dining opportunity had presented itself,” said Trudi, “I know you’re getting the worst of the whole exchange, but an actress gives long hours of her time for so many other people, for ten years in my case. With that comes a sense of wanting the best of everything in those times when she’s not performing in front of a camera. I guess I’m just reiterating what I said yesterday afternoon, when I was planning to eat you up for last night’s dinner.”

“It was worth hearing it again, expressed a little differently,” said Murray, “And I suppose I can appreciate that eating a shrunken boy is one of the few things that can improve on all the experiences of life that you’ve already had.”

“Thank you for developing that degree of open mindedness,” she said, and kissed him again.

She spent the day with him alone in her home, extending their one night of romance for the remaining hours that he had left before his upcoming fate. Murray savoured every moment of it for what it was worth, often looking at her mouth to picture just exactly how his final destiny would play out.

Dinner time came, and she took him to the kitchen.

“You might be able to help with the preparations, if you can share some more of your knowledge of the future,” said Trudi.

“Sure, I guess,” said Murray.

“How long did the giantess leave you in her oven? I just don’t want to burn you,” said Trudi.

“She had it on the lowest setting, I think. If I remember my conversation in the oven with other timeline future you, she seemed to be in the room for a minute or so, then out of the room for another five minutes or so, and then came back into the kitchen and made an immediate beeline for the oven. I was feeling fairly warmed up by then, but not burnt. I was trying to concentrate on sending my mind back to yesterday, when she picked other you up and stuffed you into her mouth. I saw her gulping you down, knew I’d be next, and got it together and time travelled,” said Murray.

“I don’t think I’d better take the risk of leaving the room, and I don’t have any need to. I’ll tell you what. I’ll put you in the oven and then sit on a chair in front of it. The moment you’re feeling close to being a bit too warm, wave both of your hands, and I’ll open it up and take you to the table and eat you.”

“I think I can manage that,” said Murray.

“That way, we won’t have any cooking accidents,” said Trudi.

She turned the oven on, and then looked in at the oven.

“Is there something else you need to know?” asked Murray.

“I just realised that you won’t be able to stand or sit or lie comfortably on the narrow rungs of the oven shelf. You might even fall through,” said Trudi.

“The giantess put us on a baking dish,” said Murray.

“I know just the thing,” said Trudi, and fetched one from the cupboard.

She put Murray onto it and slid it into the oven.

“It’s quite a comparison for me to think about while I’m waiting in here,” he said, looking out at her, “In less than two days, in my own personal memories, I’ve gone from watching a giantess eating you to the point where I’ll soon be watching you eating me. Her mouth looked okay, but I’d much rather be eaten by yours ... given that I have to be eaten at all,” he said.

“I understand your sentiments, and thank you for the comparative compliment,” said Trudi, “Give me a good wave when you’ve reached the optimum temparature, and we’ll go ahead from there.”

He watched the oven door closing, lay back in the dish and watched Trudi pull a chair over from the kitchen table, sit on it with a contented and slightly amused look in her eyes, and cross her legs. This gesture made a little more of her calves visible below the end of her fairly long skirt, and he recalled the view he’d had of her lower legs when dress had been swaying while she had chased him in the garden behind her back verandah the day before. She was incredibly arousing, even with her current reinstated plans for him.

When the time had come to avoid being overcooked, he began to wave, with the knowledge that averting oven burns would be done at the cost of expediting his journey to her stomach.

She carried him to the table in the dish, sat down and smiled at him.

“I know that you were saving yourself as well as me from that alternate future, when you time travelled. But nonetheless, thank you for all that you’ve done, especially for warning me. You ultimately haven’t saved yourself from being eaten by warning me, just placed yourself in the hands of a more attractive diner, going by what you said in the kitchen. I’ll always be grateful for my new lease on an alternate timeline life, even though I’m not going to pass up this unique dinner date experience by sparing you,” said Trudi.

“Your other future self told me a lot of the story arcs of the full series of the show, while we were walking in the Irish forest. I’ve just realised that I’ll never see any of those episodes now,” said Murray.

Trudi giggled down at him.

“Then I’ll offer you the guest starring role in the Mountains Family Lost Dinnertime Episode,” she said.

“They do say that television EATS UP a lot more story plot material than movies,” said Murray.

Trudi was grinning from ear to ear in the most adorable manner. Below her teeth, the smiling shape of her lower lip was driving him wild with excitement. He could have looked up at that smiling face for the potentially available nine years and for many more years after that, if she’d only been willing to continue their romantic involvement indefinitely.

“I think we’d better get on with this before your joking has me choking,” she said.

She picked him up and licked him twice.

“Was that an improvement on what little you saw of my fifteen year old tongue in the Easter Special?” she asked.

“A visual extravaganza, and an unprecedented tactile sensation for my skin,” said Murray.

“Now it’s time for the final act of the lost episode,” said Trudi.

She opened her mouth again, placed him inside it, and let him come to rest on her tongue.

It was only then that he realised how radically he had altered fifteen years of his own timeline. Having brought his mind back with him, he remembered the original events that he’d lived through, but his body would not walk those paths now.

He suddenly felt her gulping him into her throat. There was nothing more he could do. He felt her gulping him down her throat. He felt her soft comfortable throat all around him, holding him in place, preventing him from climbing back up to her mouth again. Even if he had been able to turn around vertically in her throat and make the attempt, he would have found the portion of her tongue which began in her throat to be far too wet and slippery to give him any traction.

Murray knew that such hypothetical fantasizing was even more of a moot point, in any event. The moment he reached her mouth, she would simply gulp him down into her throat again, and might even find the strength in her relatively larger throat, to gulp harder and faster, taking down quicker than she had just managed to do.

One memory after another flashed through his mind in a matter of seconds. He recalled the day that he had first seen her fifteen year old self sticking out her tongue on the ‘Mountains Family Easter Special’ video. Then he remembered the stunning beauty of her elegance when she had reprised the role on the ‘Mountains Family’ reunion movie video. He thought of the happiness he’d felt at the sudden discovery that the woman he’d been trying to pass on the path was the very same Trudi Northumberland that he’d fallen in love with while watching videos and never imagined he would actually meet in person. His mind skimmed over their adventure in the giant land in the previous timeline. The one thing he’d liked about that was being with her for such a long time, when she would otherwise have been called back to make another film or television show. Then he thought of his mental time travel, and her two decisions to eat him book ending an incredible night of unparalleled romance.

Even if he called out back up her throat and she was able to hear him, there was nothing that would change her mind. She was in charge of the situation, and enjoying the effect of his fate on her immensely. There was no way that he could ever talk her out of making that final gulp. Within seconds, or at the most, within minutes, he would be inside her stomach.

It was then that Murray Jensen thought of the one thing that had never occurred to Sandra Corlani’s Time Class students, but might have been possible for the ones who had time travelled by this mental consciousness method that he had used to reach Trudi Northumberland in the past. He had already tried to mentally reverse the process and return to the time from which he’d come, in the hopes of restoring his size too. That hadn’t worked. However, there was still one thing he might be able to do in order to extricate himself from his current dire predicament. What was to stop him from a course of action that involved, not reversing the journey to the past, but instead repeating it? If he could use the same technique to travel into the past again, further into the past, he could arrive at a point before Trudi had captured him in her back garden, with the knowledge that he should not reveal his presence to her. That would have saved him from being eaten by either the giant widow or 24 year old Trudi.

He was more than halfway down her throat, and he felt her neck muscles flexing and preparing to make the final gulp. He could hear her stomach acids rumbling and gurgling below him in the darkness. He knew that he probably had only seconds to make his move.

He concentrated on travelling further back in time, and closed his eyes.

Suddenly the feeling of being surrounded by her gulping throat went away, but he did feel a familiar and more pleasant sensation. Murray opened his eyes and looked around to see how far back he had come. He realised that the familiar pleasantness was in fact Trudi’s sleeping cheek. He wondered if having been heated up had reduced the range of his time travelling capacity. Then he dismissed that theory, as he recalled how heated up he’d been in the giant widow’s oven just before he successfully travelled back 15 years.

Perhaps it was the reduction in his size that had proportionately reduced his ability to time travel. He tried again, but couldn’t manage another journey into his own past. Here he was, less than 24 hours before the moment when he had been gulped most of the way down Trudi’s throat, lying right beside her on her pillow, with the knowledge that she would announce the renewal of her plan to eat him not long after waking up in the morning.

He remembered exactly what she had told him that morning, which in his memory was many hours earlier, but in real time would be coming up after she had slept for a few more hours.

He was lying against her cheek, not the top of her upper arm. So she had already woken up, gone to the bathroom, talked to him for a while, asked him to move off her neck, talked a little more, and then fallen asleep again. She said that she had decided to eat him after all only after she had woken up in the morning.  

The important thing was that, at this point in the middle of the night, the Trudi who would have spoken to him about her neck and soon after dropped off to sleep had not yet decided to eat him. He moved away from her cheek gently, and checked to see that the withdrawal of his tiny presence from (contact with her lovely face) had not woken her up. There was still one unknown factor. If she had woken up again before morning, would she have decided in the middle of the night, that eating him was her preferred course of action? Or would she have not begun to think about that option until the morning? He knew he could not take the chance on waking her. He had to escape from her, not by time travelling again, but by simply getting out of that house while she was still asleep.

Murray stood up and walked to the edge of the pillow, and then looked at the blanket. It was not tucked in on this side of the bed, he remembered from the way she had pulled the blanket and sheets over herself each time she’d climbed into the bed on this side. The blanket reached most of the way down to the carpet. Murray gripped the felt with his hands and slowly climbed and slid his way down to the carpeted floor. He then ran across the carpet, out the open bedroom door, and made his way through the house and out into the back garden, recalling that there had not been enough room for him to slide under the front door. Fortunately the back door allowed enough space for him to fit under. He ran around to the front garden, and then noticed the first hint of the rising sun in the sky.

He knew that he had woken up in the previous timeline long after sunrise, by the amount of light in the room during her announcement that he was to be her dinner. Then he also remembered that he had taken longer to drop off on both occasions, and had woken up later than her. How much later? It was important to know how long she’d been awake before he’d woken up, because it told him how early she’d woken up. If she woke up now, then instead of lying awake and waiting for him to catch up on sleep as she’d done in the previous timeline, she would notice his absence, probably around the very same time that she realised that she wanted to make a dinner out of him, and come racing out and catch him again.

Exhausted as he was from sleep loss, he kept running until he was out in the street, and then ducked into the next door neighbour’s front garden and hid amongst the plants.

He had barely laid down to catch his breath, when he heard Trudi’s voice. She was humming a tune that her fifteen year old self had hummed in the Easter special.

There was a high fence between the two properties, but soon Murray heard Trudi’s footsteps out on the footpath, and then she came into view. He saw her walking past, looking keenly along the footpath, then turning to face the street with her back to him, and then turning around and facing back towards her own property. Murray made sure that he kept himself well and  truly out of sight, and just peeked past a flower petal to monitor her movments.

“Why would he have run away?” he heard her saying aloud to herself, “Even I didn’t know I was going to eat him after all, until a few minutes ago. I haven’t had a chance to tell him yet, and now it doesn’t look like I’m going to get that chance... unless I already did.”

He knew that she had fully understood the story of how he had used mental time travel to escape from the giant widow. He guessed that she was just now joining the logical dots to work out that he could have been told of his upcoming fate in a second timeline, and then repeated the time travelling method of escape in order to get away from Trudi herself too. She wouldn’t have known that he only made it less than 24 hours into the past. She would have assumed that he’d played it safe and gone back weeks, maybe months or years further into the past, to a point where her even younger self wouldn’t have even known of his existence.

“I’m glad she doesn’t know how close she came to recapturing me,” he whispered to himself, “If I couldn’t get back any further than the middle of the night, I don’t think I’ll be able to time travel ever again, at least not that way.”

“For all I know he made himself five years old again, and resolved to stay out of my way,” she murmured aloud, “He’d be able to live all those years over again, with a fully educated and developed 29 year old mind. I suppose he’ll skip the cartoons and watch the whole run of ‘Mountains Family’ through this time, while hiding in the living room of any full sized local who addictively never missed an episode.”

Trudi wandered back into the house.

While she was presumably having breakfast, Murray walked through four more front yards, until he came to one with a pink car parked in the driveway and a bumper sticker which indicated that the owner was obviously a young woman. He waited until he saw her get in the car, wearing a business coat and dress which implied a day’s office work and drive off to begin it. Then he snuck into her house and used her telephone to call directory assistance. He got the number for Trudi, and managed to press the buttons to call her.

“Hello, Trudi Northumberland speaking,” came her voice.

“And it’s lovely to hear you,” said Murray, in as loud a voice as he could manage.

“I imagine you’ve been time travelling again,” said Trudi.

“And I don’t have to imagine what you’d be telling me now, if I were still in your bed with you,” said Murray.

He didn’t want her to know that he was still relatively close to her, in her own street in fact.

“I thought that’s what had happened,” said Trudi.

“I decided that the best thing to do was go back to a point before you’d met me in your back garden. But after I escaped into the past, I wanted to talk to you. So I got your number from directory assistance and called you,” said Murray.

“And you’re telling me that you’ve been waiting in your younger body for weeks or months, how long exactly to ring me up and chat about it?” asked Trudi.

So far everything he had said had technically been true. He’d merely deliberately omitted to tell her that his longer time travel attempt had been cut short in the middle of the night.

“It’s probably best if I don’t tell you,” said Murray, “I was more than halfway down your throat, when I finally had the desperate thought of time travelling again to escape. That tends to put a different complexion on the concepts of self preservation and secrecy.”

“You needn’t bother trying to trick me, Murray. I still have a memory of everything right up to our last conversation before I dropped off to sleep for the second time after going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. That means you only made it as far back as the early hours of the morning, and had to escape from my bedroom the more manually exhausting way. It’s a shame that I can’t remember what it was like to have you in my throat. We’ll have to do something about that, won’t we?”

“Not likely,” said Murray.

“I do take it from your account of events, and my having straightened out the full detail, that you aren’t able to travel back in time any further. Don’t answer or deny it. The conclusions are obvious. You can only have gone as far as your tiny self could walk or run in the last few hours, which by my reckoning doesn’t even get you out of my street. You’re obviously calling from one of the neighbouring houses, on a property that doesn’t currently have a car in the driveway, because the owner has gone to work and can’t catch you using his or her phone without paying for it. So all I need to do is check a few driveways for absent automobiles, and then perform a brief but necessary break in. I’ve plenty of earnings from ‘Mountains Family’ to reimburse the owner anonymously later, for any windows broken in order to gain entry. I’m coming out now, and once I’ve recaptured you, I don’t expect that you’ll be able to make another last second time travelling departure from my throat. I’ll see you soon enough, Murray.”

Trudi rang off.

She was relentless! She had probably worked all this out and decided to do the aforementioned upcoming housebreaking even before he’d made his phone call.

She would be out in the street in a minute or two, and it would not take long to spot the first temporarily unoccuppied house, as soon as she started walking along the footpath. Once she’d broken in, she had most of the day to turn the place over in search of him. He could  think of only one place that she would be most likely to miss. He turned the phone onto its side on the charger cradle, removed the back cover, and pulled out the batteries. He had climbed a power cord to the table in order to make the telephone call, and remembered that there was a waste paper bin full of screwed up paper and other rubbish beside the table.

Murray rolled the batteries off the table, and watched as they fell into the bin. Just as he’d hoped for, they sank between the balls of paper, weighing more, and having room to move. Neither battery was visible. He then climbed into the battery compartment of the phone, pulled the cover back onto it, and shook himself a little, causing the phone to lose the balance of its precarious position and fall back into place on the charger.

A few minutes later he heard footsteps on the gravel driveway outside. If it was the owner coming back to largely work from home, he would have heard the car pull in. It had to be Trudi.

A minute after that, he heard the living room window smashing, and then the door latch being unlocked. He could not see anything from within the phone battery compartment, but he heard occasional sounds for the next hour or so, as Trudi systematically searched the entire house. Then he felt the phone being picked up and heard her pressing buttons with her thumb.

“It’s dead,” he heard her say, “Either it hasn’t been on the charger for long, or she’s used up the batteries. He can’t have called me from this place. Still I have two more likely options just down the street. First I’d better leave a little cash to cover the breakages, and an anonymous letter on her own stationery. I can’t see any paper. I’ll have to use the back of something from the bin.”

His heart sank, as he heard her pick a piece of paper out of the waste paper bin and unfold it from its scrunched up state. The batteries must have gone right to the bottom of the bin. So the paper ball that she’d retrieved from the top of the bin wouldn’t have disclosed the batteries.

He knew that she had placed the seemingly useless phone back on the cradle, and waited until he heard her walking along the gravel driveway again. Then he pushed and shook and shuffled around, but found that he could not move the phone.

Murray was pinned in the phone’s battery compartment, and for how long?

It occurred to him that, by time travelling back into the middle of the night, he had negated more than half of the sleep that his body had acquired in the second of the three timelines which make up this story. He couldn’t think of any way to get out of the phone, and he didn’t have the energy to stay awake. He lay back in the battery compartment and fell asleep for most of the day.

“What sort of burglar breaks in through my window and then compensates me for the damages?”

It was the sound of the voice of the woman he’d seen driving off to work that morning. It awoke him instantly, and then he heard it again.

“I’ll call the Guardia for this! It gives me the shivers!”

He felt her picking up the phone, and listened again.

“What a time for the batteries to need replacing?” she blurted out.

Then he felt the phone being turned over and saw the cover being removed. She looked down at him in surprise and gaped open mouthed.

“The batteries aren’t missing. They’re at the bottom of the waste paper bin,” he said, “I only rolled them in here, because it was the only place to hide from your burglar. She was after me. She didn’t take anything, just searched the whole house for me and then left you the cost of fixing the window in cash, I guess,” said Murray.

“Why does she want you?” asked the woman, lifting him out of the phone and placing him gently on the table.

“She’s Trudi Northumberland from ‘Mountains Family’. She lives down the street from you and found me after I’d shrunken because of a science experiment. She said she wanted to eat me whole, but I snuck out of her house in the middle of the night and got as far as this. I’m sorry I caused your break in. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t phoned her to say goodbye after my escape. She guessed I’d have to be in one of the houses whose owners were at work,” said Murray.

“You called her? Why did you take such a terrible risk?”

“I was ... I mean I ultimately still am in love with her. I’m a fan. We had one wonderful afternoon and evening together yesterday, but she’d made it clear enough that she was going to eat me up for her dinner tonight. So I had to get away and talk to her from a safe distance. Apparently it wasn’t safe enough, and so she came here to collect me. If I hadn’t hidden in your phone, she’d be placing me into her oven just about now, I should think ... Are you likely to eat me too?”

“No, little darling, of course not. I guess I don’t need to call the Guardia after all, since she won’t be back here again. I’ll help you get far away from here, and she’ll be none the wiser. In fact she’s lucky that her next filming engagement was not on the CCTV cameras I’ve been planning to have installed.”

“I’m very grateful.”

“I feel for your situation. My boyfriend is one of the leprechauns. He told me that they’ve had trouble with ladies wanting to eat them too. I’ll take you to meet him, and he’ll show you their secret little town. Then you can live in safety with all of them,” said the friendly neighbour.

So Murray joined the leprechauns, vicariously pleased that one of them was enjoying the safe unadulterated romantic affections of a full sized woman he loved. From the safety of Leprechaun Town, Murray thought every day of his original first timeline adventure with 37-39 year old Trudi in giant land, of his second timeline romance with 24 year old Trudi in one of the villages, and finally of his third timeline escape from her throat and subsequent avoidance of recapture on the last day. His infatuation with her never faded, but nor did his awareness of the extreme danger of ever being seen by her again. However, he knew he only had less than two days of her being in Ireland, and he desperately wanted to talk to her again. When her friendly neighbour came to meet her leprechaun boyfriend, he went with the leprechaun and asked if he could use her telephone to call Trudi again.

“You’ve still got it really bad for her, haven’t you?” said the neighbour, “I guess it’s alright, since she thinks it wasn’t my house you called from. You can tell her you’re far away by now, perhaps even in the next village. I’ll leave you with the phone while we’re ... upstairs.”

The neighbour and the leprechaun went off to enjoy some intersize canoodling, while Murray made the call.

“I didn’t expect to hear from you again,” said Trudi, “I don’t know how you got away, but I suppose I should congratulate you on your ingenuity. Did you manage to time travel again? No, of course you wouldn’t have. If you had, I wouldn’t remember any of this.”

“Maybe I decided to pick a house with the owner still in it for the day, and got their permission to use the phone,” said Murray, convinced that a hypothetical untruth was morally permissible under the circumstances, “It was only you who assumed that the owner of the house I was calling from would be out for the day.”

“You’re not going to tell me any more than that, are you? I’ll assume that somebody has taken you in permanently. Is it a woman?” asked Trudi.

“Yes,” said Murray, hoping that she wouldn’t feel any unjustified jealousy.

He considered it astonishing to know how much things like that still mattered to him.

“Are you dating her now?” asked Trudi.

“No,” said Murray.

“Do you want to?” asked Trudi.

“I don’t know. She has a boyfriend, which makes it rather pointless to think about it. Even if I did, it wouldn’t be nearly as much as I wish I could have dated you in an ongoing way instead of you wanting to eat me. Hey, if I could keep up the time travelling indefinitely, I could even let you eat me over and over again, and then make short trips to escape from your stomach afterwards,” said Murray.

“Well that’s very sweet of you to say so,” said Trudi, “and it’s nice to hear you again anyway. Not that I’m having second thoughts about not dating you for the next nine years. But from my perspective, I’ve never had the chance to eat you all up either. You said you were more than halfway down my throat by the time you zapped yourself back to the middle of the previous night. What was that like for you?”

“To be absolutely honest, it was incredibly arousing, moreso than anything else that ever happened between us,” Murray replied.

“Sounds absolutely dreamy. I don’t suppose you had any indication of what it would have been like for me.”

“You were smiling and making jokes about it, right up until you started licking me. I’m guessing you were having the time of your life too.”

“I’m sure I would have been.”

“Your smiles at that dinner table were the most stunning thrilling looks I’ve ever had from a woman, and even better from that towering angle, with the knowledge of what an advantage you had.”

“You’re really arousing me too right now,” said Trudi, “... Oh! Do you know how it feels to want this even more than I did at the time, and not be able to catch you again?”

“I guess it’s the reciprocal feeling that I had when I wanted to date you for nine years and couldn’t see a way to escape being eaten by you. Actually, I’m feeling the frustration right here and now of wanting to date you for nine years, and yet not being able to see you again because you’d have me down your throat within a day. I know exactly how the reciprocal feeling is.”

“I guess we’ve both got it bad for eachother, just in different ways,” said Trudi.

“I love you more than ever. I’ve missed you so much, beyond what I can express in one phone call,” said Murray.

“I love you too. Tell me one thing. If I changed my mind about dating you, would you take the risk of coming back to me, given that I could change my mind back again at any point, or even wait out the nine years of dating and then eat you up at the end of it?”

“That’s the most difficult question I’ve ever had to consider,” said Murray, “If you promised me the whole nine years, with no change of mind until the end of those years, I think I just might choose to enjoy that time with you and face my fate at the end, even give you that ending willingly for making me happy all that time. Are you considering any deals like that?”

“In one sense I’d like to wait patiently for nine years, and enjoy your affections as much as I could in that time. But to be honest, look what happened. I was going to date you, and the very next morning I decided to have you for dinner that coming night. I’d give anything to have you back in my clutches and look forward to eating you all up for good. I just don’t want to make a promise that I most likely will not be able to keep.”

“Could you promise to hold off for a lesser number of years, maybe four instead of seven?” asked Murray, with baited breath.

“I’d try, but I couldn’t guarantee it. You have to understand that I’m enervated beyond any hope of self control now, merely wishing I could get my hands on you, not to mention my tongue. I’d be feeling that every day for years, and eventually I’d either have to give into it and break my word, which I can’t see myself doing, or drive myself crazy with wanting something I’d agreed not to do,” said Trudi.

“Well .... I guess if you feel like that, there’s not much pointing in my suggesting three years, or two, or even one,” said Murray despondently.

“No. I’d want you in my stomach within days,” said Trudi, “It hardly seems fair. You’ve had a whole night of romance in your second timeline, as well as the arousing aspects of being partly swallowed by me. I don’t even have that memory anymore, merely your narrative to convince me that it must have happened in a previous timeline.”

“I only made that escape in order to avoid something that was unfair for me. If things had worked out your way, I’d have had one night of romance, then been swallowed whole and had nothing more at all. You’d have enjoyed eating me and had all of the future I already know from the first timeline to look forward to, and more beyond that, now that I saved us from being eaten by the giantess.”

“I guess you’re right. We each have our own perspective on fairness, and what’s fair to one person is often heavily clouded by what amounts to their own desires.”

“I’m glad you don’t hate me for escaping,” said Murray.

“I don’t, and I never will. But I can’t have you the way I want you, and you can’t have me  the way you want me. In three days’ time I’ll be in America.”

“You could give me your number when you’re settled there,” said Murray.

“How would I contact you, when you’re in hiding?” asked Trudi.

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“There’s little point in either of us continuing to yearn for what we can’t have and frustrating eachother over the phone anyway. I guess we just need to move on. I’ll always know that you’re out there somewhere at tiny size, making what you can of your new life. Maybe I’ll come back for holidays and try to find you again in the future. If I do, and it’s within those nine years I’m still single, and if I can control myself long enough, I’ll give you a week of romance before I gobble you up for my dinner. But for now, I think it’s time to say goodbye and give us both at least half a sense of closure.”

“I’ll miss you like crazy,” said Murray.

“You’re DRIVING me crazy,” said Trudi, “We each have to move on.”

Now she’d said those last six words twice in the space of only a few minutes.

“Maybe my new host will let me watch the rest of the series on reruns,” said Murray.

“Goodbye, little Murray. I’m going to hang up now. Please don’t call again in the next two days. After that this number will be disconnected.”

“Farewell, Trudi. Best wishes for the American chapter of your career.”

She hung up and the line went dead.

Life, even life as an honorary leprechaun, was going to be comparatively unstimulating.

Several weeks later, Trudi was one of the guest stars in an American television series called Romance Hotel. While offscreen, she was invited to a dinner party hosted by the lead star Bob Worth. He introduced Trudi to actress Pandora Montague, who had been his girlfriend for eight years. Pandora was 49. She had dated a social swinger when she was 21-22, dated an actor when she was 23-30, and dated the producer of a series they began working on together when she was 30-38, having a daughter called Reece when she was 36. Their break-up when she was 38 led to the cancellation of the eight year run of the series which had brought Pandora and the producer together in the first place, namely the sitcom called ‘Marriage ain’t Easy’ She had been dating Bob from age 41 onwards.

Trudi told Pandora that she had grown up watching ‘Marriage ain’t Easy’, and confided in Pandora about her short lived marriage from age 18-20. Pandora likened it to the boyfriend she’d had from age 21-22, and the two women formed a fast friendship in the weeks that followed.

One day they were having lunch together, when Pandora spoke up about her observations of Trudi’s moods.

“Take it from a woman who’s been around for a while and seen a lot. You don’t have a boyfriend, and you’ve said you haven’t been remarried since you were 20. It’s not that I don’t believe you’re strictly telling the truth. It’s just that you always have a look in your eyes that speaks volumes about a man that’s very much on your mind.”

“I didn’t realise that it showed so much,” said Trudi, “And your intuitions are good, but it’s far different from any guesses you might have made. The short answer is that a younger man called Murray (who knew me in the future as a friend) managed to send his mind back in time to warn me of something. He told me that in the future, we both discovered a giant land, where we were caught by a giantess and held captive for two years as pets, until she decided to eat us. He’d watched the giantess put me in her mouth and swallow me whole, before he could manage to perform some sort of mental time travel technique. He managed it just before the giantess could stuff him into her mouth as well. What he did was ... well not like the kind of time travel in time machines that you see in movies and sci-fi television serieses. He didn’t bring his body back in time, but sent his consciousness, his very mind, if you like, back into the body of his younger self. So he was back in my present time (which was a few months ago) in the body of his present day self, but with all the memories of his meeting my older future self and having that adventure with the giantess.”

“That’s a story that defies the imagination,” said Pandora.

“It’s true though,” said Trudi.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you. I can tell when someone’s being sincere, and I don’t think you’re deluded or mentally unbalanced or anything like that. What I find so engaging about your story is the plurality of different concepts involved in it, all of which would have been considered as mere science fiction until I just heard your story. Another land, where a giantess lives, is amazing enough. Yet consciousness time travel, and warnings of the future which saved your life by changing that future... To have all that worked into one phenomenal experience is what staggers me the most.”

“It’s still doing quite a number on my mind, I can tell you,” said Trudi, “He called what happened to me the first time around ‘a previous timeline’, and said that by merely doing that mental time travel act, before he even got around to warning me, he’d created a second timeline. Doesn’t it unglue your head to know that we’re living in a second timeline now? ... I mean, it affects everything we do.”

“So where is this knight in shining armour who saved you from a fate you’d already faced in that previous timeline you guys called it? It’s no wonder you can’t get him out of your thoughts. You’ve had the look of an obsessed lady since I first met you at Bob’s dinner party. What could possibly be keeping you and this guy apart?” asked Pandora.

“It was my doing, really. You’ll think I’m terrible,” said Trudi.

“Trust me, I’ll think you’re my friend. I’m in my fourth relationship, with a teenage daughter to my third who has to understand that,” said Pandora.

“From the moment he approached me after he got his mind back to my time, I had one burning desire in my head, probably even in my heart as well, to have him small enough that I could gobble him up. Can you believe that, after he saved my second timeline future self from living out the same result. I almost feel terrible, but I can’t think that way. The desire is so strong, and I can’t deny it,” said Trudi.

“You’re beating yourself up, because you’re trying to take responsibility for feelings beyond your control,” said Pandora.

“He obviously didn’t want to face a fate like that, even if I could have gone ahead and done it with him. He called me on the phone at my old Irish home twice in the weeks leading up to my moving over here to look for new roles. We talked about it. We both tried to find some sort of compromise between his more traditional romantic yearnings and my highly culinary crush on him. In the end, I had to tell him that I couldn’t see any way for us to make it work between us, as we both wanted different things from eachother, and both wanted them so strongly that we would only go on frustrating eachother. I asked him not to call me again, and moved over here, and had my Irish phone disconnected,” said Trudi.

“And yet you’ve brought him over here in your mind,” said Pandora, “He’s not in your stomach, like you’ve explained that you wanted him to be, but he’s been there in your eyes every day that I’ve known you. You looked so distant at Bob’s party that I really felt for you,” said Pandora.

“Thank you for being a friend. It’s felt so good to have somebody I can talk to about this,” said Trudi.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t even remotely disapprove of your kitchen based yearnings in any way. In fact, you’ve awakened something in me just by telling me about it,” said Pandora.

“Do you mean you’d want to do that to Bob?”

“Not to him, no. We’ve been too attached for too long for me to think of spoiling all that for the sake of one shrunken meal. But if I could find someone else, a younger man, and if it were possible to make him small enough to eat, like you keep wishing, then I could gobble down the younger man in my house, and Bob would be none the wiser in his. It would be a perfect case of having my cake and eating him,” said Pandora.

“Well obviously I wouldn’t think to judge you either. It sounds dreamy!” said Trudi.

“So what are you going to do about your Irish admirer?” asked Pandora.

“I guess I’ve got to go back and find him, haven’t I? It’s not as if I was running away to this country, to get away from him. I’d already planned this as a career move, after my last stint on ‘Mountains Family’. But I have been using it in an attempt to avoid him. After that guest spot on ‘Romance Hotel’, I haven’t had any more calls for acting work. I guess I’ll make use of this hiatus and try to track down Murray somehow.”

What Pandora was unaware of was that Murray was living as an honorary leprechaun in their hidden town. Circumstances had seen him shrunken to the very size that would have made him an appealing dinner time conquest for either Pandora or Trudi, and could no longer continue taking his chances amongst regular sized Irish society.

Trudi and Pandora promised to stay in touch with eachother. Trudi booked a flight to Ireland and a room at the Irish village hotel, which had been doing well since the D.I.R.E. (DISAPPEARANCE INVESTIGATION RETRIEVAL ENTITY) organization had put an end to its erstwhile owner using it to lure tourist into the dimension shifting trap that used to take the village to the awaiting native giantesses to be caught and eaten.

When she got there, Trudi was acutely aware that, when she had disconnected her old home phone number and sold the house in order to take up residence in the United States, she had removed any opportunity for Murray to contact her. He could be anywhere now, and statistically, her chances of locating him were almost negligible. However, so strong was the desire to swallow him whole during her every waking hour, that she was determined to find him.

Bolstered by her confidential conversation with Pandora Montague, Trudi would not give up until there seemed to be nothing else to do.

It was with this renewed sense of purpose, that while walking through the woods between the village and the meadow, Trudi found and captured an unfortunate lady leprechaun.

“It’s a shame you’re not a male one instead,” said Trudi, “But I’m on my way to the meadow, and you’ll make a nice picnic lunch just the same.”

‘Mountains Family’ had finally gone into syndicated reruns, and the friendly neighbour would always let Murray watch the show on her television set. In a few months, he had watched the entire series through, including catching the ‘Mountains Family Easter Special’ for the second time. As he returned to the leprechaun town after watching the last episode, he felt like he’d finally been dating Trudi in his mind for several months. Now it felt like they had just broken up for good. He’d never see her again, and couldn’t even hear her voice on the phone. That had been her own decision, the one thing she could still control about the situation.

When he got back to the leprechaun town, he tried to put Trudi out of his mind for a while, and to focus on the gala ball coming up the following night. Twenty-four hours later, he put on his best tailored leprechaun fashion statement and turned up at the ball. Once the dancing had started, he found himself without a partner, until a young leprechaun woman named Rinkella asked him to dance with her. He’d grown up thinking that, in the regular sized society from which he’d come, it was more traditional for the man to take the lead in these situations. However, Rinkella had a sense of beauty that was only dwarfed by his all consumng thoughts of Trudi. He might as well see if he could replace impossible fantasies with immediate reality.

The leprechauns had no form of disco music or disco freestyle dancing. So the music at the ball was designed for the leprechauns to adopt slow dancing embraces at the very beginning of the dance music bracket. It seemed to serve one purpose, Murray thought. It eliminated the possibility of a guy getting the wrong idea and entertaining false hopes while disco dancing with a woman, only to have her think of him as ‘just friends’ material and walk off in the middle of the evening. Here at the leprechauns gala ball, he felt for certain that Rinkella had asked him to dance because of a genuine interest in his company.

They slow danced and talked together all evening, until the ball came to an end. Knowing that they’d both sleep in the next day, they planned to meet for a lunch date in the closest flower bed in the meadow.

Murray arrived right on the agreed upon time, to see that she was already there. Lady leprechauns appeared to be more punctual than humans, when turning up for dates, he reflected.

Murray and Rinkella sat down together with their prepacked picnic lunches. Murray had his back to the meadow grass, looking at the combination of Rinkella and the scenic normal sized flowers around her. Rinkella was facing him, with a view of the meadow grass behind him as well. They ate their lunches and talked for the best part of an hour.

“I guess I should be honest with you, Rinkella. I think you’re going to find me to be a very slow mover in anything that may or may not develop between us. It’s not than I ever saw myself as being a slow mover in general. The thing I’m struggling to deal with at the moment is that you’re only the second lady I’ve ever been with, and only the first leprechaun. I came to join your society after being reduced in size from regular human stature, as all your people have known since they voted to accept me as an honorary leprechaun. I’m still very much grieving the necessary but heart wrenching break up of an all too brief relationship with an older human woman I loved, make that still love, very much. Is that too much baggage to lay on a girl on a first or second date?” asked Murray.

“No, but in the spirit of being equally honest with you, I haven’t really developed any feelings for you either.”

“Oh ... It’s okay, but I’m just a bit confused. Why did you ask me to dance last night, and suggest this picnic yourself too?”

“To keep an agreement she made with me,” came a third and very familiar voice. He turned around and looked between the flowers, to find that Trudi was lying on the edge of the meadow grass, with her head resting on her hands.

Murray shuffled his legs, rotating his body around, so that he could sit facing Trudi, while Rinkella got up and sat down beside him.

“I’m sorry. It was the only way to save myself,” said Rinkella, “She caught me in the woods and brought me to the meadow to eat me for her own picnic lunch. I asked her what would make her do such a thing. She told me that it was as some sort of poor second best substitute for eating you. She told me all about the history between you two. It was then that I got the idea of asking her if she would promise to spare me, if I could guarantee that she would recapture you. She agreed, and said she’d much rather eat you all up than me. So we set this trap, and I offered myself to you at the dance last night as bait.”

“Does she know where the leprechaun town is?” asked Murray.

“No. That wasn’t part of the deal. I’d never agree to put all our people at risk, but you have to understand. You came to us recently as an outsider, and it was you she was really after,” said Rinkella.

“I see,” said Murray, “You’d better tell me the rest of it.”

“She came back to Ireland from some other great large country over the distant seas, because all she could think of was hunting you down, so that she could finally fulfil her every waking desire to eat you all up. I couldn’t face being eaten by her myself, and she was emphatic about much preferring to get you back in her clutches instead. We came to an agreement, and here we are...” said Rinkella, and turned her head forward to look out at Trudi.

“You’re free to go,” said Trudi, “And I’m eventually heading back to the United States. As I said when we sealed our bargain, you’ve helped me to recapture Murray. In so doing you’ve bought this one time escape from me for yourself. Now that I know that the existence of your people is not merely a legend nor a rumour, I may well return to Ireland in the hopes of catching more of you, especially male leprechauns, at some time in the future. There will be nothing that any of them could offer to do for me, that would enduce me to spare them from being eaten. You just need to understand that I’m not promising any leniency for your people in the future.”

“That word ‘leniency’ automatically implies that one of them being eaten would be a punishment for something,” said Murray.

“Forgive my poor choice of words then,” said Trudi, “Just rephrasing it, I’m not promising any kind of mercy or escape clause for any leprechaun I manage to find and catch in the future.”

“I understand,” said Rinkella, “And thank you for letting me go. Sorry again, Murray. I just couldn’t help it.”

“I know,” said Murray, “And with no form of immodesty intended, I guess I can see that eating me would be a far more appealing outcome for Trudi than settling for you.”

“Thank you,” said Rinkella, with a sympathetic look, “I’ll be going then.”

Trudi sat up, folding her legs and sitting on them, and rested Murray in the lap of her dress. Together they watched Rinkella walk off and out of sight.

“I heard everything you said to her about the longevity and persistence of your feelings for me,” said Trudi.

“I got to watch every episode of ‘Mountains Family’ in the syndicated reruns while you were away. It was like dating you in my thoughts five days a week, until the end of the last episode was like breaking up with you again,” said Murray.

“I was doing a guest role on ‘Romance Hotel’, but you’ll be in my stomach by the time it goes to air in America, let alone the later programming of it over here,” said Trudi.

“Where are you staying?” asked Murray.

“I sold the house in the other village, and bought a place in the States. I made an extendable booking at the village hotel, and managed to arrange your capture with Rinkella not long after I’d arrived here,” said Trudi.

“Are we, umm .... going to do it here, now?” asked Murray.

“No. I made friends with the star of that old sitcom called ‘Marriage ain’t Easy’ after her boyfriend directed my episode of ‘Romance Hotel’. She picked up on my moody fixation with you, and asked what it was. I told her everything, all about the giant land, the other timelines, the way you saved me, and how much I was yearning to eat you up. She was very understanding and supportive, and encouraged me to do something about getting back with you. I once said that I’d give you some time with me first, if I ever recaptured you. I’ll keep you concealed over here, and on the flight back home. Then we’ll have another week together, so you can settle into my new home in the California hills. After that, you’ll have the opportunity to settle into your new home in my tummy,” said Trudi.

“I can’t help but think of the expression ‘opportunity cost’,” said Murray.

“Well don’t start any of that. After all we’ve been through, and after all the discussions we’ve had about this, you don’t really think there’s any likelihood of you talking me out of it with a psychological discourse, do you?” said Trudi.

“I wasn’t thinking that. I know the situation well enough by now,” said Murray.

“That’s good to hear ... and Murray?” she said, lifting him up to her face.

“Yes.”

“It’s lovely to see you again.”

With that, she gave him a long slow kiss.

“Let’s get back into town,” she said.

She slipped him under the top of her dress and walked back to her hotel room and locked herself inside with him. Trudi sat on the bed, and put him down on the blanket beside her.

Then she got up, stepped over to the bedside table, and unplugged the telephone from the wall socket. She rolled up the cord, and placed the whole unit on top of a high cupboard, before she walked back to the bed and sat down again, with her legs draped over the side and her left foot touching the carpeted floor.

“Now that there’s absolutely no chance of you calling whichever one of my former neighbours has been helping you all this time, and therefore no chance of her ever being able to help you escape from me again, could you satisfy my curiosity about one thing?” asked Trudi.

“What’s that?” said Murray.

“Who was she?” asked Trudi.

Murray thought for a moment. Trudi had just reminded him that her former neighbour and the leprechaun who was dating her were the only two people in the next village who had an ongoing vested interest in keeping Murray rescued and safe. If there was even the slightest chance that he could make an overseas call to Ireland from the telephone in Trudi’s California Hills estate, perhaps one day while Trudi was out on an acting job, then he didn’t want to make their anonymity any less effective.

Trudi’s eyes glared at him in an arousing manner, indicating that she seemed to be guessing what his thought processes were.

“Just to let you know, I’ll be doing exactly the same thing with the landline telephone in California too. I have a mobile phone for my new agent to reach me on, and I’ll have it with me at all times. I know you’ve used a second round of time travel, and various other tricks, and the help of your friend to escape me once before. It seemed only fair to turn the tables on you, by using the coerced help of one of your little leprechaun friends to help me to recapture you today. I won’t be taking any chances on you escaping again, not here, not in California. I’m giving you the two weeks or so of romance with me first, but that’s the only break you’re getting. After that, you’ll be going down my throat for the last time (which from my perspective, will be the first time), and I will take every possible precaution to make it absolutely impossible for you to even attempt another runaway caper. Do you accept the reality of your situation?” asked Trudi.

“And the way it’s driving me wild, for now at least,” said Murray.

“Then there’s no point in trying to conceal the identity of your previous rescuer, is there?” said Trudi.

“I guess not,” said Murray, also thinking that it would heighten the chemical arousal between them while he was telling her the full story of his escape three or four months earlier.”

“Then you may begin,” said Trudi.

“Well you were right in guessing that I time travelled out of your throat and only managed to go back as far as the second sleeping session we had, the one after you got back from your middle of the night foray to the bathroom,” said Murray, “Since you’d woken up before me in the previous timeline, I didn’t know how much earlier it was. That left me having to second guess how much of a headstart I’d get on you if I vacated your bedroom as soon as I could. It also left me not knowing just exactly what time it was that morning that you’d decided to go ahead with eating me after all. I didn’t want to be still around if you woke up before sunrise, for example, and made that decision and told me about it before I could get away.”

“Well I can fill in a few gaps for you there.  What time did you wake up in the timeline that’s been lost to my memory?” asked Trudi

“Around seven-thirty,” said Murray.

“Well if I got the same amount of sleep in both timelines, then I must have woken up at the same time that I did in this most recent one. I opened my eyes just after six am, and saw that you weren’t beside me on the bed,” said Trudi, moistening her lower lip with the tip of her tongue.

“So if you woke up at six am on the previous timeline too, you’d have had nearly an hour and a half to think about me, before I awoke. I guess it must have been some time during that eighty-something minutes that your mind turned to thoughts of making dinner plans for that day which would not have worked out in my favour,” said Murray.

“I’m enjoying this discussion very much,” said Trudi.

“I like the way we’re filling in a few blanks for me too,” said Murray.

“So what happened next with you?” asked Trudi.

“Well it was still pitch dark in some parts of your room, but I had enough moonlight to work with. I slid and climbed down the blanket to the floor, ran across the carpet, out of your bedroom and out into your garden. I had to work my way around to your front fence, out onto the footpath, and then slip between the separated palings of the next door neighbour’s fence. I only just got there in time, when I heard you walking through your garden, humming the same old tune you sang in the ‘Mountains Family Easter Special’. I kept myself hidden in the front of the next door neighbour’s garden, and watched you look around the street for me and then heard you working out that I’d used another time travelling effort to escape you, after you’d told me your plans in the previous timeline,” said Murray.

“But how did you call me from the nextdoor neighbours’ place, when she stayed home all that day. I remember her car was in the driveway. It was the first one I checked,” asked Trudi.

“I ran from one property to the next, a few times, until I reached another one, just in time to see a lady leaving for work. I snuck into that house and made my first call. I realised how careless I’d been in taking risks like that, when you told me your plan to come out and find me, but I just had to hear the voice of the woman I loved once more,” said Murray.

“Very gallant, kind sir,” said Trudi, “Do go on.”

“I knew you’d be checking the house I was in soon enough, and it stood to reason that you’d get me,” said Murray, “There was no point in getting caught while trying to run to another house, and you’d have checked that one as well in due course. I hid myself in the only place that I didn’t think you’d look.”

“Where was that?” asked Trudi.

“In the battery compartment of the phone I’d used to call you, after I rolled the batteries into the waste paper bin and saw them fall between the paper balls and out of sight,” said Murray.

Trudi opened her mouth in surprise. From where he sat, the view of her tongue in her mouth was not as good as the view had seen when her previous timeline self had begun the process of eating him. Still it aroused him nevertheless.

“I had that phone in my hands, had you in my hands inside the phone, after turning that house upside down to find you, and I didn’t even know it! You ARE very clever,” said Trudi.

“Thank you,” said Murray, “The owner came home and found your donation and the damage to the window. She was going to call the police, when she found me while checking the battery compartment of the phone, since it wouldn’t work. I told her who you were, and why you were in her house, and promised her that you hadn’t come to steal anything from her ... except me.”

“Well that’s an academic opinion,” said Trudi, “You said that she had a boyfriend. I take it that she never told him about you.”

“He’s the one who introduced me to the leprechauns,” said Murray, “Her boyfriend was one of them.”

“That’s one thing that didn’t quite come through in Rinkella’s account of your arrival in their town,” said Trudi.

“She and the leprechaun would often be necking upstairs while I’d be watching the early evening syndicated reruns of ‘Mountains Family’. Do you realise what it was like, staring intently at the television screen during every dinner table scene, or any storyline that called for your character to stick her tongue out at someone. It was highly enervating, given the memories I had of riding your tongue to your throat in the previous timeline,” said Murray.

“Some rides are worth going on twice,” said Trudi.

“Says the roller coaster to the frightened passenger,” quipped Murray.

Trudi laughed and kissed him.

He made the most of a lovely night beside her face on the hotel bedroom pillow.

“Maybe I’m having my own episode of ‘Romance Hotel’ with you,” he said.

“What a lovely thing to say to a lady only a few minutes before sleep time and only two weeks before a significant dinner time,” said Trudi.

“What shall we do today?” she asked the next morning.

“I wouldn’t mind going on that walk where I first met you on the original timeline, in the forest, I mean,” said Murray.

“Sounds good. I’ll take you there after breakfast,” she said.

He led her all the way along the forest walking track, until they came to the very portal that had begun the entire series of adventures that had unfolded between them.

“The other side of the portal is not in a place where the giants can see it,” said Murray, “We can step through and take a look at the scenery if you like.”

“I suppose if we stand just in front of the portal on the other side, we can’t possibly be caught before slipping back through it to safety,” said Trudi.

She carried him through and was surrounded by enormous plant life on the other side.

“So this is where it all began,” she said.

“We walked through these flowers and bushes for a while, and didn’t know that we’d come to a giant land, at least not for certain, until we saw the giant widow,” said Murray.

“That must have been your ... our most important discovery,” said Trudi.

More importantly, she saw us. In spite of being captured by her, I enjoyed having your company every day during those two years. The situation was a bit of a blessing in disguise ... right up until the day she said she was going to eat us. And when I saw her eating you ... That was horrible,” said Murray.

“I can see why you brought me here, and I’ll give you points for trying, but it’s not going to work. I’ve known since late in the afternoon of our first meeting (which was the same on both the second and third timelines), all about what you and my alternate future self went through here. I know what you saved me from, but you did it a way that has negated any need I’ll ever have to be saved from anything in the first place. You won’t have any success in using this as a visual influence on my emotions concerning your own fate in this new timeline. Since you shrank to tiny size, you’ve been the only one at risk in the new timelines, and I’ve turned that risk into a certainty in the last twenty-four hours. I appreciate this outing. It’s been very educational, but it won’t help you out of your upcoming appointment with my my mouth,” said Trudi.

“It was worth a try,” said Murray.

“I can appreciate your motivation, but believe me once and for all, when I say that nothing you try will do you any good,” said Trudi, “And think how much things have changed in the last two days. For months we were going frantic with unfulfilled romantic and culinary desires, which are now all coming to fruition. You’re getting two weeks of what you’ve been longing for for months, and then I’ll have the final pleasure and satisfaction of gobbling you all up, just as I’ve been longing to do all this time. It’s a win / win situation for both us.”

“Except that I stand to lose a lot, when you collect your final winnings,” said Murray.

“That’s just the way it is,” said Trudi, holding him right in front of her face, “I’ll be making the most of your last two weeks. The least you can do is to make the same effort.”

“You’re right, of course, and for what it’s worth, you look better now than you ever did in the show,” said Murray, and leaned in a little and kissed her conveniently positioned lower lip.

They heard huge footsteps nearby, and then the sound of two giantesses talking to eachother.

“We’d better go,” said Trudi, and slipped back through the portal to the Irish forest with him.

“That was close,” said Murray.

“If they’d caught me, they wouldn’t even be able to see you.”

“I suppose, if they had you caged long term, and weren’t aware of miniscule me, then you’d still have eventually eaten me while you were there,” said Murray.

“I dare say so,” said Trudi.

“Even if one of them said that she was going to eat you?” asked Murray.

“Oh Murray, come on. Please don’t start that again. How many times are we going to go through this?” said Trudi.

“I’m sorry if I’m annoying you. But I’d honestly still really like to know,” said Murray.

“I’d be in the cage then, and I’d know I was going to be eaten at some point in the near future. I’d enjoy at least one of my last days, by getting my money’s worth out of eating you first. And I suppose, if the giantess came and ate me only a few minutes later, you’d have been eaten by both of us ... effectively, anyway, even if she knew nothing about it,” said Trudi, “So you see, I’d be making the most of being on both sides of the argument.”

“That’s quite a way of putting it,” said Murray.

When she took him back to her California Hills home, he found the spacious layout and inner decor even more impressive than the Irish property which had played home to their two earlier games of pursuit. She didn’t even tell him where she put the telephone after unplugging it, and he knew it would be a waste of time to even think about it. Her agent didn’t call at all, and she expected to have the whole two weeks free to spend with him. She did make one telephone call to Pandora, and invited her over to meet Murray and hear the story of her having recaptured him.

Soon they were all seated around, or in his case, on the table, talking. Murray found Pandora to be likeable and pleasant, with the knowledge that she was highly supportive of Trudi’s endeavours.

“Some time after this, when you take another trip to Ireland, I’d like to go with you,” said Pandora, “Think what it’d be like for us to hunt leprechauns and eat them together.”

“We might never catch any,” said Trudi, “Now that I think of the warning I gave to Rinkella. They’ll be far more cautious about coming out of their city.”

“Do you think they’ll hold it against Rinkella for luring Murray into your trap in the meadow?” asked Pandora.

“If she thinks they would, she probably won’t have told them anything about it, and left them guessing why Murray had gone missing,” said Trudi, “If she thinks they’d value her safety over Murray’s and support her decision to set him up, then she’ll tell them, and maybe they’ll be understanding about it. I’m going to brew another pot of herbal tea. Do you want any more?”

“I’m alright,” said Pandora, “You go ahead.”

Trudi walked into the kitchen.

“So you persuaded her to come and look for me then,” said Murray.

“I hope you’re not mad at me about that,” said Pandora, “You should have seen the look in her eyes for weeks before I asked her to tell me what was on her mind all that time.”

“No, I’m not mad, and it’s nice to hear more about how she’s been doing,” said Murray.

“We became fast friends, and what are friends for if not to encouage eachother to go for their dreams?”

“I guess she was lucky to have you,” said Murray, “I had a leprechaun friend who was dating the lady who’d kept me safe from Trudi. In a way I envied him, not that I had any feelings for his normal sized girlfriend. It was more that I envied his situation. He was the same size as me, and in his case, he’d always been this size. Yet he was in an ongoing safe relationship with a woman Trudi’s size, who had no interest in bringing that relationship to an end by eating him up. She didn’t even have any interest in eating me, which needn’t have bothered her when she had all her romantic needs addressed by the leprechaun.”

“You really love her, don’t you? Trudi, I mean?” said Pandora, “I can hear it in your every word.”

“I’ve spent the last few days wondering if it was worth getting caught again, not that I had any chance to avoid it,” said Murray.

“Maybe it would help you to look at it this way. I saw the state she was in before, and I’ve been witnessing the extent of your love for her today. The situation as it was in those months you were apart .... Well that just couldn’t have gone on. Things had to come to the point you’ve both reached now,” said Pandora.

“I guess I’m agreeing with you emotionally, even though my heart is at war with my self protective instincts,” said Murray.

“Sure, that’s only natural. But you’re no longer in a position to be able to do anything about your self preservation instincts. From where I’m sitting, it seems that the best thing to do would be to maximize the romantic opportunities that being recaptured has opened up to you, while you still have the chance to enjoy them. And I know she feels that way about you,” said Pandora.

“How does she describe me to you exactly?” asked Murray.

“First you were her hero, her time travelling white knight. Then you became her most deeply embedded eating aspiration. She carries both those feelings for you in her heart every minute of every day,” said Pandora.

“Then why doesn’t the implied contradiction ever catch up with her?” asked Murray.

“Because to her, there isn’t one. She can be both grateful for the new timeline’s lease on future life you’ve given her and equally enthusiastic about ...” Pandora trailed off.

“About taking mine away from me,” said Murray.

“We tend to grab at all the chances for happiness we get in this world,” said Pandora, “And in that world of giants too, apparently. In this case, one of the happiest upcoming experiences in her life will be one of the most challenging experiences in yours. If she doesn’t take the opportunity, she’ll be back there feeling her share of what you’ve both been going through for three months on end.”

“It seems an inequitable distribution of happiness,” said Murray.

“Only because of the outcome in your situation,” said Pandora, “Think about it. If you could have restored your size before she could eat you, you’d have kissed her for as long as she’d have you, which I’m sure would have been the rest of her days. You’d have gotten everything you wanted, and would be forever taking her ultimate dream goal away from her, just by making it impossible for her to go ahead and eat you, once you’d restored your size. But the dice have fallen differently, and she will be taking your ultimate dream goal away from you, eventually. But at least she’ll be giving you two weeks of having that goal fulfilled, plus the night you had with her before she moved away from Ireland. Your preferred outcome would have denied her dream entirely, but she’d have had to live with it. As it is, you’ll have to be the one to put on a brave face.”

“I can’t seem to think of any way to argue with that analysis of the situation,” said Murray, “She’s had it her way in the second timeline, until I time travelled out of her throat....”

“What is it?” asked Pandora.

“Thank you so much for talking to me. Believe me, that your friendly conversation has helped me just as much as its helped her. I know how to cope with this situation now. You’ve really helped me to gain a new perspective on the whole scenario,” said Murray.

“That is my pleasure,” said Pandora.

They heard the kettle click off, as it finished boiling the water. Trudi came back with some herbal tea bags, placed one in a cup and filled it with water. She swung the dangling tea bag around in the water, using the tea bag to stir its flavoured emissions into the water, and then pulled the bag out and set it down on a saucer. She raised the cup to her lips and sipped. As she lowered the cup to the table again, Murray looked up and saw the tip of her tongue come out a little way and hold that position for around half a minute, while Pandora was telling her something about Bob Worth’s next directing assignment.

“Well I’d better be getting home to him,” said Pandora at last, “It’s been lovely to meet you, Murray. I don’t suppose we’ll touch base again before Trudi gobbles you down, but I wish you all the best in the meantime. I’ll be off, then.”

Trudi showed Pandora to the door, and then took Murray to the living room couch and settled down on it with him.

“Did you like her?” asked Trudi.

“Yes, she was very friendly, very talkative, and I can see how she helped you through the loneliness while we were apart. As a matter of fact, she even helped me to gain a significantly better understanding of this situation,” said Murray.

“I’d like to hear it,” said Trudi.

“And you’ll soon understand how much I’d like to tell you about it,” said Murray, “I think that somehow, time travelling from the giant land from this one must be what reduced my size. It probably has something to do with my time travelling mind having interacted with the very moment in that time stream when I first passed through the portal with future you.”

“How do you know that that’s what did it?” asked Trudi.

“Because think of the second time I time travelled. It was only from two thirds of the way down your throat into your bedroom not far away, not through any portals, and only through a fraction of the amount of time being reversed. I came out on your pillow beside your beautiful sleeping face at exactly the same size that I was when I initiated the time travelling process in your throat,” said Murray.

“That makes sense,” said Trudi.

Neither of them knew that he had reduced in size the first time, because he’d passed through the period of time affected by the Ring of Reversal’s interaction with the radiation from Colleen Balfour’s shrinking devices. On the second occasion, he started off on the early side of that period of time, and only went further backwards. Not passing through another irradiated time stream, he wouldn’t have shrunken any more.

“So if somebody already on earth, not in the giant land, time travelled back, perhaps just a day or a few hours on earth, they wouldn’t have to worry about losing any of their size,” said Murray.

“But you’ve already exhausted your time travelling capacity. You can’t do it anymore,” said Trudi.

“I think that’s because my mental time travelling potential was reduced along with my size the first time,” said Murray, “I used up what little potential I had left, when I travelled that short bit the second time.”

“So you can’t do it again. We’ve known that for months,” said Trudi.

“But you can!” said Murray, “At least you could, if I taught you the technique. I studied Kayla’s old lecture notes from Sandra Corlani’s Time Class for weeks, before I met alternate future you and went to giant land. I remembered the technique for the whole two years. I could teach you, and then without shrinking yourself in the processs, you could probably time travel as many times as you wanted, without ever losing that ability.”

“So what are you saying? I mean, how has this given you a new perspective?” asked Trudi.

“Don’t you see? I can teach you the technique, and make sure you’ve understood it fully. It may take a few more than the rest of  these two weeks you’d allotted to me for our romance. Then, once you’ve got time travel mastered, you can go ahead and eat me all up, which for me will be as enjoyable as it will for you on those terms. Then you can time travel back, maybe just a day or two, or an hour before you ate me, and cook something else for your dinner, with me at your side again,” said Murray.

“I understand the theory, I suppose,” said Trudi.

“We can continue our romance from the moment that reversing that small period of time has brought me back out of your stomach,” said Murray.

“I don’t know...” said Trudi.

“Well you and Pandora talked about going back to Ireland to look for more leprechauns and eating them. You wouldn’t need to. If we do things this way, it means you’ll be able to eat me over and over again, for the next nine years. Just think of eating me and eating me again and eating me again, as many times as you like,” said Murray, “If I hadn’t thought of this, you’d have only been able to do it once.”

“I ... think it has potential to be a lot of nice dinners,” said Trudi, “And you’re confident that you can teach me this mental time travel technique.”

“I’ll be betting my own future on it,” said Murray, “If I don’t teach you well enough .... If you don’t manage to get it right, I won’t be returning from your stomach at all. So you can count on me to make a proper job of it.”

“Alright, my tasty teacher. I’m sold,” said Trudi.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t think of this before. It would have saved us both all those months of heartache and frustration,” said Murray.

It took her three weeks to master the technique. To test it without risking the teacher (who might be needed to provide further instruction if the test failed), Trudi spent the day playing board games with him in the house, using her own hands to move his pieces at his direction. Then she ate a large slice of ham for dinner.

After that, she time travelled back, and found herself standing over the kitchen bench, looking down at the slice of ham, right where she’d placed it in the third timeline. This was now their fourth.

“It worked,” she said to him, “We had another hour or so together at dinner time, and then I brought things back to here. I can still remember eating that ham, can still recall the taste of it on my tongue, only this time I haven’t eaten it yet, and it’s still here.”

“It’s quite a feeling the first time you do it, isn’t it?” said Murray, “And it’ll be the same when you’ve eaten me and then time travelled back. You’ll still remember the taste of me. You can even wait until some point after you’ve digested me, if you want to, and then reverse time. You’ll find me outside your mouth and tummy, undigested, with no memory of having been swallowed.”

“If I keep doing that, and keep on reversing time, then you’ll never have the memories of being eaten.”

“But I’ve got the memory of that one time I went most of the way down your throat and then time travelled out of it again. That will be burned in my mind in a very thrilling way forever,” said Murray.

“It must be the most vivid memory that you have, from any of the timelines,” said Trudi.

“And there’s no reason why you can’t put me into your mouth without swallowing me sometimes, with no need to reverse time at all. That way I’ll have some new tongue sliding adventures to remember. You could give me some more licks too,” said Murray.

“I’d be happy to,” said Trudi, “I suppose I’d better use the ham tonight, now that I’ve got it out and prepared it in both timelines. How do you feel about me having my first turn (that I’ll remember) of eating you tomorrow night?”

“I’ll be thinking about it with excitement and arousal all day tomorrow,” said Murray.

“You can be quite sure I will too,” said Trudi.

“Don’t forget that you’ll still need to have something else ready for an alternate dinner to eat after you’ve reversed time and brought me back,” said Murray, “Otherwise you’ll still feel hungry in the new timeline with me no longer being digested in your stomach.”

“I’ll remember,” said Trudi.

They had the most mutually happy night of their lives in bed, and an interlude of unqualified arousal in eachother’s company in her house the next day. When dinner time came, he looked up at her from the dinner table.

“You’ve already been through this once before,” she said, smiling affectionately down at him, “How do you feel on the second time out ... or in?”

“In a way I’m just sorry I won’t remember it. If I’d been able to continue time travelling after I escaped you in Ireland, I’d never have run away. I’d have stayed and let you eat me over and over again,” said Murray.

“Wouldn’t that have effectively stopped time from moving beyond the night I ate you?” asked Trudi.

“Well I’d let you eat me once, then time travel out, get away, let time move on for a while, and then let you catch me again. I don’t know exactly how we’d work it out. I guess I’d have to tell you what was going on, to help coordinate things,” said Murray.

“But I’d have lost all the memory of eating you each time. I’d never have gotten a memory to keep,” said Trudi, “Those memories are precious, not to be undone.”

“Yes, I guess you’re right. This way, I can keep my memories of being licked and placed in your mouth without being swallowed some times, and you can keep the memories of both that and the times you’ll actually eat me and then time travel back,” said Murray.

“Are you ready then?” asked Trudi.

“Under these conditions, I’ve been looking forward to it since I first thought it up the day Pandora was here,” said Murray.

She lifted him up, licked him twice, and then slid him into her mouth. She felt the sensation of him lying on her tongue, and then gulped and enjoyed the feeling of him sliding a little way down her throat.

Trudi savoured his presence there for a while, and then gulped again. He was carried down to her stomache in a wave of mutual ecstasy.

From Murray’s perspective he was back on the couch with her towards the end of the afternoon, after they’d finished their last board game and been talking for a while. He suddenly saw an unusual expression come into Trudi’s eyes.

“We’ve done it. It worked!” she said, “I’ve started a new timeline.”

“So you ate me okay then,” said Murray.

“Yes! Oh darling, you were wonderful in there. You’re brilliant!” she said.

“How long did you let the old timeline progress, before you came back?” asked Murray.

“I swallowed you, put the dishes away, watched a movie and went to bed. When I woke up in the morning, I felt hungry again. So I knew that you’d been well and truly digested in the night. Then I time travelled back to just now, and here we are. It looks like round two of tonight’s dinner will be pork for two,” said Trudi.

“Can I have some licks that I will remember first?”

“By all means,” said Trudi.

She held him in front of her mouth, put out her tongue and slid it over his sholders and neck and face a number of times.

“Do you want to go in there for a while?” she asked him.

“I’d love to,” said Murray, “And you know how to bring time back again, if the urge to gulp me down again overwhelms you.”

“It just might,” said Trudi.

She let him climb into her mouth and lie down in comfort on her tongue.

With the memories of having eaten him on the previous timeline still fresh in her memory, and the current pleasing taste of him lying on her tongue, she decided to continue this timeline without swallowing him. She opened her mouth and beckoned him out with a wave of her finger, took him to the kitchen, prepared their dinner, and sat and ate with him.

It was finally the best of both worlds for both partners.

The next time she ate him, he asked her about the last events of the previous timeline. It had become a subject of fascination for him, to hear about what she’d been doing while he’d been digested in her stomach, or to hear about having been brought back the moment he’d reached her stomach.

“So how long was I gone this time?” he asked.

“Nine years,” said Trudi.

“Nine ... years. Do you mean that you ate me that time, planning to live the whole nine years out with me long since digested, and then time travel back and live those nine years out again, after you brought me back?” asked Murray.

“It could be the secret of perpetual youth,” said Trudi, “But I won’t do that again. It would get rather boring to keep living the same nine years, over and over,” said Trudi.

“And you wouldn’t have my company then either,” said Murray.

“No, I wouldn’t,” said Trudi.

“Tonight while we’re in bed, and tomorrow, I’m looking forward to hearing in great detail about everything you did and experienced in those nine years in the previous timeline,” said Murray.

He found her long dissertation to be very interesting, and in some way arousing, knowing that she had spent nine years living in anticipation of the day she would travel back in time and see him again as though she’d never parted from him.

Science was a mysterious commodity. In the weeks leading up to the commencement of the timeline which had gone on for nine years, Trudi had, countless tims, eaten Murray Jensen (a young man whose first journey back through the period of time affected by the Ring of Reversal had caused him to permanently shrink). Each time, after eating him, she had made short mental journeys back in time. Murray’s repeated digested or semi-digested presence in her stomach had functioned like a chronal anti-toxin. The result was that Trudi was one time traveller who was able to pass back through the period of time affected by the Ring of Reversal, with an immunity to the more typically encountered side effect of shrinking. This meant that she had been able to live out nine years of normal time after eating Murray, and then time travel back through the Reversal affected period, without absorbing any of the interactive radiation from Colleen  Balfour’s shrinking devices. She had a special gift, and was unaware of it, as Murray’s ‘new perspective’ had incorrectly attributed his own shrinking outcome to having resulted from time travelling back from the giant land’s widow’s kitchen through the forest portal.

One evening, after several more rounds of being eaten and then brought back by time travel, he was carried out to the kitchen bench as usual, where he saw a medium sized pavlova sitting on the bench, and a bowl of strawberries beside it.

She gently lifted him up and lowered him into the pavlova, so that he stood with his neck and head still above the surface.

“This is your best recipe for me yet,” said Murray, “It feels very comfortable, and I visually like the sensation of being surrounded by white sticky stuff. You’ll be sending me into orbit, when you’re licking it off me too.”

“I’ll be sending you somewhere, anyway,” said Trudi.

“Yes, your mouth and tummy, of course. But I think I’ll still be in orbit on the way there,” said Murray.

Trudi began pulling the stalks off the strawberries and placing them onto the pavlova in various positions, discarding the stalks into the same bowl. Soon the strawberries bowl was full of stalks, and the pavlova bowl was full of pavlova and strawberries and Murray.

Trudi walked off to the pantry cupboard, and came back with a can of whipped cream. She pulled the lid off, and put her right index finger down on the spray nozzle. She put the tip of her left hand’s index finger up to the end of the nozzle, and pressed the nozzle gently with her right index finger. Soon she had a small blob of whipped cream from the can on her left index finger.

“I won’t get any on your eyes or your nose and mouth,” said Trudi.

“Sure, that’s fine with me,” said Murray.

He saw her left finger approaching slowly, and then she gently dabbed a bit of the cream on his left cheek, and then on his right cheek.

“Was that okay?” she asked.

“Yes, you missed all the vital viewing and breathing organs,” said Murray, and looked around to the side of the bench, “The only thing is that pavlova by itself isn’t very filling or nourishing, even with the strawberries.”

“Well you’re in there too,” said Trudi.

She raised her left finger to her mouth and licked the remaining cream from it.

“Oh boy it looked thrilling when you just did that!” said Murray, “But I was talking about the alternate dinner for the next timeline. Pavlova and strawberries on their own are just dessert. You forgot to put out a main course.”

“Did I?” said Trudi.

Murray looked around the bench once more, but couldn’t see anything else.

“Well it’s what we usually do. Otherwise, if you bring us back to just before you put me in the pavlova, you’ll be starting the next timeline with no meat to give you a balanced dinner,” said Murray.

“I don’t think I need any more timelines,” said Trudi.

“Well how else are we going to keep doing it?” asked Murray.

“We’ve never really done it the first time,” said Trudi, “Not if it keeps getting invalidated by time travel each time after I’ve swallowed you.”

“But I explained all that before I started teaching you. The way it works is that you have all the memories of doing it, and then you bring us back to before you did it,” said Murray.

“Which means that, ever since we started playing these games, you’ve never really faced up to your fate, because you know it will only be temporary,” said Trudi.

“If you did it permanently, without reversing time, then you’d never be able to do it again,” said Murray.

“I had nine years to think about it, not that many timelines ago,” said Trudi, “I’m every bit as romantic as you are, and I always have been. A lady really only needs one set of memories, especially if they’re happy ones. I don’t really need to be pouring the memories of more and more alternate timelines into my mind, and then trying to focus that already crowded mind on the task of initiating yet another timeline too. I think I’m ready to let time resume a more natural course.”

“Well okay. I’ve grown to like being these meals of yours. I’ll miss it, but are you sure your mind won’t be too crowded to bring me back, before you let time roll on uninterrupted?” asked Murray.

“It won’t be an issue. I’ll be letting time roll on uninterrupted from the moment I last brought us back and started the timeline we’re living in now,” said Trudi.

“Oh ... I can’t believe you’d still do this to me, after I’ve given you every viable alternative,” said Murray.

Completely unmoved, she positioned the can above the pavlova and sprayed whipped cream all around him, partly covering each of the strawberries and about half of the pavlova’s surface.

“You were saving yourself, and as I told you before any of our recent collective time tinkering efforts, I don’t have any need to assist you in that endeavour,” said Trudi, “Your lessons have given me a lot of half finished meals and a full nine year do-over. I got through those nine years without you the first time, and I’m sure I’ll do fine in the replay. My time with romancing you and playing time tricks on us both doesn’t need to go on any longer. You’ve been a chapter of my life that has made for a unique and interesting interlude. Now it’s time for me to start the next chapter. In order for me to do that, you’ll need to make the journey down to my inner realm without using time travel to book a return trip,” said Trudi.

“I suppose I’m just a stickler for meticulously making bookings,” said Murray.

“I’m at ease with its effect on you, and quite resigned to it. I’ll be celebrating that resolve with the meal that surrounds and includes you in a few minutes’ time. I didn’t tell you about it any sooner, because it wouldn’t have been helpful to give you any more warning. You’d have just spent the whole time worrying about and put me through all those protestations and alternative suggestions again. I don’t think either of us needed to go through that one more time. It’s the one thing we’ve done so many times without having it lost in a time travelling gesture. Let’s just go out to the table and enjoy it one last, and in one sense, one first time.”

She put the lid back on the spray can and put it away. Then she picked up the pavlova bowl in both hands and carried it out to the dining table. He looked up at her facial detachment and tried to concentrate on bringing about one more time travel effort of his own. Nothing happened.

He could see that she had already set the table with a spoon and a napkin. So there was no chance of him attempting to get off the table and make a run for it while she was making a nonesuch return to the kitchen. He watched her sit down, pick up the spoon, dig it into the pavlova right under a strawberry, scooping both fruit and sugary dessert up. He saw her tongue come out of her mouth to recieve the spoon’s contents, and thought she looked more stunningly beautiful than he’d ever seen her before.

He watched her untroubled efforts with the spoon many more times, until there was nothing but a bit of pavlova and cream stuck to his body. She passed the spoon under him, and he slipped backwards and lay down on it, and watched her raising it to her lips. He saw her tongue come out of her mouth at point blank range and lick the remaining dessert elements from his body, before her free hand lifted him off the spoon, so that she could lick the cream from his sides and behind him as well. She turned him front on and licked him again, put down the spoon, and held him in her free hand. Replacing the spoon with a glass of water, her other hand raised it to her mouth. He watched the elegant movement of her neck as she gulped down a full glass of water in less than fifteen seconds.

“Does everything look all clean and shiny in there now?” she asked, and opened her mouth wide in front of him.

“Yes, and sparkly in the case of your tongue,” said Murray.

“And have you accepted that all your scientific techniques and tricks have run their course, and that your time has really come?” she asked, with an arousingly intelligent look in her eyes.

“Yes, my dear Protrudi,” said Murray softly, “I guess I have.”

“PRO-Trudi,” she said, “Are you resorting to indefensible insults now?”

“I’d never use any insults on you. You know that we always make jokes and puns when you’re about to eat me. I’ve just had several of the best views of your tongue PROTRUD-ing. So you’re my beautiful Protrudi,” said Murray, watching her radiant smile returning as she understood the pun, “I wasn’t insulting you, and yes of course I’ve accepted that this is my last chapter.”

“That’s what I meant, when I said that we hadn’t really done it the first time, not like this. In the next few minutes, you’re going to face the effects of being really, irreversibly and conclusively eaten,” said Trudi, “Doesn’t that add a huge new element of excitement to the whole experience, one which simply wasn’t there before?”

“There’s still one hope I can hold out for the next few minutes,” said Murray, “After you’ve had all those other chapters in your life, maybe when you’re in your sixties, you might miss your youth, and you could time travel back and start all over again.”

“I don’t know if I’ll feel like that when the time comes,” said Trudi, “It’s decades into the future that you’re talking about, much further even than the future in which you met me when I was in my late thirties. Maybe I’ll want to keep on going.”

“Well it doesn’t make any difference to me how long you let an old timeline continue, before time travelling back and starting a new one,” said Murray, “It’s not as if I’d be waiting all those decades for you to do it. I’d just end up in the new timeline, without any knowledge even of this meal having taken place now.”

“I can’t say whether I’ll want to relive my youth in a new timeline or not,” said Trudi, “But I can promise you one thing. If I do decide to relive my youth, it will have to start again tomorrow morning. I wouldn’t be coming back to a point in time before my digestive processes will have permanently welcomed you into my inner self some time in the night ahead. This meal will  remain unchanged, whether I remember it in one lifelong timeline, or two or even more.”

“Wow!” said Murray.

“So now I’ll ask you the question again: Does knowing that immutable fact add any new element of excitement to this final instalment of our five month interlude, that wasn’t in your thoughts on any of the previous times we’ve talked about me gobbling you all down?”

“I can’t deny it,” said Murray.

“Well now that you at last have that fully in perspective, in you go,” said Trudi.

“She licked him again with a tongue that was no longer tainted with any whipped cream, and then opened her mouth wide and fed him into it. This time she gave him fifteen minutes of lying on her tongue, so that both of them could fully appreciate the ramifications of the gulping which was soon to follow.

Then she started, and he found himself sliding into her throat. This was the first time that he had a sense of finality, since the last second or so before he’d first thought of time travelling out of her throat back in Ireland on the night of her first attempt to eat him.”

For weeks, Murray had managed to engineer a reversible version of these events, but this time, it was the last time, and she wasn’t in the least bit uncomfortable with being the instigator of this outcome.

She gulped again and again, and he reached her stomach with a whole new outlook on the rapidly approaching ending of their incredible saga together.

It was only after he had been digested for the last time, that she told Pandora the whole story of how Murray had proposed the idea of using time travel to eat him temporarily. Pandora marvelled at the way he had taken inspiration from his conversation with her in order to come up with that option. Trudi completed her full account of everything, including the time she’d lived through the full nine years of her singleness, before time travelling back and telling Murray that she’d left things that way for that long.

“You could always time travel back at any point down the track and bring him back again,” said Pandora, “I suppose you might change your mind.”

Trudi smiled in a friendly manner.

“I don’t think I will,” said Trudi, “I might time travel back a day or two here and there, now that he’s long since been digested. But I don’t want to keep reliving portions of my life. He was here. I enjoyed it. He loved me. I loved him too, but I also wanted to eat him, and now I’ve done it properly for once, and he’s gone. I’ve got plenty more to do and see in this world. He understood that, and in the end, he simply resigned himself to his inevitable fate with a realistic outlook.”

“You sure had some fun with it,” said Pandora, “I don’t suppose you’d be able to teach me that time travel technique too. It could be useful the next time Bob forgets to turn the hose off in the garden. Water rates are always going up.”

Trudi laughed.

“I’ve always looked up to you, but I think it’s best if that secret stays with me. If anyone else knew about it, I’d always be worried that some part of my life might be reversed by somebody else, without even consulting me. I guess I also don’t know for an absolute certainty that you wouldn’t ever think of using the techique to save Murray,” said Trudi.

“I wouldn’t do that to you, but it might give me a way to trap a leprechaun or someone else myself,” said Pandora.

Trudi and Pandora occasionally caught up with eachother over the years, as time moved on without any more of it being reset. They took two Irish holidays together, but never caught any leprechauns. They never even got into a situation where time travel would have given Trudi the foreknowledge to take a leprechaun by surprise. Nonetheless, she enjoyed walking in the Irish sunshine, frequently recalling the night she’d finally eaten Murray.

Pandora’s daughter Reba (from her eight year dating relationship when she was in her thirties) grew up, and married an Australian called Mick when she turned 21. Reba went to live with Mick in Sydney, Australia. When Reba was almost 24, she and her husband learned about the Upsizing program, while Mick was out of work. Being a graduate from the Green Carpet College, he soon learned of the G.R.O.W.T.H. agency, and its promise to Upsize any gold from converted financial assets so much, that it would even be worth a fortune in the giant land.

Mick and Reba decided to move to the Upsizing colony, and make use of the abundant wealth of their share of the upsized gold in order to start a family.

They told Pandora and her boyfriend of 19 years Bob Worth, that they were going to be moving to another location, and that it required a lot of explanation which could only be given in person, if Bob and Pandora were going to take steps to enable Pandora to see her future grandchildren.

So Bob and Pandora came to visit Mick and Reba at their Sydney home.

“I’m turning sixty soon,” said Pandora, “It will be nice to have grandchildren, but where could you be moving to that would be so hard to visit?”

“It’s in another dimension,” said Reba, and explained the entire Upsizing program to her.

“And you’re going to become giants and live there,” said Pandora.

“When we sell this house and spend it on gold and then have that upsized, it’ll be worth an endless fortune up there,” said Reba, “You can visit there any time at your normal size, but I thought you’d like to be able to interact with any grandchildren we give you, by being the same proportionate size that they are. They’ll be born as giants too.”

“If you’re asking me to become a giant and move into that colony too, I’d like nothing more,” said Pandora, “I’ve certainly got the wealth to convert to gold to pay for everything, once they make the gold bigger of course. So has Bob. We could each buy houses up there.”

“The colony now has some builders up there. So new houses are being built for people who use their gold to pay for it,” said Reba, “But there is a less disruptive way to continue your present home lives up there. The Upsizing technology can simply teleport your entire houses to the giant land. You and Bob could just keep the houses you live in now, but they’ll be Upsized along with you two, as long as you’ve got other assets to convert to a small bit of gold.”

“We both have more than enough,” said Pandora, “Let us pay the Upsizing people to upsize your house too. Then you won’t have to sell it.”

“Mum that’s very generous. It’s really great. Dad would have been the only problem grandfather if he didn’t want to join the program, but since we lost him ....” said Reba.

“You don’t have to say anything,” said Pandora, “I’ve had my own dreams about becoming a giant for my own reasons for the last ten and a half years. We’ll work out all the details together, and soon we’ll leave the troubled economies of Australia and the United States behind us.”

Mick and Bob went off to the pool room to play billiards, while Pandora stayed in the room to continue talking to Reba.

“Why did you want to become a giant all these years anyway?” asked Reba.

“It started with an amazing story I heard over ten years ago,” said Pandora, “Bob was directing an episode of ‘Romance Hotel’. You were still at school, and living with your father most of the time. Bob held a cast and crew dinner party after filming completed on that episode, and one of the cast was Trudi Northumberland. Remember her from ‘Mountains Family’?”

“Sure. I grew up on the later seasons, and then the reruns of the early episodes,” said Reba.

“Well Trudi and I became instant friends, and she told me a lot. It seems that there’s another way into that giant land, or at least into another part of it, that involves a portal in an Irish forest. Trudi and some young man she met in Ireland are aware of that portal and told me about it. It can’t be anywhere near the Upsizing program though, because Trudi didn’t know anything about an Upsizing colony or any of what you’ve told me today.”

“I guess the distance up there is relatively easier for the giants to traverse than it would be for us to get to Ireland,” said Reba, “But if that’s how far away the access points are on earth, then there must be a corresponding distance between them in the giant land. There’s a portal that runs from West Lindfield bush to the gardens of the giant offices of the G.R.O.W.T.H. agency too, but we mainly use the teleportation part of their technology to travel between worlds.”

“Well I’d have wanted to go through that Irish portal, but only if there’d been some way for me to become a giant,” said Pandora, leaving out everything Trudi had told her about time travelling and leprechauns and Murray’s major shrinking episode.

“So you wanted to move there anyway?” asked Reba.

“Well I wanted to become a giant, and that would have been the only place to do it,” said Pandora, “The reason is that something Trudi told me gave me the idea that it would be one of the best treats of my life to be able to eat a normal sized man whole. I don’t mean Bob, but I wouldn’t want him to know about something he probably wouldn’t approve of. I’ve got plenty of time to find someone else who doesn’t know about Bob either, invite him to meet me in the giant land without being Upsized, and then I’ll tell him why I’ve brought him there.”

“I wonder how he’ll react, when he hears that,” said Reba.

“Once he’s in that situation, he’ll just have to accept the fact that I’m going to eat him. So your family planning works in with my previously hopeless dreams rather well,” said Pandora.

“Mom, that’s really something!” said Reba, “Well I always keep secrets we’ve shared as mother and daughter, even from Dad when he was around. I won’t tell Mick or Bob what you’re planning. I do feel a bit sorry for whoever that younger man turns out to be though.”

“He won’t know about it until he doesn’t have to wait that long for it to be all over with,” said Pandora, “I’ll have the whole time to look forward to it, while he thinks he’s courting me.”

“I guess he can enjoy that part of it as well,” said Reba.

“Well if the destination is an Upsizing colony best accessed from Sydney, Australia, then I’d better do my manhunting right here,” said Pandora, “Bob’s going back to the States in a few days for short directing engagement. Then he’ll stop taking on jobs and help with working things out over here. Can your Upsizing process really move our house from all the way over in the States up to the giant land?”

“I asked them about that, because I wanted to know before I brought up this move with you, Amanda and Megan both assured me that the teleportation screen can bring something from anywhere on earth to the giant land,” said Reba.

“Then I think I’ll give Bob some instructions and written authorities about winding up our financial affairs over in the United States. Then when he comes back here with the gold we need, we can have your friends Upsize it and finalize our arrangements with them,” said Pandora.

When Bob had left Sydney, Pandora got up early one morning, and took a train to North Sydney station, with a view for taking the Lavender Bay walk that Reba had recommended. As Pandora came up the station steps, she saw a very handsome and very young man handing out paper catalogs. She made sure to walk in his direction, and accepted one of the handouts. She stopped and browsed through it, and then put 39 years of film star charm to work.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever need any of the things advertised in here,” she said, “But I’d love to purchase a good lunch for you instead.”

“Have we met before?” asked the young man, in a friendly manner, “I’m Lennox.”

“If I seem familiar, I’m Pandora Montague. You’ve most likely seen me on ‘Marriage Ain’t Easy’. My daughter tells me it’s rerun almost endlessly here.”

“Of course! You played the wife! So that’s why you’re so pretty,” said Lennox, reaching out to the right to hand catalogs to other passing passengers who had alighted from trains.

She blushed and smiled.

“That was in my 30s. I’m turning sixty soon,” said Pandora.

“I’ll soon be 25. It was around ten years ago, that I was channel surfing one morning in the school holidays, and came in early in a black and white episode of ‘Marriage Ain’t Easy’,” said Lennox.

“You remember it after all those years!” said Pandora.

“As soon as I saw you, I watched it every day until school went back.”

“That would have been from one of the first two seasons,” said Pandora, “What time do you finish?”

“As soon as the morning transit peak hour is over. It’s the only work I could get in these economically difficult days. I’ll use my professional qualifications when the right break through comes along, but for now, it’s handing out these on stations. I’m supposed to clock off at nine am,” said Lennox, “I finish up on the station at 8:45 and then hand whatever I haven’t distributed back to the company around the corner. Then I’m free for the rest of the day. I can meet you back here at ten past nine.”

“I was on my way to try the Lavender Bay walk. It looks like I’ll still have two and a half hours to do that. So I’ll see you then,” said Pandora, taking a notepad from her handbag. She licked her finger to turn over the first page, which had something written on it already, and then took out a pen and wrote her telephone number on the next page, tore it out and gave it to him.

“Thanks I’ll tell you mine, if you want to write it down too,” said Lennox, and dictated his number while she wrote it in her notebook.

“I prefer to trust certainty over serendipity,” she said, “Now at least one of us will always be able to contact the other. Until ten past nine then.”

She walked away and turned the corner to head down through a passageway between buildings which led to a lower street. Finding a similar such passage in the form of wide steps, she walked down them, through a tunnel under the old disused Lavender Bay railway line, and then looked out at Sydney Harbour from the Lavender Bay side. Lennox had looked dashing, debonair, gorgeous, and absolutely mouth watering. He wasn’t out of her mind for a moment, despite the beauty of the scenery. Pandora walked around the Bay for two hours, and then made her way back up to the top of the stairs. On the right, she saw a restaurant, and looked through the front window to find that it had an excellent view of the Harbour from a higher vantage point than the ground she’d been walking on before. She walked inside.

“Do I need to make a booking for lunch?” she asked.

“It’s not compulsory, but you have a better chance of securing seats if you do,” said the waitress.

“Would it be possible to book two seats by the far window, looking out onto the Harbour?” asked Pandora.

“I know that one table up there’s already taken. But you can have the other,” said the waitress, “What time are you planning to have lunch?”

“Around twelve noon. There’ll be a young man with me,” said Pandora.

“Here’s our card with our number, if you need to cancel the booking,” said the waitress.

It seemed that, in the last twenty years, none or next to none of the movies and television appearances she had done since finishing ‘Marriage Ain’t Easy’ had been shown on Australian television. The waitress hadn’t recognised her as a celebrity actress, which left her a certain refreshing anonymity in Sydney. The considered that this might well be useful in avoiding any undue interest being shown in her, while she was engaged in luring a much younger man away to a giant land and eating him up for one of her earliest meals in that place. She noted the restaurant’s telephone number in her phone, in case she needed to cancel the booking. It was just possible that her young fan might prefer a different venu.

She made her way back towards North Sydney Station, but saw Lennox coming out of an office building in Miller Street, which brought them together at the traffic lights intersection. There was no need to walk back down to the station now.

She reflected on her appearance. She had a light brown medium length skirt, and a long white frilly shirt. Her hair was cut short these days, which was what had made it harder for Lennox to recognise her straight away. Her skin and facial features had held up well, but she had always had long hair in the sitcom he’d seen as well as the next 12 or so years of movies and television programs she’d been in. She hadn’t started cutting it short until she’d known Trudi for a few years and realised that, unlike the younger woman, Pandora now wanted to change her appearance a little.

“I took a chance that it would be worth booking a restaurant that looks out on Lavender Bay and Sydney Harbour,” said Pandora, “But I kept their number, so that I can ring and cancel if you’d rather go somewhere else.”

“It sounds like a very nice spot,” said Lennox.

They walked around North Sydney for a few hours first, with Lennox taking the lead on showing her through the shops and landmarks that he hoped would appeal to an American tourist. A long wide circuit eventually brought them to the Lavender Bay restaurant, where they sat at the table, each facing side on to the window, so that they could look out at the Harbour, as well as looking across at eachother.

“Don’t worry about Dutch treating me or anything. I’ve had 35 more years to be doing very well, and your country’s economy hasn’t been very kind to you. My son-in-law’s been out of work for ages,” said Pandora, “Lunch is entirely on me. Order anything that strikes you as one of your potential favourites, anything and everything.”

“That’s very kind of you indeed. I’ve only had this job a few days, and it’s temp work from an agency. As soon as all the catalogs are gone, the work runs out. So I know how your son-in-law ...”

“Mick, and my daughter’s Reba,” said Pandora.

“I know how Mick feels,” said Lennox.

“I know that many of us are filling up our otherwise unproductive periods by writing autobiographies these days, but I’m still getting enough screen time to keep me busy,” said Pandora, “Do you know much about my personal history?”

“I’ve seen you in those holiday reruns of ‘Marriage Ain’t Easy’, but you’ve never been on ‘This is Your Life’ or any personal documentary shows, have you?”

“No, and from what I’ve seen of the Sydney TV guide in my daughter’s newspaper, you won’t have had the chance to see any of my movies here either. I dated one man when I was 21-22, another when I was 23-29 or 30. Then I met the producer of ‘Marriage Ain’t Easy’ and really fell in love like never before, just as we were starting the show. It ran eight years, and we had a real life daughter during the sixth season. We broke up a few years later, and so I’m a single mother with a daughter your age.”

It was technically true, given that she had spent 19 years dating Bob without marrying him.

“No you’re not,” he said, lifting a tiny prawn out of his bowl of seafood with his finger and thumb and holding it up to her mouth, “Season six came out a year after I was born.”

Her eyes beamed affectionately at his humourous flattery, as her mouth opened to accept his prawn. While trying to make it look as though she was merely doing her best to eat something proffered by his finger instead of her own, she slid the top of her tongue gently under his finger, until he turned it a little and let the prawn fall onto the middle of her tongue, and then slid the front of it back into her mouth, maintaining the contact with the soft feel of his finger as long as she could credibly do so.

The prawn was a delicacy that did not rate very high in comparison to the first taste that she had experienced from that exercise. She knew that this was the one. There was no need to do any more hunting, unless this one couldn’t be persuaded to come to a giant land with her.

She had to persuade him! He was the most delicious and appetising thing he’d ever tasted. Whatever the waitress brought to her table was merely an appetiser for the meal towards which Pandora was ultimately working.

Lennox didn’t seem to have shown any uncomfortable reactions to her tongue’s approach to the receiving of his prawn.

“Thank you, both for prawn and compliment,” she said, “Mick and Reba have decided to move to another land, and one that’s accessible through an interdimensional portal of some sort which is only seven stations down your line and a walk into the bush behind the back streets of West Lindfield. The economic prospects for Mick will be much better than here. I’ve decided to move into their new area too.”

“So there’s actually another dimension, with a portal leading into one of the lesser explored parts of the North Shore,” said Lennox, “I can hardly believe it.”

“You would if I took you there,” said Pandora, “But that’s not all there is about the place that will be hard to believe. Many people from your North Shore and a few other places have started a colony there. My daughter told me all about it. People have had their entire houses, lock stock and barrel, all teleported into the other dimension, and enjoyed its abundance of land and prosperity. Mick and Reba have asked me to move in there too, to be near my grandchildren which I’ll have in the years ahead. As soon as I saw you, I knew I wanted you to come with me.”

And there it was, just like that, everything laid out for him, just as she’d rehearsed it many times, but with the last page of the script left unread. The young man obviously liked her, which was heightened by him having seen her on television for the first time a little over a year into his adolesence. She’d been leading up to telling him the last fact about the other world, namely that it was populated by native giants and Upsized earthlings. Suddenly she’d made the instant call to leave out that one rather large detail, until he was there at a time when she had become one of those Upsized earthlings. There seemed to be no need to make it any more complicated than that.

“A good looking celebrity and a chance to move to a better world, and the way things are going, I won’t even have to quit my job. How could I say no to that?” said Lennox.

She smiled affectionately.

“Well .... if you’re already sure you want to come, I can show you where the portal is and tell you when and where to meet us,” said Pandora, “My daughter already knows the location of the portal. She can take you there some time before the day, and show you where the portal is. Then you can go back there by yourself and walk through at the prearranged time. I’ll have to fly back to the States, and make sure that I’m in my house, when teleporter collects it and me. Reba and Mick will be picked up by the teleporter along with their Sydney home too.”

She had just bought him an expensive lunch in a waterfront restaurant and offered him the way to a much better sounding world. It was unlikely that he would ask questions about not being able to be in her house at the time of the teleporter’s use on it. It would have involved her paying for an expensive flight to take him over to the United States, where he presumed she would have been living all these years as an American actress. He would guess that Mick and Reba needed their privacy, and that the portal was the best way for him to go.

“I don’t anticipate any problems,” said Lennox, “How soon are you planning the move?”

“It will be some time in the next few weeks, probably the third week,” said Pandora, “We’ll be able to see eachother again for our last look at Sydney before I fly back to the States. If you can be available for another lunch tomorrow, I’d like my daughter to meet you.”

“Well I can, but maybe we should go somewhere that doesn’t charge like this place,” said Lennox, “I can’t keep taking advantage of you, and I’m getting by on three hours’ casual wages a day.”

“You’re not taking advantage of me. I invited you today as my guest, and I’m doing the same for you tomorrow. All you have to do is come,” said Pandora warmly.

“Well thank you.... It’s a date then,” said Lennox.

“I’ll give you a call tonight or in the morning, once Reba and I have chosen a restaurant,” said Pandora.

They finished their seafood, and then she started eating sorbet for dessert, having ordered a bowl for each of them. She made sultry gestures as she spooned each mouthful onto her tongue, and hoped that he was enjoying them in some way. When the meal was over, she paid the bill, and they stepped out into the street.

The young man inched his hand into hers, and she took it gently and walked with him, until they got back to the station. Both of them were heading up the North Shore line by train. So  they were able to sit together until Pandora got off at Artarmon, to go to Mick and Reba’s Lane Cove home.

The next day, Lennox prepared to go to the restaurant which Reba had chosen in Lane Cove. It had outdoor tables in the mall. So Lennox caught the train to Artarmon Station, and a bus from there to Lane Cove.

Mother and daughter were already there waiting.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Reba, offering a handshake as Pandora beckoned him to sit down, “Mom told me how you met eachother, and you shouldn’t feel bad about your job. Mick hasn’t had any work for ages. We’ve thought long and hard, and we know this move to the colony is a good idea.”

They made their orders, all on a bill which Pandora would consider to be a worthwhile investment, considering the return it would bring in the form of a far more extravagant meal once she reached the giant land. They talked and ate together for nearly two hours. Pandora had explained to Reba the night before, that she had not told Lennox about the giant size that would be adopted by all of them ... except for Lennox. Reba didn’t mention the word ‘Upsizing’ in full even once during the entire course of the lunch date. When it began to slip out once, she quickly turned it into ‘upsydaisy!’ and produced an artificial sneezing fit. By the time she’d stopped coughing, Lennox would not have remembered the poorly iterated impromptu exclamation.

Shortly before two o’clock, Pandora’s mobile phone rang. It was Bob, calling to update her on his resolution of their United States financial affairs.”

“I have to speak to this man. He’s handling the conversion of my finances into gold to pay for my transition to the colony, and Reba’s and Mick’s too,” said Pandora, briskly getting up and walking away from the table, so that Lennox would not realise that she was talking to a boyfriend of nineteen years and counting.

Reba had guessed who the caller was and the reason for her mother’s desire to take the call wihout Lennox overhearing it. She didn’t want to tell him about her mother’s boyfriend, but having met him, she knew she had to tell him something. Here was a man one year older than her, at the outset of his life. He had told her mother the day before, that meeting her was the closest thing to a romantic relationship that he’d ever had. He seemed like such a nice guy, and to be set up to first have his heart broken and then soonafter be eaten alive by her mother just didn’t seem fair. She loved her mother with the family loyalty of any young woman, but in this case she saw something else at stake that had to take precedence.

“I have to tell you something,” said Reba, “You can’t go to meet Mom in the other dimension. She’s planned something for you that she hasn’t told you about.”

“I don’t mind surprises, and she’s already been the best surprise I’ve ever had this week,” said Lennox.

“I know. I can see how much you like her. She’s lovely, but she’s going to be different in that world. Part of the process of moving to the colony means turning into someone as big as one of the native giants of that world. You’ll be no bigger than her second smallest finger by comparison when you get there. She’s planning for Mick and me and herself and Bob to become giants, but not you.”

“Who’s Bob?” asked Lennox, now aware that there was somebody in their dimension hopping entourage that he had not met yet.

“He’s been her boyfriend for the last 19 years,” said Reba, “Both Bob’s house and hers will be enlarged, or Upsized as it’s technically called, once they’ve been teleported into the giant land by technology managed from giant offices in the giant land. The portal comes out in the garden outside the giant office building.”

“If she was just looking for an affair with a younger man, while her long term boyfriend’s still back in the states, then why not just have it here in Sydney? She must have a very good reason for wanting to uproot me from my home town and meet up with me in a land of earth made giants,” said Lennox.

“She has a very powerfully motivating reason, and I can no longer see fit to honour her desire for me to keep it secret from you,” said Reba.

“Well I’m very eager to hear it,” said Lennox, wondering if she was planning to leave her boyfriend Bob, once they were settled into their new location.

“Once she’s settled into her house after it’s been Upsized, she’ll collect you at the office garden portal, and take you to her house. She’ll be friendly enough to you for a while, but then she plans to tell you her real objective in all of this, the thing she’s really wanted all along, the reason she told me she was going to look for a younger man while she was still in Sydney,” said  Reba.

“And what’s that objective then?” asked Lennox.

“She’s going to eat you ... whole ... just like that. She’ll put you onto her dining table, sit down in comfort, place you into her mouth for long enough to savour the experience, and then she’ll swallow you alive. I’ve thought for days that I could let that happen to someone for the sake of her enjoyment of it, but I can’t, especially not a guy who seems as nice as you,” said Reba.

“I guess I can’t find a way to thank you for telling me that,” said Lennox.

“You’ll have to let her think you’re going ahead with it, until she’s been Upsized and can’t come back here and look for another young guy to take by surprise instead of you,” said Reba, “If she knew I told you, she wouldn’t hold it against me. I’m her only child, and the most precious person in her life. It’s the next guy I’m worried about. You’ve got to let her think you’re going through with it, right up until she’s Upsized. Then you just avoid the dinner time surprise she’s got planned for you, by not turning up through the portal on the day. I couldn’t bear to think of her doing that to you, and knowing that Mick and I are responsible for her becoming a giantess to do it in the first place.”

“She’s coming back,” said Lennox quietly, “And it looks like she’s finished the phone call. We’d better make small talk.”

Pandora sat back down at the table.

“All sorted out,” she said, “Do either of you two want anything else?”

“Nothing for me,” said Lennox, as affably as he could, now that he was reminded in the most unique way it could have been done of the old addage that there was no such thing as a free lunch.

“I’m full too, Mom,” said Reba, “But I can drive Lennox back to the station on a round trip to taking us both back to our place. It’ll save him from having to wait for the bus.”

“I won’t say no to that,” said Lennox, doing his best to conceal the plethora of mixed emotions that were going through his head.

Two afternoons later, he got an sms text message on his phone from Pandora.

“You haven’t returned my calls for days. I can understand if the appeal of meeting a celebrity is declining in her middle age, but if that’s it, could you at least tell me in person.”

He thought for a few minutes, and then texted her back:

“Sorry, it’s not that you’re any less lovely to me. I’ve needed to think a bit more about moving to another dimension. There’s a cafe near a station, with a very nice atmosphere, where we could meet and talk about it ... and let me treat you this time.”

He pressed send, to give her time to read that message while he was writing the address of the cafe, and then sent it in another text message.

A few minutes later, she sent a reply:

“I can be there in an hour, if that time works for you.”

He sent one more back:

“It does. I’ll see you then, pretty lady.”

He got to the cafe first, acquired a table for two beside an attractive looking indoor plant, and waited for Pandora to arrive, perusing the menu.

She came in and sat down.

“I’d already had an early dinner before you returned my sms,” she said.

“Are you sure? I can afford this, and it would be nice to do it. It would mean something to me,” said Lennox.

“I could eat a lot of dessert then,” she said, “Something with plenty of cream and pastry.”

“See what you like in the menu,” said Lennox.

She looked through it for a few minutes, and then said, “I think that apple turnover will give me all the cream and pastry I feel like.”

He waved his hand for the wandering waitress who was looking for people ready to give their orders.

“For the lady, an apple turnover” he said, and paused for the waitress to write it down, “and I’m having satay beef kebabs, a side salad, and for dessert, a family size serving of lemon roulade.”

“It’ll be ready in about twenty minutes,” said the waitress, and walked away.

“That’s quite an order. You can certainly eat,” said Pandora.

“It seems that so can you,” said Lennox.

She looked a little uncomfortable, and briefly thought of the time that Reba and Lennox had been talking by themselves in Lane Cove Mall.

“Are you sure it’s just the big move that you’ve been thinking about the last two days?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you all about it, but can you promise me that you won’t be upset with me or anyone else if I do.”

“On my word,” said Pandora.

Reba, she thought. Pandora remembered the time she’d first mentioned what she was planning to do upon becoming Upsized. Reba had said she felt sorry for the as yet unknown young man that Pandora would select. Well, she’d never turned on her daughter before, and she’d just effectively promised Lennox that she wouldn’t now.

“Reba told me about Upsizing, and about why you want me to meet you after you get there. I didn’t decide not to call you. I just needed a day or two at least, to think about what to say to you. It was almost an unbelievable thing to find out, that you wanted to, that you still want to quite literally eat me, to swallow me whole, as she explained it.”

Pandora maintained the appearance of preserving her dignity in her posture and the expression on her face, which was unapologetic and apparently not embarrassed either.

“I never claimed that I didn’t want to do that,” she replied, “I just never told you that I did. I was going to tell you about the Upsizing, so that you’d know you were coming to a colony of earthlings who’d become giants. It’s just that, when I was about to get to that part of the conversation in the Lavender Bay restaurant, it seemed to suddenly register on me that you were going to get a surprise about being eaten, once you got to the giant land anyway. That would be the main surprise, whether you knew I’d become a giant or not. It just suddenly seemed simpler to keep things as normal as possible, as far as moving to another dimension can be considered normal, and save all of your most dramatic surprises up until you were there and couldn’t do anything to spoil my plans for you.”

“Well I am certainly surprised about it all,” said Lennox, “Reba told me not to let you know that she’d tipped me off. She wanted me to play along with you until the day we were supposed to meet on the other side of the portal, and then simply not turn up. She thinks that if you can’t lure me to the giant world, then you’ll find another younger man while you still have time before the day of the move.”

“I guess I’ll have to resort to that now, but it won’t be as simple as just switching off my consuming yearnings for you. As soon as you handed me that catalog on the station, I knew you were the one I wanted. I guess I’ll have to settle for someone else now. So why are you telling me, if you know that I’ll be out looking for him tomorrow?” said Pandora.

“Because I don’t want you to do that,” said Lennox.

“Well that’s not for you to say. And by telling me, you’ve let me know that I’ll need to do that, just like my daughter tried to tell you,” said Pandora.

“I mean I don’t want you to look for someone else, because I’m still coming to meet you there,” said Lennox.

“You are?” said Pandora, “I don’t know what to say, except: Why?”

“Back on the station, when you got out your notepad, there was something already written on the first page. You licked your finger to  turn it over and write your phone number on the next sheet of paper. Then in the Lavender Bay restaurant, your tongue made such an unforgettable contact with my finger, when you were accepting the prawn I was offering your mouth. I can see now the reason that you were kind of overdoing it, all to get one prawn into your mouth, but it felt like nothing I’ve ever experienced or dreamed of before,” said Lennox.

“Then I take it that you liked it,” said Pandora.

“To have the giant version of such an inviting tongue involved in the early stages of the process of swallowing me whole would be the most sensuous and thrilling thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m sorry it took me a while to think it through, and then I gave you that false excuse on the phone messaging this afternoon. Now I’ve had two days to think about it, and I’m glad you want me to be the one more than anyone else, because I’m the one who most wants to be that one too,” said Lennox.

“I guess I should be glad I’d used up the first page of that notepad,” she said, “You’re a treasure, young man. Are you sure you’re not upset that I was just going to do this to you without giving you any chance to object?”

“It’s part of what made me feel like a treasure, even before you said it. You must want me in your mouth ... and later your tummy, very much,” said Lennox.

“I surely do,” said Pandora.

“Then I want to make it easier for you to organise too. Reba told me about Bob as well. So you won’t have to worry about keeping his existence a secret from me. I just don’t want him to know about me, or Mick, and there is one more secret I think we should keep. Reba feels bad about having initiated all this by inviting you and Bob to be Upsized. I think she’d feel better if she thinks that her warning to me has kept anyone from being eaten. So instead of playing along with you, I’ll play along with her. I’ll do that by letting her think I’m playing along with you. You can help, by not telling her after I turn up on the giant land side of the West Lindfield portal, and by not letting her know that we’ve worked all this out tonight. Is that all okay with you?” asked Lennox.

“I don’t think I could have resolved all those loose ends that well myself,” said Pandora.

Their food arrived, and Lennox watched her tongue dealing with every straying drop of whipped cream in the most arousing manner, as little by little, the apple turnover made its way down into her stomach.

When they had finished eating, he called for the bill, and went over to the counter to pay.

“Are you sure I can’t put in something to contribute?” she asked.

“I’ve got this,” he said, collecting his receipt from the waitress and putting his hand on her shoulder to walk her out to the street, “I’m guessing you think you had to buy me as much good food as possible, since you see me as the best meal you’ll ever have. But you don’t need to do that. I’m volunteering for this now, or at worst agreeing to it, instead of being taken by surprise. I know all about your plans for me, and I’m still willing to come to the giant land with you.”

“That means a lot to me,” said Pandora.

“And as for my sinking a bit of money into the meal we just had, I don’t think there’ll be an ATM in your stomach anyway,” said Lennox.

They had walked one door down from the cafe, and stood under a lamp outside the darkened window of a shop that had closed for the evening.

“I know about Bob, but I’m open to a hug,” he said.

She put her arms around him and hugged him tight. He felt her cheek against his own, and then she spoke softly.

“I’m the one trusting you now,” she said, “If you did let me down on the day, I’d miss out altogether, not just on eating the young man of my first choice, but on eating anyone at all.”

“If I couldn’t be trusted, I would have played the game until you were gone, without saying anything,” said Lennox, “Your own daughter tried to trick you for my benefit, and instead I’m tricking her for yours and mine.”

“I guess I’m in your hands ... until we get there,” she said.

“And soonafter that, I’ll be in just one of yours,” said Lennox.

She hugged him a little tighter.

“Reba lent me the car for the night, probably keen to help with any meeting that would enable you to start stringing me along,” said Pandora, “But it means I can drive you home.”

“I’d like that,” said Lennox.

She drove him all the way to his own driveway and parked in the front drive, turning off the engine and undoing her seat belt.

“I don’t really want this night to end,” she said.

“It doesn’t have to, yet. And you can stay the night if you get too tired to drive back to Mick and Reba’s,” said Lennox.

“No more secrets from you, I promise. Ask me anything,” she said.

“Well ... how did you develop this desire to eat someone?” asked Lennox.

“I was telling the whole story to Reba not long before I met you,” said Pandora.

She went on to tell him every single aspect of the story of Trudi and Murray. This time she left out nothing, and went into every nuance and every single detail of the Irish portal, the giant widow’s capture of Trudi and Murray, the many time travelling incidents, the countless times that Trudi ate Murray and then time travelled back to negate the interim events, and Trudi’s account of the night she ate Murray in the pavlova after forewarning him that it would be the last time.

“She could have let him assume she was going to bring him back again,” said Lennox.

“She’d done that every other time, because she intended to. This last time, she wanted him to know and face the fact that she had him in her power and wasn’t going to give him any get out of stomach free cards,” said Pandora.

“That’s quite a game of Mouthopoly,” said Lennox, noting her slight smile.

Pandora remembered another episode in Trudi’s story, and told him about it.

“It’s amazing that one time she left things as they were, with him long since digested, for nine years. I guess it would have been only two years ago, from our point of view, that she finally stopped that timeline and went back and started the next one.”

“Maybe he should have seen the pavlova showdown coming after she told him she’d gone nine years before bringing him back,” said Pandora.

“The most amazing thing they’ve done that we can’t do is turning back the clock,” said Lennox.

“It only turns back the clock for the mental time traveller,” said Pandora, “The other person doesn’t even remember what’s gone on in the previous timeline, once the next timeline has started.”

“Murray got to be 14 again at the time he was eaten, all the times he was eaten. I was not quite fifteen when I first saw you in ‘Marriage Ain’t Easy’. It’s the one thing I won’t be able to recapture when we enact our mutual gobbling fantasy,” said Lennox.

“For Murray, it wasn’t a matter of recapturing it, at least not recapturing anything with Trudi,” said Pandora, “He didn’t see her for the first time until he watched videos of ‘Mountains Family’ in his twenties. It was only after time travelling out of the giant widow’s clutches that he became a 14 year old again in his own past, albeit shrunken. It was only under those conditions that he met Trudi’s 24 year old self.”

Pandora yawned.

“No need to cover your mouth or turn away on my account,” he said, trying to stare into her mouth.

“I’ll break the habit of etiquette and let you see the next one clearly,” she replied.

They talked some more, with Lennox marvelling at the way Trudi and the lady leprechaun had arranged for Murray to be surprised at the meadow grass and be recaptured by Trudi.

Pandora yawned again, making no effort to conceal her open mouth this time. Lennox gazed in at her tongue again.

“I really think the prawn got the best of our Lavender Bay restaurant interaction,” said Lennox.

“You left me thinking it was a poor second best for your luscious finger,” said Pandora.

“Maybe you could taste test a cheek,” said Lennox, and shifted sideways in his seat, so that his cheek was just near her face.

He had to turn his eyes away from her in order to make the offer, but he was not in the least bit disappointed as he felt her soft moist tongue sliding over his cheek slowly, from beside his chin to just beside his ear.

“There you are,” she said.

“We never gave any feedback to any of the waitresses we’ve met this week, but what’s your review of the taste test you’ve just done?” asked Lennox.

He could still feel her tongue on his cheek in his immediate memory.

“I’ll give it six stars,” said Pandora, as he turned to face her.

She yawned again, and this time he had the most point blank view into her mouth, with his eyes just above it.

“I’m really excited about going in there,” he said.

“Well I was planning to get settled into my house again in the giant land, having been over here for weeks, while Bob gets settled back into his after flying back and forth between Australia and the U.S.,” said Pandora, “So I won’t be eating you until after we’ve been there for a few months. But I can give you a better round of that prawn’s early experiences, and then pop you in my mouth for a better preview of things to come, without gobbling you down as soon as I get you to my Upsized home on the first day there.”

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

“Can I accept your kind offer to stay the night?” she asked.

“Absolutely.”

They got out of Reba’s car. She locked it and let him lead the way inside. He gave her his bed and then went to the living room, opened up his futon,  and got comfortable for the night. He always slept without pyjama shirts, finding their presence uncomfortable and distrating from getting off to sleep. So he changed into a pair of pyjama shorts which were still hanging on the folding clothes horse in the next room.

Pandora texted Reba about the sleepover, and said she’d bring the car home as early as Reba might need her to, the next morning.

Try as he might, Lennox could not sleep. He was far too excited about going to the giant land and being eaten by Pandora. After he’d been tossing and turning for over half an hour, he saw Pandora come walking into the room.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t mind if I came and joined you ... so that I could lick your cheeks again,” she said.

“Be my guest!” said Lennox, lifting up the blanket and sheet on her side of the futon.

She slid in beside him and put her arms around him, and then started with the cheek which had not yet partaken of the benefits of making contact with her tongue. He felt the sliding motion of it, slowly stirring him into a powerful but very positive frenzy. She moved her head around and went to work on his other cheek again too.”

“Am I doing okay?” she asked.

“If I were an author trying to describe this, I’d run out of words,” said Lennox, “You’re welcome to do my upper arms and shoulders too.

She shuffled herself a little further down the bed, while he opened the blanket and sheet a little to let in the moonlight. Now he was able to see her tongue coming out of her mouth, as well as feel it sliding gracefully all the way along his upper arm to the shoulder, and then back down, an inch from the first trail of tongue moisture it had already left on the near side of the exposed part of his arm.

“Hmm, I can’t reach over to do your other arm,” said Pandora.

“I can help,” said Lennox.

He put his arms around her and then pivoted his body, so that she was carried over him and laid to rest on the other side of the futon. She then went to work on his dry arm, until he had experienced matching moisture.

“Can you imagine that sliding over your whole upper body and face at once,” she said.

“That’s what I’ve been thinking about almost all the time, since you started,” he said.

“You’re so young and sweet and delicious,” she said.

“You make me feel incredible, every time you say things like that,” he said, “I love it more than anything. The Incredible Edible Fan.”

“I think I’m tongue tired,” said Pandora, and fell back beside him.

“Your efforts were much appreciated,” said Lennox.

The next thing they knew they were waking up seven hours later to the sound of Pandora’s phone beeping in a text.

“It’s from Reba: Don’t worry about the car. Hope you two had a good night.”

“That doesn’t begin to describe it,” said Lennox.

Things were fairly uneventful until the day when the move was coordinated. It was not until Lennox came to play his part in it that he realised that there was one important thing that he and Pandora had overlooked. Thinking that Lennox was only playing out an act with Pandora, and that he had was going to honour her advice not to turn up on the day, Reba had neglected to show Lennox the location of the West Lindfield portal. They would be on their way to giant land, along with their teleported houses, and he would be left behind. Pandora would think he had been double crossing her all along. She might even take it out on Reba, who would think that Lennox had been taking her advice.

Then he remembered the mention of the G.R.O.W.T.H. agency. In at least one of their conversations, mother or daughter or both had told him about the West Lindfield earth based office of the agency, which was just near the Green Carpet Business College. Lennox got there as fast as he could and explained that he had arranged to meet some Upsizing friends of his, but without changing size himself. They’d forgotten to show him the location of the portal.

“It’s nothing to worry about. We use it all the time to liase between the earth offices and the giant land offices of the agency,” said the receptionist, “I can put the answering machine on and show you the way.”

She got him to the portal well enough, but he was an hour and a half later than the time they had agreed for Pandora to meet him and collect him. He ran through the portal and through the giant flowerbed on the other side.

“I’m here!” he called.

“I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind. I knew you were sincere that night on your futon,” said Pandora, now towering in front of him.

The sight of her as a giant was magnificent.

“I never changed my mind,” he said, “But we forgot something. With Reba thinking I was never going to turn up, she didn’t show me the location of the portal. If I hadn’t remembered the agency office you told me about and gotten help from the receptionist, I’d have missed our rendez-vous altogether, and you would have gone home thinking I’d been tricking you all along.”

“It did cross my mind, but I thought of all our times together, and I fought against believing you’d trick me... even though I was tricking you at the start of all this,” said Pandora.

“That doesn’t matter. I said I wanted to come, and I have. Let’s go see what your house looks like Upsized. I’ve never even seen it normal sized,” said Lennox, “You look amazing, by the way.”

“Thank you, little friend,” she said, reaching down and picking him up.

“Do you have to be anywhere else, like Bob’s house, later today? I guess I’ve made you late,” said Lennox.

“We’re not getting together until tomorrow, and not visiting Reba for a week or two,” said Pandora, “Why do you ask?”

“Well I was hoping we could still have that chance to ... formally introduce me to your Upsized tongue,” he said.

“Of course we can,” said Pandora.

She took him home and showed him around the house. Then she sat down on the couch and held him in front of her mouth. He saw her tongue coming out, recalling the view he’d gotten the day she’d eaten the prawn from the tip of his finger, saw and felt it sliding from his chest to his forehead, with his arms and hands getting their fair share of its benefits as well.

“Would you still like to go in for a tour as well?” she asked.

“Would I ever?” said Lennox.

She opened her mouth and slid him into it. He rolled around, turned over onto his stomach and back a few times, letting every visible part of him enjoy the chance to become far more acquainted with her tongue, until she finally slid it out of her mouth and let him fall gently into her awaiting hand.

“I guess Reba could never understand how much I enjoy all this,” said Lennox.

They repeated this routine whenever they were alone together over the next few weeks, which didn’t include the day Bob took her out on a picnic to celebrate her sixtieth birthday.

Another day, while taking a walk by herself, Pandora met Moira Bradley, who said that she was a long time fan, and invited Pandora to bring Bob with her for a time travel outing in the giant land.

“You mean that’s possible too, even up here?” asked Pandora.

“It is for me. I don’t think anyone else has the means to do it,” said Moira.

“But won’t I forget it, once you’ve started the new timeline?” asked Pandora.

“I don’t really know what you mean,” said Moira.

Pandora explained everything Trudi had told her about mental time travel.

“I don’t know how to do that,” said Moira, “Mine is done in a machine, and none of its passengers forget. I took possession of it, after its young owner was caught without it. He parked it on my property on Sydney’s upper North Shore, while he went out for the night. While he was gone, I had my whole property upsized here along with me, bringing his time machine along for the ride, and upsizing the time machine without Clarence. He found this place through the portal and met up with me later, and with his instructions, I was able to take us on lots of adventures in the machine. I don’t need his help to operate it anymore.”

(See Book Six for all the details).

“And he doesn’t want it back?” asked Pandora.

“Not at this stage. I ate him a while ago,” said Moira.

“So it’s not just me and Trudi. It seems a few of us like to swallow our admirers whole,” said Pandora.

She told Moira all about Bob, Mick, Reba, herself, and of course, of her upcoming plans for Lennox.

“I’m glad you won’t be looking down on me. Even Lennox himself approves. It’s my own daughter who has to be kept in the dark about it,” said Pandora.

“Well it would be a pity to let the opportunities go unused,” said Moira.

They exchanged addresses and telephone numbers, and eventually worked out a date to take the time machine out for a spin. Pandora left Lennox at home and met up with Bob on the way to Moira’s house.

This time, Moira took the time machine back thousands of years, much further than she’d ever gone with Clarence, and came to the base of an ancient mountain with a spiralling path going up it. At the base of the mountain, beside the beginning of the path, was a large rock with words engraved into it:

This is the Mountain Of Youth.

Each bite of the blue vegetables

growing on the plateau at the top

of the mountain will renew five

years of youth in the body of the

person who has eaten it. The

effect is permanent, and cannot be

undone, except by slowly ageing

all over again.

“This doesn’t exist in our time,” said Moira, “So it hardly contradicts the fact that the native giants don’t live forever up there. I wonder if it would work for us.”

“If it does, I’ll take five bites,” said Pandora, “I just turned sixty.”

“I’m almost fifty-two,” said Bob, “Would you like me to take five bites too?”

“Maybe you should stop at three or four,” said Pandora, “It would be nice to be roughly the same age this time around.”

“Let’s see if we can get up and if the blue bites have any effect on earthlings first,” said Moira.

They walked up the Mountain of Youth, and came to the blue vegetable patch.

Pandora picked one of the vegetables and took a bite. It had a very pleasant taste, albeit not familiar nor in any way like anything she’d ever tasted before. In fact the only taste she could recall enjoying more was Lennox.

She swallowed it, and then looked at the others.

“I don’t feel any different,” said Pandora.

“But you do look like you were five years ago,” said Bob.

He picked another blue vegetable and sampled it as well.

When they’d finished, Pandora had resumed the appearance of herself at age 35. Bob had stopped at three bites, and was now 37, at the request of Pandora, who dissuaded him from going down to 32. It was Moira who took the smallest number of bites, only two. Being in her forties, she would be content to join the other two in their thirties.

“What’s the worry for any of us?” asked Moira, “I can always bring us back here, and we can get even younger again if we want to. Or we can all wait another twenty or thirty years, and then come back here for another four or six bites each. And I can bring any partner I have back here to equalize our ages too.”

When they got back to the present, Pandora gave Lennox the biggest surprise he’d had since he’d learned about her impending gianthood and eating plans.

“I remember one episode, when you were wearing your hair up, with a short wig over it,” said Lennox, “You look a bit like that now. Your hair was usually long and down in the show.”

“Would you like me to grow it long again before we set the date for me to eat you?” she asked.

“Would you? I’d love it,” said Lennox.

“You remember when we were talking about Murray and Trudi,” said Pandora, “You also said that he got to be 14 again. I had a talk with Moira after Bob went home today. She already knows about you and our upcoming plans. She said she’d be happy to take you back to the Mountain of Youth with me, if you’d like to make yourself 14 again before I gobble you up.”

“Do you think I look too old, now that you’re 35 again?” he asked.

“It’s not that,” said Pandora, “I’m sure you’d be the nicest dinner I could have at any age. I was just thinking that when you saw my 35 year old self in the school holidays on TV, I was actually 50 in real life. If you make yourself almost 15 again with two bites, given that you’re almost 25 now, then for you, our ages would be exactly as you remember them the day you first saw me on one of those rerun episodes.”

“Oh yes, it sounds wonderful. Let’s do it, and thank Moira for me!” said Lennox.

“You can, when you meet her,” said Pandora.
Lennox realised that he had been too excited to think of the obvious.

Pandora, Moira and Lennox set a date to take Lennox back in time to the Mountain of Youth, when Bob was visiting Mick and Reba, and knew that the time machine would be back only seconds after it departed, regardless of how much time they spent in the past at the Mountain of Youth.

“How am I going to take a giant sized bite of one of those, let alone two?” asked Lennox, when they reached the Mountain top plateau.

“I don’t think you’ll need to,” said Moira, “I think that the amount needed is in proportion to the sizes of our own bodies, “Two giant bites took ten years off my age, and two earthling sized bites will most likely take ten years off yours.”

“Just don’t overdo and turn yourself into a ten year old or a five year old,” said Pandora, “I’d like to have you at fourteen at least, when I’m eating you.”

“I’ll just try one bite and see what happens.  The change should be more obvious at my age, even to your giant eyes,” said Lennox.

Soon they confirmed that he looked like a 14 to 15 year old boy, and returned to the time machine and the present.

Over the next few months, while Mick and Reba got used to Bob’s and Pandora’s renewed youth, but felt too young to want to visit the blue vegetable plateau themselves, Pandora’s hair grew to the length that Lennox remembered from the television show, and Lennox turned 25. She let him enjoy getting used to having her around him with long hair, and then they set the date for her to eat him. He enjoyed her company on her bed the night before, and then they spent the day together. At his suggestion, they played hide and seek in the house, and he enjoyed her mischievous arousing giant sized smiles each time she found and cornered him.

She looked the picture of elegance when she was preparing him in the kitchen and taking him to the dinner table. When she picked him up, she licked him first with only the front half of the visible end of her tongue. Then she stuck it right out and licked him a little more vigorously with the entire visible portion of her tongue, obviously excluding the part attached to her throat which nobody ever saw.

“Oh Pandora, Pandora, Pandora! Don’t stop!” he said.

Spurred on by a mixture of his ecstatic encouragement and her own euphoria, she kept up the action, making every sensuous gesture count. Then she stopped.

“For a few minutes in that cafe, the night you finally returned my calls with your texts, I thought we’d never get to this point,” she said, “Thank you so so much!”

“I’ve enjoyed this game!” he said, “Now let’s play Swallow the Feeder.”

Pandora’s face was still right in front of him, as he saw her burst into a wide open mouthed laugh. He looked in at her perfectly formed sparkling pink tongue, over the moon at what awaited him.

“You really are one of a kind,” said Pandora, “I wouldn’t have this, if you had gone with Reba’s warning. If you’re sure you don’t want to do anything else first, I can send you on your way.”

“Well after the laugh I just saw, I’d certainly like to lie in there for at least as long as I enjoyed doing when you were sixty,” said Lennox.

“Can we work out a signal for you to let me know when you’re ready for me to swallow you?” asked Pandora.

“Well if you feel me rolling and turning over like before, you’ll know I’m still exploring your mouth from all angles and enjoying the feel of your tongue. Same if I’m lying still. When you feel me slap your tongue hard three times with my hand, which will get your attention, but won’t hurt a giant tongue at all, that’s my cue for you to swallow me,” said Lennox.

“I’ve understood all that. If you’re ready to go in, I’ll just take my cues from the feel of your Mouth Code.”

“And when I get to your stomach, if you feel me slap the inner wall of it a few times, it means: Arrived safely. Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here, but of course that wouldn’t make sense,” said Lennox, and enjoyed the reward of seeing her burst into wide open mouthed laughter at point blank range again.

As her response eventually evolved into a closed mouth giggle, her head moved forward a little, and he felt her cheek brushing firmly against him while she composed herself.

“Well you can always tap my throat three times while I’m swallowing you, if you come up with another good joke and want me to cough you back up again, so it doesn’t go to waste,” said Pandora.

“You must be choking!” said Lennox.

And she was at it again.

“Oh honey, I think you’re too much.”

“Well I’d better stop, or I’ll never get in their to sample that view that looks so good each time you start laughing. Truly, it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.”

“You make a perfect choreographer for my tongue,” said Pandora, “All you have to do is say something funny. But you’re right. We should move on to the next stage. I’ll let you climb in yourself.”

She opened her mouth wide. He looked in again, and climbed over her lower lip and onto her tongue. He turned over and lay down on his back first. Then he rolled onto his left side after a few minutes, then after a few more, onto his right side, and then onto his stomach. Swivelling his head from side to side, he saturated both of his cheeks in turn with the moisture of her soft pink tongue fulfilling all of the wildest dreams he’d had since the day that he’d fully processed Reba’s warning. Holding onto the back of her lower back teeth, he slid himself back and forth a few inches, and then he began to hear moans of pleasure coming up from her throat. They were soft and non-intrusive, and formed the equivalent of a suitable melody to accompany his physical experiences. He could have done this forever, but he wondered if she might think he was taking too long. He lay down still for a few more minutes, contemplating the fact that she had planned to do this without his consent, that he now had not only her satisfaction, but her gratitude as well. He visualized the sight of her stomach and her neck and her chest and her face, while he’d been looking at them from the outside over the last few weeks, since her hair had fully regrown. Forming a firm picture in his memory of what her neck and her stomach looked like from the outside, he tapped her tongue hard three times, and waited.

Lennox felt her tongue rising a little in her mouth, and then it began. She drew him into the top of her throat, where he looked down into darkness. He could still feel her tongue resting against his face and chest and legs and arms, even though he was now suspended vertically in her throat. On his back he felt the back of her neck.

He couldn’t think of any jokes worth signalling her to cough him back up, and waited again.

Soon he felt another gulping movement, and he slid down further. By his reckoning, he would now be level with the base of her neck, which he’d seen many times from the outside of her body. To think that her beautiful face was now several giant inches above his current position, and he would just keep sliding down further.

The next gulp came, and then he began to slide faster, and then he reached her stomach. True to his humourous suggestion, he slapped the wall of her stomach three times, as hard as he could.

He felt a sudden heaving that went on for about thirty seconds, and realised that he’d made her laugh again. When things had all settled down again, he lay down and waited to be absorbed into her forever.

Trudi hadn’t seen Bob Worth and Pandora Montague, since they had told her that they were moving to Australia to live near Pandora’s daughter, who was planning to have grandchildren. That had been four years ago. She thought back to the night she had conclusively eaten Murray Jensen for the last time, after lining her stomach with a strawberry pavlova in the preceding minutes. That had been fifteen years ago. She had replayed their final gobbling adventure in her mind many times, along with her memories of all the times that she had eaten him in other timelines. On this particular day, thirty-nine year old Trudi was concentrating on Murray’s desperate last minute suggestion that, after several decades, she might consider time travelling back to regain her youth, thereby reversing her otherwise final consumption of Murray in the process. She had made it very clear to him that, even if she ever returned to the past, she would not go back further than the morning after her final consumption of Murray. She still felt a strong sense of satisfaction at having helped him to come to terms with the fact that he was about to be eaten by her, with no possibility of reversing his fate at any point down the track.

As far as Murray’s motivations were concerned, she still had no intention of changing her decision. She would never return to the time when he was 14 and she was 24 for the purpose of giving him a chance to go on uneaten.

She had no awareness of the chronal immunity she had acquired from repeatedly eating Murray (after his initial trip through the period affected by the Ring of Reversal and Colleen Balfour’s shrinking devices). So she was both blissfully unaware that time travelling through a certain period of time had a side of effect of shrinking, and equally unaware that the problem didn’t affect her.

Through all the timelines she’d lived, she had retained the memory of the warnings Murray had given her about the portal, as well as the memory of the timeline in which Murray had persuaded her to take a short journey through the portal, in an attempt to get her to see his point of view about being eaten by her. No matter how many times she made journeys back in time, she would always be safe from both unwittingly walking into the giant widow’s clutches and from being shrunken by time travelling.

Since she had now lived through this timeline’s period of her being aged 37 to 39, forewarned about the portal, she had never even taken the forest walk that had led to her discovery of it. It would no longer have been possible to have met 27 year old Murray on the forest path at her own age of 37, because her 24 year old self had eaten his 14 year old self early in this latest timeline, a timeline which she had allowed to continue for 15 more years.

Trudi still felt no desire to undo Murray’s final fate by travelling back further than the night she had eaten him. However, there was a new yearning which had forced her to reconsider her refusal to travel back further than that period.

Trudi had recently been in the audience of a poetry slam that was on once a month in the village hall. She was 39, currently not on call for any acting roles, and had taken another holiday to her home country. Having seen the poetry slam advertised, she was interested, as there was a scarcity of interest in poetry in modern times. People were more interested in videos, internet chat rooms, and various other more immediate distractions than the possibility of having one’s mind transformed by the more classic art of the spoken verse. She sat in the audience at the back row of seats, aware that her fame had largely receded in the fifteen years since the final season of ‘Mountains Family’ had gone to air, but not willing to seek too much attention.

Many of the poets wrote short lines, often badly scanning with no regular rhythm and some couplets with flawed attempts at rhyming. In addition to those disappointing aspects, they didn’t really have much of a message to deliver either. Trudi was close to writing the event off as a bad bet and walking out the back door of the community hall, when onto the stage walked someone who immediately caught her attention. He stood out from everyone else in the room, because he was wearing a fancy striped double breasted jacket, a turtle neck sweater, and a neat pair of trousers. The outfit reminded her strongly of the clothing worn by the more dapper fictional television characters, when she had been a teenager. He looked around 29, which would have made his birth year the same as Murray’s, she mused, wondering how Murray would have felt to know that she was free to enjoy another younger man’s poetry long after sending Murray down to his delectable destiny. If that was the case, then the young poet would have been in kindergarten, while 15 or 16 year old Trudi had been forming crushes on dapper television actors. If this young poet had even started watching television back then, he wouldn’t have been watching adult adventure shows. Trudi surmised that he had probably watched the reruns many years later, and taken his fashion cues from those hours of viewing pleasure. She glanced around the room again at all the dull, ininspiring black hooded parkas and jeans and made the decision to hear this new poet’s performance, rather than walking out.

Hopefully she wouldn’t suffer any more add verse effects.

“Good evening. I’m Daniel Blackridge,” said the latest poet, “I’ve been writing poetry since I was eighteen years old, and desktop self published a selection of my personal favourites in a book. Since people are generally doing two poems each, I’ve chosen a couple that are about looking back at life. Although the first one, being a little bit cynical, also speculates about stages in life that I haven’t reached yet. It’s titled....

NO MATTER WHAT I DID, THE SITE KEPT FALSELY REJECTING THE SUBMISSION FOR THIS CHAPTER AS BEING LESS THAN 500 WORDS LONG, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS 504, AND THEN HAD SUBSEQUENT TEXT ADDED TO FIX THE PROBLEM. 

SO TO WIN THE ARGUMENT WITH AN ANNOYING BOT, I AM REPEATING THE LAST PART OF THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER. JUST SCAN PAST IT.

“Good evening. I’m Daniel Blackridge,” said the latest poet, “I’ve been writing poetry since I was eighteen years old, and desktop self published a selection of my personal favourites in a book. Since people are generally doing two poems each, I’ve chosen a couple that are about looking back at life. Although the first one, being a little bit cynical, also speculates about stages in life that I haven’t reached yet. It’s titled....

‘What is this Thing called Homework’:

You're born at age zero, and soon your baptised;

And you'll take life easy, until you're surprised,

That legs make you mobile, without help from Mum.

The time to step out of the cradle has come.

No more of the good life. You've had your free ride.

The pram's now discarded, when you go outside.

When you've reached the cookies, by climbing the stool,

Along comes this nightmare the grown-ups call "school."

You're trapped in a large room, with tall desks and chairs;

And there's this new grown-up, and nobody dares

To reach for the freedom they've had for four years:
She lays down the ground rules, and then the air clears.

You live for the lunch breaks and time after Three,
When, just like before, you'll be basically free.

This goes on a few years, and then it gets hard.

That monster called "homework" drags you from the yard.

As every year passes, they add to the load,

And time that went quickly seems now to have slowed.

The H.S.C. drains you, and then you can see

No light at the end of a uni degree.

The money, which then should be rapidly earned,

Is paid into taxes and bills, or else turned

To mortgage repayments, and starting once more

The loop, with the children you know you'll adore.

And then comes the shock, that you're fast growing old;

And if you're unlucky, some illness takes hold.

The pension supports you, if you're still alive;

And if you pass tests, they'll allow you to drive.

So was it all worth it, once you left the cot?

Or could your own parents have spared you a lot,

By not having children, and buying a pet,

Whose hardest endurance is trips to the vet?”

Trudi smiled and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. He hadn’t overstated the cynicism which must have taken hold the day he’d put pen to the piece of paper that had contained the first draft of that poem. Still, she had to remember that he was a decade behind her, and about two and a half decades behind the average age of most of the other poets she’d suffered through. His rhyming and scanning seemed to be perfect, and he had delivered a rhyming commentary on many stages of a human’s life. Besides that, he was too cute to walk out on,” she thought.

There had been a few snickers of amusement around the room, while Daniel had been reading his poem. The one thing that the others had over him was that most of them had learned their poems by heart, long before stepping up onto the stage. They could make eye contact with the audience, whereas Daniel was looking down at a sheet of paper during his entire performance, in order to read his poem. She could see that he was handsome, but would have liked to see his eyes looking out at her, rather than down at his poetry.

THIS LINE IS INSERTED BECAUSE THE SITE FALSELY COUNTED 504 WORDS AS LESS THAN 500

With any luck, she might have the chance to talk to him over supper. Her speculations about abandoning the event had left a feeling of remorse for the effect it would have on her stomach. Then, while listening to the fifth verse of his poem, she’d enjoyed another flashback to her time travelling culinary adventures with Murray.

After a few seconds of clapping, Daniel was ready to introduce his second and final offering.

“As I indicated, this one’s also a philosophical piece about life, but with a strong focus on childhood nostalgia. I’ve titled it ‘Reflections in Rainwater’,” said Daniel

Trudi had a feeling that this one was going to be significantly better than ‘What is this Thing called Homework?’ and she was not disappointed, as Daniel read it to the audience:

“(1)      One cloudy afternoon, when all the sky was overcast,

            Consistent falling rain reminded me of decades past:

            School holidays with freedom, which would leave me overjoyed.

            Yet now there's something missing, and it's hard to fill the void.

(2)       Frameworks, built by teachers shaping life within my class,

            Gave way to modern lifestyles, as the years began to pass.

            Those who put the magic into infant learning sessions

            Have long forgotten me, since they have made their own progressions.

(3)       Grandma, in her sixties, was not starting to decline,

            As those later years of hers became the greatest years of mine,

            With chocolate bars and walks in parks done for a special treat,

            Until the day I went to church and mourned her in my seat.

(4)       High school came with football boots and military training;

            And all those nasty names for those who'd rather be abstaining

            From death by reckless driving or a dangerous narcotic:-

            One's ticket out of prep school sold by someone too psychotic.

(5)       Thinking back, I can't ignore a sadness I find strange,

            Born of all the fears and losses known to come with change.

            To press life's great pause button back when life appeared so calm

            Would once have frozen time, before I learned how life could harm.

(6)       Streets of youth, where trees were once reflected in rainwater,

            Are now replaced by gardens all paved up with bricks and mortar.

            Progress moves me on much faster than my walking feet;

            But would it be so bad with an occasional retreat?

(7)       Perhaps I need to be grown up, and move into new cultures,

            But business worlds are overrun with corporate human vultures.

            The key to restoration, as I travel through the wild wood

            Is reinventing concepts lost in time back in my childhood.”

This time there were no laughs, but the applause was the longest and loudest she’d heard all night. She took note of where he sat down. She wasn’t going to let anyone else monopolise him for too long over supper.

While the last three poets for the evening subjected their victims in the audience to an even worse collection of tasteless drivel than the performances which had preceded Daniel’s, Trudi took refuge in a new realm of nostalgia, which had been seeded by Daniel’s performance of ‘Reflections in Rainwater’.

Daniel was clearly happiest when taking mental refuge in the memories of the earliest recollected years of his childhood, being those from age five to ten. Psychiatric text books had been documenting for decades the fact that many people, perhaps everyone at some stage, spends a portion of their adult life trying to recreate whatever situations had made them happy in the first ten years of their lives. For Daniel, everything seemed to have gone downhill in high school, with everything from school cadets to bullying and avoidance of drug pushers.

Trudi’s teenage years had been different. She didn’t feel that strongly attached to the first ten years of her life. But from age 15 to 17, she had been well liked at school, as her friends were fans of ‘Mountains Family’. All of her scenes had been filmed on Saturdays, which required any cast members and guest stars in her scenes to attend on Satudays as well, so that Trudi could continue with her regular schooling on the weekdays. She had left school at age 18, entering into her short lived marriage, while continuing on as a regular cast member in ‘Mountains Family’.

So her teenage years were the ones which were brought back to the forefront of her mind by Daniel’s second poem. She had spent fifteen years nostalgically recollecting the timelines in which she had eaten Murray. Now, for the first time since she’d BEEN a teenager, Trudi was consumed with happy memories of that earlier time in her life.

What also stood out in her mind was the fact that her teenage years had coincided with Daniel Blackridge’s childhood of ten years earlier in his life. His poem had poured out his attachment to the days when he’d been aged five to ten, and made particular reference to school holidays spent staying at his grandmother’s house. During those exact same years, she had been aged 15-20. She felt no nostalgia at all for her marriage, having been discarded for a different model when the user had grown bored with her. Yet being aged 15 to 17 was a time that she would give anything to return to, now.

Anything?

Even undoing the satisfaction that she still felt from having seen Murray finally accepting the immutable imminence of his fate that night in the pavlova? She began to re-evaluate the scenario in her mind. From her perspective, she had done that. Even if she time travelled back to an earlier time and undid that event, she would still retain the memory of the time that Murray had been forced to come to terms with being her irrevocable dinner treat at no cost to her own continued enjoyment of subsequent life.

As the final performing poet plunged the tone of the night into shameless crudity, Trudi forced her mind keep focussed on considering the effects of time travel.

In the very first timeline she’d known about, Murray had met her 37 year old self when he had been 27.

Alternate timeline Trudi and Alternate timeline Murray had found the portal, been captured for two years by a giantess, and almost eaten. Murray had time travelled back to when he was 14, shrunken in the process, warned her of the portal’s dangers for future benefit, and then been eaten. Now that she had lived through being aged 37 to 38 in one of many subsequent timelines, her 37 year old self had never met Murray in the Irish forest. At this stage, her 24 year old self had still met shrunken time travelled 14 year old Murray and eaten him. If she time travelled back to her teenage years, then would she still meet Murray when she aged back to 24? It seemed unlikely, because all of the timelines containing scenarios where Trudi and Murray had met would have been erased. Murray would never have met Trudi at all, and would never have been eaten by her?

So what would have happened to him instead?

If Trudi had never eaten his 14 year old self, then he would have gone on the way he did in his very first timeline, until he was 27. Then he would have taken the forest walk by himself, and not met Trudi, who had used the foreknowledge from earlier timelines to avoid the forest track that led to the portal.

She realised that Murray would have found the portal by himself.

He would have gone to explore the other side of the portal, discovered the giant land, been caught by the widow, kept as a pet for two years, and then eaten by her.

With his knowledge of time travel, and the fascination with being temporarily eaten that Trudi now knew he had, Murray might have made the journey most of the way down the giant widow’s throat, before saving himself by time travelling out. However, having never met Trudi, having never shared the two years of captivity with her, he would have had no reason to travel back as far as the year he’d been 14. He might well have only gone back the two years needed to avoid being captured by the widow in the first place.

Trudi assumed that if he still went back through the moment in time when he’d passed through the portal, then it might still have the side effect of causing Murray to shrink. This was the only hypothesis in her mental repertoire which would have been incorrect. If Murray had only travelled back two years to avoid going through the portal, he would not have passed through the Ring of Reversal Era, and hence not have shrunken at all.

However, on Trudi’s assumption that he would have shrunken, she began making resolutions. If she were to go ahead and reverse time back as far as her teenage years, she would remember to come and hunt around the safe side of the portal for a shrunken Murray every day, from the moment she turned 37 in any future timeline she might create.

Then Trudi dismissed the idea. She had had her fun with forcing finality on the Murray of the timeline she’d lived to date. If recapturing her adolesence gave him a way out of everything they’d been through together, he would have missed the parts he’d enjoyed as well as the night that had sealed his fate in sticky pavlova. She decided that she would let him play out his own fate and let someone else have the pleasure of eating him in the next timeline.

Trudi would never know of course, that once Murray had used his two year backjaunt to escape the widow, he would be home free in Ireland with his normal size intact. He would have enjoyed the reversible effect of being eaten by the giant widow enough to venture back and try it out on other giantesses.

The final poem of the evening came to a merciful end, and the master of ceremonies announced that a good supper had been prepared in the next room. Trudi saw Daniel get up from his seat in the second row from the front, and make a beeline for the supper room, with a late middle aged lady in hot pursuit. Trudi wasted no time in briskly bridging the distance, but was briefly stopped by mildly interested fans who had caught her appearance in the ‘Mountains Family’ reunion movie. Politely negotiating her way through the human obstruction, she finally reached the door, and walked towards Daniel. He had his back to her, which gave her a clear look at the lady who was talking to him.

“You’re a very talented young man. I got a lot out of your poems, and I especially enjoyed ‘Reflections in Rainwater’.”

“So did I,” said Trudi, stepping past Daniel and into his peripheral vision.

He showed no sign of having recognised her from ‘Mountains Family’, but his eyes seemed to light up at first sight of her, in a way that hadn’t been there in the previous few seconds, when he was still looking at his other fan.

“I’ll let you young people get acquainted,” said the other lady, who then walked over to get acquainted with the assortment of Danish pastries which adorned a portion of the supper table.

“It was motivated by my best childhood memories,” he said.

“I could tell, just from hearing it. I’m Trudi, and you really brought back some of my best memories too. For me it was my teenage years. I lived with my divorced mother in the next village. She’d married an actor, had me with him, and then eventually ... Well he went over to America, as most stars don’t find that much work in Ireland. He had an affair with the leading lady in a film he was doing, and telephoned Mum to say that he wasn’t coming back. I was eight, when I got that news.”

“No wonder you prefer your teenage years,” said Daniel, “I lived in this village, but my grandmother was in the next village.”

“They’re an easy walking distance apart,” said Trudi.

“Every school holidays she took me in to give my parents a vacation from parenting. Grandma made those visits a lot of fun, and she had a huge turn of the century mansion on a large battle axe block. Every part of the garden was an adventure waiting to happen. She left her other two properties to my mother and that one to me. So I’ve enjoyed 73 St Patrick Street every day for the last five and a half years, instead of only the school holidays,” said Daniel.

“73 St Patrick Street! Because of the battle-axe block, that must be the large property that shared a borderline row of trees with 69 St Patrick Street,” said Trudi, 69 was fairly large too, and also of a battle-axe configuration. So 71 St Patrick Street must have been between the driveways of 69 and 73.”

“How do you know so much about that street?” asked Daniel.

“I lived with Mum in 69 St Patrick Street until I got married from age 18-20. Then my own divorce settlement augmented my acting wages enough to enable me to keep the brief marital home by buying my ex husband out,” said Trudi.

“He doesn’t sound at all EX-emplorary,” said Daniel.

“Mum never remarried, as the experience put her off trusting men altogether. Having watched a few of Dad’s pictures on TV when I was aged 10 to 13, I knew I wanted to be an actress. I got an ongoing supporting role in a show filmed near the next village from age 15 to 24, and we did a reunion movie about four years ago,” said Trudi.

“What was the show?” asked Daniel.

“’Mountains Family’,” said Trudi.

“I know the name, but I’ve never seen it, I’m sorry to have to admit to you,” said Daniel.

“In a way that’s refreshing,” said Trudi, taking a folding set of photographic sleeves out of her purse, “I have these with me all the time, to show them to agents and casting staff. They’re stills taken from some of the shows I’ve done. Here’s one from the first season of the show, when I was 15.”

“You were pretty then too,” he said.

She blushed, and did her best to change the subject. Now didn’t seem to be the best time to bring up the fact that she had a boyfriend of four or five years back in the United States, with a young son as well.

“We shot all my scenes on Saturdays until I left school,” she said, “It’s such a surprise to learn that you live in the house that’s effectively next door to my childhood home.”

“That row of trees is still there, but the new owners of 69 and I shared the cost of building a proper fence the two properties, just on 69’s side of the trees. I’m glad I got to keep the trees on my side,” said Daniel.

“They’d have meant more to you over a longer period of living there,” said Trudi.

“I can still see into the garden of 69 from two of the upstairs windows my place .... Well not at night, I mean, but I could show you what it looks like now in the daytime. It’s been repainted from its original maroon colour to a shade of dark brown. Other than that it looks the same,” said Daniel, “I suppose it could be photographed in black and white, to hide the colour change.”

“I live in America now with my boyfriend and our little boy,” said Trudi, thinking that it needed to be brought out in the open, before she could accept an invitation to visit another man in his own home, “But I’m staying in the hotel in this village on a holiday. I saw the poetry slam advertised on the hotel lobby noticeboard, and thought it was as promising a way as any to spend the night. After hearing the other performers, I can’t come anywhere near to saying that the poetry slam has been a highlight of the holiday. But I can definitely say that ‘Reflections in Rainwater’ was the highlight of the poetry slam.”

“I’m really glad you liked it,” he said, with some of the light now no longer visible in his eyes.

She knew that he felt embarrassed by his compliments on her appearance in present day and in her teenage photo, now that he knew she was well and truly spoken for. He was trying to recover from the shock, and didn’t know if his invitation to look at 69 from the windows of 73 was still a good idea.

She smiled reassuringly, to let him know that he had not undermined the formation of a casual friendship, but was not yet ready to talk about the idea that had been fermenting in her mind since the third verse of his second poem.

“It’s very thoughtful of you to let me take a glance at 69. Maybe we could even open the window, so that I could zoom in and take a few photographs of it, without having the camera focus on the glass of your window,” said Trudi.

“That’s easily done,” said Daniel, “You’re welcome to come over.”

“Well I know exactly how to find the place. I guess with you being a little boy, and me being busy with school and acting and then moving away to get married, our paths never crossed back then,” said Trudi.

“When did you meet ... he who wasn’t exemplary?” asked Daniel.

“It started very quickly. That’s probably why it ended quickly after only two years. We met when I was barely 18, got married a month later, having never taken the time to get to know eachother properly. It was all just based on instant love at first sight, which wasn’t enough to sustain a lasting relationship with any working compatibility,” said Trudi, “Why did you want to talk about him? He doesn’t bother me anymore, since I’ve had time to get over him. I’m just curious.”

“Well you have a good relationship now, and had a bad relationship from 18-20, and then you were probably grieving a divorce. It would have been nice to have known you back in the happiest times of your childhood from age 15-17, if only I hadn’t had the mind of a little kid. If you’d seen me back then, I was typically running around the garden and climbing trees with a towel safety pinned to my shirt, pretending it was a super hero’s cape,” said Daniel.

“I used to know someone else who was addicted to cartoon super heroes when he was that age,” said Trudi, recalling one of her bedtime discussions with 14 year old Murray, “It’s not something that needs an apologetic explanation. I’ll come over at around ten in the morning and see you. I should be getting to bed now, but I’ll leave you with a potential inspiration for a new poem. Maybe you could write about what it would be like to be 5 to 7 years old again, but with the mind that you have now.”

“That IS an idea. Thank you,” said Daniel.

“Until the morning then,” said Trudi.

She made her way back to the village hotel, and lay in bed with a mixture of thoughts. One the one hand, she could return home to the California Hills in a week or so and see her boyfriend and son again. On the other hand, she could time travel back to her mid teens, after teaching Daniel how to time travel back with her at the same time. Then she could spend every school holiday period with a part time next to next door neighbour she’d never known in the first timeline. She would be able to relive her adolesence with the nearby friendship of a boy ten years younger than her, who had the time travelled mind and memory of a 29 year old accomplished and talented poet. She could let her two year marriage play out the same way, with her memory still intact. Knowing what was coming, she would not be shocked or hurt by her brief husband’s abandonment when the time came. With her memories of his future, she had a distinct advantage over him. She had two questions to consider:

Firstly, was she really prepared to start a new timeline that excluded not only her final consumption of Murray but also their many interactions in the months leading up to it? She thought about that one and decided that, since she would remember the earlier timelines, it would not matter to her that they no longer happened.

The second question on her mind concerned the matter of waiting from age 15 to age 31 before she could see her current boyfriend again, and even longer before she could even see her son born again.

She’d relived a nine year period after waiting nine years before time travelling back from age 33 to eventually undo one of her earlier planned temporary consumptions of Murray.

This potential new venture into the past (that Trudi was contemplating) would be a far more radical step to take. She would not be missing out on any of the last eight years. She would merely have to wait at least 16 years to relive them, which meant that she would have to wait 24 years to find out what life held in store for her after the age of 39.

She eventually dozed off to sleep, with the calming thought that Daniel might be able to help her to come to a decision.

Several hours later, she took the walk to the next village, the one she’d grown up in, and passed by the front gate of 69 St Patrick Street, before making her way to the long driveway of 73. She rang Daniel’s doorbell, and soon heard his footsteps.

He opened the door, and welcomed her in.

“We’ll use the southern staircase,” he said, leading her through the living room.

“You mean there are two?” said Trudi.

“The other one’s not as fancy.”

They walked up the stairs, turned at the top, walked through a long hallway, then a doorway, and then another hallway. Turning left, they went to the end of the final corridor and came to a pair of windows, which he had thoughtfully already opened in preparation for her visit.

She took out her camera, and zoomed in on the gardens of 69.

“If you stand close enough, you can see the close up through the camera too,” she said.

He seemed to be doing his best not to brush up against her deliberately, and she made every effort to make him feel at ease.

She snapped several photographs from various distances, by adjusting the zoom lense between each one and the next. Then she panned up and did the same with the upstairs exterior of her mother’s old house.

Finally, she zoomed in on the upper portions of the row of trees. They still reached above the new fence which divided the two properties.

“To think we could have just walked between those trees and met eachother back then,” she said.

“We did, in a poem,” said Daniel, taking a sheet of paper out of his pocket and unfolding it, “I took your advice and came up with a fictional version of our lives back then.”

Trudi took the page in her hand and read through it slowly.

“It’s beautiful!” she said, “You’ve got so much talent, that you should have had your poems published.”

“I’ve tried, but the publishers tell me there’s not much of a market for poetry nowadays,” said Daniel.

“It’s a shame,” said Trudi, “I don’t have any contacts in my industry to help you with that, but as fantastic as it sounds, I do know a way to bring your poem to life. We could, quite literally use time travel.”

“Even if that’s really possible, it wouldn’t help our younger selves if one of us went back now,” said Daniel.

“Not with that theory of time travel, no. The method I know of would enable us to become our younger selves. We would send our consciousnesses back in time, and they would be transferred into the bodies of our younger selves. For example, then you’d have all your 29 year old mind and memories in the body of your 5 year old self. I’d have all of my 39 year old mind and memories in the body of my 15 year old self. It can be done, I can assure you. In fact, I can prove it. We’ll wait twenty minutes. Then you tell me some secret that I couldn’t possibly know now. Then I’ll come back in time those twenty minutes, and tell you in a few seconds time what I’ve learned from your 20 minutes into the future,” said Trudi.

“If you say so,” said Daniel.

“Now don’t say anything significant for the next twenty minutes, because it’ll be removed from your memory. In fact, from your perspective, you’ll never have said it, once I’ve time travelled. We need to spend the time doing something of no importance, so that it doesn’t matter when it’s undone,” said Trudi.

“We could play Snap with the pack of cards in that spare bedroom,” said Daniel.

He showed her into the room, and sat on one end of the bed and dealt the cards. She sat a meter away and prepared for the game. At times, when one of them snapped up a pile only less than a second ahead of the other one, their hands would make contact. She began to wonder what this sensation would be doing to him, and hoped the twenty minutes would soon be up.

He had almost emptied her of her entire deck of cards, when he looked at the clock on the bedside table, and said, “It’s been 19 minutes. We’d better get back out in the corridor, so that you can time travel.”

“We don’t have to. My mind will revert to wherever my body was twenty minutes ago. From your point of view as this timeline comes to an end, you won’t know anything. But your twenty minutes younger self in the next timeline should have some proof by then,” said Trudi.

When the allotted 20 minutes was up, she asked him, “So what’s your secret?”

“I wish I could have seen ‘Mountains Family’ when it was on,” said Daniel.

Trudi laughed.

“I could have guessed that. Tell me something that’s just about yourself, that I couldn’t possibly know yet,” said Trudi.

“When I was ten, my favourite cartoon super hero was the Sapphire Skyflyer,” said Daniel.

“Well there’s one I never saw,” said Trudi, “Okay, let me concentrate...”

She soon found herself back at the point when he had just said “If you say so.”

“I’m back from 20 minutes time,” she said, “We had a game of snap at your suggestion, to pass the time and then you told me your secret. Namely that your favourite cartoon character was the Sapphire Skyflyer, when you were ten.”

“We only just met last night. Are you sure didn’t sneak over and see me watching that cartoon here when I was ten?” Daniel asked.

“Fair enough, we’ll do it again. This time, after twenty minutes of cards, tell me something that you’re absolutely positively certain will be impossible for me to have known by any means other than having learned it from your alternate future self,” said  Trudi.

It took two more rounds of twenty minute backjaunts, before he was throroughly convinced.

“Trudi, this is the discovery of all time!”

“So you see we could be a prep school boy and a teenager again.”

“But I’ll never know about it properly. You’ll go back 24 years, and I won’t know who you are. I’ll be happy to meet you and be friends, but I’ll forget everything after you’ve undone all my memories.”

“That’s what’s always happened before, but I had an hour to think of a solution to that in bed last night. I was taught this technique by someone when I was 24. First he did it himself. Then he taught me. But we never did it together at the same time. If I spend a few weeks teaching you – and I’ll have to call home and extend my holiday in this timeline to do it -, then we can time travel back simultaneously, together. We’d both concentrate on going back 25 years. Then we’ll arrive in a school holiday period when I only have to work on the TV show on Saturdays, and you’re here at your grandma’s.”

“I really do prefer that time period and the good times I had, but now I don’t know. Couldn’t we go back to when I was a teenager and you were divorced in your twenties?” he said.

“That’s a nice thing to say, but that era’s already been riddled with time travelling when I was in it,” said Trudi, “I shared this proposal with you, because ‘Reflections in Rainwater’ and the poem you showed me today have awakened such a strong desire in me to be a teenager again, and live in 69, that I’m even willing to put off re-meeting my boyfriend and having my son for decades in order to do it.”

“But I’ll just be a little boy to you back then,” said Daniel.

“Visually that’s true, but you’ll have all the poetic skills and thoughtful creativity that I saw last night,” said Trudi, “And if I stay in this time, as a mother in a long-term dating relationship, we can’t be together in any capacity.”

“It’s just that ... I can hardly picture you wanting to kiss a five year old kid, like the one in these photos,” he called back, darting into the bedroom and returning with an album of childhood photographs.

He turned the pages and showed her pictures of himself taken in the first ten years of his life. While she was looking at his childhood photographs, he was having a difficult time of not making it obvious that he enjoyed looking at her.

“You were quite a cute little boy, weren’t you? With you at that age, I guess waiting all those years to have my own son’s company again won’t be a problem at all. As for kissing you, I’m sure I could quite happily manage a few slow and wet smacks on the cheek each day of the school holidays,” said Trudi, “And your mind will be as capable of enjoying that as it is now. I know it wouldn’t be full scale necking, but you’d feel my lips. I know I’d fall in love with your expressive mind back then.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because I already have, now. We can’t dwell on that in the here and now, because it’s not fair on you, me or my boyfriend. But at fifteen, I wasn’t seeing anyone, and if I go back, I’ll still have those feelings,” said Trudi.

“You’re not just trying too hard to talk me into it?” asked Daniel.

“I was on the brink of walking out of that shock show last night, until I saw this lovely young fashion statement walk up onto the stage and raise the tone of the evening’s event for the next several minutes. I would have gotten to you in the supper room sooner, if I hadn’t been stopped by two fans of the recent reunion movie,” said Trudi.

“Well .... I do remember having crushes on a few grown up ladies when I was aged 6 to 10,” said Daniel, “I’m sure I’d have one on you as you looked in that TV still of you at 15 that you showed me last night.”

“Of course you would. You’ll have the same mind,” said Trudi.

“The same struggling mind. Still ... if I can’t be with you at all now, and I can’t be with you at all when you were 24 to whenever you met your current boyfriend, then maybe what you suggest is the best proposition going,” said Daniel.

“Can I start training you in time travel then?” asked Trudi.

“If that’s going to take weeks anyway, we’ve got nothing to lose. It gives me time to more firmly make my mind up,” said Daniel.

“I’ll have to see you try a few twenty minute tests, to make sure you’ve got it perfected, before we commit to a 25 year backjaunt,” said Trudi, “If you pass those alright, then we will have to make the first test I know of in which two people do it together. We’ll go back a day or so. If that works, and we both retain our memories of the old timeline, then we’ll be right to go for the 25 year trip.”

“You won’t believe this, but I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve been too shy, or too fussy, or too busy, or too rejected. Now I’ll have to go back to waiting through most of my childhood before I can give mutual mouth to mouth resuccitation a try, even if my developed poetic skills give me more confidence the next time around.”

Trudi thought back to some of Murray’s reactions to their more intimate oral interactions.

“There is one more thing I could do back then to sweeten the pot,” she said.

“Do tell,” said Daniel.

“Well you must understand, that I really don’t like talking about it while I’m still at this stage of this timeline,” said Trudi, “But if you think it would be something you’d enjoy, I could sit little you on my lap and slowly lick the cheeks on each side of your face.”

Daniel gaped at her in awe.

“What’s the first lesson in consciousness time travel?” he asked.

It took them two weeks, before Daniel was able to attempt some twenty minute backjaunts. He performed them with distinction, and then they both went back the same twenty minutes together.

“Do you know we’ve travelled?” asked Trudi.

“I was just going to ask you,” said Daniel.

“Daniel, it works! I’ve never tried this before, not even with the guy who taught me fifteen years ago. The whole plan would have fallen apart, if this test had failed. It works! We can really go. We can be 15 and five years old again!”

“Except in our minds. My grandma once said I was ’30 years old in the head’. Now I’ll be back there and 29 years old in the head,” said Daniel.

“And I’ll be 15 years old in the tongue,” said Trudi, with a look of warmth and affection.

“I can hardly wait for that!” said Daniel, “Well you told your boyfriend you’d be another two weeks. Do you need to call him again and let him know you’re off ...? No, of course you don’t. You’ll be back there with him again, after a 25 year wait for yourself and a few days for him, I suppose.”

“That’s pretty much how it will work out,” said Trudi, “He’s not expecting me back for another five days in this time now, since I last called him. Why don’t we have a last look around the lives of our adult selves, and perhaps a celebration before we backjaunt?”

“Its not as if we can announce it to either village and throw a party,” said Daniel.

“You could take me to the village dance,” said Trudi.

“You’re still a celebrity. If anyone recognises you and takes photographs of you with a younger man, it could get back to your boyfriend. I don’t want to spoil what’s left of this timeline for anyone,” said Daniel.

“You’re a gentleman,” said Trudi.

“I could put on some dance music here, and there are two spare beds to save you walking back to the hotel in the other village at the end of the evening,” said Daniel.

“That sounds nicer than the village dance anyway,” said Trudi, “An evening with your poetry alone would have gone better the night we first met. If it weren’t for you, I might have time travelled back and come up with a way to make them call the whole thing off. It’s the only thing I could think of to save the audience.”

The next day Daniel walked through to her hotel in the other village, and then they went strolling in the meadow together.

“You won’t be able to bring me out here, once I’m a five year old again. My grandma wouldn’t let me go off with a high school girl next door,” said Daniel.

“It’s important that you never tell her about me, especially the time travelling thing. However, we COULD come here for a day, and then both of us time travel back to the start of the day, and your grandma would never know you were missing. We’d still remember it, but in the new timeline, to her it would never have happened,” said Trudi.

“I couldn’t put her through the worry of the first timeline, even if it would have effectively never happened after we’d time travelled,” said Daniel.

“Your thoughtfulness is ever bit as likeable as your creativity,” said Trudi.

“Let’s take off in the morning,” he said, “I’ve become eager than ever to leave this timeline, or at least my cheeks have.”

“We’d better go and get some sleep then, if we’re going to have our dance party for two tonight after a long morning of walking out here,” said Trudi.

“Why don’t you come all the way back to my place in my village first? Then you’ll have done all your walking before you get your afternoon’s rest. When we wake up, I’ll put dinner on, and we can dance the evening away on plenty of food and plenty of sleep,” said Daniel.

“That’ll be good. I think I’ll settle up with the hotel on my way back, so that I don’t leave any loose ends before I wind up this timeline. I doubt they’d catch up with me in the next, but I’d feel better,” said Trudi.

They walked back through the first village, and once Trudi was all sorted out, they made their way to the second village and his home. He gave her a bedroom and then got into his own bed. He woke up after two hours, and started work on preparing a gourmet dinner for them. He used all the best things in the house and the pantry, knowing that there was no point in leaving anything behind for future nights in a timeline that would come to an end the next morning.

Trudi came down the stairs with ten minutes to spare before he served up the meal, and then they sat at the dining room table and enjoyed it.

After that, he led her to the music cabinet in the living room, and took out several compact discs that were suitable for lengthy slow dancing.

“Since we’re only one night’s sleep away from leaving this timeline, would slow dancing be alright?” he asked.

“I think so,” said  Trudi.

He put the first disc in the CD player, and turned on the amplifier. When they were both comfortable with the volume, he took her in his arms and moved slowly around the floor with her.

“I can hardly believe that we’ll be cheek to cheek like this 25 years in the past by tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

“And lips to cheek, and tongue to cheek...” said Trudi.

“You’re really not helping my self control, you know. I’m trying to do the fair thing right up until the last second if this timeline,” said Daniel.

“That’s one of the things I’ll really like about you in the next one,” she said, “Which reminds me of some specific outcomes we’d better prepare for. We know that you’re here at your grandma’s every school holidays, but we don’t know the fine details from memory. If we arrive at a time when one or both of us is in a house with my mother or your grandma, then we’ll just have to start playing along in the roles of our younger selves.”

“That will be the most challenging part of it. I’ll have to play that part in order to conceal the time travelling of my mind for quite a few years. I’ll have to talk like a child again,” said Daniel.

“Well maybe that ’30 years old in the head’ accusation will help to cover any slip ups you make, but try not to,” she said, “We can each take the first available opportunity to head outside, under the fairly truthful banner of ‘playing in the garden’. Then we each just head to the row of trees and wait for the other, and compare notes. I’m glad that fence wasn’t there back then. It would have made all our upcoming rendezvous operations very tedious.”

They danced and talked for two hours, and then settled down in their separate bedrooms.

The next morning, after a breakfast which made another generous use of household supplies which would no longer be needed, they stood together in the living room.

“We should take off from the corridor with the windows that look out on your place,” he said.

They walked up the stairs and positioned themselves by the window.

“There’ll be plenty of cuddles in the new timeline, but would you like to launch ourselves back together in the shared posture of a hug?” she asked.

“Surely,” said Daniel.

They put their arms around eachother, drew close and embraced.

“Now just remember everything you’ve learned and practiced, and concentrate on going back to the school holidays of 24 years ago,” said Trudi.

It was eight-thirty in the morning, when everything seemed to dissolve from view around them.

The next thing Trudi knew, she was at the back of the garden of 69 St Patrick Street. She looked down at her clothes and saw that she was wearing a creamy brown and white dress. A few meters away from her was a garden seat, and just in front of that, the row of trees. She stood beside the seat and watched intently, waiting for some sign that Daniel had made the journey back with her. She had asked herself many times what she would do, if anything went wrong, and his mind was lost in the future of the old timeline.

The boy’s mind in a boy’s body wouldn’t be able to understand what she’d done, even if he would most likely still have some sort of boyish crush on her. If the reverse had happened, his 29 year old mind would have a much better chance of explaining things to her 15 year old mind, even if it took him a while to convince her.

She waited for most of the morning, and remembered that her mother had been working full time after her father had left them. She would not be expected in the house for any reason, and could prepare her own lunch.

Then she saw some small movement just in front of the row of trees. She couldn’t make out what it was, perhaps a leaf blowing in the gentle breeze. Then it drew closer, and seemed to be headed in her direction. Straining her eyes, she suddenly realised that it was Daniel.

Somehow he had shrunken, just as Murray had done.

She didn’t understand it. Daniel had never been through the portal, at least as far as she knew. They’d never discussed it, but she could not imagine him having kept a secret from her, given the bond between them in the other timeline. There was no logical explanation for Daniel having shrunken. Besides that, Daniel certainly hadn’t come from the other side of a portal to giant land during the trip that they had both just made that morning. He hadn’t shrunken at all, during the test backjaunts they had made back in his house in the other future. The situation defied reason.

All she could think of was that Murray’s theory about his reduction having been caused by time travelling from giant land was false. It was one step closer to accuracy, but it left her with no idea why he had reduced in size and she hadn’t. She did not know about the Ring of Reversal Era’s shrinking side effect, nor about the immunity she’d acquired by repeatedly eating Murray.

He came up to about one meter away from her and looked up at her.

“Trudi, do you know it’s me ... Daniel?” he called.

His voice sounded so child like now, even for a shrunken boy.

“Yes ... I made it too,” she said, “It’s 39 year old me in my 15 year old body. You seem to be 29 year old Daniel in his much smaller five year old body. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I really didn’t think it would this time.”

“THIS time? Have we tried this before?” asked Daniel.

“No, but that guy who taught me when I was 24, called Murray .... Well he time travelled back from a giant land on the other side of a portal that’s located in the forest outside the village I was staying in. He came back tiny. Apparently he’d known me in the future, when I was 37-39 in a much earlier timeline,” said Trudi.

“And you didn’t think to tell me this before you enticed me into tripping through an even longer chunk of my life with you?” said Daniel.

“You’d never been through the giant portal. I mean: you haven’t, have you?” asked Trudi.

“No. I didn’t even know about it,” said Daniel.

“I’ve never shrunken, and I didn’t think you’d ever been through the portal to giant land. So I really thought that we’d both be find to make the trip and come out at this end both normal sized,” said Trudi.

“Well I’m no scientist, but in my own poetic language, I like to know all the variables, before I try any experiments,” said Daniel.

“I’m really sorry. It just slipped my mind,” said Trudi.

“So how on earth did this ... Murray get his full size back?” asked Daniel.

“He didn’t. And he could only make one more short backjaunt after he’d gotten back to 24 year old me too,” said Trudi.

“Then where is he now? Roaming the streets of the village, passing himself off as an action figure?” asked Daniel.

“The night I met you, I lay awake in bed, trying to come up with all sorts of theories of what would happen to him if I came this far back in time with you, to a point long before Murray and I ever met,” said Trudi, “He might have gone into the giant land again. He might have avoided it, except that I figured that if he never met me, then he’d have discovered the giant land by himself, without the me of several timelines ago. If he went to the giant land by himself, got caught by a giantess and caged as a pet for two years, then he’d have eventually time travelled back two years to get to the Ireland side of the portal, only to find himself shrunken to tiny size in Ireland. That was my theory, but if the portal has nothing to do with the shrinking side effect, as your presence would seem to indicate, then maybe Murray would just get back to Ireland at normal size about 22 to 24 years from now.”

“Okay, but so what happened to him in the timeline when he came all the way back to when you were 24?” asked Daniel.

“I was getting around to telling you that. I put him in a pavlova with strawberries and set it down on the dining table,” said Trudi.

“How could he have eaten all that?” asked Daniel.

“He couldn’t, and he didn’t. I emptied the bowl myself, using a spoon for proper dining etiquette,” she said.

“It seems a bit pointless to have made him and his clothes all sticky in the first place. You would have had a time cleaning him up afterwards,” said Daniel.

“I didn’t need to, and it wasn’t pointless. I ate EVERYTHING in the bowl. The pavlova wasn’t the tastiest part. Neither were the strawberries,” said Trudi.

“So what other toppings did you put on it?” asked Daniel.

“None,” said Trudi.
“You’re making as much sense as you have by not warning me about the possiblility of accidentally shrinking myself,” said Daniel, “If all you had in the bowl was pavlova and strawberries, then what else could have been the tastiest part?”

“Him,” said Trudi.

“Oh! .... You can’t be serious!” said Daniel.

“Well he offered every argument against the idea, but when a tiny man turns up in your backyard looking better than prawns and caviar, and he’s small enough to be gobbled whole, it’s hard to deny oneself the pleasure of making the most of him,” said Trudi.

“Just like you couldn’t deny yourself the possibility of goofing up this backjaunt!” said Daniel.

“Daniel, you are becoming increasingly rude,” she chided, “You’ve asked a lot of questions, and I’ve given you straightforward answers. What more can I do?” asked Trudi.

“You can work out what we do next in order to salvage this fiasco!” said Daniel.

“Well your powers of expression are as good as they were in your adult body, even if your manners are lacking,” said Trudi, “It’s obvious what we’ll do next. I’ll pick you up and take you into the kitchen, and clean you up a little since you’ve been running through the grass. Once that’s done, I’ll sit down at the dining table and eat you for my lunch.”

She sat down on the garden seat with a look of detachment and confidence, and stared down at him.

“You!...” he started.

“The master poet seems to be running out of words,” Trudi taunted, “You can run and hide in the flowerbed, if you like. I’ll soon fetch you out in time for lunch.”

He turned and ran.

“Try hiding under one of the roses. They look lovely in bloom this time of year,” she called.

He could do worse than take her advice. Soon he peeked out as she stood up and strode confidently over and looked down into the flowerbed.

She stepped to one side, and then back again, and then her eyes fell upon the rose that concealed him. She knelt down, reached in with her hand, and snatched him up.

“You probably knew this would happen all along! I’ll bet you set me up for this! All those fancy speeches about wanting to take my creative intellect back in time with you and stick it in the body of my kindergarten self!” said Daniel.

“You’re being unfair again,” said Trudi, “I was telling the truth, when I said that I didn’t expect this to happen. It’s taken me by almost as much surprise as it’s taken you. I certainly didn’t plan it. I already had the memory of having eaten Murray. But this does help to balance things out. By coming back this far, I’ve saved him from the fate I inflicted on him in an earlier timeline. I’d been wondering if I could go through with this backjaunt anyway, because of that. But the way it’s worked out, I can make short work of you instead.”

“And then live it all out again, and go back to playing happy families with your boyfriend in the distant future, with a son who’ll get to live a lot longer than me,” said Daniel.

He was too small for her to be sure that he wasn’t foaming at the mouth.

“He will, once he gets through his first 29 years. Don’t forget you’ve had all those in the previous timeline,” said Trudi.

“But now I’m going to lose it all at five years old in this one,” said Daniel.

“That you are,” said Trudi, standing up and carrying him inside.

Soon she was seated at the dining table.

“I wish I’d never written you that poem about being this age again! I wish you’d never even come to the poetry slam at all!” he shouted.

“No you don’t,” she said, “You’re just saying those things because you’re unhappy about the way it’s turned out. Don’t worry. It’ll be over soon enough, but not too soon for me to savour it. I did promise you some interaction with my tongue, and now you’ll have quite an experience of that.”

She lifted him to her mouth, put out her tongue and licked him affectionately.

“There now isn’t that nice,” she said.

“I’m not really a kid any more, you know,” said Daniel.

“I was just trying to be friendly,” said Trudi, “I also don’t know if you’d have tasted this good at 29. I’m glad we came back.”

“It’s been more like a backstabbing than a backjaunt!” said Daniel.

“You still haven’t even thanked me for the licks,” said Trudi, “You kept telling me how much you couldn’t wait for that on your cheeks alone. You’ve had them all over your upper body instead.”

“Well it was admittedly terrific,” said Daniel.

“There’s my little poet back again. I think I’ll give you a quick send off, before you go back to being rude,” said Trudi.

She opened her mouth wide, placed him into it, onto her tongue, and gulped him down rapidly.

Then she time travelled back to the point where she’d caught him in the garden, and stood up again.

“It’s all done,” she said, “You were very tasty too ... You don’t understand, do you. I didn’t want you to, the first time. I’ve started another timeline. In the last one, I took you inside and ate you. Then I time travelled back to this point when I’d just caught you.”

“You could have told me you were going to time travel back after you’d done it,” said Daniel.

“You’ll know in future. I just wanted to see your reactions when you thought it wasn’t going to be reversed. From your perspective, as far as you know, you’ve never been eaten,” said Trudi.

“Well thanks, I guess. I’m sorry I got so hot under the collar. Being stuck at this size is a lot to take in,” said Daniel.

She gave him a friendly smile, carried him inside and put him on the kitchen bench.

“Now for this timeline, what shall we BOTH have for lunch?” she said.

“I ... um ... I’m thinking about after lunch actually,” he said, “If I haven’t blown it by all those things I yelled at you.”

“You haven’t, so don’t worry. I can understand that you’re frustrated. What’s on your mind?” asked Trudi.

“Is it still possible to have those kisses on the cheek, or both cheeks at once now?” he asked.

“You won’t even have to shave any more to fully enjoy them,” said Trudi.

After they’d finished eating, she took him up to her bedroom, sat on the bed and pressed her lips to his entire face at once.

“Oh honey that was great,” said Daniel at last.

“I think I can act the part of my teenage self indefinitely, but we can’t let my mother or your grandma or anyone else for that matter know what’s happened to you,” said Trudi, “You can live in this room, and stay well hidden when my mother’s around.

“I guess there’s one benefit to my reduced circumstances,” said Daniel, “Now you can take me on outings with you, when nobody else is going along with you.”

“We can do that,” said Trudi.

A year later, after several temporary gobblings, and countless licks and kisses, they were sitting at the lunch table again one day during the school holidays, while she was preparing to eat him again.

“The rides on your tongue each time are by far the best positive aspect of my being this tiny now,” said Daniel, “And we can keep on doing it over and over again.”

“Until I’m nearly 18,” said Trudi, “Before we even left the other future, I decided to let my two year marriage play out just as it did the first time I lived through those years. I’ll know that he’s not going to stay with me. So I’ll go into the marriage with lowered expectations, and no chance of being surprised and emotionally upheaved like last time. I’ll just enjoy the time with him while it lasts, but I won’t invest any emotion in him this time. That way I won’t get hurt.”

“I understand,” said Daniel, “Could you maybe ask your mother to let me stay here and look after me during those two years?”

“You can stay here instead,” she said, and pointed to her stomach.

“That joke wasn’t funny the first time you ate me,” said Daniel.

“I was joking then, because I knew we’d have three years together. At the moment, you’re forgetting what happened to Murray in the last timeline I spent with him.”

“But darling, I’ve done everything you wanted, by coming back here, dictating lots of new poetry for you to enjoy as you hand write it out for me, loving you with all my heart. Surely you could let me wait for your divorce, when you’re 18.”

She blew an enormous raspberry at him, keeping her tongue in the protruding position for several seconds. The sight of her tongue drove him into a state better expressed when he’d still had a fully developed body. It also confirmed that he would be wasting his time and building false hopes by continuing to appeal to her. His best option was to savour every moment of the next two highly promising years.

When Trudi was almost 18, she told Daniel that she was due to meet her fast fiance for the first time, at a point in time about four weeks further on. The announced that she would eat Daniel for the final time the next day, and let him snuggle against her cheek in her bed once more. The next morning, when her mother had gone to work, she talked with him until soon after midday and then turned him loose in the garden.

“Take half an hour to hide, and then I’ll come and find you and catch you,” she said.

He ran off, thinking that she was at least giving him a chance to avoid becoming her lunch for the last time. It hadn’t occurred to him that she just wanted to enjoy hunting for him and chasing him, that if he did by any chance elude capture altogether, she could just time travel back an hour or two and leave the game of hide and seek out of her itinerary.

It took her forty minutes to find him, and about forty seconds to catch him.

Then she prepared him, took him to the dinner table, and sat towering in front of him.

“If it’s any consolation, I’m going to give you a lot more licks, and a lot more time lying in my mouth today. I hope my tongue is as much of a treat for you as you’ve always been for my tongue,” said Trudi, “I can’t really think of anything else we need to say to eachother, except to compliment you on your good behaviour this time. For a man so gifted with words, you’ve managed not to make all the fuss and protests and arguments that Murray went on with every time we talked about my eating him permanently. I’ve got 24 years to relive, and you’ll be part of my tummy the whole time, even though you soon won’t have any awareness of that fact. Thank you for all your time as my poetic partner. Be as brave as you can, and have a good ride.”

True to her word, she licked him so many times that he lost count, and then left him lying on her tongue for two hours, while she cleaned up in the kitchen, went up to her bedroom to read a book, and then finally looked out the window as the sun set on her mother’s garden. She would be home from work soon, Trudi considered, and it wouldn’t do to talk to one’s mother with one’s mother full.

She thought back the final gulps that had once despatched the Murray of an earlier timeline down her throat, and wondered what would become of him in this latest timeline. Then she gulped Daniel relentlessly into her throat, and down, until all she could feel was an easing of the slight stomach pains that were beginning to form in her stomach.

She realised that her long and intentional delay in swallowing him had caused a certain amount of hunger to build up.

“Oh my!” she said aloud, “He went down rather late. I hope I saved room for dinner.”

18 year old Trudi (with the mind of her older self) met her fiance not long after that, while taking her Christmas holiday from filming ‘Mountains Family’ on Miami beach, and they had their wedding just as they had in the original timeline.

When they reached the hotel room for their honeymoon, she felt ill at ease. They got into bed, and Trudi said, “I want to tell you something.”

She didn’t go into all of the details about Murray and Daniel and the other timelines. She just told him that she had time travelled back from a future, when she had seen him abandon her after two years, that she had thought she could live it all out again, without being taken by surprise by the divorce this time. She performed one twenty minute time travel trick to convince him that she was telling the truth.

“I can’t,” she said, “this time I don’t want a divorce in two years’ time.”

“Well now that I know this, maybe I wouldn’t do that to you,” he said.

The word ‘maybe’ fell through her heart like a lead balloon and crashlanded somewhere in the regions of digested waste product awaiting its final departure from her system.

“To my memory, it’s as though you already did. There will be no divorce later, just an annullment now.”

She changed from her night dress back into her wedding dress and walked out of the room.

She had the wedding annulled a few days later, and then returned to her mother’s home.

She felt a pang of guilt about the way her revelation of time travel would torment him forever, and decided to let him off easy. She time travelled back a few weeks, and simply never went to Miami Beach for her Christmas break. As a result, she never met him, except in her memory of other timelines. The main thing was that, as far as his mind was aware, he had never met her. She was only a supporting star of a television show to him, and always would be. She resolved never to take that Miami Beach holiday in any subsequent timeline.

Trudi eventually turned twenty and went for a walk to the other village, and saw that there was a dinner and dance event on in the community hall. It was where she had met Daniel at the poetry slam some decades into the future. A man just a few years older than her asked her to dance, and she spent forty minutes in his arms. Yet her mind was focussed solely on the night she first met Daniel. She waited until they both had their eyes closed during a particularly slow number, and then concentrated on time travel.

And she went back to the day her seventeen year old self was hunting for Daniel in the garden.

She enjoyed reliving the last few minutes of the chase, and then picked him up.

“Well you’ve won!” said Daniel, with a more sedate sigh of acceptance this time.

“I’ve not only won. I’ve eaten you again and time travelled back again,” said Trudi, “I’ve gobbled you down, met my fiance, had our wedding, gone to the hotel for my honeymoon, decided that I couldn’t go through with two years of half-invested marriage with a known adulterous husband. I walked out that night and had the wedding annulled. Then I time travelled back and made sure I never took the Miami Beach holiday when I first met him. Having done that, I would never see him again. So I lived through the same years from age 18-20 with neither the marriage nor the resulting divorce from his infidelity. When I was nearly 21, I took a walk into the other village one night, and went to a dance at the community hall. I had another man in my arms for over half an hour, but all I was seeing was the night we met at the poetry slam. So in the middle of the dance, I time travelled back to the last part of our chase today. I knew that the thing I’d been missing was your poetry.”

“But you did it then. You ate me for what you thought would be the final time, regardless of what that would mean for me. You know what it feels like to be betrayed by a man, having gone through a divorce in your first timeline. How do I know what to expect from you in the future?” asked Daniel.

“You don’t, but you have the here and now. So do you want me to kiss you or not?” said Trudi.

“Well how could I say no to lips like those?” said Daniel.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’,” said Trudi, and put those lips to work.

When she was nineteen and Daniel was nine, she sat out on the outdoor swinging chair on her back verandah with him in a beautiful light blue dress, with her hair worn up, sat him in her lap while she read through the paperwork for renewing her contract on ‘Mountains Family.’ She signed it, put it on the seat beside her, and then lifted him up in front of her face.

“This has been the best timeline for both of us, hasn’t it?” she said.

“It surely has,” said Daniel.

“You’ve escaped becoming a permanent addition to my stomach so many times in the last few years. I think I’ve lost count.”

“Well there were all those times when you were aged 15 to 17, and then after your big trip back in time to undo the last one, we’ve done it several more times since, so you’ve told me,” said Daniel, “The only thing is that I have to go by your narratives, because I don’t remember them after you’ve done them. So in a sense, for me, each time is the first time.”

“That’s right,” said Trudi, “And it had to be that way, since you lost your time travelling power when you shrank. The same thing happened to Murray,” said Trudi.

“Only now he’s never met you in the first place,” said Daniel.

“So you’ve had one escape after another from the results of my time travelling efforts.”

“For which I’m very grateful,” said Daniel.

“Well I needed a lot more of your poetry to really satisfy the artistic fascination I acquired at the poetry slam,” said Trudi.

“I’m glad I’ve brought that into your life,” said Daniel, “I’m too small to use a pen and paper now. If you hadn’t written them all up for me while I was thinking them up and dictating them, there’d be nothing we could do about poetry.”

She lifted the acting contract papers up from a book she’d been using to press on while she had signed the contract, and put them down a little further across the seat. Then she held the book up for him to read. On the cover it said:

POETRY FOR ALL TIMES

                Daniel Blackridge

“I did the binding and made the cover myself, after I bought the materials,” she said, “I couldn’t let any professional out there in this time period read the intimate and time travel sensitive information in many of your best pieces about me. Now I’ll always be able to hold it in my hands on a couch, or a couple of pillows while sitting up in bed, and reread through all your poems.”

“Except for the new ones,” said Daniel, “I guess we’re starting a volume two.

“I think I’m happy enough with one volume,” said Trudi, “I can keep rereading that for the rest of my life. As I said, you’ve had a lot of escapes, even though you can’t remember the dire predicaments you were in. I think it’s time you faced up to the gobbling with no possibility of a reset button bailing you out afterwards. Murray had to be made to see the reality of that, but then it was undone, when I time travelled back far enough to be back here in this time with you. This time is for the last time, Daniel. I hope you enjoy the ride down as much as you can.”

She carried him out to the garden, and set him down on the grass.

“Thanks for coming back and giving me these extra two years,” he said.

“It’s matured you, even though you’ve really been an adult in your mind for a long time,” said Trudi, “I’ll be out to find and chase you shortly.”

He watched her turn and walk away, and this time he wasted no time in trying to hide in Trudi’s garden. He ran for the row of trees, ran between them and went to conceal himself in his grandmother’s garden.

Trudi couldn’t find him, and decided to time travel back. She found that she couldn’t. Her chronal immunity to being shrunken on the first long journey back through the Ring of Reversal era had kept her safe from being reduced in size. However, her full sized body had just taken a few years longer to lose the ability to time travel.

For months Daniel hid out in his grandmother’s garden, living off berries and fruits, but he realised something.

Trudi had beaten him in a previous timeline, by eating him for good, or so she’d intended, but had then come back because she missed him. Now he had beaten her, by escaping for good. He thought about his prospects as an adult in a nine year old boy’s body that had been irrevocably shrunken to tiny size. He could spend the rest of his life hiding out at tiny size, lonely and unloved, or he could go to his destiny, and enjoy the final gobbling.

He made his way into Trudi’s garden for the first time in months, and found that she wasn’t in the back garden of the large battle-axe block. It was the middle of the morning. So her mother would be at work.

Daniel walked around to the side of the garden, and saw Trudi relaxing on the grass beside the pool, wearing a bikini. It was the first time he’d ever seen her stomach.

He watched in fascination, as she soon got up, climbed the short ladder to the diving board and dived into the pool. She surfaced, went to dry off on the lawn again, and looked out at the garden.

He ran towards her, calling her name: “Trudi!”

She gaped at him in surprise.

“You came back!” she said, “When you got away, I tried to time travel back to prevent it, but I can’t do it anymore either.”

“So this will definitely be my absolute last time, but for me it’s kind of still the first,” he said.

“But why put yourself in my clutches again? You won,” said Trudi.

“So did you, in the previous timelines, at least once. I love you. I came back to this time to be with you. I lost my size and can’t be with you in the way we’d planned. But I’ve come to see that this will be better than a life lived in this condition without you. I’m giving myself to you completely. I want you to do it, and be happy,” said Daniel.

“You little sweety,” she said, “Is there anything I can do for you first?”

“I’ve been watching you for a while before I showed myself this morning,” said Daniel, “I’ve never seen your tummy before, without a dress over it, I mean. Could I lie on it, here in the sun for a while, and feel it?”

“You certainly could,” said Trudi.

They lay there together until lunch time, and then she sat up.

“We always played this out indoors at a dining table. Would you like to do it out here, right here and now?” she asked.

“Sure,” said Daniel.

She gave him a final kiss and then opened her mouth wide.

“It looks lovely in there,” he said, “I should have done this months ago.”

“You needed time to process all your feelings for me, and think about the alternatives to being eaten,” she said, “I’m just so glad you came back to me.”

“You may gobble when ready,” said Daniel.

“Farewell then,” said Trudi.

She opened her mouth wide again.

“Hey, can I climb in slowly myself,” he asked.

“Be my guest,” said Trudi, “I’ll give you a long time on my tongue, before I gulp you down of course. It’s the least I can do ... for both of us.”

He crawled over her lower lip and onto her tongue, which was still laid out for him like a moist and expectant carpet. Settling himself down, he enjoyed lying comfortably on the most time travelled tongue in history, until she swallowed him whole.

Decades later, 43 year old Trudi separated from her boyfriend, and became a single mother, as they went on to share alternating custody periods with their son. Taking another Irish holiday walk, she headed through the far village woods, on her way to the meadow. A man approached in the distance, and was about to pass her. He was in his early thirties. As he made to step around her, she quickly side stepped into his path to block his way, and threw her arms around him and kissed him for several minutes, before she released her mouth to catch her breath.

“That was ... my first kiss actually,” he said, “But what was it for?”

“For being Murray!” she said.

“You know my name,” said Murray.

“Will you come back to the meadow with me? I was on my way there anyway. There’s so much to explain,” she said.

She told him the story of all the timelines, including all of his original involvements, and everything that had happened with Daniel. It took her until the middle of the afternoon, by which time they were both feeling the need to head into the village for an overdue lunch.

“It’s incredible. But I believe you. When I was 26, in this timeline, I still found the information about time travel in the encrypted folder on my old boss’s computer. But there must have been a butterfly effect of time travelling somewhere along the way. I never found the portal nor met you,” said Daniel.

“I had to make sure of that,” said Trudi.

“So I never had any reason to take the risk of attempting time travel.”

Trudi just realised that she’d missed a golden opportunity to trick him into making an attempt that might well shrink him, and meet up with him at some point in the past. He saw the look of consternation on her face. She’d told him too much. He knew the risks now.

“Sorry,” she said, “I was just thinking...”

“That if I’d time travelled, you could have eaten me again. Well I won’t do that now,” said Daniel.

“Would you really want to be with me, after learning all that about me?” she asked.

“From what you’ve said, when you finally ate Daniel for the last time, even he on that last occasion offered himself voluntarily. You sold me with that kiss you laid on me in the wood,” said Murray.

“I’m feeling hungry,” said Trudi.

“Then let me buy you something other than me to fill your tummy,” he said.

They stood up, held hands and walked into the village.