Work Text:
You are a pizza, topped with meat, vegetables, and thin slices of pepperoni. Look at you, showing off that sauce under the cheese. Now, you enter the oral cavity. Passing the lips, you are sounded by the cheeks, making up the walls. You look around at your new room, admiring the fade from hard palate to the muscles of the soft palate. You’re not sure what it does.
Not so suddenly, (as it’s been going on the entire time and we’re just now mentioning it)... movement. Teeth mash at you with no mercy. Maybe it’s just your imagination, but you hear an excited squeak of the salivary ducts stirring behind their orifices. There’s a sense of pride at how fast you got chemical digestion to start. Must be the effect you have on the tongue. The taste buds are excited within their papillae.
The structure here is simply magnificent; the shape of that glossopalatine arch. You can’t really compare, as this is your first time being digested. Those digestive enzymes in the saliva are really going at it, breaking you down.
The tongue bucks, and the view of the teeth gets smaller as you slide sensuously down the esophagus. You’re more bolus than pizza now, your lovely form pulverized. However, you can still feel the muscular tube pulsing, pushing, peristals-ing (that counts as use of “peristalsis”) you downwards. Sploosh. You fall into the stomach (with the help of the lower esophageal sphincter relaxing/contracting of course).
This is your new home for the next 1 to 4 hours, so get cozy. You’re slowly cruising through the fundus (upper portion of the stomach). Like the educated pizza you are, you just looked up what’s happening to you here. You’re just chilling with some other food and gases, talking about your lives. You meet some water that came down just after you. It’s been awhile and you’re in the body of the stomach now, and starting to get pretty bored. It’s not as stimulating as being in the mouth. Sure, getting mixed with pepsin was fun, but you weren’t the first to get the rugae going. Turns out hydrochloric acid tickles. Although it might just be that having your proteins digested in general that tickles. The stomach turns, churning and mechanical.
Pretty rude that this sac that can’t even keep itself together isn’t absorbing much of you. Imagine not being part of the absorption process. Yeah, go right ahead and take that ethanol from last night, you unfeeling piece of soggy bread.
Finally, after deciding you don’t really care for that stomach guy (but liked the other food you were mixed with in the chyme), you finally pass through the pyloric sphincter and into the duodenum of the small intestine. You hear that this is the body’s favourite part, “absorption”. The body sucks what it needs right out of you, the little villi. You whisper a soft goodbye to the nutrients now floating around the capillaries, starting a new life in the circulatory system.
This is pretty big for a small intestine, you think. A whole foot long. You wonder if that means a foot could be digested. There are multiple organs at work here, how important are you. The liver and gallbladder are both being juiced of bile. Guess what’s coming from the pancreas. You’ll never guess. Pancreatic juices. Unexpected, I know right. You feel your fat and fat-soluble vitamins being slurped up by the acidic acid. Amylase swims around you, breaking down those carbohydrates in what used to be your crust. There’s amylase everywhere. It ain’t your first meeting though, you got good and familiar with salivary amylase in the mouth. This here be pancreatic amylase. You’re slipping through the small intestine, feeling so many things working at you. Carboxypeptidase is splitting your amino acids; you meet these twins who say they’re different but the “mono/di/polysaccharides” and “various-other-prefixes of glycerides” both seem like sugars. A polypeptide floats by, and you recognize some of your own amino acids. Your very own children! Turns out the twins really were different, the polysaccharide is the only one being seduced into amylose. Right, you’ve been in this small intestine for awhile now and think we’re due for a new paragraph, vocab done or not.
You take a look around the large intestine. The appendix flops off the side. You think you went through the liver at some point, got filtered. Honestly, you’re kinda tired now, too tired for the play from the other sections. You sit passively as your water is sucked out.
You're but a shadow of what you once were. Your fats, emulsified and absorbed by the lacteal (dunno if the lacteal do emulsification, but artistic license), even the fancy fats (lipids). Minerals, vitamins, carbs, saccharides and triglycerides, GONE. All gone. Who needs nutrients when you’ve got a nice body to stay in though. It was a hard break up, but sometimes the people you meet are meant to get you away from things you don’t need.
Ok. This. This is rude. Straight up rude. You thought you’d found your soulmate. But no. Here goes the uhhhh rectum and anal sphincter and all that pushing you out. You’re nothing but feces now. Waste. Left in your misery after a one day stand that felt like everything.