“Journalism,” he said, while she finished the last of her lunch and wiped her lips with a disposable napkin, “I guess I’d have quite a story if I told my own memoirs after this. I don’t know how to play Bridge.”

“It’s a very complicated game to learn. It can take months to really master it, but the rewards are a far more interesting game to play. It remains interesting, week after week, and no two games ever play the same way,” she said

He wondered if he could join the club and play the game with her, if and when he worked out what had happened to him and how to undo it.

“It sounds like it would be a lot of fun, if I could get the hang of it.”

“Well I must be on my way in a few minutes. It’s been nice to meet you,” she said, and put him into her opening mouth and closed it.

He was lying on her tongue after the brief views he’d had of it. He began to guess at the ramifications, and remembered one of her first questions, that hadn’t sounded as though it had been ideally worded, in terms of semantics.

She had asked him, “What course WERE you studying?”

He’d have expected the wording to be “What course ARE you studying.”

Her question had assumed that his days as a university student were over. At the time, he’d assumed that she was simply referring to his reduced size making university participation prohibitive. In fact she had already decided to eat him.

He remembered the sight of her sitting in the gardens eating her lunch when he’d arrived. He could picture her still there now, apparently at ease with what she was doing to him. She knew that he was not some sort of legendary leprechaun, but someone from her own people, who’d had the misfortune to lose most of his size, and was not influenced by this knowledge at all. He was trapped in her mouth, wondering how much time he had left (which would not have been more than the ‘few minutes’ she had mentioned just before popping him inside, and knowing that there was nothing he could do to get out or to appeal to her to look at it from his perspective.

He felt her soft moist tongue below him, and recalled the one second glimpse he’d had of her gaping maw, in that moment when she’d surprised him with what for her had been a simple gesture of her hand and mouth combined.

All of a sudden, she moved her mouth dramatically and swallowed him so rapidly, that he reached her stomach almost as quickly as he’d reached her mouth.

He felt her stomach begin to bounce a little, and guessed that she must have gotten up and started walking out of the gardens.

As she reached the street, Brenda Leesil felt as though she had overeaten a little, but that the taste of the last mouthful had made it well and truly worthwhile.