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File it under "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

Like a lot of college students, you work whatever jobs you can to make ends meet. Dad pays for the dorm room, which keeps you housed and fed, but not much more. You take odd jobs so you'll have money for other essentials. Beer, comic books, trips to the zoo, baseball games...

It is a combination of the last :two that gets you in trouble. One day you stop by the stadium work office and they need someone to wear the peanut costume. You nod and smile, because you need the money and it sounds better than picking up trash after a game. You spend four hours that evening dressed as a walking peanut. People aren't buying enough salted nuts so they dug out the old costume and off you went.

It turns out that bored kids like to trip people in costumes but the thick fibrous shell provides a lot of protection even when you fall on your face. You get your money at the end of the evening and decide you've had worse jobs.

The problem arises when you wonder if the zoo would pay you to be their peanut mascot too. You sneak the thing home, show it to the guy at the zoo gate and what do you know, they say they'll pay you for a half day and see if it sells snacks.

At first it's a lot more fun than the stadium. Fewer people, and happier ones as the kids actually want to be there, so no one trips you or throws things at you. You amble clumsily from exhibit to exhibit as a six-foot-tall peanut. Kids laugh and wave and you wave back when you can see them through the costume's eyeholes. The animals watch with bemusement from behind the bars.

Except the elephant. It doesn't just watch. It eyes you with interest as you amble toward its enclosure and the second you are within reach its trunk wraps around you and lifts you into the air.

Oops. You forgot that the big elephants can and do reach over the pen wall and take peanuts from visitors. Luckily the costume's shell protects you from the squeeze and you just laugh, sure it will realize its mistake and put you down.

It doesn't. It hefts you easily over the pen wall and stuffs you into its mouth, shell and all.

"Hey!" Things go dark and moist as a six foot peanut with you inside inside it bulges out the elephant's cheeks. Blunt teeth crunch down and the shell collapses. Suddenly you're awash in thick gooey elephant saliva and surrounded by fragments of the shell that scrape and scratch you. The muscular tongue moves beneath you, trying to push you between the grinding teeth.

You concentrate on staying out from between the molars, pushing against them each time they open. Brief glimpses of the outside world show you a family looking on with horror. None of them seem inclined to go for help. They must think you are doomed or are too shocked to move. They may not even see you in the dark moist maw but they know the guy in the peanut costume disappeared into a hungry elephant.

Crunch, crunch. The huge teeth grind the shell into a mass of woody fragments all held together with gallons of saliva. You push at the teeth with your feet in a desperate effort to avoid being masticated to death and unknowingly doom yourself. Unable to slip out of the elephant's jaws in the brief moments they are open you push in the other direction, and the wad of shell pulp that just happens to contain an entire human slides to the back of the elephant's mouth. The elephant pauses, then does what anyone does when their food is properly chewed up. It swallows.

The huge muscular tongue gives you a powerful shove and you realize things have gone horribly wrong. The wad of shell fragments clings to you thanks to all the elephant drool and the whole mass slides down into the thing's throat. The unexpected bulk of an intact man makes the elephant gag, but it is a very big animal that was expecting a lot of food from the giant peanut. The throat muscles squeeze down as it swallows again and you slide heavily down the elephant's throat, clothes, shoes, chewed up peanut costume and all.

The awkward bulge of an entire human moves though the elephant's thick neck but between gravity and the strength of its swallowing muscles there is no stopping your slide. The bass drum of its heart thumps through you as you slip helplessly down its throat and into the waiting stomach. A mass of half digested hay cushions your arrival and the stink of wet vegetation mixed with bile fills your nostrils.

You kick and squirm, trying to find a way out of the slimy pocket of flesh. It's obvious from the start that struggle isn't going to save you. Even if there weren't a couple hundred pounds of wet hay absorbing your struggle there is a thick layer of muscle and skin between you and the outside world. Five tons of elephant barely even notices your squirming, and more hay arrives as Jumbo, somehow still not full, swallows another mouthful of masticated hay. He's so huge he probably doesn't even notice the new, modest droop to his belly.

Well, he does notice, a bit. Even from inside the elephant you hear the guttural belch. Quite a lot of air went down its throat with the chewed-up shell and you and most of it goes right up up the gullet. Shame you don't go with it.

Speaking of the shell. The woody fragments are sodden with saliva and digestive juices, developing a slimy feel as the herbivorous beast's guts work on them. The hay has the same sort of feel, some chewed up but almost intact and some a mass of mush ready to move into the intestines for absorption. You've seen the "cannonballs" of used-to-be-hay in the elephant pen. A whole lot of vegetation goes through an elephant's guts each day. Today you're going with it.

Elephants aren't evolved to eat meat, but it's inevitable that bugs and other small bits of protein make their way in with all that vegetation. An elephant may not digest meat efficiently, but it can digest it. It just needs time.

You wonder what's happening outside the leathery gray beast. Did someone finally tell the zoo what happened? Even if they did, there's not much time for help to arrive. Little air is left in the sloshing mass of hay and digestive juices. Your clothes are sodden and your skin stings all over. The process of digestion is slow, but its starting. The only part of you not tingling is your feet, temporarily protected by your sneakers.

What will happen when the zoo finds out what happened to you? Probably nothing. They have to assume you were chewed to death. They're not going to kill an elephant to recover the body of a man. No, they'll call the zoo vet and keep an eye on the situation. They'll wait for your clothes, and maybe your bones, to reappear. The elephant's plumbing is roomy enough for those to make their way through without trouble. Even a man's skull and ribcage will fit through an elephant's guts. Eventually your shorts and shirt will show up, mixed in with bones and digested hay. Your shoes may survive intact enough to be worn again, if some Goodwill shopper wants oddly stained and elephant-scented sneakers. More likely they'll give your "remains" back to your family. "Here are your son's shoes. Sorry about the smell."

It'll make for an amusing anecdote, once the story appears in the papers. "Idiot wears costume to zoo, finds out what really happened to Mr. Peanut."

The churning dark presses in. There is nothing but wet hay, the thump of a great heart and the gurgle of elephant guts. Soon the last air will be burped up and there will be nothing but heat, and acid, and the rest of the trip though the beast. You wonder, briefly, if the thing has a chambered stomach like a cow. Even if it does, by the time you make it to the next one you'll be dead.

The elephant burps and you remember a joke you heard in grade school. How do you get out of an elephant's stomach? Run around and around until you're pooped. Well, you won't be doing much running by then, but you got the last part right.