Kevin gasped as his entire darkness-flooded world seemed to come apart at the seams.  His body, sweltering in the airless heat, was sandwiched between the filthy worn-out insole of a black pump and the heavy ceiling of his teacher’s wrinkled, swollen foot.  As her pink sole peeled slowly away from the base of her shoe, he felt his arms, which had practically molded into the doughy ceiling of her skin, remain adhered to her heavy appendage for another moment before he plopped into the black basin of the footwear once again.

            He lay there at two inches tall, unwilling to try something as useless as getting up, and squinted as a crack of light was allowed in once the woman’s sole had arched high enough in the air.  It was practically blinding after he’d become accustomed to pitch-black, though it was merely from the humble glow of the energy-efficient bulbs that hovered above the desk in her office.

            The dim allowance of vision briefly illuminated the fleshy ripples of Courtney’s sole like soft mountain ranges on a road map as it loomed above him.  He watched the wrinkles bend and change shape with the tiniest of muscular shifts, forming new patterns in her skin.  A dance of light and malleable flesh, done without thinking, and all for him to witness and be rightfully intimidated by.

            A gloss of foot sweat was uniformly smeared across the uneven terrain of the forty-two-year-old’s massive foot, from her heavy heel, along her arch, over the hill of the ball, and down to her meaty toes, which were concealed in the dark tip.  As he studied the titanic appendage, he could make out the shape of his tiny body as though it had been painted on: the only place on the expansive sole that was clean of her salty excretion, because it had been absorbed directly into his own skin through oppressive, crushing contact.  It was just as belittling as ever to have to be reminded of precisely how small he was beneath the woman.

            This reprieve of light and stale air didn’t last long.  Courtney was extremely practiced with this treatment of her student, allowing him just enough time to get a few good gulps of semi-fresh oxygen into his lungs before he was returned back to the darkness.  Slowly, her sole arched and began to descend again until it squelched the light from the shoe and made contact with Kevin.  The heft of the mass of skin, sticky and repugnant, molded back around its miniscule occupant.

            The shrunken fifteen-year-old sighed, not with hopeless defeat, but with simple surrender as his body was smashed tenderly back down into the greasy insole, the bulbous influx of his teacher’s skin filling in every available pocket of air as she slipped the shoe back on fully.  He was far too used to this now to let it get him down.

            Not too much, anyway.

            It had to be admitted.  At the very least, this summer was shaping up to make all previous crappy seasons look like an island paradise by comparison.  The last summer had been spent working at his grandpa’s apple orchard, carrying baskets of the produce back and forth across a field.  The summer before that was spent at school as he uselessly tried to make up time for failed classes.  The one before that away at summer camps so boring they made a season feel like a year.

            But this.  This beat them all.

            Thanks to a new educational rehabilitation program endorsed by the Techilogic Corporation, Kevin was facing a summer of being shrunken down by a Portable Matter Reduction Device and worn inside his teacher’s shoe.  An entire summer.  Nine weeks of being trapped under her pungent sole or flicked between her dexterous toes.  Sixty-three days of being stood on, sweated on, and stamped into a black oblivion by Courtney’s feet, either garbed in stockings, socks, or simply in their naked, doughy glory.

            He’d tried to get out of it, but his parents, spurred on by an introductory offer from a local branch of the company that allowed for an attractive discount on the new summer-long program, agreed.  Already at their wit’s end with their consistent disappointment of a son, they were ready to try just about anything to make a turnaround: including, it seemed, putting their shrunken child into the hands of a woman who’d earned the whispered nickname “Sergeant” from many of her students.  Courtney Foster, Kevin’s algebra teacher of the previous year and newly trained Shrink Act warden, would make a healthy stipend over the summer in return for implementing a Reduction & Rehabilitation “therapy” program designed to instill a new work ethic in its academically and behaviorally challenged participants and squash, literally, any complacency out.

            Techilogic was responsible for more than arranging this unusual teacher-student relationship, though.  The very company that had invented the conveyance that made this diminutive hell possible had recently put out into the market a medication it had been developing with the armed forces for the better part of a decade.  Originally intended to make soldiers immune to harm, the pharmaceutical product known as Sizac had been found to have its admittedly insubstantial effects exponentially increased such that it became useful when the patient was shrunken.  The smaller the subject, the more potent the effects, meaning that anyone under the effects of a PMRD who had taken a dose beforehand experienced far less pain and, best of all, were rendered virtually resilient to any but the most egregious forms of punishment.

            Of course, unluckily for someone like Kevin, the existence of such a product meant his teacher could wear him in a shoe and stand her full weight on him without any ethical qualms or legitimate risks of crushing.  All his parents had to do was powder a double dose of Sizac into his breakfast every morning before dropping him off for wearing duty, and the young man came away without a scratch or bruise after a full day of being smashed again and again and again under her powerful foot.

            During the summer, Courtney worked several jobs as a part-time summer school teacher and at a local magazine publisher.  Given how thinly she was stretched, sometimes the hourly range was more like 5-to-9 than 9-to-5.  For her student, nearly every second of that time out was to be spent with him at two inches tall and pinned under the sweat-sluicing ball of her foot.  Breaks were scarce, usually just consisting of Courtney lifting her foot partially out of her shoe for a few minutes, or if she was feeling generous, her entire appendage.  At noon, he was removed for thirty heavenly minutes to scarf down scraps shared from her lunch, as well as to humiliatingly take a bathroom break into a condiment cup while she turned her back, and then he was deposited immediately back into the shoe without exception and often without conversation.

            Kevin had learned quickly that weepy groveling to his parents would not get him anywhere.  Evenings and weekends could occasionally be counted on for a desperate break wherein he had to study to prepare for the coming school year, but more often than not, Courtney would find uses for her charge during this time away from her job and put him back on duty.  Sometimes this meant being tucked into her house slippers while she sat back with a mug of coffee on the couch.  Sometimes, even, this meant riding atop her foot inside a soaking sock while she went for a run or used her stationary bike: a very particular kind of hell that made the days at school and the office look a little less bleak.

            Currently, he was midway through week two, though it felt far more like decade two.  And perhaps the worst part of this two-month nightmare was that the entirety of the blame had to be placed on his miniscule shoulders.

            On the day Kevin had been let out from his freshman year of high school, watching all his friends excitedly charge toward the buses, freed at last, he’d had to trudge out to the carpool line for the inevitable, knowing the luxury of being normal-sized with access to clean fresh air was about to be taken from him later that evening.  It had all been discussed ahead of time.  There was no escaping it: the number of F’s on his report card from both semesters, despite the valiant efforts of a few tutors, had rendered the teen a moron in the eyes of administrators, and he was doomed to repeat.  A rare “A” from the art teacher, known to give B minuses or worse to all but the finest creative types, had showered glowing praise on the teen for his drawing craft, but aside from this odd phenomenon, he was an academic pariah.

            His mother, while disappointed, had spent the last four years designating several hours of extra study time for Kevin in the evenings to try to catch up.  She pitied him for his apparent ineptitude despite his efforts, and had accepted that he wasn’t going to achieve as highly as his peers.  As long as he was putting in the time to improve, it was enough for her.

            That was, until the morning two weeks before school ended when she went rooting around his bedroom after he’d left for school, something she almost never did due to her personal policy of the room maintenance being kept up by the owner.  An old dresser had been shoved into the back of the boy’s closet for storing paper and practice sketches, a hobby that Kevin’s mother occasionally feared was affecting her son’s schoolwork, but several spot checks had convinced her he apparently didn’t draw during his study time.  On this particularly day, though, a scrap of paper sticking out against the wall had revealed a compartment she hadn’t been aware of, and once she’d pulled it out, revealed a lot more.

            The compartment was filled to the absolute brim, pages numbering well over a hundred, of intricately detailed and stunningly realized drawings of bare feet.  Standing, swinging, arched against a floor with toes splayed with the sole on full display, either in dark pencil sketches or fully colored in pastels.  Kevin’s parent acknowledged the first drawing she found for its artistry, marveling at her son’s talent, until she began skimming through the rest of the stack.  A more thorough search of the room revealed innumerable folders of them hidden under the mattress, in old boxes beneath the bed, and even hidden under boards in the closet.  A veritable library of drawings of female feet, outnumbering by a staggering margin anything else drawn in the room, and what was more, it revealed that Kevin spent far more of his time drawing than his mother realized.  Finally, searching through a desk drawer, the woman discovered a partially finished drawing wedged between the pages of a tutoring textbook Kevin had supposedly been working in the night before, and that moment, Courtney knew what her son actually spent his supposed study sessions on.

            When the doomed teen arrived home that afternoon, he was greeted by being ordered into a kitchen chair by both cross-armed parents, followed by a stack of more than two-hundred full size foot drawings being placed onto the table before him with a thunderous slam.  For a while, the mother and father just drilled into her guilty son with their gaze and let him stew in anxiety and hopeless humiliation.  There wasn’t much he could say to snake out of this one.  Indeed, after forty minutes of tense reprimanding, a few outpourings of truth about how little studying the boy truly did, a conveniently placed advertisement for Techilogic’s new summer rehab program, and even a few embarrassed tears from Kevin, the decision was made.  And thanks to a day of hard pontificating and a predilection for poetic justice, Kevin’s mother knew precisely how to make sure the message stuck for once in her son’s life.  It had taken an hour of begging just to avoid having Ms. Foster being made aware of the precise reason for this tipping point.

            So here Kevin was, spending his eighth day in the muggy confines of his teacher’s shoe at the office, with only the occasional nonchalant tapping of her heel to remind him there was life outside of being squeezed mercilessly between sweat-matted shoe fabric and the unrelenting weight of firm flesh and muscle.  He’d reached the point of being surprised to rediscover light and fresh air every time Courtney mercifully arched her deep sole above her miniscule sprawled student.

            Despite the fact that Kevin came away each day with no injuries, and the process was relatively painless, all things considered, a few pills of the protective Sizac drug wasn’t going to save him from the claustrophobia that now settled in exactly when Courtney first lowered her foot over her charge and strapped her shoes on at the beginning of each day.

            Nor could it save him from the omnipresent stench of dry skin and shoe fabric cooked in conjunction for an entire day in a stew of gummy foot sweat and smeared toe jam.  The sheer wallop packed by his teacher’s sole, where he usually found himself mashed, was putrescent and borderline rancid.  If nothing else, this experience had taught Kevin things about the human body he had never wanted to know.  The very idea that any human foot, let alone one belonging to his math teacher, could produce musk this unholy and sour in its balmy filth made him squirm to consider, even when he was safely out of her shoe for the day and trying hopelessly to shower the stench away that had been permanently stamped into his skin.

            And, maybe most unfortunate of all, the technical painlessness provided by the medication did absolutely nothing to save him from the endless cataracts of sweat seeping in vigorous rivulets from Courtney’s sole from about two hours into work until the end of the day when she luxuriously kicked the heels off.  It was already akin to a sauna being in the shoe, the air moist and so thick it stung to inhale its nauseating fog.  However, being pinned under the eventually soggy mass of flesh, its wrinkles contoured to allow for maximum liquid flow as Courtney’s pores gifted sweat drops seemingly by the gallon, was the capper that made it the heinous sentence that it was.

            Every day thus far had begun with the same foolish hope that the oncoming river could be avoided.  Yet as sure as the sun rose and set, he would find himself all but swimming in the warm, sticky rain of it all.  Soon, his goal was shifted to merely avoiding getting his face too deeply ensconced in it.  His hair usually ended up crusted with Courtney’s sweat by day’s end, his clothes were dampened through to the underwear far sooner than that, and his lips became chapped from the amount of salty liquid that made their way forcibly between them, no matter how tightly he closed his mouth.  Spitting it out was a dangerous move, as it often required that he open his mouth wide again and risk an even bigger gulp.  The day left his entire body glued into the swollen bulk of Courtney’s sole such that he remained stuck to it until the cool air outside allowed him to be peeled off.

            Over and over.  An endless cycle.

            Right now, the teen estimated that it was about two in the afternoon, and right on schedule, his body felt soaked through and redolent of the smelliest location on his teacher’s body, all but indistinguishable from her sole thanks to the heavy mashing into the flesh he’d received.  And even though the pills ensured he couldn’t be damaged or feel pain to an extent, the brute force attack of being stood on by feet the size of buses to him for at least nine hours a day definitely took its toll.

            By day’s end, Kevin would feel ready to flop over and fall asleep, as though he’d run a half marathon, yet he couldn’t manage it with the ease his aching body demanded, partially as a side effect of the Sizac, and partially because he couldn’t calm himself down well enough after such rigorous existence in the personal hell his vindictive teacher and furious parents had constructed for him.

The hellish day’s routine was shattered suddenly as Courtney’s foot pulled entirely from the shoe.  It was performed delicately enough that, in his refusal to fight the immovable force that represented his teacher’s appendage, Kevin’s body remained stuck to the woman’s massive sole by a combination of dried sweat and being compressed into the doughy surface for hours on end.

            A thumb wider than his entire body dug into his side and plucked him from the broiling skin of the foot, reddened from its confines, and deposited him into the center of her palm.  As he opened his eyes, he found himself staring up at the usual pitiful grimace Courtney gave him when observing him like this, as though he was some living tragedy she might see on the news and shake her head at.  A lost cause, almost.

            “I just thought I’d let you know they scheduled a meeting over at the school after summer classes let out, so we have to head over there next,” Courtney’s voice boomed in the quiet sanctity of her office, and she couldn’t help but let a small smirk cross the corner of her pink-glossed lips that she obviously wasn’t shy about her student observing.  It wasn’t like he could do something about it.

            “Okay,” he croaked, less from total abandon and more because he hadn’t had a reason to speak at all since that morning.

            “Still feeling the Sizac?” she inquired.  She asked the same question every day around this time, though she knew the effects were intended to last far longer into the afternoon and evening.  Apparently it helped her conscience through all this, and his parents’ as well.

            “Yes,” he answered truthfully.

            “Good,” she said with a self-assured nod, and laid the tip of a fingernail over Kevin’s stomach, as though considering poking him to confirm this.  “Since you’ll be down there a little longer today, I’ll give you a dinner break just before the meeting to get a little more air.”

            “Okay.”

            “You’re looking a little more tired than usual,” she commented.  “I suppose it was because I’ve had to do so much walking today.  Not as many chances to sit and slip the shoe off.”

            “Maybe.”

            “We’ll try to balance it out a little,” Courtney said.  Reaching into her purse where it was stowed under the desk, she pulled out a tiny spritzer bottle of a perfumed air freshener made to smell like a combination of juicy summer melons and popped the cap off with her thumb.

            Then, leaning closer to the carpet, she pointed the plastic cylinder into the currently empty high-heeled prison cell for her student and squeezed a generous mist of the spray inside.  Even from his perch this high up in his teacher’s hand, Kevin could feel it tickling his nostrils.  He knew it would be a strong aura to return to, given how much she’d used, but it was obviously still far preferable to the ungodly must of salt and earth he would be experiencing without it, and he even found himself slightly looking forward to the prospect of a change.

            For as long as the smell lasted before it was supplanted again by the overpowering stench of its much larger and meatier occupant, anyway.

            “There, that should help with the breathing a little,” Courtney declared as she tucked the small bottle back into her handbag and fully returned her gaze to her two-inch charge.  Her palm shifted underneath him, causing him to roll a couple inches closer to her curled fingers, though he remained secure.

            “Thanks,” Kevin answered instinctively.

            “You’re welcome,” she said with pleasantry she’d been particularly short on for most of the time he’d known her, and to Kevin’s surprise, it sounded dangerously genuine.  “Now let’s try to do something about the heat, hmm?”

            In the past to help with this issue on the longer days at work, Courtney had tried massaging her sole with ice cubes until they melted, giving her skin a much more comfortably cool sensation before she buried her student back underneath it, and Kevin was grateful for it.  Of course, this effect didn’t last long once her foot was crammed back into its previous hot environment.

            “Okay.”

            “Lift your arms up,” she instructed quietly, and suddenly the fingernail that had been hovering over Kevin’s abdomen hooked itself under his sweat-soaked t-shirt, the hard surface of it tapping against his stomach.

            “Sure,” he said, barely giving the matter any thought, and found himself humiliatingly grateful to find his disgusting shirt and then pants stripped easily away from him by his teacher’s practiced fingertips, leaving him in just his equally wet skivvies and sprawled in Courtney’s palm.

            Her finger approaching slowly again, the nail touching gingerly at the waistband of the teen’s underwear, the woman’s lips parted slowly.

            “I’ll leave it up to you.  If you want these off too, it might be more comfortable.  But it’s your choice,” she stated simply, sensing the potential for mind-bending humiliation in such an act.

            For a second, Kevin felt the urge to agree and be freed from this last filthy article of clothing that clung to his skin so hatefully, but some shred of tainted pride held his tongue.

            “No.  No, I’ll keep them,” he gulped, and Courtney nodded.

            “All right.  If you change your mind at the dinner break in three hours, just let me know,” she said as her palm began descending back toward the inevitable reinstating of Kevin in pump confinement.

            Once again, a thumb and index finger the width of punching bags pinched gently around his hips and plucked him from the plain of palm flesh.  In a brief rush of wonderfully calming wind that soothed his overheated body, Kevin was deposited back into the center of the heel, kept from sliding down to the toes by the friction provided by the matted insole.  As predicted, the melon spray packed a real nasal punch, but was still infinitely preferred to the alternative, which still managed to leak its way into his body between the fruitier whiffs.

            Biting his lip, the teen sensed that the possibility of him taking up his teacher’s offer of total disrobing after another three hours beneath her was fairly strong.  In fact, he was looking forward to it already.

            With determined finality, Courtney lowered her sole with a fleshy slap back into its original position in the shoe, its meaty mass consuming her drugged-up pupil once again beneath its sticky expanse.  With Sizac flowing through the boy’s veins, she had absolutely no qualms about grinding him with all her strength into the damp runway of her shoe.

            Kevin sighed, coughing in an attempt for air, and ended up taking a fresh mouthful of warm sudor expelled from the tender flesh at the top of Courtney’s sole.  His tongue lapped accidentally against the sea of firm, shifting skin, and rather than risk getting yet another taste, he bitterly gulped down the revolting, watery gift.

            Throat burning in rebellion for his unnatural forced beverage, the teen could practically feel a void opening up inside, and one thing became known to him with intense clarity when every other sense was clogged up by the miasmic essence of his teacher’s pump-baked skin.

            He was never, ever going to draw again.