I was a too big a bite of pizza, too much chalupa. I was that bite you take out of the Big Mac when you're really starving, and you wish you could spit it back out and start over, but you can't because you have a yap full of gray meat and stale bread and you have no choice but to mash that puppy while the special sauce dribbles down your chin and makes you look like a two-year-old working his first solid food.

The tongue shoved at me, heaved up beneath me, all wet muscle covered in bristly taste buds the size of cashews. I was facedown on the tongue, facedown on a wet, pink blanket draped over half a dozen WWF stars trying to heave me off, push me, shove me, force me under molars as big as my head.

The roof of the giant's mouth came down, clamped me, forced the air out of my lungs, and the tongue tried to toss me again. I sucked air, sucked in his god-awful, stinking-like-a-week-old-corpse breath. The stink alone would have killed me if I'd had the time to worry about it.

The tongue twisted me around. I was holding on with my hands slippy-gripping, my feet up against the rubbery inner cheek, calves lined up perfectly across the anvil of the lower jaw, just waiting for the downstroke. I felt the jaw contract, sensed rather than saw the mashers coming down, yanked my feet toward me, into a fetal position, crying Mommy and getting a mouthful of giant spit.

Down came the teeth. I cleared them by a millisecond, but my convulsive movement had loosened my grip and now the tongue had me. It shot forward and sideways and I was on my back, big damned teeth sticking into my spine. I was lined up, gripped, held in place between tongue and cheek.

The mouth opened, just enough light to see the uppers coming down hard and fast, and instinct took over — I rolled, pushed at the yielding flesh of the cheek, like pushing against a half-inflated balloon. I shoved off the uppers as they came down, and suddenly, I was peanut butter: a big wad of weeping, yelling, peeing-myself peanut butter between teeth and cheek.

No way to breathe, the pressure of the cheek and gums was too much. And now the tongue was trying to dig me out, a freaking backhoe looking to dig a trench, and me in the role of dirt.

I grabbed the digging tongue tip and yanked it over and past me. It slid down my face, my chest and was gone. Any second now it was going to occur to the giant to use his finger. Or he could just slap the side of his face and I'd burst like a prom-night zit.

Panic. Sheer, no-brain, losing-it panic. I kicked, lashed out, slammed my fists in the confined space, buried alive and just waking up. Knees, feet , fists, head, and all around writhing.

Something gave. I kicked and kicked with a target now. I kicked and there came a bellow, reverberating up through the flesh and the gums and the bones and rattling through me before it burst full-fledged from the giant's mouth.

The tooth came loose. I gave a savage, blind kick and the whole molar rolled over onto the tongue. Blood gushed around me, blood and spit and the giant yelling and me yelling and mad now because I'd had that tiny little impact that lets total save-me-Mommy despair give way to screw-you hatred.

I shoved my head into the gap and felt in the dark for the molar. I hefted the small boulder up and piled it on top of the nearest surviving tooth. Down came the uppers.

"Chew on that!" I screamed.

Crunch. And now a serious bellow and a gassing of manure-stinking breath and he slapped his cheek, slapped it and knocked me back out onto the tongue. I doubled up, legs numb from the blow, and kicked unfeeling. I kicked with all I had, which wasn't much on the left side, where my leg was either broken or just numb. But my right foot caught the backside of a front tooth and knocked it spinning into the air.

How many teeth in the giant mouth? Well, whatever it that number was, minus two.

All at once I was falling. A long way. I hit the ground and bounced. Head spinning, swirling, down and dark and...

At the top of my lungs I shouted a four-syllable word that was very popular with Eddie Murphy back when he was doing stand-up.

I shouted that word, jumped to my feet, spun, and fell into my girlfriend's mother. She was a small woman, and I carried her and her serving platter of lemongrass chicken right down to the geometric-pattern rug and lay on top of her panting like a sled dog in the last lap of the Iditarod.

There was a horrible silence. A silence so complete that of the four people in that tastefully decorated dining room with the matching antique table and sideboard and the table linen that was the same as that favored by the late Princess of Wales, I don't believe there was so much as the sound of a single heartbeat.

My girlfriend, Jennifer, my girlfriend for a week, said, "Christopher, I think you'd better go."

Up till that point I had not guessed that Jennifer had a talent for understatement.

Jennifer's father was not a big man; I had a good six inches on him. But the deep moral authority that comes to a man who has just stood by while someone screamed that particular Eddie Murphy word and then launched himself into the cleavage of said small man's wife as though determined to make that word a prophecy, well, a man in that position carries more than his natural height and weight.

I babbled an incoherent apology, tried to help the mother up, was grabbed by Jennifer, who literally shoved me toward the door while her father snatched up a silver candlestick and came after me.

I fled into the night and ran for my car with cries and shouts and shrill accusations following me.

Then I woke up, on my back, soaked with giant spit and tooth blood and stinking like the gym locker of the kid who left his sweats behind through the long months of summer vacation.

The giant loomed huge. His leprous, rotting, distorted, snaggle-toothed, malevolent-idiot face wore a dimly abashed expression.

"You okay?" David asked calmly.

Before I could work up a suitably savage reply, there came a woman's voice. A voice that was, literally, music.

"The poor boy, the poor boy," the voice said. "Oh, look at him, the pity of the world. There is the stream nearby. I will bathe him and tend to his wounds with my own hands, poor, lovely young lad."

I wiped giant goo out of my eyes and sat up and looked at her. She was simply the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.