Sneaking inside

Last night I finally managed it. I snuck inside a potato and got sucked down without hitch. You have to understand how much I built up to this. How much work I put in. I’d spent three to four months trying to convince her to eat chicken, literally any meat, anything but the salads she usually went in for. She’s no vegetarian but spurns meat as much as your average middle-class westerner. I had to find the right product. Anything with a bit of camouflage. White and red good, green very bad. Anything that was likely to hide the gleam of my eyes, since I found that when I sat in a darkened room in front of a camera, it was the eyes which gave me away. There would have to be gluten or some overt adhesive constituent, so a sauce was desirable. If I could convince her to use ketchup I’d be onto a winner. But she’d always been snobby; the most she managed was hollandaise. Balsamic but only in moderation. Bread was a non-starter because she never ate it. I won’t bore you with more detail but I had to be able to roll myself up into the foodstuff. I had to be certain I wouldn’t fall out. Imagine how many times I had to abort, when I was literally there on her plate about to dive in, when I knew she could see me, or at least if she hadn’t seen me in that moment, it didn’t feel right to run the risk. 

People say food’s life’s greatest pleasure and so why even bother. I thought I could go further, deeper. I’m an opposer, a bit of a contrarian. That’s not to say I don’t get the same amount of pleasure from food as the others. I’m as much of a glutton as anyone. My pot-belly is testament I’m eating more than I need. But I sensed that there was more than just being the receiver. I wanted to know what it was like to be taken in, to be used, to be utterly disregarded.

It got to the point where eating wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I wanted to know about the insides. I wanted to dream myself in, attach myself to mitochondria, I wanted to go where no man had journeyed before. 

My research proved to be fruitless. The only things that came up were people who’d tried to shrink themselves first and who spent so much time and energy on the shrinking that they never got to the ingestion bit. I have always been quite small. I don’t need to worry so much about shrinking. That is my advantage, my forte. Shrinking is not the priority. I’m small but I’m not small enough just to go in unnoticed. I was going to have to make at least some effort at secreting myself.

Every night just before dinner I had a ritual. I ran a warm bath in which I’d placed hundreds of geranium petals. They seem to purify and remove smell.  I made sure not to use any industrial soaps, any of that laureth sulphate crap you buy at the supermarkets. After coming out I was practically odourless because beyond actually being able to see me, my girlfriend’s next best faculty is her smell. I had to go undetected. I rubbed myself in a very light lubricant and then waited. It had to be in the evening because of the light. It had to be a time when her senses were dimmed, her mental processes slow, to catch her shovelling it in with one hand and in the other mindlessly tapping about on her phone on Instagram.

I watched her make supper. I would ask her every single day almost as soon as she got up: What are you having for supper? Every day, every morning, she would already know. She would reel off a list like a machine gun. It was something quite amazing but it made my life a lot easier. How could she have planned her whole dinner when she hadn’t yet even had breakfast? Food runs this girl’s life.  This probably fomented some false mystery. I probably thought there was something worth seeing, perhaps a black hole.

But she never suspected a thing. It allowed me to plan but it also put on a hell of a pressure. I had the whole day to ruminate. I second- and third-guessed myself, making endless U-turns. I had delayed it so many times in the hope of establishing the perfect conditions. Some sort of distraction, an absent-mindedness. I had never realised that potato was the perfect decoy. If anything she’d be looking out for the meat, and the non-flesh wouldn’t arouse her suspicions. In the end it seemed almost too easy, too carefree, too foolhardy. If she caught me, she was going to think I was ridiculous. I couldn’t let that happen.

It was about 7:22 pm when I went in. The throat was exactly as you’d expect, like you see on those internal cameras. It was disgusting and magnificent all in one swoop. It was gloopy and full of craters and crevasses, so many sights to behold, so many strange colours that you never set eyes on outside the body, all types of fleshly tone so hard to convey because they are mixtures of organic materials -- coalescenses almost happenstances -- some hard some softer, and then the saliva and the blood making it a bewildering sight.

But then it started to get strange. There isn’t much light. You don’t realise this or at least I had grossly underestimated the extent to which the inside is in darkness.  It became unknowable, I lost my bearings and got scared. It is impossible to know what is up or down, and you realise as a human-being that the thing you most strive for in any unknown situation is the bottom. You need to get your feet on the ground and I felt like I was still floating.

So I didn’t really know where I was. People lead you to believe you end up in the stomach. There’s no way you can be that precise. It’s not the same when you’re outside. What you see when you’re there is just gradations of cell coverage constantly changing, constantly shifting, and it is impossible to say: oh now I am in the small intestine, or now I am in the perineum. The words are just a convenience. When you get inside it’s all just one big mist.

It was fortunate then that I had taken my phone. And it was auspicious that she had decided to send me a WhatsApp. Where the fuck are you; it lit up like a flame. It was some relief as I’d forgotten I’d taken it and was foundering. I responded. I didn’t sweeten the pill, nor did I overegg the pudding. I didn’t go in for sardonic remarks, a ‘guess where I am,’ for freaking her out, or pretending I was dead. I didn’t try and belittle her like I barely manage to prevent myself from doing when I’m outside her intestines. I was matter of fact. I said I was inside her stomach and didn’t know when I’d be back. I saw the two ticks so I knew it had come up on her screen. She doesn’t necessarily click on the message when it appears so it was probable she had read it. But she didn’t respond. Whether she believed me or not was not my concern. I might have asked her to help me navigate but she’d have thrown it back in my face. I’d decided I was going to make my way out in the same way I’d gone in; using my own ingenuity.