Stomach Bug

Lisa stared at the TV screen with droopy eyes, not paying all that much attention to the documentary. A chunky sea lion bull was just starting to hump a cow, announcing his reproductive triumph to all creatures on the rocky beach with a series of excited grunts. This was in spite of the distinctly bored look on the face of his newfound mate, who looked more like she had just given up rejecting his advances and wanted to get it over with.

“Good for you, buddy.” Lisa mumbled absent-mindedly, her last words drowning in a sudden build-up of phlegm before she started coughing.

Once the fit subsided, she swallowed it all down, frowning to herself as the glob of slime and snot slid down her sore throat. Then she pulled her warm pink blanket over her shoulders and leaned back in her pillow, letting out a whiny moan as she closed her eyes for a moment. She had been under the weather for the past week already, but it was only since this morning that she had been feeling downright sick. The fever had subsided by now, but Lisa had stayed at home nevertheless, planting herself on the living room sofa and watching all kinds of nature documentaries all day. She liked the cute animals in those, and it didn’t matter if she drifted off to sleep in between episodes. But she had skipped the spider one. Those were disgusting.

“Any better at all?” A voice suddenly asked from the hallway.

Lisa opened her eyes again, looking over towards the living room door to see her mother step inside. Walking towards the sofa with a concerned look on her face, the middle-aged woman then sat down next to her daughter and put her hand on the girl’s forehead.

“Ugh. I feel miserable.” Lisa whined, starting to cough again when she tried to sit up straight.

“Well, your fever is gone. That’s good.”

“My head hurts.”

“Have you been drinking enough, like I told you this morning? You need to stay hydrated.”

“Can’t you just give me some pills?”

“It’s just the flu, Lisa.” Her mother gently rolled her eyes as she gave her a loving smile. “But you should eat something. How about I make you some chicken soup?”

“Fine.” Lisa replied, pouting as she leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder.

“Also, I’ve got some leftover tinies from my lunch break. I’ll put them in there as well.” She said, giving her daughter a pat on the head as she got up. “Your body can use the protein.”

“Sure.” The girl mumbled, turning her attention to the TV again as her mother walked away.

Over the course of their brief conversation, the focus of the documentary had shifted from the sea lions on the beach in Antarctica, out into the open sea and to a swarm of krill making its way through the icy depths. As the swarm of tens of thousands of tiny crustaceans swirled across the screen, Lisa found herself oddly captivated by the beauty of the living orange cloud. But then, the humungous mouth of a blue whale cut into the swarm from the left all of a sudden, swallowing scores of the helpless creatures in a single greedy gulp.

Lisa sighed. Poor little crab thingies. It truly had to suck to be at the bottom of the food chain.

***

Jürgen joined in with the chorus of panicked screams, looking up at the colossal woman who had been making his life hell ever since she had bought his box. This bitch had nearly eaten him for lunch a few hours ago. She had eaten his cellmate and friend, Holger. And it didn’t seem likely that she had anything good for them in mind now that she was lifting the box up from the kitchen counter again. For the last few minutes, she had completely ignored them, instead preparing something on the stove of the gigantic kitchen she had brought them to. But now, she had turned her attention back to them, and Jürgen already feared what this meant.

Just seconds later, his worst fears were confirmed as the woman held the box above a bowl of steaming hot soup, some kind of chicken broth by the looks and the smell of it. And then, she started tilting his plastic prison, causing the first few of the remaining shrunken people inside to slip out and tumble down towards the bowl of soup below. The cacophony of screams rose to unbearable levels, the worst since the lunch massacre that had seen Holger disappear down the throat of this uncaring giantess. But Jürgen couldn’t cover his ears. He needed his hands to hold onto something, at least if he didn’t want to get eaten after all.

“Pomocy!” A shrunken person in the cubicle next to him yelled at the top of their lungs, their voice cracking as they slipped out of the box. But when Jürgen looked behind himself, trying desperately trying to hold onto the hard plastic incline, he could only see a human silhouette falling down. Then it splashed into a thick broth of noodles, vegetables, and chicken bits.

“Shit.” He cursed, now feeling gravity drag him down towards his doom as well. It couldn’t be. Had he survived all these hours just for this woman to eat him for dinner instead of lunch?

For another few moments, he was able to claw his way up the steep slope that had been one of the walls of his cubicle most of the day. Then his increasingly sweaty hands began to slip again, and before he could even let out another cry of despair, he suddenly found himself in freefall. The box above him disappeared from his field of view, replaced by the huge upper body of the woman as she leaned over and casually threw his last prison into the trash. Then there was a loud splash and he found himself submerged in hot, murky broth.

Instinctively holding his breath, Jürgen swam back up, gasping for air as he broke through the surface. The intense smell of chicken soup was so overwhelming that he felt he was going to be sick, and his skin was searing with pain from the almost boiling hot liquid. And then there were the screams. Roughly a dozen different voices howling with pain and existential dread, crying for help or mercy. Even though they all knew that there would be neither.

Spitting out some of the soup that had made its way into his mouth, Jürgen looked up at the huge woman again. His gaze was inadvertently drawn towards the area just below the bulge created by her breasts. Holger was in there somewhere. What was left of him, at least. It had been many hours since this lady had swallowed him whole, and it was to be assumed that she had mostly digested him at this point. Poor Holger. He had been in for nothing more than shoplifting, with only 30 days to go on his sentence. But then they had decided to clear the block to make room for new arrivals. The prisons were hopelessly overcrowded these days. What a shitty way to go. And now, Jürgen thought grimly as he heard an ominous wet gurgle from the gigantic woman’s guts, it was his turn. His turn to be eaten.

“Please make it stop!” A frenzied voice cried out somewhere to his right, followed by another uproar of screams as the giantess picked up the bowl and started carrying it somewhere.

The woman’s thundering footsteps were accompanied by the soup sloshing from one side of the bowl to the other, but Jürgen could see that the edges were still far beyond anyone’s reach. They were trapped in here. Holding onto what appeared to be some kind of giant carrot chunk, Jürgen closed his eyes and tried to block out the burning pain and noises around him. It was his attempt to find a last moment of calm before what undoubtedly would be a drawn-out and excruciatingly painful death. Feeling the menacing boom of her footsteps, he couldn’t help but wonder who this lady was. She was wearing a sweater and jeans now, but earlier today, when she had eaten Holger, she had been wearing a white lab coat, talking about patients to a younger giantess in scrubs. So she likely was some kind of doctor? The thought alone made Jürgen furious. Hadn’t these people sworn some kind of oath to do no harm?

“There you go, sweetie. Careful, it’s hot.” The woman then spoke all of a sudden. The tender care in her voice threw Jürgen off. She just didn’t sound like somebody who was about to eat him. And when he looked up and out of the bowl again, he realised that she wasn’t going to.

Beyond the confines of the bowl, he now could see that the middle-aged woman was handing the soup to another giant, a girl easily twenty to thirty years younger than her. Given the age difference and a nevertheless obvious resemblance between the two, Jürgen surmised that this girl had to be the woman’s daughter. Not that that changed anything about his situation.

“Thanks, mum.” The girl answered hoarsely, dispelling any doubts the shrunken people in the soup might have still had about who she was. Then she started coughing, a sound that Jürgen had been hearing in the distance back in the kitchen but hadn’t been able to make sense of.

Since the girl now was the one holding onto the bowl, its contents were shaken around with every cough, almost causing some to spill over the edges. And although she at least made a half-hearted attempt to cough into her fist, Jürgen could feel blasts of warm air ripple across the surface of the soup, blowing into his face. He knew that it didn’t really matter. He would be dead long before any viruses or bacteria would have an effect on him. He wasn’t even sure if shrunken people could catch illnesses from normal-sized humans. But he still felt violated and humiliated by the notion that this girl was just coughing onto him like he wasn’t even there. He was a breathing, living human being, not some fucking soup condiment.

“Uggghhh.” The young giantess complained in a nasal tone. “I’m dying.”

“Hang in there.” The mother said, bending over to give her daughter a brief, patronising kiss on the forehead. “The paramedics will be here any minute.”

The girl frowned and stuck out her tongue at the older woman, who simply responded with a short laugh. “Call me if you need anything. I’ve still got a couple of files to work through.”

“Yeah, thanks.” The daughter muttered, shifting her attention back to a television running in the background as her mother left the room again.

Then she suddenly lowered an enormous spoon into the bowl, her blue eyes eerily reflecting the pale light from the television as she kept her gaze fixed on it. The girl didn’t even bother to look down as she lazily scooped up a spoonful of noodles and chicken bits, along with one particularly unfortunate shrunken man who had ended up right in the middle of the spoon.

“No!” The poor fellow sobbed, frantically swimming towards the edge of the giant spoon as it slowly rose out of the bowl of soup. “Oh no, please! Someone help me!”

Jürgen felt the urge to look away, but just like this afternoon when he had witnessed Holger being eaten by this girl’s mother, he couldn’t help but stare in horror as a very similar scene unfolded in front of his eyes. The spoon carrying the crying man travelled further and further up into the air, and the giant girl now leaned over towards the bowl as she opened her mouth. Her lips parted to reveal two shimmering rows of straight white teeth, which again opened up to the almost perfectly dark abyss of her mouth. The only thing Jürgen could see within were even more teeth nestled against the squishy insides of her cheeks, and the dim shimmer of the saliva on her tongue as it reflected the ever-changing light from the television.

“Please, listen to me!” The increasingly weak sobs from the spoon turned to the girl in a last, desperate plea. “I shouldn’t even be here, I… NO, PLEASE DON…”

Clenching up, Jürgen finally managed to look down as the miniaturised man’s pitiful begging suddenly turned into a harsh shriek, and then fell silent altogether. The soft “nom” sound that followed was jarringly mundane, even kind of cute, but neither Jürgen nor anyone else in the soup could stop thinking of their comrade, now trapped inside the girl’s mouth. There were a few smacking noises, and to his horror, Jürgen even believed to be able to hear exceedingly weak, muffled screams coming from behind the young giantess’ closed lips.

Gulp.

A series of screams erupted throughout the bowl again and all around him, Jürgen saw other shrunken people starting to swim through the steaming hot broth, trying as best they could to make their way around the giant noodles and vegetables. But, as Jürgen quickly found out, it was not an outburst of empathy for the poor bastard who had been eaten alive. It was survival instinct, brought on by the huge empty spoon descending down towards them again.

“Fuck.” Jürgen panted and let go of the carrot piece he had been holding onto, joining in with the others as they desperately swam away. He wasn’t a very good swimmer, but what choice did he have? He couldn’t just keep floating around there, waiting to get scooped up.

Suddenly, dramatic music started playing. And even though he knew he couldn’t afford doing this, Jürgen found himself slowing down a little. What the hell was that?

“A great white.” A posh voice from somewhere beyond the bowl said in an almost lamenting tone. “This female hasn’t eaten in days. And the sardines make for a perfect late-night snack.”

A smooth wave splashed over his head as the spoon sunk into the soup just behind him. Then Jürgen and a shrunken woman to his left were suddenly sucked backwards as the displaced liquid levelled out. For a few moments, he frantically looked around, but then noticed that the woman next to him was just staring down, almost not moving at all. Despite being drenched in hot soup, Jürgen felt a shiver go through his body as he followed her gaze. And then he froze. Even through the broth, he could see the contours of the spoon push itself beneath them, like a dark circle rapidly expanding towards the horizon.

“Her arrival sparks a panicked frenzy.” The voice continued sadly. The music rose to a hectic crescendo and then stopped. “Some of the slower, weaker sardines can’t keep up…”

Jürgen looked at the woman again. She looked back at him, tears running down her cheeks.

“Not like this.” She whispered.

“…and are separated from the group.”

There was a loud splash, accompanied by an abrupt, harsh upward acceleration as their entire surroundings were lifted up into the air. In an instant, their world shrank down to no more but a puddle of chicken broth and themselves, all on a spoon being lifted towards the mouth of a complete stranger. Someone who didn’t see them as any different from the pieces of chicken around them. Feeling his heart violently beat in his chest, Jürgen allowed his gaze to wander back at his prospective consumer, flinching as her lips began to part.

Even with what was about to happen, he could just not fathom it. The girl looked so harmless, vulnerable even. Her light blonde hair was a bit dishevelled and greasy from lying around on the sofa all day, and her blue eyes looked puffy and tired, with dark circles underneath. Her skin was probably paler than it usually was, and the area around her nostrils was red and sore from blowing her nose, as evidenced by a pile of crumpled tissues on the table next to her. Who was she? What was her name? What kind of a person was she? He would never know.

 “All on their own, they stand no chance against the mighty predator…”

The girl’s mouth opened up all the way, filling Jürgen’s entire field of view with the rapidly approaching sight of her gaping maw. A vast cavern of gigantic, perfectly straight white teeth, circling around an impossibly huge, slimy tongue like a picket fence from hell. Thick strings of gooey spit extended down from her smooth pink palate. And at the very back of the titanic cave, Jürgen saw her glistening uvula, dangling above the pitch-black abyss of her gullet. Just when the uvula bobbed up a little, a blast of hot and unbearably moist air blew across his face. Jürgen gagged at the smell of it. A revolting blend of chicken soup, some kind of sickeningly sweet cough syrup, and stale morning breath. The girl likely hadn’t brushed her teeth all day.

“…and are easily devoured.”

The spoon passed between the rows of sharp incisors, each one of them perfectly capable of grinding him and the woman next to him into dust. Then the giantess lips sealed behind them with a wet smacking noise, shutting out all light. And even though Jürgen may not have been able to see, the assault on his other senses was as instant as it was overpowering. Now sealed inside the girl’s mouth with no influx of fresh air, the smell grew even more intense, and the air so warm and humid that it was almost impossible to breathe. There was an excruciatingly loud slurping sound, accompanied by a sudden change in air pressure that simply sucked him and the rest of the soup off the spoon, even causing Jürgen to go deaf for a few moments. As the monotonous ringing sound in his ears subsided again, he found himself drenched in hot, sticky spit, sliding across a bumpy and slimy surface that seemed to be just squirting out even more of the thick ooze whenever he touched it. Then there was a sudden jolt, accompanied by a wet splat to his left, and pieces of vegetable and chicken splattering across his face.

“AAAGH!” He screamed in complete, unfettered horror as he was squeezed between the wet, squishy flesh beneath and a harder, but still slimy and warm surface above him.

Ghostly blue light poured into the cavern all of a sudden, but that just made it worse. All the shrunken convict could see was slimy pink flesh, molars the size of his entire body, and globs of disintegrating chicken soup. Then, as quickly as the light had appeared, it vanished again, plunging him back into complete darkness. Somewhere to his right, he heard sobbing.

“Not like this!” The voice of the woman sniffled once more, then there was another jolt and Jürgen found himself pinned between the hard, wrinkly palate and the soft tongue yet again. “No, please!” The other shrunken person shrieked all of a sudden. “OH GOD, N…”

The pressure all around reached its peak, and the woman’s words were cut off by a disgusting crunch, followed by eery silence. But before he could even try to regain any kind of sense of orientation, Jürgen suddenly found himself in a deluge of soup and spit sliding down towards the back of the giant girl’s throat. It was as if he could almost feel the tremendously powerful muscles all around him clench up and drag him down towards certain doom. Again, there was a sickening slurp, followed by a huge gulp, and then total silence as his ears popped.

***

Lisa swallowed her second mouthful of soup, grimacing as it slid down her throat. Distracted by the remarkable footage of a great white shark ploughing through a shimmering swarm of sardines, she had forgotten that her mum had added some tinies to the soup, and accidentally chewed up one of them. Normally, this wouldn’t really have bothered her, but with her sore throat, the little bone splinters felt awfully scratchy going down.

“Ouch.” She frowned, putting the bowl aside for a moment as she started coughing again.

“Do you need some more cough syrup?” Her mother called out from her study across the hall.

“Nah. Still got half a bottle here.” Lisa croaked, noisily clearing her throat before swallowing the ball of mucus and snot. “Ugh, I hate being sick. There’s slime everywhere.” She moped, reaching into a packet of tissues, and emphatically blowing her nose.

“That’s your body fighting back.” The older woman explained.

“It’s fucking gross.” The girl whined nasally.

“Language, young lady.” The voice from the other room admonished her.

“Ugh.” Lisa made again, picking up the bowl and focussing back on the documentary. 

She was just about to scoop up another spoonful with a single tiny on it when the residual itch in her nose prompted her to sneeze loudly, blowing the shrunken man and some chicken bits back into the soup. Annoyed, Lisa rolled her eyes and looked down at the bowl.

“Sorry, guys. That wasn’t on purpose. Which one of you was next?”

The remaining shrunken people floating around in the broth didn’t react, continuing to stare up at her in paralysed fear or swimming towards the edges of the bowl, as if that was going to help them in this situation. Lisa sighed impatiently.

“Look, I’m just…” She began, interrupted by another hearty sneeze. “Fu… dge. Sorry.”

“Please, let us go!” One of the tinies finally broke the silence. “We won’t tell anyone!”

“I’m just trying to make it quicker for you.” Lisa finished her sentence, completely ignoring the shrunken person trying to bargain with her. “It’s not like you’re getting out of there.”

The response to that was another wave of terrified shrieks and wailing. Lisa made a facepalm and rubbed her aching forehead in irritation. She really didn’t understand how Tanja was able to keep tinies around for days, weeks even. Whenever Lisa tried actually talking to them, it always turned out the same way. It was just tedious and vexing. Seeing that she wasn’t going to get a straight answer out of any of them, she just shrugged and lowered her spoon into the bowl again, scooping up a little one who was railing at her in some foreign language. While she didn’t understand what he was saying, it didn’t sound like he was being very polite.

“Pierdol się, suko!” The man screamed, making an obscene gesture as Lisa opened her mouth.

She placed the spoon inside, slurped the soup off and swallowed, not even bothering to chew.

***

When Jürgen’s ears popped again, compensating for the abrupt change in air pressure, he was gasping for air and thrashing around like a fish on dry land. Except that his new surroundings were anything but dry. There wasn’t a single square centimetre on or around him that wasn’t completely drenched in hot spit and slime. His face was sliding across a disgusting, slippery wall of warm, throbbing flesh, making it difficult to suck in even the most miniscule amount of insufferably humid air. On all sides, powerful muscles wrapped around his body, pushing him further and further along the pulsating tube he found himself in, along with some chunks of what he assumed to be chewed chicken and noodles. Jürgen could also feel something else wedged between his body and the undulating oesophageal walls, something hard and sharp. He even had an idea of what it could be, but some primal mental defence mechanism stopped him from reifying the thought. The taste of blood in his mouth was bad enough already.

Now that his hearing had returned to him, Jürgen wished that it hadn’t. What had just been an odd throbbing sensation on his skin before now turned out to be the girl’s thumping heartbeat, as if he needed yet another reminder that he was deep inside the body of another human being. All around himself, he could hear the giantess’ breathing, calm, but also a bit raspy. Then the oesophagus violently constricted all of a sudden, squeezing his aching body so hard that his steady descent came to a near halt for a few moments. Jürgen’s ears popped yet again, but he could still hear a harsh cough echo through the gigantic body. But any faint hope he had held that the girl was going to throw up was quickly dispelled when the coughing eased down just a couple of seconds later, the oesophageal walls relaxing and pushing him further downwards. Yet another wet plop went through his auditory canals, restoring his full hearing once more.

Sliding along a slight curvature in the hitherto completely straight oesophagus, Jürgen braced himself for his arrival in the place where he would die: the girl’s stomach. Judging from the ominous groaning and squelching sounds below, it had to be close. Just when his feet touched against a tight muscular sphincter, another muffled sound rumbled through the entire body. It sounded like the girl’s voice, though it was too distorted to understand, and Jürgen couldn’t even so much hear, but rather feel it. It was pulsing through the hot, slick flesh all around him. Not that it mattered anymore if he understood what she was saying or not. While the girl went on to say something, Jürgen’s feet slipped through the opening muscular ring below, a sudden suction greedily slurping in his entire body along with some masticated chicken bits.

As his head slipped through the tight sphincter, Jürgen’s face was briefly submerged in a pool of broth and saliva following him downwards, and so he instinctively inhaled when he finally broke free of the muscular ring’s embrace. Never before had he come to regret something so fast. A searing pain shot up his airways with the first breath he took, instantly burning up his insides. Part of that pain turned out to be a smell, an utterly overwhelming blend of puke, acid, chicken broth and cough syrup. Flailing around in fear and disgust as he fell into the pungent void, Jürgen was able to hold his breath just in time before he splashed into the bubbling stew of digesting stomach contents. Now somewhere below the surface, the thought of just taking a deep breath and allowing himself to drown went through Jürgen’s mind. His mind reeled in disgust just at the thought of having to breathe in that noxious air again. But he was afraid.

And so, he pushed himself up again, taking care not to breathe in too deeply as he resurfaced. But even the little air he did allow into his inflamed airways made him retch and convulse again. The stench alone made his head throb with pain, and although it was pitch black inside the girl’s stomach, he kept his eyes shut as he floundered around in the putrid broth, trying to find something to hold onto. Bumping into floating pieces of digesting food, it felt not unlike swimming in the chicken soup just a few minutes ago. But Jürgen knew that he was basically drifting through an ocean of vomit. Very much unlike the soup, however, this vile sludge was in constant motion, ceaselessly kneaded and churned around by the regular contractions and expansions of the slimy stomach walls. Unable to see, Jürgen cautiously reached around, but anything he tried to hold onto simply disintegrated into pulpy mush within seconds. It was as if the entire world was melting into more of the same shapeless goo.

High above, the sound of the girl talking transitioned into a strange croaking noise, suddenly interrupted by a thunderous roar. It took Jürgen a few seconds to figure out that the girl was just clearing her throat, followed by the ominous sound of her swallowing. Jürgen began to panic at that, trying to swim against the constantly changing currents, but to no avail. There was another sickening slurp as the cardia opened up directly above him and spat something into the stomach. A split second later, something that could only be described as a huge ball of slime splashed into the broth right next to Jürgen, almost exploding on impact and sending a wave of vomit rippling through the stomach. The shrunken man was simply swept away by the current, smashing into the soft, wrinkly stomach lining headfirst. Since this was the first somewhat solid thing he had touched ever since he had been catapulted into this place, Jürgen desperately tried to hold on. And indeed, he actually succeeded, withstanding the drag of the fierce current that would drag him back into the depths of the gurgling stomach.

With a hoarse pant, Jürgen pulled himself onto the squishy stomach fold and rested his head against the raw, pulsating flesh. The girl who had eaten him said something again, and he felt her voice reverberate through the squishy mucosa. Had he not been covered in her vomit and whatever phlegm she had just swallowed, feeling his skin peel off his body while her stomach enzymes started to digest him alive, the sensation would have been almost pleasant, like a full-body massage. But it wasn’t. If anything, the almost godlike omnipresence of her voice only served to reinforce the maddening sense of dread he felt. He wasn’t just dying; he was being digested. In a couple of hours, nothing would be left of him, he would simply become a part of this nutrient-rich sludge, to be further processed by the girl’s intestines. Her body was going to absorb him, and what would be left of him by tomorrow would end up in her toilet. There would be no grave, and nobody to mourn him. There would only be a pile of shit, and he had no doubt that this girl would flush him away just as indifferently as she had eaten him. She hadn’t even taken her eyes off the damn TV when she had shoved him into her mouth.

There was another thundering noise as the giantess apparently blew her nose and continued to talk to whomever she was speaking with. Was it her mother? Jürgen frowned at the painful memory of Holger getting eaten earlier today. He must have had endured the same inside the stomach of this girl’s mother. But that had been hours ago; Holger had to be long digested by now. Pushing the thoughts of his deceased friend aside, Jürgen was just about to take another deep breath to try and calm himself when the girl’s body lurched up a little, accompanied by a loud sneezing sound. But as unremarkable as it may have been to her, it proved catastrophic for Jürgen, throwing him off the slippery gastric fold and back into the bubbling chyme.

Once again finding himself fighting to not be dragged underneath the surface of the billowing soup, Jürgen let out a cry of agony. How long had he already been in here? How much more of this was he supposed to take? It couldn’t even have been all that long yet, but somehow, it seemed like this place was without time, without direction. He’d never been a very religious man, but now Jürgen was certain. Hell existed, and this place was it. What if this would never end? What if this just would just go on and on forever? Until he even forgot who he was?

The only reminder that this place was, in fact, not some kind of metaphysical realm of eternal torment, but just the slightly upset stomach of a teenager with a cold, was the girl’s booming voice, followed by another hefty sneeze. Then she said something again, and moments later, there was a further gulp. Jürgen had absolutely no idea where he was now, only making sure to stay afloat while the maelstrom inside the girl’s stomach tossed him around like a ragdoll. He could only hope that he wouldn’t get hit by whatever was travelling down her oesophagus now. Or maybe he should hope for it to put him out of his misery? Any thoughts that Jürgen may have had on the matter were quickly dispersed by another wave of anxiety as the cardia vomited more soggy bits of chicken soup into the groaning stomach. To his horror, he could now also hear the terrified voice of another human being travelling down towards him.

“To nie może się dziać! Niech ktoś mi po...” Whatever the poor fellow was saying, he didn’t get to finish his sentence, splashing into the murky broth somewhere to his right.

Even though he was in no position to help, Jürgen attempted to swim towards the spot where the new arrival had gone under. But then the stomach wall behind him folded inward all of a sudden, accompanied by an unearthly gurgle roaring through the stomach, as if some ancient sea monster was awaking from its slumber. Once again having lost any sense of direction, Jürgen gargled as he was pulled underneath the surface by a particularly intense undercurrent. Unable to find his way up again, his oxygen-deprived muscles began to spasm and cramp up. But just before he thought that he was going to pass out, he was pressed to the surface again, feeling more soggy chunks of vegetables and chicken rain down on him. Somewhere in the distance, someone was screaming hysterically, only for the helpless shrieking to be drowned out by more wet groans and gurgles as the stomach continued to churn without mercy.

At this point, Jürgen was so weak that he could only just about keep his head above the rough sea of digestion, waves of pulpy vomit splashing in his face and acid burning in his orifices. Hot, metallic tasting liquid was running out of his eyes, his ears and his nose, and pooling in his mouth, though this time he could be sure that it was his own blood. His very skin started to flake off his body, melting into the bubbling stew and becoming an indistinguishable part of it. Again and again, the giantess would swallow and send another avalanche of mushy food into her belly, but the giant stomach didn’t even seem to fill up from it. In fact, Jürgen would even feel an odd downward drag every so often, which would lead to the surface of the ocean of digesting food to drop down a notch. Even without being able to see what was happening, he could feel the equivalent of Olympic swimming pools worth of chyme being sucked out of the stomach and into the depths of the girl’s intestines. Vanishing into an endless underwater labyrinth of organic tubes, devoid of light and air.

“RAAAAGH!!” He screamed, gargling as more blood pooled in his mouth. “LET ME OU…”

Suddenly, the slick stomach walls collapsed around him, mercilessly forcing him beneath the surface and shattering his bones as a thundering roar echoed through the vast body.

***

“UUURRP.” Lisa belched, frowning when she noticed that her hearty burp had pushed a sour glob of semi-digested food back up her oesophagus and into her mouth. “Eww.” She whinged, swallowing and reaching for her glass of mineral water to wash it back down.

 “I think you and I need to sit down and talk about manners again, Lisa.” Her mother laughed.

“I’m sick!” The girl moaned, slipping her hand underneath her sweaty pyjama tank top. Then she carefully began to massage the area below her left breast.

“… you need a bucket?” The voice from the other room asked, sounding more alarmed now.

“No, I’m fine, it’s just…” Lisa began, her belly noisily gurgling as the massaging movements of her hand broke up some pockets of gas trapped in her guts. The girl grimaced at the slight pain caused by the bubbling within her intestines and then farted, the sound thankfully being dampened by the thick pink blanket. “My tummy’s a bit upset.”

“But you don’t think you have to throw up?” Her mother asked, having suddenly appeared in the doorway. “Let me know if it gets worse tonight. I can give you an antiemetic.”

Lisa smiled at her, feeling a tad guilty now. If she had activated her mum’s doctor mode, she maybe had overdone it a little with all the moping. “No, really, I’m good. Just bloated.”

“Right. I’m going to make you some chamomile tea.”

“No, I’m oka…” Lisa began, but her mother already had turned around and went off into the kitchen. Knowing her, she wouldn’t have taken no for an answer anyway.

Letting out a soft sigh, Lisa leaned back in her pillow and closed her eyes, gently rubbing her groaning belly for a few more moments. When she opened her eyes again and looked at the bowl in her lap, she noticed that only a little bit of soup was left, along with a single shrunken woman. The tiny was desperately trying to scale the steep porcelain walls, each time failing miserably and sliding down into the remaining broth with an almost inaudible splat. Then she imploringly looked up at Lisa, falling down on her knees as she folded her hands.

***

“Please, listen to me!” Sophia whimpered, tears running freely down her cheeks. “My name’s Sophia. I’m thirty years old and I work for an ad agency. Please, I have a husba…”

She paused, lost for words for a moment when the gigantic girl gave her a tired smile and put the spoon away. Was she going to be spared? She herself hadn’t truly expected to get through to the giantess, who had completely devoured the ocean of soup Sophia had been swimming in over the last half hour. Along with everyone inside it, save for her. They were all gone now, inside this girl’s belly. The place where all these harrowing gurgles and squelches deep below the bowl were coming from. Sophia nervously inhaled, the lingering smell of the girl’s burp and fart sending her mind reeling again. She would do anything, absolutely anything for her new owner, if she would just spare her that fate. All Sophia could think of was that she didn’t want to die. Eaten alive and digested by a total stranger. The thought was so horrifying that it had never occurred to Sophia that this could happen to her. What had she done wrong?

Suddenly, a jolt went through the bowl, causing Sophia to slip and splash into the puddle of chicken soup face-first. Panicking again, she quickly rolled onto her back and stared back up at the girl, who apparently had picked up the bowl with both her hands and was raising it up to her lips. Sophia wanted to scream but could produce no more than a pathetic squeaking noise as she fearfully glared at the girl’s mouth. Her gaze then inadvertently travelled down her neck and her chest, her large boobs wobbling a bit underneath her loose pyjama top as she leaned over forward and began to open her mouth. Sophia looked up again, staring right into the young giantess’ wet, red maw. It was the last thing she would ever see in her life.

Just a second later, the bowl was brought against the girl’s lips and there was a loud slurping noise. Sophia was simply sucked into the huge mouth along with the rest of the soup, unable to put up even the slightest bit of resistance. All went dark and she heard a deafening gulp as unfathomably powerful muscles clamped down on her, easily ferrying her down to her final destination. When Sophia dropped into the girl’s stomach, she managed to scream again.

***

Swallowing the last drop of soup, Lisa placed the empty bowl on the table and sighed, feeling a renewed sense of self-pity. Even a simple movement such as leaning over forward to drink the rest of her soup had made her clogged-up sinuses throb with pain, and fluid snot run down one of her nostrils. Life wasn’t fair. None of her friends had caught this bug. Why her?

Lisa tried to just sniff the snot back up, but when she realised that her nose was not going to stop running from that, she frowned and reached for one of the open packets of tissues on the table. Slightly struggling to produce a single tissue from the packet, she then noisily blew her nose again and leaned back in her pillow, turning her attention back to the documentary. The narrator was now talking about the social behaviour of dolphins, with the screen showing a group of calves happily playing with each other in the ocean off the US West Coast.

“Aww, cute.” She said hoarsely, coughing as more phlegm began running down her throat.

But then the documentary switched to an interview with a brunette, tattooed marine biologist, which Lisa found a lot less interesting. The woman seemed pretty cool, but she wanted to see more cute animals. Only half listening to what the biologist was talking about, she went back to massaging her rumbling belly. Lisa could still feel the occasional tickle from the tinies she had had with the soup, but they paled in comparison to the far less pleasant twinges and aches in her guts. She really hoped that this wasn’t going to turn into an outright stomach flu. At least she didn’t feel nauseated or anything like that. That had to be worth something.

“Here’s your tea, sweetie.” Her mother said, stepping into the living room and handing her a big mug with steaming hot chamomile tea.

“Thanks, mum.” Lisa said with a grateful smile and took the cup from the older woman.

While her mother returned to her study, she carefully blew on the tea to cool it down, taking a furtive slurp after a few moments. Lisa didn’t especially like chamomile, but the tea did help soothe the inflamed mucosa in her throat, and it felt nice and warm in her belly. Hopefully it would also calm down her tummy over the night. The shrunken people inside her stomach, on the other hand, seemed less pleased about the arrival of the hot tea, as marked by an increased flutter beneath Lisa’s left breast. But with every further gulp she took, it died down more and more, until it ultimately vanished, replaced by nothing but the feeling of liquid being churned around in her stomach. There was another quiet bubbling sound as more chyme was pumped further along into her intestines, but Lisa’s attention had already moved back to the TV.

Putting the empty cup down on the table, she yawned contentedly and allowed herself to be distracted from her headache and aching limbs by the next episode of the nature documentary. This one focused on a variety of adorable furry animals living in rainforests around the world, something that piqued Lisa’s interest a lot more than submarine wildlife. But about halfway in, her eyelids began to feel more and more heavy. Pulling her blanket over her shoulders and snuggling up against her pillow, Lisa let out another soft burp and drifted off to sleep.

***

Although Lisa hadn’t been able to feel them inside her stomach anymore, Sophia and two or three other shrunken people were still barely holding onto life by the time she fell asleep. The tinies whimpered fearfully as the organic cavern contracted around them, along with the deep roar of their consumer burping again. But while their desperate cries echoed off the churning stomach walls for some more time, they were eventually drowned out by the soft snore of the giant girl, until they themselves succumbed to the potent digestive acids and enzymes. About an hour after Lisa had fallen asleep, the only sounds left were the moist gurgles of the girl’s digestive system, her calm heartbeat, and her snoring. But there was nobody left to hear them.

Roughly another hour later, when the TV had turned itself off due to inactivity, leaving Lisa sleeping on the couch in the darkness of the night, a glob of digested slush that contained the remains of Jürgen was sucked into her duodenum. Just a few minutes later, Sophia’s lifeless corpse followed. But unlike Jürgen, who had been reduced to nothing but an unseemly mash of semi-digested flesh and bones due to his prolonged stay in the stomach, Sophia’s body was still mostly intact at this point. Gradually travelling along the curvature of Lisa’s duodenum, these two people, who had never met each other in life, were compressed into a loose ball of chyme. Over the course of the next few hours, as they travelled along the winding labyrinth of the intestines, the organism of the girl that had eaten them drained them of all nutrients it was able to extract from them. What had once been their skin, muscles and flesh was broken down into protein for Lisa’s own muscles, or converted into lipids to be stored in the soft fat deposits on her breasts, her belly, and her butt. The calcium sucked out of their disintegrating skeletons would serve to help keep Lisa’s own bones and teeth healthy and strong. Even their blood would become part of their consumer. And whatever vitamins and valuable nutrients the girl’s digestive system was able to extract from her most recent meal would immediately be put to use in strengthening her immune system, and fighting the viruses that were plaguing her. In the end, those too would be dealt with by Lisa’s body just as mercilessly.

But although the girl’s organism was merely dealing with the flu, some of her normal bodily functions were still slightly impaired by the microscopic battle raging inside of her. This was also the case for her digestive system. And so the pulpy sludge carrying the stripped bones of Jürgen and Sophia passed through Lisa’s bowels somewhat quicker than they usually would have. In the middle of the night, when Lisa woke up to another fever spike and a coughing fit, semi-consciously rolling around on the sofa for a few minutes before falling asleep again, the little that was left of the shrunken people spluttered through her ileocecal valve, entering her large intestine. At this point, the chyme had turned into an amorphous, green-brown porridge, interspersed with semi-digested vegetable chunks and tiny white bones. Still infused with a considerable amount of water, the sludge travelled through Lisa’s ascending and transverse colon along with more bubbles of gas, retaining most of the fluids as it finally splashed down the descending colon. Having reached the end of her digestive tract, it settled in the final bend of the sigmoid colon as a pool of liquid diarrhoea, waiting to be expelled.

***

Sometime during the early morning hours, Lisa woke up yet again, this time due to a series of twinges and loud rumbles within her belly. Feeling more than a little disoriented and feverish, she initially feared that she was going to throw up. But she realised that the aching sense of pressure was urging her to evacuate her digestive tract through the other end. Lisa groaned as she sat up, feeling her pyjama top and trousers cling to her sweaty body. Pushing the blanket aside, she weakly rose to her feet, a sudden wave of nausea and dizziness going through her. She gave herself a couple of moments to make sure she wasn’t going to fall over on the spot, then Lisa slowly shuffled into the hallway and towards the bathroom. It was still completely dark outside and her parents didn’t seem to be up yet, so she tried to close the door behind her as gently as possible, even though the pain in her lower abdomen urged her to hurry up.

Then she rushed over to the toilet and pulled down her pyjama pants, a wet fart escaping from between her butt cheeks before she could even fully plop them onto the seat. Lisa frowned as more loud bubbling noises erupted from her bowels, causing another slightly painful twinge in her belly. A second later, the surge of gas and liquid stool pushed itself out of her rectum, and, accompanied by another loud fart, splashed into the bowl below.

“Ugh. Fucking hell.” Lisa muttered to herself, her head still spinning. Then she wrinkled her nose as she noticed a pungent smell rise up from the toilet. Why did being sick have to be so utterly disgusting? As if it wasn’t bad enough that she felt like crap.

With a resentful groan, she clenched her belly muscles, allowing more of the watery poop to push out of her aching gut. When she finally sensed that her bowels were empty for now, she farted once more and proceeded to clean herself up. Lisa grimaced at the sight of the sickly green-brown residue on the paper, then she dropped it into the porcelain bowl and pressed the flush button. She didn’t even take note of the disembodied bones or the semi-digested pieces of vegetables and noodles floating in the water, let alone think of the dozen shrunken people whose remains now forever disappeared into the municipal sewers. Lisa just pulled her pants back up and washed her hands, then she reeled back into the hallway.

Although she still felt quite dizzy, she nevertheless made a slight detour to the kitchen to pour herself another glass of water, feeling a little refreshed as the cold liquid poured into her dry mouth. Her head was throbbing like hell, and if she now had the fucking runs on top of it all, she would really need to make sure she stayed hydrated. With an almost inaudible sigh, Lisa returned to the living room and slipped under her cosy pink blanket again. For a few minutes, she restlessly turned around on the couch, listening to the rainfall outside. But before she fell asleep again, Lisa remembered that it was only Thursday, and that she definitely wouldn’t be heading in today. So she reached around on the table and picked up her smartphone.

She flinched a little at the glare when the touchscreen lit up, then entered her unlock pattern and opened up the messenger app. Selecting the chat with her boyfriend, she quickly typed up a message just to let him know that she was still sick, and probably wouldn’t be back on her feet by tomorrow either. Before sending, she checked the time. It was 4:55 AM, so he surely wouldn’t be up yet. But Konstantin generally turned off his phone overnight anyway, so the risk of waking him up wasn’t all that high. And even if she did, Lisa felt entitled to that at the moment. She was sick and suffering miserably, after all.

Putting her phone back on the table, Lisa closed her eyes and cuddled up against her pillow. Her limbs were aching, and her fever had definitely gone up again, but at least her stomach appeared to have calmed down a little now. And with that slight feeling of relief to provide her with some comfort, Lisa soon drifted back off to sleep.

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