Smash!

Prologue

I was in her floor.  I wasn’t on it.  I wasn’t underneath it.  I was IN it.

The varying intricacies of how I came to be in her floor, we’ll touch on later in this telling, so I’ll save it to say that I pissed her off really badly by cheating on her.  Also, it is important to this story to note that she was one of the big gurus at a national technology and chemical company.

And that she has a really bad temper, and a completely insatiable streak of vengeance.

My girlfriend, she just outright killed.  Shrunk her down to near nothing and crushed her to a ground-out-of existence paste under the toe of her stiletto.

Me, she buried in her floor.

Imagine the contractor’s puzzlement when he had been asked to cut 14 x 20 rectangles in all of the floors in all of the rooms in the house, and at strategic locations in all of the rooms.  Fit them with removable plates, seamless so they wouldn’t show in the carpet when they were in place.

It must have been bewildering, but my lady is rich and powerful and so the contractor did as asked without question.

If with a bit of head-scratching.

I didn’t need to ask why she was doing it.

I KNEW why.

But still, imagine my shock when she brought home this set of firm foam blocks, with an indentation machined out of them just my shape and size.

Yeah, you would have guessed right, if you’d guessed that she had shrunk me too.  Me, however, she didn’t crush beneath her stiletto.  For me, she had other plans.  I was to begin a new life in the foam blocks.

In her floor.

Her, was my wife.

Mary was her name.

And she was way pissed because I had cheated on her to explore a foot fetish.

And she was going to punish me HARSHLY for it.

PART ONE

Chapter 1

After having caught us with the use of a Private Detective, she had marched right over to our hotel (mine and my girlfriend’s) and almost beat the door down!

“Greg!  I know the two of you are in there! You better open up right now, or I swear to God, I’ll shoot the fucking lock out!”

I knew she would, too.  She had that kind of a temper.  And the kind of gun she carried – a .44 magnum snub-nosed she always carried in her purse – would empower her to do exactly as she promised.

Grabbing my underwear and telling Jess (that was my extra-marital girlfriend) to hide in the john, I hurriedly went to the door and opened it.  (I was hoping I could cool my wife down enough to be able to leave with her so Jess could get out.  I knew my wife would shoot her if she discovered her here.  Mary had that kind of temper!)

Mary barged right in, nearly bowling me over she threw the door open so hard.

Mary was a big woman – 6-foot 2 with sexy shoulders as wide as an axe handle.

She was the paragon of a woman boss, too.  Strong, sexy legs, high heeled shoes with those panty hose with those black lines that ran up the backs of her legs, a $10,000 immaculately tailored business suit, and an utterly no-nonsense attitude ever on a face framed by straight, silky locks of jet black hair.  If not for her usual sternness, her face would have had a beguiling beauty.  But more often than not, especially when she was around me, her face had the unflinching hardness of an anvil.

Completing the ensemble, were a pair of damn near needle-point stiletto, sleeker-than-polished-onyx black shoes.  Every step she took with them was as if she intended to make her footsteps heard in Hell.  They clacked loudly on tile and hardwood.  They made these deep, staccato thumps on carpets.  And she seemed to pile drive them every step, as if to emphasize with her approach, that people had better get out her way.

“Where the fuck is she?!” she demanded, marching into the room.

Me, she shoved back on the bed, and then – at first what I thought was her .44 – she pointed her gun at me.

“No!” I cried!  “Mary!  For god’s sake!”

With a cruel but knowing smirk, she fired.  But the gun only went off with a “Pfft!” sound and a puff of mist.

At first, I was confused.

A dart?

Plucking the thing out of my arm, I held it up and looked incredulously at her.

“Wha--*”

But that was when my world fell away, darkness collapsing in on me like two ocean waves meeting in the middle.  Darkness took me with a sensation like a thunderous rise of fizzing foam.  The last thing I saw when my world got washed into blackness, was my wife’s evil smirk.

Chapter 2

When I awakened, I was...

I was...

I sat up.   Groaned.

My fucking head THROBBED!  My ass, my back and shoulders hurt, too, like I was lying on a hard, uneven surface.  But most of all, my head throbbed.

I sat up slowly, tried to take in my surroundings.  My vision though, seemed to be betraying me.  A desert of blue... rocks?  A hazy vision of a vast bedroom beyond a... my eyes squinting... was I looking through glass?

Then my heart skipped a beat.  My head snapping around to my right, me still trying to focus my fuzzy vision, I nonetheless saw clearly enough to recognize Jess.  She was lying not too far from me, her body collapsed on the blue desert the same as mine was not moments ago.

Getting up on shaky legs, groaning at the throbbing in my head, and the pain of the rocks turning under my bare feet, I froze.

I found myself looking out at some monstrous bedroom!  But not just any bedroom!

Huge armoire, an accompanying dresser.  Big, four-poster bed with matching overstuffed comforter and pillows with floral designs.  Solid mahogany frame with matching nightstands on either side and a matching footlocker at the foot of the bed.  A pair of $2500 Tiffany lamps stood on the nightstands.  The armoire and dresser boasted a massive mirror with tons of beauty supplies with a Tiffany chair in front.  A big, four-door walk-in closet stood at the west wall, which I knew boasted over a hundred pair of shoes and a couple of dozen $10,000 Armani business suits.  An absolutely massive bathroom was beyond the south wall.  Finally, thick, light blue carpet covered the bedroom’s floor, with a massive area rug occupying most of the floor between the bed and armoire.

It was our bedroom!

Mine and Mary’s bedroom!

I staggered forward.  My hands came upon glass.  I realized in that moment that I was in a fish tank, that the blue “desert” rocks were blue fish tank pebbles, and that I was staring out at mine and my wife’s bedroom from within the fish tank!

What the fuck?  More importantly, how the fuck?!

I put my forehead against the tank’s glass, squinted my eyes shut and tried to make my mind wrap around the utter and absolute ridiculousness, not to mention the enormity of the situation.

Mary was a bigwig at a multinational technologies and chemicals firm.  She had Top Secret “Eyes Only” clearance, and worked on shit that most people only ever dreamed up conspiracies about.

Once Mary was onto what I was doing, she had evidently brought some of her work home, to give me what for with it.

And had she ever.

Looking down at myself, and judging the fish tank I was in to be a 10-gallon tank, I estimated my new height at 6 to 8 inches.  Mary had somehow shrunk me down to a size of an action figure!

Suddenly, Jess groaned behind me.

Pushing away from the glass, the gravel turning and smarting under my bare feet, I tottered slowly over to her.

I took her hand, positioned myself so that she wouldn’t be able to see past me to the bedroom if she sat up, told her to lie still, that everything was all right and that help was coming.

“Jess, you all right?” I asked solicitously, really worried that Mary might have hurt her.

Her bare skin was bruised in a few places, by what looked like giant... finger marks.

It looked like Mary had been pretty rough with her.

“Wha--?” she moaned groggily.  She groaned, brought a hand up to her head.

“Lie still,” I said again, trying to calm her by patting her hand between both of mine.  “It’ll be all right,” I lied.

My gut clenched as I looked down at her.  She was so very fucked.  The only reason Mary hadn’t killed her already, I knew, was so she could gloat over catching me at my affair Jess.  Who knew what tortures lay in store for this sweet-hearted woman.  My mind refused to even imagine them.

It tried, but I did not want it to.

“I rem—“ Jess began again, still moaning and mumbling the words.  “Someone shouting, then the bathroom door bursting open, then a woman with a gun.”

Jess’s eyes snapped open.  They were red-rimmed and bloodshot.  They locked with mine.  Her eyes filled with horror.

“Was that your wife, Greg?”  Then her eyes widened.  Then suddenly, she was looking this way and that, her eyes frantic, she trying to snatch her hand away, when she too suddenly froze.

She had frozen when her eyes fell upon the blue pebbles that made up the floor of our fish tank prison.  Then putting her hand on my chest to push me back, she started to sit up.  When she did, her eyes went wide, she staring with dawning horror at mine and Mary’s monstrous bedroom beyond our prison’s glass walls.

“Jess, look,” I began hastily.  But before I could finish, Jess had fainted dead away, her head and body falling back on the loose pebbles with a soft crunch.

It wasn’t moments after that, me trying to coax Jess back awake with little pats to her cheek and with soft words, that I heard the all-too-recognizable click.. clocking of the rhythmic footsteps of my now goliath wife coming down the hall.

END PART ONE

PART TWO

Chapter 3

As tall as ever, as callous and business-like as ever, Mary strode into our bedroom.  Wearing one of her expensive Armani business suits, she looked as stunning as ever, but the sheer size of her now turned my insides to ice and I backed away from Jess’s prone body, to fall on my ass, mimicing her soft crunch in our fish tank prison’s blue gravel.

Mary was carrying one of her best Gucci, calfskin briefcases.

Mary wrapped a perfectly manicured hand around the back of the Tiffany chair in front of the dresser and brought it over to our prison.  She said not a word.

Seating herself, she brought her briefcase up onto her lap, fixed me with a momentary stare, shifted that stare for an instant to the still-fainted Jess, then began poring through the contents of her briefcase.

Her long black hair falling to either side of her face in front of it, she riffled for a few moments, then at last produced a manila folder.  She slapped it up onto the chest of drawers on which our fish tank was situated.

She fixed me with that hard stare again.  “Doubtless,” she began.  “You’re very much wondering by now, why I shrunk you.”

I could only sit there and nod dumbly up at her.  Those eyes, they were like augers – blue ice that could chip stone with their stare.

“Not the how of it, any longer,” she continued.  “But why I did it to you.”

I did have a good idea how.  Well, not how she had done it.  I have no idea what kinds of chemical concoction she had used, or if it was technology or simply magic.  I had begun to accept the fact that I was shrunk, she had done it, and I had a pretty good idea why.

I was puzzled by one thing, though.  Mary could have sued for a divorce.  Hell, she could have killed me, and likely gotten away with it, too.  Well, modern forensics might have nailed her with the rap, but she was so rich and powerful and so well connected in government circles, that it didn’t take much of a leap to imagine her walking away from such a charge.  In a divorce, she would have gotten everything.  The proof she obviously had of my infidelity assured it.  She had, after all, known exactly where I was, and that I was with my extra-marital mistress.  She wouldn’t even need to see an attorney.  One phone call, a few faxed pictures, and I would have been sent off, humiiated and penniless.

So yes, why then the shrinking?

Apparently having seen the question in my terrified eyes, Mary gave me a small, lopsided grin.  Then she fished into the manila folder and brought out a stack of photos.  Setting the briefcase out of her lap, she squared the photos in her lap and selected one.

This, she then slapped against the front of the fish tank.

And there I was, with Jess.  Jess on her stomach, and me going at the soles of her feet like a loyal hound, tongue clearly visible in the photo, leaving a glistening trail up Jess’s cutely arched right sole.  I was kneeling on a hotel room bed over Jess’s feet, me naked, my penis plainly erect.  Jess, for her part, was smiling back at me indulgently.

My face catching fire, I feeling completely humiliated, I looked away.

Mary took the picture away and slapped another in its place.

There I was, on a hotel room’s floor, my hands handcuffed behind my back, me lying on my back, with Jess standing barefoot in my face.

Again, I was naked.  And once again, my penis was plainly erect in the photo.

Mary’s smirk deepened.

“Figuring it out yet?” she asked coolly.

I could only look away, humiliated, fully disgusted with myself for being caught in such an act, and angry at Mary for shoving the evidence of my infidelities in my face like this.  And my foot fetish in my face like this!

Mary took the picture away.

“There are a couple dozen more like this,” she stated.  “But I think I’ve made the point.”

Squaring the photos again, she slid them back in the manila folder then sat back, resting her hands in her lap.

She stared at me.  “Well?  Have anything to say for yourself?” she asked.

I got slowly to my feet.  My face was as hot as the sun.  My fists were bunched at my sides, outraged.  Not able to meet those cool, vindictive eyes, I shouted, “Goddammit, Mary!  You knew I had a foot fetish!”

I worked up the courage to meet her eyes.  When I did, I wished I hadn’t.  Hers were so cold, so full of self-justified hostility and cold, calculating certainty, that I felt my bowels loosening.

I immediately looked down again.  “But you thought it was weird,” I went on, my words a mumble.  “Your final word on the subject in fact was, ‘What the fuck could anybody like about a woman’s stinky feet!’.”

She scoffed.

Rage bubbled up in me like a cauldron left on the boil for too long.  Too many years of doing without with this horrid woman.  Doing my best to satisfy all of her smallest whims, but getting nothing for it but scorn, ridicule and dismissiveness towards my needs!

“Fuck you!” I railed!  “For years, Mary, years, I put up with your tyrannical bullshit!  I did everything you ever asked!  I took out your fucking dry cleaning, cooked your meals for you, and had what you called sex with you!  But for what?!”

I was quivering now, on a roll.  Whatever she was going to do, she had already decided to do it.  This was just her having a moment of gloating over me, before she went through with what she intended.

“When you were home, I got to do what you wanted!  Went to all those stupid  plays you wanted to go to, hung out with all of your dry, socialite friends!  But when I wanted something, it was scoff and I’d get to bottle it up and hope one day you’d feel kindly disposed enough!”

I paused there, sputtering, momentarily unable to go on, fully in the grip of my tirade.

Mary only raised a pretty brow, waiting for me to continue.

“You fucking bitch!” I burst out then, so angry I was shaking, tears running down my cheeks in my anger and outrage.

“Sex with you had become something dead and mechanical, just something I was required to perform!  I fucking needed an outlet, Mary!”

I was winding up to a truly magnificent torrent, my rage propelling a sense of relief, me at long last able to work up the fury to let all of this out at her.

“SHE provided it!” I raged, spittle flying from my lips, my arm jerking towards the unconscious Jess.  “YES, I have a foot fetish!  Yes, I was in need of someone who cared about what I needed!  Yes, I fucking cheated on you to get it!”

Mary’s only response was to smile.

I stood there shaking with so much fury, that I thought I was about to break a tooth.

“Well,” Mary finally said.  “One can’t blame one, one supposes.”

I blinked, a big part me going “Uh oh.  Where was this leading to?”

“I have been a bit of a bitch,” she admitted, even sighing with a lack of theatrics, almost genuinely even.

I felt my insides turn to jelly.

She smiled at me.  I felt my knees nearly give way.  There was a horror in that smile, what I knew to soon be my horror, reflected in them.

“You do have your little fetishes.  And I have been remiss in helping you explore them.”

Her hair was once again hiding her face, she going through the pictures again.  She pulled one out.  “I just had no idea how important it was to you.”

She flicked her eyes up to me and fixed me with a cruel smile.  She turned the picture.  It was another of Jess standing barefoot in my face, but one of me actually jerking off this time.

I quailed, my anger dying in a whole new wave of humiliation.

Just then, Jess started to stir.

Mary’s eyes flicked to her.  And then she rose.  She looked down at me.  “Well, now that I know how important it is to you, I am going to start providing...”  She broke off there, an amused thought making her eye me in that cruel way again.

“No.  I am going to start indulging you.”

Suddenly her huge hand was reaching into the tank.  Jess, having come awake enough to hear Mary’s last words, looked up in time to see my wife’s huge, perfectly manicured fingers reaching for her.

She screamed.

I thought to leap forward to grab Mary’s hand, to bite it to save Jess, to plead with Mary, but I knew nothing I did would alter this cruel woman’s intentions in the slightest bit.  If anything, I would only succeed in angering Mary further, and thereby give her an excuse to hurt Jess more.

“Please don’t hurt her,” I croaked, taking a step back from Mary’s giant fingers.

Jess fought the fingers, screaming my name, but Mary’s huge hand closed around her.  Squeezing her in her hand, Mary shook a few clinging blue pebbles from in between her fingers and hauled Jess, kicking and screaming, out of the tank.

I felt like an utter coward.  A completely helpless and utterly terrified coward, but a horrid little coward very much nonetheless.

“Why not? Mary asked in a mocking voice.  “You don’t need her anymore, not with a wife who understands now, and who is ready to indulge your every whim.  What is she to you, now that you have me and MY feet to play with?”

Mary turned Jess’s flailing legs up towards her.  Then reaching into her pocket with her other hand, she produced a syringe, and without a blink, jabbed it into Jess’s backside and pressed the bolus into her with a perfectly manicured thumb.

I screamed!  “No!”

With a gagging scream that far too swiftly strangled down into a sound of barely-audible piping, Jess vanished in Mary’s huge hand.

Then Mary opened her hand.

Smaller than a robin’s egg now, Jess’s naked form plummeted out of Mary’s fingers.

I slammed against the fish tank’s glass, struggling to see.

Jess’s small body hit the carpet.  But being too light for gravity to have much pull on her, Jess bounced on the carpet’s luxuriant fibers without harm.

Mary lifted her stiletto-shod foot, passing it over Jess’s small form.

I screamed again, this time a wordless wail for Mary to please not do this thing.

Mary gave me her cruelest smirk yet, then stomped her foot down on Jess, hard.

There was scream.  It cut off with the smallest imaginable crunch.  Mary twisted her foot back and forth.  I vomited against the glass of my prison.

PART THREE

Chapter 4

Two days had gone by, but I still couldn’t believe it.  Jess... she was just this super sweet young lady.  She had a very sweet heart, if a few little insecurities, and she loved me for who I was.  She enjoyed indulging me, enjoyed the amount of pleasure she was able to bring me by giving to me the way she did.

Moreover, Jess was an innocent in all of this.  Well, she knew I was married, so maybe she wasn’t completely innocent, but she didn’t deserve the uncelebrated execution she got.

Mary, with great malice, and only to get at me for cheating on her, had carried out that execution.  Worse, she had crushed Jess like a bug - the message clear: “Anybody who gets between me and what I want, gets stepped on.”  Jess was a flower in an often very selfish world.  Mary would trod on flowers with the same indifference and malice.  She gave a fuck only about what was important to her.  Everybody else was just scenery to her, and bugs to be scraped off of her shoes if they didn’t move out of her way fast enough.

The hubris required to be able to do something like that without feeling, had to be monumental.  And Mary had executed Jess without any feeling at all.  Except to explain to me the depth of her feelings of property rights over what she wanted.

Jess lacked completely in hubris.  She took pleasure in life, gained self esteem by making other people happy by doing things for them.  Saying thank you to her lit her up the same as if you’d given any other woman a dozen roses.  She honestly found self-worth in making other people happy.  While my wife (god-damn her), found happiness in only herself.

If the bitch could ever be accused of being happy.  If she ever was happy, it would be only when she was placing her foot firmly on the next rung of the ladder, and likely only if that “rung” got crushed as she used him or her to get up to the next rung.

Chapter 5

Those two days, needless to say, went by in bitter tears.  I was bitter at the way Jess had been killed.  I was bitter at Mary for doing it.  I was bitter at being too weak and helpless (and cowardly) to stop it.  To give myself credit, there was no way I could have stopped it, but my mind raced with all of things I could have done differently leading up to the event, which might have prevented it.

And that was what I was most bitter about of all.  My fucking foot fetish.  My fucking obsession with feet!

If I’d not been so obsessive, I might have planned better.  I might have chosen better places for our rendezvous.  I might have seen Jess less often.  I might have used cash more, and my credit cards less.  I might have been a much less traceable idiot had I had not such an overwhelming obsession with Jess and her fucking feet!  Getting my face stood on by Jess’s soft feet!  Being able to lick her feet, being allowed to jerk myself off on them.  I was such a self-absorbed and careless asshole!

Sitting in the corner of my fish tank prison, my knees hugged to my chest, these questions and self-recriminations raced around in my head and tormented me.  I tormented myself.  My list of crimes could fill any ledger in Hell, rightfully dooming me to eternities of all the shame and punishments equaled by the crimes of none other.

Mary, for her part, ignored my withdrawn sullenness.  For those two days, she made sure my water bottle was full, and laid a Petri dish of baby food in my place of incarceration.

Yeah, I hadn’t mentioned the water bottle.  Mary had hung one on the side of the fish tank not quite half an hour after she had murdered Jess.  It was a fucking hamster job, which of course, was insulting.  But it also had the quality of long-term planning about it.  We’d never had any pets (God forbid Mary’d ever deign to have any), so it must have been something Mary had picked up for this occasion.  That sent me to wondering how long Mary had known about my affair.  Could it have been weeks?  A couple of months?  Mary could be keenly observant when something caught her attention.  So it was likely she had known about it not long from the start.  She had planned to shrink me.

If that was so, why wait until now?  Maybe she was using the excuse of the affair to do something to me – something like use me for a laboratory experiment?  It jived as something she would do.  She was honestly that callous – to take and use her husband to try out some new idea her and her colleagues had cooked up at work.

But I was getting ahead of myself.  Mary knew, and that was that.  That she had acted upon the knowledge was what was important.  How she had acted upon it... it still begged that very nagging question.

Either way, not ten minutes after cleaning up the mess she had made of my Jess, Mary had hung the water bottle on the side of the tank.  She hadn’t gone out and bought one after my capture.  She had had one ready.  Mary had likely decided to kill Jess the way they had, too, as part of a larger plan.  The water bottle, for one, suggested more than just the decision to use one as opposed to something simpler, but the killing, and especially, the way she had done it, struck me as her setting something larger into motion.  Or had she had other reasons for killing Jess the way she did?

God, one’s head could spin for hours trying to make sense of it.  But then, that was my Mary.  Einstein wouldn’t be able to figure her out.  Hawking would be at a loss.  Fucking Sigmund Freud could be on the best cocaine high of his life, but never understand the height of Mary’s cold, calculating cunning.  I considered myself doing well if I remembered the difference between marinara and spaghetti sauce!  Mary and I were so many leagues apart it was laughable.

I puzzled on it and puzzled on it, until the second day, when these questions began presenting themselves.  They weren’t questions I much liked, either.  Any reasonable person would be disturbed by them.

But knowing Mary like I did, me making her refill my water wasn’t her only motivation.  It was too simple for what I knew of her.  And did the water have a somewhat odd flavor?  When I first drank from it, I had noted a somewhat medicinal aftertaste to the water, but had dismissed it as “new water bottle” taste, and was just feeling fortunate that she was giving me water to drink at all.

The food was just plain baby food.  Simple, easy-to-digest goop that I had to scoop up with my hands to eat.  The food didn’t trouble me, but the water bottle... it did.  So much so that I felt a sense of dread every time I drank from it.

Chapter 6

Then came the third day.

Without a word, Mary came into the room and picked up the fish tank.  With me in it, she carried it through the house and finally down the stairs.  Then finally into a room we had set aside for the storage of our travel gear, our luggage and other such travel-related items.

I noted with some alarm that all of the luggage had been removed.  Alarm bells really started going off in my head, when I noted a respectably large hamster habitat had taken the place of several suitcases on one of the larger shelves.

Sliding the fish tank onto an adjacent shelf, Mary simply reached in for me and grabbed me.

“You even think of biting me, Greg, and you’ll get the same fate your little bimbo did.”

I wouldn’t have dreamed of trying, the threat of a body-bursting stomp from one of her stilettos or not.  She didn’t need to make the threat.  I knew she would do it.

And so, meekly surrendering to her hand, I let her pick me up and transfer me over into the hamster cage.  Once inside, the lid closed, I started watching her, an odd sense of security with me with the thick, amber plastic walls of the habitat between me and my wife.

Mary started messing with something she took down from another shelf.  It was an iPad, or something very like.

This, she turned on, fiddled with it for a few minutes, and then slotted it down into one of the walls of my new prison, running a power cord to it and plugging it in.  Looking at it, but afraid to approach it, I noted with confusion that its screen was blank.  I looked back out at Mary, noting that she had taken up another of the pads.

Placing her pad under an arm, she pinned what looked like a small brooch onto the lapel of her suit.  Accomplishing this, she took up the second pad again and started doing something with it.

I blinked, and returned my attention to “my” pad.  It had just come to life.  I really stared when the pad was showing me four separate camera views, the views segmented into four panes on the pad’s screen.  I gaped when I registered that the four views were of four different views of this room – Mary standing in the middle of it with her pad, my big hamster habitat on its shelf.  And squinting, I could just see myself leaning against the plastic wall of the habitat, my head turned to look at the pad.

Then, still without a word, carrying her pad, Mary strode from the room.  Watching her leave, I turned to my pad and then approached it.

And then froze.

As Mary left the store room, the images in the four panes changed, they showing four new views of Mary striding through the room adjacent to this one!

And then the next room, the next one after that, and then the next one after that!  And then up the stairs, then finally up to the kitchen’s landing.  Through the kitchen and then down the hall – Mary’s staccato footsteps audible only because I could hear them through the ceiling above my habitat.

The cameras were following her!

“What the fuck?” I breathed, truly bewildered by this development.

But then I knew.

Earlier, I mentioned that we had a house.  Well, house, in our case, was a misnomer.  We had a mansion.  Complete with roundabout driveway, huge swimming pool out back, an apple orchard, and sitting in the center of it, was a five-story house that occupied over an acre.  We even had one of those two-mile-long private roadways that served as our driveway.

With a house this big, and with the kind of money Mary made, security was pretty high on the list of priorities.  In this of course, just like everything else Mary sees things done that are important to her, she spared absolutely no expense.

It had taken two months for the system to be installed, and then another week to program it all.  Among a myriad network of motion sensors, heat detectors, pressure-sensitive floors, there were hundreds of cameras around the house and on the grounds.  And there were exactly four cameras in each room!

Also, it was all automated.

That brooch!

It wasn’t a brooch at all!

It was a special tag that one of us could give to contractors, so they could move about the house without setting off alarms.  It could be programmed and everything, to for instance, set off an alarm if a contractor strayed into a room he wasn’t supposed to.  And most importantly of all, tracked his movements through the house with cameras!

But why had Mary done this thing?  More importantly, why had she set it up so that I could watch her movements?  When compared to everything else she had done so far, this was completely the most bewildering!

“Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” I breathed.  I couldn’t touch the pad.  It was slotted down on the other side of the plastic wall.  I nevertheless laid my hand on it.

“What the fuck are you doing, Mary?” I continued.

My guts had turned into ice and had frozen me solid in the truest sense of dread and fear I’d felt since all this began.  I couldn’t say what I was afraid of, exactly, but this had a feel about it that was truly diabolical.

PART FOUR

Chapter 7

Day six.

I had sat for the subsequent three days, following my incarceration in my new prison, doing nothing.  Oh, I watched Mary wander around the house.  I watched her when she pulled onto our private road.  I watched her wind up the road to the house on it in her sleek, black Maserati.

Which, by the bye, was the one car which fit her personality perfectly.  Not because it was a powerful sports car, but because of its grill emblem.  Sure, one would expect a woman like her to drive a powerful sports car, but one would find more than a little humor in the fact that she had chosen a car that had a trident for its emblem.

It was Neptune’s trident.  But for Mary, I fancied it a devil’s pitchfork.

I certainly found humor in it.  Always had.  I still did, if I fancied it thusly with a whole lot of weighty fear attached to it, especially now.  Mary was a devil, and one who had me subject to her cruel whims.  The grill emblem of that car coming down the driveway everyday, was a poignant reminder of it.

In any case, everyday, Mary would check my water and give me a new Petri dish of goop to eat.  She would check the status of the pad she had given me to view, stare in at me for a few minutes and then depart – the cameras following her progress to her bedroom, where she would kick off her shoes, get into her night clothes, and then spend the rest of the evening working on her laptop and then going to sleep.

She ate very little.  And usually took supper at a restaurant on her way home.  She never ate at home on her work nights.

At any rate, this was how I spent those three days.  And I was looking forward to another day of same tedium on the next day, when on the sixth night, she brought home an animal carry case.

Standing and approaching the pad, I watched Mary carry this case in from her car, bring it into the house, march straight through our kitchen and then head down the stairs with it.  Moments later, I was watching her progress through the basement rooms with the case, then turning and watching her enter my room.

She sat the case on an adjacent shelf.

I watched keenly, dreading what she might have brought in the case, but fascinated by what might be in it, also.

The dread rose from the possibility that she could have brought home an animal which might be dangerous to me, like a ferret or a mongoose, or even a large rat or a small dog.  It wouldn’t be beyond her to put something like that in with me, just so she could get a thrill from watching me fight it out.

But instead of any of these things, Mary extracted a small man from the case!

My eyes bugged, my stomach lurching swiftly up into a knot!  “What the fuck was this all about?!”

I didn’t voice the question, of course.  I didn’t dare.  So I watched in quiet fascination, watching the little man as Mary’s large hand drew him out of the case.

He was clearly terrified, and clearly intimidated to the max by my wife.  Saying not a word nor making the slightest struggle, he was alert but completely unmoving in Mary’s hand as she drew him out.

Mary turned to me with him.  Her silken black locks falling about her face, she looked down at the little man in her hand and then held him up for me to see.

She then raised a brow at me.  Said not a word, only fixed me with that unspoken query.  (That was her way.  She thought most too stupid to waste her breath explaining things to.  If they weren’t smart enough or quick enough on the uptake, then they could just puzzle it the fuck out on their own.)

Then, my gaze was jerked downwards.  Mary was kicking off her shoes – the sound of their expensive leather clattering on the concrete floor drawing my attention.

She dropped four inches in height, settling her bare heels to the floor.  She looked again at the little man she held, then looked back at me again.  Her brow rose again.  Then, she bent over.

Then placing the little man on the floor, she shifted her left foot forward, catching the man’s bare legs under her toes.

The little man began to scream immediately bending himself forward at the waist to push against her ankle.  Ignoring him, Mary unbent and rose, the toes of her left foot still pinning the man’s legs to the floor.  She then looked pointedly at me, picked up her right foot and seized the little man down against the floor with that foot’s toes, pinning him all the way down to his back beneath the toes of both of her feet.

The little man's screams rose in pitch and desperation, but was muffled now beneath Mary's toes.

Her eyes held mine, she then directing me with them, to watch.  Slowly, reluctantly, my eyes followed hers back down to her toes.  No sooner than I looked, my eyes fixing on her purple painted toenails and the man pinned beneath her toes, Mary shifted her feet forward, one after the other, until she was pinning the small man beneath both balls of her feet.  The man’s screams were muffled instantly into silence.  I could only imagine the pressure he was enduring, the weave of my wife’s pantyhose digging into his skin, the balls of her feet cruelly pressing, he about to burst beneath them.

Helpless to do otherwise, I could only stare.  And then Mary rose up onto the balls of her feet, her heels lifting, putting all of her weight on the man beneath her!

I stared in a mixture of fascination, wonder and horror!  The wonder was why the man had not immediately burst under all that weight.  The fascination had me unconsciously licking my lips – me wondering what it had to be like under there!  The horror was because I wanted to be that little man!  The horror wasn’t solely because I wanted his position, but because any empathy I might have otherwise felt for him, was replaced by the sudden ungodly desire to experience what he was experiencing!

The horror had me backing away from the amber plastic wall of my enclosure, shaking, suddenly revolted by what I was thinking, but utterly unable to look away because of how transfixed I was by what I was seeing!

And that was when a new dawning horror struck me.  The little man was bearing the weight, and doing it without squashing!  Mary was standing on him with all of her weight, but he wasn’t popping beneath her feet!

I lifted my eyes and gawked  at her!  She crooked a little smile back.  Then, her hair giving a little flounce, she bounced her weight once on the little man, and that was when he exploded beneath her.

Falling onto my ass and scrambling backwards, my gourd rising, I tried to deny the witnessing of another murder.  Mary only fixed me with a smile.  Then wordlessly, she stepped back off of the ruined corpse.  I was unable to help looking down at it.  She looked down at it herself, and looked back up at me alternately, her cruelly beautiful face a mask of expectation.  The man looked like he had been run over by a truck, his insides burst out from his mouth and sides, his body compressed downwards in the shapes of Mary’s bare soles.  Then, still without uttering a word, Mary took a towel down from a nearby shelf and bent and wiped up the remains.

Tossing the towel in the animal carry case and closing the case, she turned to leave.  Before turning, however, she fixed her eyes pointedly on my water bottle, then looked at me and raised her brow again.

After that, she bent and took up her shoes and the case and left, all without uttering a word.

Chapter 8

The next morning, I got a new water bottle.  I got a new Petri dish of goop, too.

I ate the goop, but stared at the water bottle for a long time.

It was an ordinary water bottle, ordinary for enclosures such as these.  It hung upside-down, had a stainless steel spout, which had in its end a metal ball which delivered water when touched by a tongue.  In my case, when I touched it with my hands.

This wasn’t why I was staring at it, however.  The medicinal taste I had noticed in the water I got from it had taken on a whole new significance with the display I had seen the night before.  Mary was adding some of her concoctions from her work to it to make me stronger.  The purpose for which, of course, was so I would be able to withstand her weight.

It was both a compelling and horrifying concept.  It was compelling because she was prepping me to be able to take her weight.  Of that I had little doubt.  She had stated that she meant to indulge me, and this was the way she obviously intended to do it.  The experiment she had conducted in front of me last night, left little doubt of this.  It was a horrifying thought because I wanted to be strong enough to endure her without bursting.  More, I wanted her to conduct more experiments.  I wanted her to get it right, so I wouldn’t end up suffering the same fate as that nameless soul she had slaughtered last night.  I wanted her to risk killing more innocents so I could be under her feet!

Sick with myself, but compelled by desires I was utterly unable to control, I at last stopped staring at the water bottle, got up and went over to it to partake of what it contained.

Chapter 9

The next night brought another experiment.  The night after that brought yet another one.  Each morning following, brought me a new bottle of water to drink from – each time finding Mary coming and going without speaking a single word.

Each night, at any rate, found the new experiement a little harder for Mary to kill.

Finally, on the 8th night, Mary was unable to kill the experiment with her weight.  She stood on it, bounced on it, and then finally even launched herself in a leap straight upwards, crashing back down onto it with all of her weight, he hair bouncing around on her head like flaxen licorice.

The little man was knocked unconscious and one of his arms had sustained a compound fracture from my wife’s crushing leap, but she had been unable to crush him.  She finally had to finish him off by putting a shoe back on, and then by grinding the point of her stiletto into the side of his head until it cracked and burst open.

I was made ill by this, especially after the little man woke up half way through it, to start bleating like an animal, before Mary’s needle-sharp shoe heel could finish him.

When I finished throwing up, I looked up to find Mary regarding me with a smirk.  Having just tossed her towel (with this experiment’s remains in it) into the carry case, she had approached my enclosure and smiled in at me.  And then she spoke the first words to me that she had deigned to, in the last week.

“Tomorrow, Gary, is when we start getting you ready for me.”

Her eyes flicked to the water bottle.  “Be sure to drink your water.”

With that, she turned and left, her shoes dangling from one hand, the animal carry case dangling from the other, her highly arched bare feet in her black-striped pantyhose, making subtle pats as the cameras followed her.

I had not a clue what she had in store for me.  But now that I knew I could survive it, I was thrilled by the prospect of it.  I was sickened by being thrilled, but thrilled nonetheless.

That is, however, the power of fetish.  Watch men get killed for the benefit of prepping you for something you want, and you lose touch with yourself.  You just want it.

And that, I realized also, was precisely what Mary wanted.  She wanted to turn me into as much of a monster as she was.

If only I knew...

I would have asked to be crushed in place of Jess on that first day, if I could have only begun to fathom what was in store for me.

Part Five

Chapter 10

That next morning, I awoke to whole new activity on my panel of camera views.

Mary was in the kitchen.  She was talking to six men, a set of plans spread out on the table between them.  The men were wearing contractor’s uniforms - jeans or work pants with white shirts and ties and work boots.  There were clipboards and iPads, Android pads and tape measures on belts.  One of them, evidently the other mens’ bosses, had his pad out and was typing stuff on it as Mary spoke to them.

I would have given my left arm to know what they were talking about.  Damn Mary for not letting me have sound.

This was because of the logos the men had on their shirts.

Two of the men were wearing Johnson Control logos.  Johnson Controls was the nation’s leading automation and facility security firms.  They made automated security and control systems - from automated gates, to card readers for access points, retina scanners and everything.  If it had anything to do with security, especially automated security systems, particularly on government instillations, it was a good bet Johnson Controls was involved.

The next two men of the six were wearing Lockheed Martin logos on their shirts.

Lockheed Martin!

Whatever could Mary want with Lockheed Martin in whatever she had planned?  Moreover, these guys looked like engineers.  Not jet-liner or flight engineers, but specialists engineers.  (Don’t ask how I knew that.  Just take it on faith when you have lived for long with someone who works in Mary’s field, you just get to know these things.)

Still puzzling over this, I moved onto what the last two guys were wearing.  And stared!

The last two guys were wearing Bechtel logos!

Bechtel was a world-leading construction firm who was usually sought for the construction of power plant extra-structure!  They built things like those huge catwalks, massive girder-crane assemblies and equipment-lift elevators.  Why were they at our house?  What the fuck could Mary be planning that she needed Bechtel for?!

Johnson Controls, I could almost see.  Our security system was installed by them.  Oh no.  No run-of-the-mill consumer-grade security systems for my Mary.  She had to have the best.  She spent over a million dollars on our security system.  If it was only Johnson Controls who was here, I could have taken it as Mary wanting install extra precautions against my being discovered.

But why could she have wanted them here with a world-leading engineering firm like Lockheed Martin and a world-leading construction firm like Bechtel?  It surely couldn’t be to beef up our security system!  Not unless she planned to have a giant monster robot out back of the house patrolling while she was gone!  If the idea was to protect against my discovery, then we were definitely going over into the realms of overkill!  The presence of the engineering and construction firms made no sense at all!

My pad had really good resolution.  And so I moved closer to get a better look at the plans they and my wife had spread out on the table.

I realized at once, that they were plans of our house.  All right, that much made sense.  One of the men was sketching lines through areas of the plans with a pencil, talking with the five other men.

I peered closer.

It looked like they were sketching some kind of pipe system in the plans.  I got vague impressions of notations of diameters and materials.  “5-inch” and “Stainless steel”.

I had no idea what it any of it meant.  So for a lack of anything better to do, and frustrated because I knew would get no answers from Mary, I just slumped back against a nearby wall of my habitat prison to watch.

Soon, all of the men had left.  Mary did too.  I watched her car pull out of the driveway, go down our private road and then turn out onto the highway, following three company vehicles.

*****

Two days went by.  My only respite from complete boredom, was when Mary came to check on the level in my water bottle, and to give me a new Petri dish of goop.  Beyond that, I just followed her around the house on the cameras, watching her in the mornings as she got ready for work, to return 10 or so hours later the next night, to go through her usual evening routines before going to bed.

As I predicted, I got no answer from Mary about the people who were at the house.  I asked only once.  The answer I received was enough to let me know that asking again would mean trouble.  She stared at me hard enough to freeze my guts into a knot of ice, me backing away, staring back in abject terror.

I didn’t ask again.

On the morning of the third day, I was awakened.  Not by Mary, not by any bad dreams.  (Lord knew I was having plenty of those.)  But by a horrendous amount of noise coming from upstairs.

The loud screeching of power saws.  The throb-ob-botting of sawsalls, and hammering and heavy boots thumping around all over the place upstairs.

When I got up to go look at my cameras, I stood gawking at a scene from some absurd “Money Pit” movie!

There were over a dozen men, wearing tool belts kneeling in the floor over saws, hammers and wrecking bars, men pulling up wood, others pulling up carpet, pulling the paneling off of walls, others moving furniture, while still others carried wood out of the house to stack it in the garage!

Just what the HELL was going on up there?  Had Mary chosen NOW to begin a renovation of the house?!

But then I remembered the plans.  This had something to do with the men who were at the house a couple of days ago.

And they were sketching pipe.

Why was Mary having pipe installed in the floor?

Mary could be damn eccentric at times, even bizarre, but this made no sense, even for her!

Either way, I stood and watched for a while, then sat and watched for a while.

In eight hours or so, the men had gone.  But by the time they had left, every room above me had been stripped down to bare floor joists and every wall down to its bare frames!  There were no floors or walls upstairs!

I sat and brooded about this all that night.  Completely poleaxed by what I had witnessed all during that day, I wracked my brains to make any kind of sense of it, failing miserably.

Finally, in frustration and needing some way to get it out of my system, I turned to a hamster wheel that was in the habitat.

The habitat had all of the usual accoutrements.  It had the wheel, it had tubes leading to all of the areas of the habitat - these being modular sections to which the tubes led.

Find the wheel too damned demeaning to want to go to it before, I had never even looked twice at it before tonight.

Finally, I made my way over to it.

It turned out to be a lot harder to get going than I thought.  Finally, though, I had the thing going at a pretty good clip, me running in its bottom like a treadmill.

As I ran, I thought.

I was never a very talented man.  Well, I was in one area, and I was good at what I did, exceptionally even, but nowhere as good as in the field of work Mary occupied.

I my previous life (previous to being shrunk by Mary), I was a cellist - a guy who plays a cello.    I was a passably good player, too.

It was how Mary and I had met.  She loved classical music and I played in a local orchestra.  After a show one night, she got a backstage pass and came looking for the person who had played that cello solo that night.

It had been me.

She wooed me and wowed me, taking me out to dinner on several occasions, and we eventually started to fall in love.

I have to admit that I fell in love with the money Mary represented more than I did her.  From the start, Mary was a hard-edged, distant woman.  But she loved how I played, and so had to have me as her lover.

I knew not long from the start that I was little more than Mary’s very own pet cellist, but I didn’t care.  I started driving nice cars, had a fabulous place to live, and Mary, through her connections, got me bigger and bigger gigs at increasingly well renowned orchestras and for private sessions for the truly rich.

I had hit the big time.

Through Mary.

It was also made well known by her, that if I ever left her, my moment of fame would dry up and I would wind up playing my cello for the homeless.

I believed her.

All through all of this, sex with Mary was listless and lacked utterly in adventure or sense of love.

She let me make love with her on occasion, but it was when she had the itch to scratch, not out of any kind of feeling of giving me time with her.  She’d get off, then put me out of her mind until she needed me again.  If I asked for sex with her, I was usually summarily rebuffed.

The night I finally worked up the courage to ask to play with her feet, I got this robotic stare from her, followed by a roll of her eyes, and some kind of comment about me being just fucking weird.

That was when I had turned to an extra-marital relationship.

I’ve already described how that ended...

All these thoughts running through my head as my bare feet ran on the hamster wheel, I finally slowed the thing down and got out of it, not feeling any better than before I decided to use the thing.

I did feel better physically though, so at least the run hadn’t been a complete loss.

Taking one more look at my panel of camera views and through them, at the destruction to our home, I finally curled up in the nook I had made for myself in the habitat and went to sleep.

Chapter 11

The next morning, I awoke the sound of Mary’s approaching stilettos.

Entering my room, looking as stunning but as dangerous as ever, she had brought her pad with her when she came this time.

She glanced at me once, smirked a little, then started doing something with her pad.

I watched, but then found myself turning to look at my pad.  A sound was coming from it.

It was the sound of an audio channel popping open.

“You get sound from now on,” said Mary in with a business-like announcement, and then left the room.

I boggled at this, but soon, I was to learn why.

An hour later, a police detective arrived.

All four of my camera views focused on the detective, Mary walking up to him to greet him.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. Carter.”

Mary shook hands with the detective.  “Not at all.  You said over the phone that you may have some news regarding my missing husband?”

I was hearing all of this over the new audio channel afforded me through my pad.

“Well, we do, and we have some questions.”

I saw Mary’s brow raise.

The detective went on.

“Witnesses place you at the hotel on the day of your husband’s disappearance.  Can you tell me why you had gone to the hotel?”

“I’ve already filed a statement with the police to that effect,” Mary told him.

“I went to the hotel to confront my husband, but he and his floozie were not there.”

“I see,” said the detective.  “Well, we have two witnesses who said they saw you shouting and banging on the door to your husband’s hotel room, and then you barging into his room.”

Mary nodded, appearing exasperated, as well as I knew my Mary could.

“And he wasn’t there.”

She rolled her eyes at the detective again.  “If the police suspect me of foul play, keep in mind it was broad daylight, there were people around, but there were no bodies in the hotel room after I left.  How could I have moved the bodies with people around and under broad daylight, detective?  It was like I told the police in my statement.  Greg had cleared out his bank account and has likely absconded with his bimbo abroad.”

The detective nodded.

“No!” I shouted at my pad.  “I’m down here!  Dammit!  She shrunk me and my girlfriend and now I’m down here!

“Yeah, that’s what the preliminary team said,” the detective agreed, scratching the back of his head and consulting his notes.  “It’s just strange.  We’ve seen no passport or credit card activity from Mr. Carter.”  He shrugged.  “It is like your husband has just up and disappeared.”

Mary shrugged.

“Well, if you manage to find him, tell him to not bother coming home.  I plan to file for divorce within the next few weeks, right after I finish my renovations.  Once the divorce is done, he can stay with his little bimbo where ever he wants.  In the mean time, detective, if the police have nothing useful to add, please stay the hell off of my property.  I have no clue where Greg has gone, and frankly, I couldn’t give a damn.”

With that, Mary turned on her heel and marched back into the house - the camera views breaking up once more, to their four disparate views.

I slumped against the wall behind which the pad was contained and began crying.  Tears of frustration wetting my cheeks and me pounding an impotent fist on the wall, I cried “No,” very softly, feeling well and truly lost, and truly in this murderous woman’s horrible control.

Part 6 - “It Begins”

Chapter 12

A couple of days went by, little or nothing happening.  I watched my monitors.  I watched Mary come and go according to her regular schedule.  I exercised on my hamster wheel.

Two things happened during those two days.  I got really good at running on the hamster wheel.  Mary had moved into the guest house.

The hamster wheel, if you’re familiar with such things, has this horizontal bar running the width of its center.  By holding onto this while I ran, I was able to get up to and maintain a pretty good pace.  So the first thing that happened was that I was starting to get some appreciable exercise.

The second thing that happened was less remarkable.  It was less so because Mary had no other place to sleep than the guest house.  The interior of our house had been gutted.  All of the furniture was stacked in the garage.  All of the carpet had been rolled up and stored there.  All of the house’s fine oak, teak, cedar and walnut paneling had been stored there as well.  So unless Mary had a penchant for sleeping on floor joists, which she didn’t, she didn’t have much of a choice but to move into the guest house.

Four cameras followed her activity there, as well.  So I got to watch her comings and goings as I always did.

I also got more advance warning when she started for my room in the basement.

Having to cross the courtyard and then come down into the basement by the basement’s exterior stairs, I was able to follow her progress all the way.

In this, I mean, there would be no more surprise barge-ins, unless I was asleep.  Which I never was when she arrived home.  Some intuitive sense had me awake the moment her car pulled into our long driveway.  Don’t ask me for specifics.  Something in the way the camera views flicked to the outside view of the end of our driveway when her car pulled into it.

In any case, when I say “surprise barge-ins”, I mean as opposed to Mary deciding at any possible second to get up and come downstairs to look in on me.  When this was a threat, I could never spend any real time doing anything while she was at home.  Now, she had to go all the way around in back of the house - either by driving around in back of it when she got home, or walking across the courtyard from the guest house when she was at home - to come down and peek in at me.

Or as often happened, come in and start quizzing me.

I hadn’t written about these latter events because usually, I was always so flustered after them, that I couldn’t get them right enough in my mind to remember to note them down.

Which reminds me.  In addition to the few things Mary did allow me, she had given me a notepad and a package of pencils, a day or two after she had dropped me into this habitat.

I don’t know.  Maybe she expected I would write music or something (which I was fairly talented in doing) or sit and scribble pictures all day.  Or start a diary.  Which this telling is.

Knowing her, it was because she hoped I would indeed write a diary.  It would fit her pertinacity for sadism and her idea of a practical joke.  After she killed me (which I had no doubt she would), she could sit for hours after, reading my ramblings about her nastiness toward me and get a huge kick out of it.

Either way, I always did my writing while she was at work, keeping the diary hidden after she got home.  With her now living in the guest house, however, I was able to be bolder about when I chose to write.  Given greater warning of her pending arrivals, I had more time to hide my notepad, when she started for the outside stairs.

And then, day 3 arrived.

Chapter 13

A Bechtel truck arrived.  It was a four-door pickup.  Four men in engineer’s garb got out of it and went into the house.  Not long after that, another vehicle from Bechtel arrived.  Eight men, dressed in work attire, filed out of this.  Once in the house, they started aimlessly (seemingly) to wander around.

But then, not long after their arrival, a massive flatbed tractor trailer turned into our driveway.

Following this, and after the tractor trailer truck had made it to our courtyard, two of the engineer types came out along with six of the workmen, and along with the driver, they began to untarp what the truck was carrying.

It was yards and yards of gleaming stainless steel pipe.

Shortly after this was untarped, another - much smaller - truck arrived, which bore a forklift on a roll-back bed.  Once the forklift was unloaded, the workmen began unloading the pipe from the flatbed.

So they had been drawing pipe into the plans that day.  Why, however, and why this much pipe was being delivered, was still very much a mystery.

The flatbed truck got turned around in the courtyard and was soon making its way back up the driveway.

Then, another truck arrived!

This truck was obviously some kind of rigger truck.

Bearing some kind of big machine on its bed, with two huge utility boxes on either side of the bed, the truck was an International behemoth with a Lockheed Martin logo painted on its side.

Shortly after its arrival, another truck arrived - this one bearing a Johnson Controls logo.  Another crew-cab pickup.  Two engineering types got out of this.

And following this, organized chaos broke loose, the eight Bechtel workmen swarming over the pipe like an army of industrious ants.

“Just what the fuck is Mary doing?” I said aloud, staring at my camera views with a growing sense of apprehension.

I couldn’t put my finger on how I knew, but somehow I knew that all of this had something to do with me.

What then began to unfold, found me only increasingly puzzled, and uneasy, but not in the least more enlightened.

Chapter 14

The big machine on the back of the Lockheed Martin rigger truck, I soon learned, was for cutting and bending the stainless steel pipe.

The engineers, setting up a table close to the work, directing the workmen, supervised piece after piece of the pipe carried to the machine on the back of the International, and then oversaw its cutting or bending, taking measurements, then finally giving their approval for the length of pipe to be taken into the house.

I followed the work all day.

The workmen laid the pipe under the floor joists, linking each piece seamlessly together with welding torches and meticulous grinding after.  In this fashion, the laid a veritable lattice work of gleaming stainless steel pipe all through the whole ground floor of our house.

Following that, they started up the walls with the pipe.  Bending each segment of pipe to perfect 45-degree elbows, they attached the pipes in the walls to the ones they had already installed in the floor.

By the time the day had ended, they had run out of pipe, but apparently had plans for piping the floors of the second floor as well - they leaving open joints of pipe covered with banded oilcloth.

The next morning, another load of pipe arrived, and the workmen started again.  By the end of that day, they had all of the second floor piped and were starting up the walls to the third floor before running out of pipe again.

This was still very confusing.  I couldn’t for the life of me figure of what the pipe was for.  But what was even more bewildering, the pipes - for first - didn’t hook up to any water sources, or to the boiler downstairs.  The pipes couldn’t be for water or heating then.  Moreover, the pipes hadn’t been laid in any discernible pattern.  Well, they did, but not in any way that I could make sense of.

The pipes followed the courses of our hallways.  They crossed rooms at odd angles.  They terminated by where Mary’s bed was.  Terminated in the bathroom at the sink and just outside of our shower.

Just what could it all be for?

In any case, this went on for six more days, the workmen even working through a Saturday and Sunday.

In the mean time, I saw Mary twice a day as usual, her giving my daily allotment of water and fresh goop.  But no answers.

Finally, on the seventh day, the guys from Lockheed Martin and Bechtel left after doing some touchup polishing and last-minute measurements.  When they had finished, they had piped all four floors of our house, and all up through all of our house’s walls.

And that was when the Johnson Controls men started their work, and Mary brought home a large, aluminum case, whose contents started making all of the pipes to make a  dreadful kind of sense.

Chapter 15

“Get in it.”

When Mary came down that night, she had brought the aluminum case.  Setting it on the floor, she stooped and opened it, taking out what looked like a largish block of some kind of neoprene.

After taking it out of the case and setting it up onto the bench adjacent to my habitat, she had taken me out and set me on the bench next to it.

First, I marveled at the block.

It was about a foot in length, about six inches wide and about eight inches deep.  It was a solid neoprene block sunk into a stainless steel housing.  But what was most fascinating about it of all, was that the top of the block, in its neoprene surface, was a man-shaped indentation!

My marveling however, soon turned into realization, however, and I took a step backwards.

“I said get in it.”

I looked up, met Mary’s eyes.  They were hard and cold, pure threat glimmering hatefully in their hard depths.

I swallowed, lowered my eyes back to the block, then moved towards it.  Then climbed up onto it.

As soon as I did, the lump in my throat got thicker.  In place of where my arms and legs were supposed to lay, were instead holes for these parts of my anatomy to be thrust down into.

At the sight of this, I balked again.

And that was when Mary’s hand slapped the bench.

Hard.

“Do not make me tell you again.”

My guts turning to ice, I did as I was told.

I knew what this was for.  It was part of the pipe system Mary was having installed in the house.  I didn’t know exactly how it fit in yet, but knew it was somehow a part of it.

Moving into the man-shaped indentation, I sat down in it and the inserted my feet into the holes meant for my legs.  I then slid my legs all the way in.

I felt the bottoms of my feet come into contact with the neoprene’s foamy surface.  What was more, when my knees went under the neoprene’s surface, I realized at once I would not be able to get them back out again, short of moving my buttocks backwards.

“Now your arms.”

I could only nod dumbly up at my giant wife and comply.

Once my arms were fully inserted, I found myself lying all the way down in the man-shape impressed in the neoprene, a cupping formation pushing up under my palms.

Mary nodded then took a remote out of her pocket.  Thumbing a switch on it with her beautiful thumbnail, I felt the neoprene grow slightly warm, and then contract slightly around my arms and legs.

It grew only snug, however, and not tight.  Nevertheless, only snug, I knew I was nonetheless trapped in the neoprene!

Following this, I heard the distinct and all-too-recognizable sound of my wife kicking her shoes off onto the floor - her dropping the four inches she always did when she took off the stilettos.  Then without a word, she gabbed up my block, and using both hands, transferred the block and me to the floor.

For the first time since all this insanity began, I was seeing my wife for the true giantess that she was.  Standing at just under six feet, my wife was as huge as a building to me, standing over me like a goddess.

And then she stepped up onto the block.

Chapter 16

My face and my whole chest, along with both of my shoulders, were immediately crushed down upon by the full brunt of her weight.  The sole of her stocking-clad foot, gave some at first, but then molded down over my hapless form with the incomprehensibly cruel force of something akin to hot lead - just as heavy and just as solid, made all the more cruel in this instance by the skin-gnawing weave of her stocking and the weave of dermal swirls nature had given the bottom of her foot.

Only barely able to perceive the barest sliver of light to my right, and having seen her toes swoop in for the crushing stomp, I knew I was under the ball of her foot.

And then a severe wheezing sound was forced up out of my mouth against her lead-hard skin, her weight having transformed in an instant from mere crushing, to outright squashing!

Realizing at once what had happened, I was able to make only the weakest “Hurk!” sound in protest.  Due in large part because my face was now completely sealed under her foot, but also because my chest had been devastatingly compressed when her weight had increased.  What had happened, I knew, was that she had picked up her other foot - and thereby had put all of her weight on this foot in so doing.

My guess was rewarded an instant later.  Her other foot came to press upon my stomach and thighs - she having picked up her other foot to stand on me with both of her feet.

I had no way to beg or to plead.  Or for that matter, to say anything at all.  My face was just too firmly crushed up into the bottom of her foot.  This was of course compounded by the fact that her great weight was denying me my ability to draw in the breath necessary for speech, her weight still holding my chest cruelly compressed.

And that was when her weight began to grind.

I felt the metatarsal bones and ligaments up in her pop, while I simultaneously felt the devastating pressure start to increase, it focusing forward.  My lips crunched against my teeth, felt their instant swelling against the cruel weave of her stocking, against the even crueler weave of her skin’s swirls.  The balls of her feet transformed in that moment from lead, straight into iron.  I could see nothing, feel nothing but the iron hard soles of her feet start to crush the life right out of me.  And the coppery wash of copious amounts of blood in my mouth from my ruined lips.

Suddenly, the weight on my face started to relent.  Then, my lips doing their painful damnedest to go with her stocking, I watched her foot rise into the air.  When it did, I caught a glimpse of her face up from under the outside of her foot.

I wished that I hadn’t.

It was cold, calculating and cruel - and utterly without a single thread of redeeming emotion.

“...Mary!” I managed.  The sound came out more like “Rary” because of my lips.  But whatever the sound, it made utterly no difference.

Her foot came back down.  This time, when she stepped onto me with it, she did it with a bone-jarring thud!  With the poised ball of her foot!

My whole face and chest exploded with pain.  My eyes went up like fireworks - me seeing a blooming starburst of silver light upon a chaotic explosion of red and white.

Then, I felt something crunch in my face against her cruelly hard skin.  My nose, went my panicked thoughts.

Then, the foot on my legs lifted; I would have screamed in a whole new agony, the weight on my face increasing even beyond the energy of the stomp, then my lower parts were stomped just as cruelly!

Then, up rose her foot from my face.  Dazedly, my mind swimming in panic as I watched her foot rise, I realized I was looking at a spot of blood on the bottom of her foot.

And then SMASH!  Her foot returned for its second devastating stomp!

I nearly blacked out!

I would have, too, save for the jolt of crushing pain which then came to my legs again - this following the weight doing its horrible increase again on my face and other upper parts!

And then, up came her foot from my face again.

SMASH!

Then my legs again!

SMASH!

Then my face again!

SMASH!

My wife has very lovely feet.  Long, graceful arches, nicely broad heels with comely round shapes, very shapely balls of the feet and toes, her arches cutting those lovely lines of tendons whenever they were flexed...

But under them.  Like this?!  God, no beauty could circumscribe just how utterly devastating it was to be trampled on by them like this!

And that was precisely what Mary was doing to me!  She was TRAMPLING on me!

I don’t know for how long it went on.  All I knew was the continual rises, followed by the devastating returns of her merciless soles.  Before it had ended, long before, I knew I had been reduced to a bleating animal - screaming and pleading up to her in long, syllable-less cries for deliverance from her ruthlessly pounding soles.  But cries which went utterly unheeded.  Cries that fell on deaf ears entirely.  Cries of the condemned man pleading with the devil himself, to be delivered from this trampling Hell.

When it was finally over, and Mary was dropping me from the block back into my pen, I felt gratitude like no other my life had ever before been rewarded.

During the release, I was dimly aware of the neoprene expanding to let my extremities slide freely out.  I was dimly aware of how much my face was burning and needing to get it to a mirror to see what damage had been done.  But most of all, I was aware that the trampling was over - that her stomping feet were finally done.  And that I had somehow survived.

Then I was aware of her words.

“Get used to it, you lecherous little fuck.  That is going to be your life from now on.”

And then I was aware of the door slamming behind her.  And that she was gone.

And then I was gone, passed out in the bloody print of my face pressed down into the cotton of my enclosure.