A large horsefly accidentally flies directly into her oral cavity before she can speak. Outside in the air, this creature doesn’t seem that big, but from inside her mouth it feels like that giant flying reptile Rodan she once saw in a movie on cable. Her jaws are no match for this frightening pest, who, temporarily blinded in panic, begins biting her tongue with its tiny bloodsucking mouth. But Marsha is ready for any curveball nature might throw her. At first she considers spitting out this invasive monster, but then her reflexes take over and her snapping-turtle-like tongue, hidden behind her freshly glossed lips, rips the unwanted tormentor from the roof of her mouth, and with one bite of her cavity-free teeth, the execution of this pesky intruder is complete. Yes, she swallows.

The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

The human tongue is a beast that few can master.

And now she’s a parasite, living off her host. If he makes a mistake, she made the mistake.

One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand. Then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.

I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.

The ruminant, reason, chews a poisoned cud.

Falyse opened and closed her mouth, which made her look like some especially stupid fish.

Frightened by something in her own nature

I raise my left arm and twist my neck down to rip off the pill on my sleeve. Instead my teeth sink into flesh. I yank my head back in confusion to find myself looking into Peeta’s eyes, only now they hold my gaze. Blood runs from the teeth marks on the hand he clamped over my nightlock.

“Let me go!” I snarl at him, trying to wrest my arm from his grasp.

“I can’t,” he says.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

I have no mouth. And I must scream...

You must take a different route
if you expect to escape this wilderness, because the beast that makes you cry for help
lets none pass on her path, but cuts him off95 at every step until at last it kills him; and her nature is so wicked and perverse
that her voracity is never sated,
for feeding only whets her appetite. Many she’s mated with among the living100 and will with many more, until the greyhound
arrives to make her die a painful death.

The tongue like a sharp knife... Kills without drawing blood.