A man sits on the couch, his head tilted back, staring at the ceiling. In the background, his television casts a faint red light in his direction as a horror film begins. The man pays no attention. He is concerned only with the dinner cooking in the kitchen.
He is going to have corn soup tonight. The sweet starchy odor swells from the kitchen, infusing the entire house. The air is thick, and the man senses that his meal is almost ready.
He hears a knock on the front door. Sitting up and heads to the door where He looks through the peephole: a boy, with a fragile silhouette, quivering outside. His skin is gray from the biting cold. His cheeks are sunken, his sharp cheekbones glaring sideways out of his face. His skin is a thin flap of fabric over his bones.
“Who are you?”
“I smell food in there…”
“Yeah, I was about to have dinner.”
“I’m so hungry… Can I come in?” The boy pleads.
The severity of the boy's scrawny figure takes the man aback. He considers walking into the kitchen by himself and enjoying his dinner in peaceful silence. Alone. But, driven by his intuition, he opens the door and the boy rushes past his right arm, causing a small breeze to chill his bones, . For a moment, the man regrets letting him in. But he pulls out a chair for the boy nonetheless and disappears into the kitchen.
The air thickens along with the corn soup. Soon, the man emerges at the dining table with a pot bubbling with yellow liquid. Seeing the boy drool, he offers him a wooden spoon, the boy instantly jumps at the offer, shoving the spoon into his mouth.
The boy’s body inflates with each gulp of soup. First, his head swells like a floury dough, consuming his eyes, nose, and mouth. Every spoon is a corn-flavored filling that stuffs the soft dough. Soon, the boy’s ears submerge into it, too. Next, his limbs bloat. His knuckles nestle safely inside his circular fists. As his fingers swell, the boy loses hold of the spoon, holding up the pot to his face and drinks the soup whole. His stomach expands and he is soon swimming in his own skin, barely keeping afloat, on the verge of drowning.
The man watches as the boy regains his spirit—rosy cheeks, glittering eyes, pink lips. His figure glows with a newly acquired radiance. The energy is contagious, and the man feels it too. He draws closer to the boy, obeying the force that took over his body. When his face is close enough to feel the boy’s breath, the man parts his lips.
Chomp. He takes a big bite out of the boy’s cheek.
The tender meat melts like butter on the man’s tongue. It dissolves into his saliva. He feels the energy from the boy’s body transfer to his. His skin is charged with a golden glow. In front of him, the boy continues slurping, oblivious to his missing cheek. Some of the yellow liquid dribbles down the corner of his disappearing lip.
The man reaches across the table and gets hold of the boy’s shoulder. With each marvelous bite, the man grows hungrier and hungrier. From his ears to nose to shoulders to thighs to toes, the boy disintegrates inside the man’s mouth.
Finally feeling full, the man looks up. The seat across from him is empty. There is no trace of the boy anywhere—no bones, no blood, no anything. Well, that is, except for a few strands of hair stuck between his two front teeth. He finds himself alone again. He returns to the couch, rubbing his stomach. It felt funny, but he brushed the feeling away, deciding to focus instead on the screaming woman on his television screen. After all, he had just devoured a boy.
He feels his stomach tighten, and the pain grows more and more intense. Soon, it is unbearable, and he is clutching his abdomen. Leaning forward, he spits out a series of muffled gasps. Just as he is about to lift himself to head to the bathroom, he collapses onto the floor.
A set of eyes blink in the dark, inside the man’s stomach. The boy’s pinkie finger pokes the man’s stomach lining, his tongue feels its way around inside the organ, and his nose hops around in search of the rest of his face. After a series of strangled attempts, the boy manages to piece himself together; his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears reform into a disoriented lump that resembles a face. The boy tries his best to reassemble his head the way it was, but it’s difficult to position each piece correctly in the dark.
There is a more urgent matter awaiting him; he needs to reassemble the rest of his body. The boy’s eyes dart left to right, right to left, searching for his limbs. But he can’t see anything. He has to find a way out of the confines of the man’s stomach.
The fastest way is gnawing his way out. He opens his jaw, now attached sideways on his face, and bites into the stomach wall. As his mouth opens and closes, putrid acid burns the skin off his tongue. Luckily, the nerves connecting his face are too tangled up to process any pain. He keeps gnawing.
The man lies on the floor, twitching, squirming at the sensation of fiery liquid burning his insides. He looks like a man on fire, flailing his limbs in all directions. The acid soaking his intestines travels through his lungs, up his throat. He vomits a mix of corn soup and bile.
The boy continues to eat his way out of the man’s body, ripping his skin with bare teeth. He chews until a thin rod of light appears ahead of him through the man’s belly button. The outside.
Freedom. Just a few more minutes of chewing and he would be free. Soon, light floods his vision.
The boy’s head emerges first. It balances itself on its forehead while his teeth fish for the rest of himself through the gash. Next are the limbs. He attaches his arms and legs to his face; one arm above his eye, another by the corner of his mouth, and each leg on either side of his nose. He looks disgusting, like chopped-up food waste thrown carelessly aside. But at least he’s able to balance himself. Finally, he excavates his stomach from within the man’s gut. He fumbles around with it for a while, trying to figure out where it should go. He considers putting it beneath his chin, but his legs would trip over it. He tries attaching it to his back like a shell, but his arms don’t twist in that angle. At last, he plops it on his head.
The boy limps toward the front door, his stomach bouncing up and down like a crown on top of his head. He flings open the door and leaps into freedom. His loose eyeball aches at the sight of the blue sky, his nose scrunches at the sharp scent of the trees, and his feet trudge lightly across the grass. As the door closes behind him, the man lies motionless on the floor, the television light illuminating his gutted stomach as the ending credits roll.