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Here we have the sinius poysonus draconus in his natural habitat (a cave with a futon), sneakily prowling behind a blue jumping spider, who came into the cave to escape the rain. To keep things consistent, we’ll call the spider aevsivius arachnidus. Skit-skit-skit the little spider’s limbs go across the cave, faster than you and I can count the clawsteps. His abdomen flitters as he goes, and aevsivius—well, we can casually refer to him as Aevsivs—blinks his four eyes in downright bliss. He waves his furry palps at us, an insectoid Hi!

Sini pads after the blue gumball crossing the floor, at .2 miles per hour. This Sini does in fasting bursts: fasting such as an enlightened person does with food. You could argue both Sini and his bursts are fasting—the bursts from anything other than themselves, and the dragon from the spider—for he times each burst so as to always let the little bug skitter away. This, Aevs does at a consistent, carefree pace.

Aevs climbs up the railing of the futon. Sini halts at the futon’s edge. He gives the bug a bug-eyed look and the futon a bewildered one. Should he jump and pursue from the second story? Or should he go around, so that he can keep his feet on the floor and his burststreak unbroken and his fasting fastened?

Jolly despite the nearby internal conflict, Aevsivs twirls his clickety way around the railing toward the end. The metallic teek-teek-teek-teek it makes under his claws (about 0.04 decibels loud) sounds quite pleasant. He can do this all day, regardless of where he ends up! Where will he end up? Wherever the railing takes him!

Decidedly, Sini springloads himself toward his haunches. Then suddenly, he’s back in his habit of bursting, prancing alongside the locomotive bug. He foists his nose next to the bug, fascinatedly sniffing his fuzzy abdomen. Smells fruity.

In fearful delight, Aevs feels his mouth flap open. He jumps toward the futon. Perhaps, he’ll learn what sound the black vinyl makes on his claws.

Instead, Sini bounds onto the mat with an eager “Raor” and a bouncy somersault, landing dizzily on his belly. Wincing, he shoots out his forepaw to see if he caught the spider. First there’s nothing. Then out of the V of two talons Aevsivs dashes, tying and tangling all about the paw. Who wouldn’t at that size—on scales supple as leather (and yet steely), warm as freshblown glass?

“RIIR!” Sini cries, tickled by a tiny claw. “RIIIIYRCK! RIAWRR! RAHAWRPH!” He’s back and belly over the bed, rolling without a brake.

But then he extrapolates the fasting manner of his bursts into his rolls, so a brief pause heralds each sporadic barreling to each side of the bed. By and by, Sini wears himself out with that, too, not to mention wears out in nothing particular. His belly expands and contracts, possessed by the occasional paroxysm of giggling.

Aevs stops to cock his head, click his palps. Sini stares at Aevs. Aevs nestles between a couple of claws, four eyes blazing with interest into the dragon’s.

“Rurf?” Sini says.

Sini gently closes his claws to catch him. Aevs zooms away, now right on the flat part of the paw. He clicks again, studying the triangular black whiskers draped from Sini’s chin.

“Rurf?” Sini says.

He gently closes his paw to catch him. Aevs zooms off the palm, now right on the top of a claw.

“Rawrf!”

Sini stretches his maw wide then nomfs his entire paw. Imagine a bear who has stuffed a thick glob of honey into his mouth. The dragon’s eyes curve happily and a deep, satisfied note drones from his esophagus. So good is Sini’s imagination, he thinks he’s suckling on the sweet treat already, and you might’ve thought so too. (Now, bear in mind, if the story ended here, there’d’ve been no one to tell you Sini didn’t eat the spider, meaning that pruning the truth from a fantasy story changes its truth entirely. Then, why not simply believe in all story outcomes to open the possibility of infinite truths—or become a fantasy story writer, who creates infinite potential truths thus infinite potential realities? I digress.)

As I was trying to infinitely multiply your reality, Sini realized it was his paw that was sweet and not the nothing inside.

He had had some honey with his breakfast, you see.

He spots the spider skedaddling up his foreleg. “Hrumf?” He crooks it, his feverishly curious gaze following the spider up his bicep. If he doesn’t nom now, his neck won’t work out for him later. So he takes pidgeon pecks at the bug, but the bug meanders out of the way at miniature derby racer speed. Sini’s upper body contorts to that side (to the right), and his left foreleg crosses his right, and he drags his muzzle just out of reach of the bug. An agonized gape chomps a few inches from the bug, limited by the neck’s length.

Persistent, Sini pushes his tongue out. It hikes its way up his shoulder after Aevs, but the bug climbs out of bounds.

But Sini, he gets a fit of inspiration like a holy person at an altar might after a couple of days of kneeling; and he lurches and spazzes his tongue all over his shoulder. The propulsion of this lurch gives him just enough to break even.

Aevs vanishes. Not onto his tongue, but onto one of his whiskers. This next part, Sini times carefully:

Feeling the bug explore the manifold zags of his big, black chin . . .

Tuning into the tingling of each individual whisker . . .

Meditating his next move . . .

He swipes his paw over his last whisker, quickly scarfing down the top of it. He removes the paw with a squelch. Rivulets of drool run down his chin. Swishing his tongue across his lips, he tastes the leftover flavor and rumbles.

The fuzzy gumball lets out a surprised chitter. A surf of saliva washes him through an alley of two great, white spires, and he tumbles down a slippery, fleshy bluff into the maw’s trenches. Into the limbo of jaw and jowl.

Here, there’s solace from that sweeping leviathan of pink. But there’s pink here too, and then darkness and nothing else. A stagnant place where the dragon’s breath seems to barely reach. Safer, sure. But what’s life without risk?

Boldly, the bold jumping spider climbs back up the slimy bluff. He slips a few times, but carries it home, coming before a wall of great white spires. The enormous appendage strikes the other side of the wall, scouring it. The maw rumbles, and with an alarmed chirp Aevs stumbles backward. Regaining his balance, he whizzes into one of the alleys between the spires. The appendage slurps the walls behind him, and then the sky. Four bright eyes watch the creature ram and glide again and again.

Aevs clings to a marrowy wall, waiting out the quakes of movement. Excited shivers from his cephalothorax prove contagious to his abdomen, multiplying its already torrid wiggling.

A frustrated harrumph resounds. Bright orange sparks big as fireworks come from the far, far unknown, lighting up and crackling the maw. Hurricanes of purple smoke blast across the maw and out of it as it vents. A sluggish sheet of venom leaves the maw, gradually setting itself upright (such as a primate many years ago), and rises toward the cavelair ceiling. (This gets out of bounds of what our spider here can see.)

The rising curtain of poison concealing his face, Sini frowns. His dimples push his cheeks up, but just one at a time; they switch off. Did Sini lose the bug again? Thinking hard on when he had the bug last, he tucks his tongue into the flesh cavity far below his choppers on the left.

The jumping spider watches the leviathan sink into the abysmal depths. The quakes cease. Calm awe. How fun would it be to ride the leviathan? Free transit. Thrilling as a roller coaster. Hastily, Aevsivs pedals his claws off the marrowy wall then zips out of the alley, overlooking all the valley below. From here the other spires appear as razor mountain peaks, and the manifold speckles of tastebuds below look like the individual willows of some pink woodland canopy. Soaking in the sight and the gooey warmth of a continental exhale, his orbs for eyes shiver with his prickling fur.

Sini pats down his face. Nothing. He opens his jaws up, takes out of his neckpocket a pocketmirror then puts the pocketmirror to his jaws, emulating a slow yawn. Nothing—that is, until he sees a minute speck of blue leap from the left of his lower jaw onto his—the dragon suddenly rolls onto his back, all four paws up. A calm, nasally hiss pushes out of an ajar grin; and his paws, his paws progress from “paddling the ball of yarn” to—as he spontaneously combusts onto his flank—”DJing at the open turntable event.” And his tail, it swishes uncontrollably as a rope of chain. You think it’s only gonna flail so much, then it goes WHAP just that extra mile just to prove you wrong.

What’s the matter with the sinius poysonus draconus, you might ask? Let’s zoom in closer, and you see for yourself:

The big pink appendage, grinding the fuzzy gumball against grooves of the slimy roof, squeezing the berry(?) taste onto giddily writhing tastebuds.

The sounds of chirping and chittering, the sensation of little claws scrabbling for a grip, but slipping farther down the inclining tongue.

The pounding of his own hot dragon’s breath on the bug seeming to stimulate more of chittering of excite(?), panic(?), a heart-sinking buzz(?) creating a feedback loop of thrill for both dragon and bug.

Flushes of saliva clash at the midpoint of the undulating tongue, trickling, trickling down. Aevs, with a squeak, feels the flux pry his six arms off the leviathan and his cephalothorax towards Omega, the Abyss. His finicky two legs slip. He back-dives and, colliding and then tumbling up an ascending hill of tasters, gets his grip back with his arms. But gravity continues, pushing him off the apex; and then again he’s tumbling, twisting, through the air tearing—

and—and then a small, feathery tingle of palp and abdomen tickles the dragon’s left tonsil. First, he looks like someone cut off his favorite record: dazed, out of rhythm. Then he starts to chuckle, left side of his face twitching. A line of sensation squiggles along his jowl. He tries to trace it with his taster, but the art’s tough to replicate.

The spider eludes him, even vaults onto his tongue. He nestles into a nest of buds with a jocund wiggle.

A draconic harrumph splits two ways: pleased, frustrated. Pleased because the piercing flavor in the middle of his mouth evokes a fruity mint. Frustrated because the mint keeps coming back. Sini harrumphs a couple times more, engine revving sounds. But each time, the gush of breath only blows the bug away from the throat; and at the end of each breeze, he rests in another clump of buds, just as giddy as before.

Sini crosses his eyes, blinks rapidly. A flop of one of his ears: he should swallow the bug now. A flop of the other ear: he should suckle on the bug some more. Well, Sini sides with the other ear. He knows not why the bug hugs his buds, but he may as well make the most of this symmetrical pause.

Gently, Sini levels his tongue to his roof. Soundly snuggling the tongue, Aevsivs feels the fleshy sky canyons press down his abdomen fur. He cheeps, alarmed. But the ground and the sky sandwich him in place; and the ground begins to ground him against the sky. Sini grumbles happily. Saliva pulsates into the moist interstice Aevs inhabits, and sweet flavor sparks over Sini’s tongue. The dragon returns to his old shenanigans (slurping, gulping, rumbling). Swamped by great currents of drool, Aevs loses his grip on the pink cylindrical stubs, and then again he’s tumbling, twisting, through the air tearing—

bumping off the precipice—

and—and then catching the bottom of a big, bulbous thing with a six-armed embrace. The bulb, measuring twice his size, swings back hard. With a cheet! Aevs throws himself higher, finding an easier grip around the thing above the bulb, a slimy pillar.

“Glk! Glurk!” Sini pushes his tongue between his teeth. He nips down. His lips press together, the top one pulling up then slackening, pulling up slackening, and his face malfunctions. He drives in reverse off the futon then collapses on his hindlegs, taking a moment to thrust the top of a forepaw into the space between his purple plated neck and his chin, silently yelping in sync with the thrusts. His uvula undulates up a storm. He props onto his hinds, inhales deeply then sneezes.

Two stacks of poison gas rocket out of his nostrils, stopping dead 4.54 feet along the X-axis, billowing up from there. Curls of flame wink up from the nose when the coast is clear, and, transitioning into smoke, begin to go up. Sini groans and wipes his nose, smiling sheepishly.

The sneeze gives him some sinus relief, but the best relief is the uvula relief. If you asked him what was relieved, though, he wouldn’t say the uvula; he’d say “the thing that swings like a-loo-loo-loo!” and wiggle his talon really fast on the onomatopoeia. That, or “the punching bag.”

Well, a thin smoke that smells and tastes of fire colors the atmosphere of the maw, so thin, it’s more an incense than a smoke. This, Aevs notices first when his palps rustle. His four sunny eyes light back up. A little wilted, he pops up—right off his back—and flicks his head. He looks. He sees. Behind him rises this giant, curving curtain (scientists call this a frenulum) stretched some ways along a trembling roof, and on the side Aevs is on there’s a little holed stump (scientists call this a submandibular duct). He peeks inside. Looks dangerous. He takes more steps, enjoying the sensation of sheetlike flesh under his claws. If he were a little bit bigger, the flesh might have budged.

Sini sniffs a little sadly. That last sneeze must’ve sent the spider soaring. He can’t find him. He scavenges his mouth with his tongue but only feels his gums, no ball. It’s until the space below his tongue fills with spit. Sweet spit. Remember that thing called a submandibular duct? It’s until now that he had no clue a salivary gland hid there. Now, drool pools into the trench below the frenulum. A shallow lake expands. Sini’s ear twitches to a very soft, soft splashing. Molecules of exotic flavor rinse into the lake, to Sini’s broadening simper. Unable to not participate, his tongue sploshes into the lake, lathering itself with sugar water. And an mmmmm reverberates the lair . . .

* * *

The holed stump the spider concluded to be dangerous pops. Like a burst pipeline, it gargles out a spout of saliva, along with its partner just past the frenulum, with half-arcs of varying force thus length. Aevs skittishly turns. Seeing the streams of saliva accrue into raging waterfalls, he flares his palps in surprise. Scootering away without turning, his legs work like clockwork inspired by a pendulum. He eventually wheels, starting into a full-fledged flee. The falls gush forward, sweeping him away: what seem like gallons, dozens of gallons, hundreds of gallons . . .

White noise crashes. The transparent surf thrusts against the mouth; retreats; and, carried by the surf, Aevsivs coasts a U-turn up and down the mouth; the chittered equivalent of cheering follows his dip at the highest point of his rise, then fwoosh! Down and down he goes, cannonballing into the rising lake. His impact can hardly be considered a splash. Think spwoosh. Just enough spwoosh to ripple the surface and rouse a couple of bubbles.

Aevs’ head surfaces. The entire maw rumbles. His eyes bulge, and the silvery-green hair on his head poofs wildly. A giant shadow descends. Looking up, Aevs sees the leviathan plunging toward the lake. With a hasty blink, Aevs dives deep into the lake. A heavy boom hits the surface behind him, centered round the mouthfront. Boom, boom, boom. The booms persist. Between them and the flashes of quaking rumbles, Aevsivs finds the bottom of the lake comforting. The thunderous cacophony dulls into calm, ambient shuddering. Saliva under the surface wavers. Bubbles blip and trickle up around the bug, boom boom boom. He looks up again, and with every strike of the giant pink appendage over the surface he shudders in fascination.

One of the strikes propels him deeper, and, choosing not to fight the current, he butterflystrokes to the bottom. Back pressed to the pit of the mouth, he looks up again. Things grow calm. He waits.

Waits.

The saliva under the surface suddenly breaks into a flurry of bubbles, the way wind and sound breaks down a subway before the cars come through the tunnel. In just enough time for Aevs to open his mouth and gawk, the head of the tongue rails over the bottom of the lake and sweeps him up.

White noise crashing, throat rumbling, the leviathan emerging with curtains of drool gushing off the sides. It rears its mighty head out between the jaws: great white stalactites and stalagmites larger than homes. And it displays its catch: a little blue gumball, his fuzzy form drenched. Aevsivs jumps to his feet, and lo! He sees countless stories above him, the enormous black snout of the dragon with two slits for nostrils and two black sickles that jut down from either side. If he eyes the bend either way, Aevs sees what starts to register to him as the curve of a draconic grin: great, jagged teeth protruding from juicy gums orbit the split of the tongue. And Aevs, he looks up again and sees a purple snouthorn, and imagines that, beyond that, there must be two great purple eyes homing down on him, admiring the catch.

So Sini smiles, his eyes carving the shapes of parachutes. “Gaw-haah,” he says, unable to produce the “ch” sound.

The sheer magnitude of the dragon’s size overwhelms the spider. Looking past a rippling jowl and seeing a farreceded tail, hundreds of thousands of spiders in size . . . turning, peering over the point of the leviathan and seeing black vinyl, stretched over a mattress thousands of thousands of spiders in size . . . feeling his furry back blowing, beaten by hot dragon’s breath billions of spider breaths in size . . . The abyss of bedding fills the spider’s vision, his little heart pumping, pounding.

And in this moment, the music of the dragon’s throat rolls through the cragged plains of pink, buds stirring where the space of their crags will let them. His gaze looms just over the towering snouthorn, point and center, fixed on the blue blip at the tip of his tongue. There’s a glint of intelligence in his eyes: knowing. Knowing the bug and him are bound now. Knowing the bug knows the same: that if he flees, where will he go but back to the dragon’s domain, to be captured again? Knowing that fate is sealed. Knowing the only question now is What fate for them will he decide? Will one gulp, the other be gulped? Will one swallow, the other be swallowed? Sini thinks on the flavor the spider offers; thinks on the feeling of exhilaration they both experienced to his tasting; thinks on how the spider will fill his stomach . . . on how he’ll enjoy that too . . .

He’ll.

That glint of intelligence in his eyes backfires. A boomerang, sent out before, now returning . . .. Sini’s black lips hide away his jaws. His tongue still juts from his mouth like a giant diving board. In his eyes, that power heeding to responsibility . . . in his shoulders, that pounce-ready drawback undrawing.

He lifts his chin. His tongue darts back into his mouth. There’s a moment of searching, eyes searching, doublechecking. Then he gulps.

A line of fire runs to his throat. Glrk. Sini moans a little. A bulb of spittle drops from the edge of his mouth like an arachnid on a silk thread from a ceiling. The glrk bloats his neck, pushes his purple neck plates as it travels, plate one, plate two, plate three; and by the third plate, it’s so shrunken, the fourth one gets no swell.

His lips pull up for a dreamy snarl; and Sini’s whole neck pulls forward, forepaws then hindpaws plodding forward on the futon. His neck coils back into an arch then flexes, cobra striking, and again and again and again; and glrk and glk and urlk go down the gullet, halos of flesh squeezing. And the rest of the spider’s taste flows with the spider (passenger on the gutter-ride of a rainstorm) through a tunnel vertically pitching.

No time for spelunking. No time for sightseeing. So destinationdriven, these saliva falls . . .

Plummeting from a spasming chasm, the spider falls and falls and cheeps, and his head loops over his abdomen thrice before a little ploop. A large, purple ocean of bubbling juice welcomes him. Big, stinky half-spheres swell over the surface here and there.

They burst. They pop. And so it goes.

Then Aevsivs’ head rises up with a small splash, as though he had taken a quick dip. A little font of purple, he blows out of his mouth; shakes his head. Dryer but not dry, Aevs lets his eyes wander around the stomach. Flesh stretches on and on for the length of so many spider stadiums—no nation he knew could build such a thing in a single lifetime!

That thrill the spider felt before takes a scary twist, striking in him fear and uncertainty. Purple shades hurl themselves about, with their color infecting stomach walls and infecting Aevs and, and . . .

He’s warm, very warm, very very warm . . . Oh no! Should he be so warm? There’s a frightened little chitter, not like his usual blissy ones . . .

Fearsome rumbles, groans, growls, gurgles, and howls resound—all the sounds you might hear from Cthulhu! There’s the scariest, most Cthulhuest one of them all: a deep, dark, slimy, sickly belch. The stomach quakes, and every elastic wall buckles and twists and contorts, all round Aevs; and Aevs, poor little spider, dives into the ocean to hide.

But then . . .

Then, the pressure goes. The stomach shrinks, but clean air pours inside, filling it up. And the ocean drains; and it keeps going, a scary thing in the context of climate change, but not so scary here. For, Aevs feels the kiss of fresh air nipping on his back fur. And all the ocean goes away, leaving but an ocean floor. And there, where he lay ducking, he peeks open his four yellow eyes.

Stillness.

A chirp: questioning, but hopeful.

He looks all around him, and oh! An endless landscape lit by the glow of the dragon’s body warmth, surrounded by stretchy, groovy walls. Why, and his fuzzy body isn’t so itchy anymore!

Aevs springs up, chirping in elation!

Well, let’s be sure first.

He takes one careful step across the expanse. No scary, purple ocean water wells up again. No rumbles, groans, growls, gurgles or howls.

The coast is clear!

All that purple shade that infected everything is gone, the bug returned to his natural blue. So, merrily, he skips off across the expanse, moist and gooey on his claws; and he comes to one fold of a stomach wall, and clings to it; and his zigzagging smile crosses his whole face, for the whole embrace.

Hastily he jumps off. He flees off into the dark unknown of the stomach, bold as a bold little jumping spider can be. Time for an adventure!

* * *

Shadows come and pass. The moon comes, the moon goes. The sun comes up, and the light of the door reaches over Sini. The dragon lay in a snug curl, forepaws coddling his chin. He smiles, snoring soundly; and his belly goes out and in, out and in. So it goes, until his closed eyes screw tighter and he pouts. Slight contortions of his neck . . . a rise of his head . . . waking eyes . . .

Guwwrrwlrwll. His stomach wrings itself. His neck sucks in and out, shuddering. He groans. He coughs.

In a splatter of drool, a little spider appears. Sini barks at it. The spider gets up. Sini barks again, happier. The spider turns around, sees him, and jumps happily! The spider skips up his whiskered chin, up his lip, up his snout and up to his snout-horn. The snout-horn, he gives a hug; and Sini he bobs his head and chuckles.

Friend—not food.