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.”