After a day, he was surprised to find Meagan knocking at the edge of the hole he had made.

“I missed you,” she growled. Then she showed him a bottle of wine she had recovered from a wagon the giant had swallowed two years earlier, which she had been saving for a special event.

Edgar invited her in and they had a small party, sitting in the darkness and discussing what he should do next to make his tooth more homey.

The following day they ran a rope from Meagan’s home through the gap between it and the next tooth, and then along the outer wall of the teeth to Edgar’s door, which made it easier for them to visit each other whenever they wanted.

While he continued work on his new dwelling, Meagan taught him how to snatch things from the tide of food and rubble that poured down the giant’s throat three times a day. When she “went fishing,” as she called it, she first secured a safety rope about her waist, anchoring the other end of the rope to one of the chairs inside her tooth. Normally she pulled things in with the help of a long pole that had a hook on one end. But if something particularly good came rushing past that was too far out on the tongue for her to snag simply by leaning for it, she would fling her whole body onto the surface of the tongue, then use the rope to haul herself back.

Once they saw an old man go past, but he was all the way in the center of the mouth and they were not able to reach him, despite their best efforts.

His cry of despair as he disappeared down the giant’s gullet echoed in Edgar’s dreams for many nights afterward.

Once Edgar was truly settled, he began to explore the giant’s mouth in search of a way out. Though he did not tell Meagan this was what he was doing, he suspected she was able to guess. Not that it made any difference. He could find no way of escape. His greatest hope had been to climb out of the giant’s mouth while he was sleeping. But the moist walls of his lips were too slick to climb easily. Twice Edgar tried using the pickax to help him make the climb, but both times this caused the giant to rub his mouth, with results that were nearly fatal. (The second time, he barely made it back to Meagan’s tooth, where she set his broken bones but gave him no sympathy for the pain that kept him awake for seven nights running.)

It was like being at the bottom of a well: easy enough to fall in, impossible to climb out.

Despite his misadventures at the front of the giant’s mouth, Edgar continued his explorations, until he had at last reached the most distant of the giant’s molars. He carried a torch with him, which he lit and waved to Meagan when he reached the far side.