Scott was clamped into the tube of his mother’s giant tongue. Her taste buds pulsed and buzzed, as always, by the default of feeling fresh, edible material squeezed into her tongue. Except, on this particular occasion, the digestive enzymes currently beginning work on Scott’s skin were actually required. Because this was the beginning of the end now. The start of the track which would eventually integrate Scott back into the massive five-foot-eleven titaness who birthed him, shrunk him, spent ten years entrapping him inside her shoes, and then finally tucked him into her throat for good.

            Another gurgle echoed back from Judy’s esophagus. The sound was impatient, eager for the new recruit to slide down into the void beyond. Almost welcoming.

            Tears continued to drip in miniscule volumes down his face, only to be summarily lapped up by Judy’s ever-swishing tongue as it polished his naked body. Though she’d never know it, the woman was receiving the added hydration and refreshment of her oldest son’s actual tears.

            Her tongue coiled back around him in that ever-familiar serpentine pattern he’d come to know so well. It was lifting, tipping, and revolving between one cheek and the other. The hollow orb of her mouth constricted. Saliva drained in a sluice through the tipping angle of her writhing pink muscle, washing past Scott from every conceivable point. He couldn’t even say for sure at this instant whether he was pointed up or down. Gravity was rendered pointless inside his mother’s doom-bringing mouth; there was only her control in here, just as there was everywhere outside this place.

            Only here, it was made elementally clear just how out of control Scott was of his own body, mind, and spirit. This entire conversation dealing him a death sentence in Judy’s stomach had proceeded just as she’d planned it. Hell, she’d probably timed it down to the second, and he was simply a player in her plot to go down the hatch and out of her master scheme. His words and pleas were just as useless as his meager strength compared to the pushing power of even one of Judy’s maternal fingertips.

            Scott made no attempt to combat Judy’s gently swaying tongue, nor did he intend to do so at all as his arms and legs were pinned to his sides. There was no possible purpose in resistance. So just this once, even as he was about to be swallowed alive, the boy decided to whole-heartedly adopt his parent’s advice without irony. He was going to relax now.

            The usual dance proceeded, even though both mother and son knew the finale would be entirely different. Judy pinched her boy between her cheeks and commenced sucking on him like a lifesaver, completed by looping his flimsy body into a curve and jamming her tongue tip into the opening. Head over heels, Scott was sponged by centrifugal force against the cheek walls. He was trade from one buoyant side to the other, with the meaty mass of his mother’s tongue berating his form on every pass. Still he remained limp as a martyr.

            Judy was gathering saliva now. Ordinarily, once too much had filled in the moat in front of her teeth and beneath her tongue, the woman would carefully pin her shrunken son to the roof of her mouth for safety, then drain the sopping space down her throat with one gulp. She did no such thing now; it was obvious to Scott now she intended to swallow him without additional beverage aid beyond her own spit.

            True to her word, at least, Judy granted her son several more minutes of adjustment period, even while such a period wasn’t going to make the difference in his acceptance process. If anything, at this point, Scott had shrugged off his existence, and pondered why his mother didn’t simply get it over with and pull him straight down into her throat.

            She’d evidently grown bored of sucking on him one last time and taken to using his body instead to run the length of her teeth. Tucking him behind a molar like a patch of tobacco, Judy guided the boy through the slender aisle of fleshy gums, using her tongue to push him. Grit and grime speckled Scott’s back as he was used to floss along his mom’s bottom row of teeth, and then next the top, with the same artful control. Dizzy was no longer merely a sensation for Scott, but a state of being, in lieu of sight or sound aside from churning saliva.

            All the prior nausea and shock of his mother’s grim decision had clogged in his skull now, rendering him just a tiny object floating in the space of his mother’s mouth, bathed and battered in her juices and abandoned like a maraschino cherry for a one-time sweet consumption, never to be thought of again. He just “was” now, and he could feel the climax arriving fast as the collected aquarium of succulent, oozing saliva folded in on Scott’s body. Judy’s head was tipping back.

            The next sensations were novel for Scott, which he had to at least grant credit for, after so many years of being stuffed into shoes that he knew the routine by heart. His legs were gripped first in the tract of her throat, her uvula dangling and bobbing as she repressed a gag reflex. For a brief, near-comical instant, he felt his mother’s esophagus entrance rejecting him: her body involuntarily trying to save him, and her, by pushing him back out so Judy wouldn’t choke.

            But then again, his mother had always been a mind over matter sort of woman. And in that spirit, on the next attempted gulp, Scott’s entire inch-long body was absorbed with one go into the tunnel. He heard the rounded echo of her hard gulp.

            Breath, already-nonexistent before, didn’t exist in here. Scott felt his ribs closing in on him, his skin running numb with an odd cold, despite the squeezing, squishing proximity of Judy’s throat. He was nothing if not peaceful as he succumbed to the darkness of his mother’s body.

            Judy sat at her office desk, gazing out the window in a momentarily conflicted reverie. She collected a single dab of moisture from beneath her eyelid: the solitary symbol of her depression at this necessary act. In spite of herself, she managed a hopeful smile.

            “This is for the best, sweetie,” the woman sighed contentedly, recharged and renewed in the righteousness of her decision. Her hand caressed over her bare stomach. She wondered if he could hear her now. “You’ll see.”