The apartment door unlatched and swung open, flooding in light and revealing Ariel Leeds leaning in supreme exhaustion against the wooden jamb. She raked slender fingers through her cascading tresses of semi-tangled red hair, releasing a weary sigh as she entered the living space she shared with her older brother. Her boots shuffled weightily along the carpet, as if she lacked the strength now to lift each leg up.

            “Sup, sis? Rough night at the bar?” David Leeds said in his usual taunting tone as he sat on the couch beside his best friend Nina. The thirty-one-year-old cast his sibling the same smarmy grin, which she answered with a withering grimace and eye-roll.

            “Don’t even start with me today,” Ariel grumbled as she disappeared into the side hall.

            “What’s her deal?” Nina questioned softly to her friend, her adorable dimples etching in her cheeks. She gave her luscious dark chocolate-brown locks a flighty toss over her shoulder, then returned to idly picking at the thready cuff of her black hoodie.

            “Oh, you know how she gets after those long shifts at the bar. You can’t even say a nice thing to her or she eats your head off.”

            “No kidding,” Nina chuckled.

            “Give her a rest, you two,” groaned Mary from the adjacent chair beside the couch. She eyed her friends with some disdain. “You have no fricking idea what it’s like out there, being on your feet straight-through for an entire shift, never getting a second to even stand still. It’s seriously torture on your feet!”

            “I’ll bet it’s even worse for you, lugging those two big jugs around,” Nina joked to Mary. She pointed at the young woman’s breasts. “You’ll probably get scoliosis.”

            The lanky blonde waitress instinctively looked down to her supple D-cups confined to a t-shirt at least two sizes too small, then frowned.

            “You really think so?” Mary muttered anxiously. She lightly jostled her tits. “Scoliosis?”

            “No, Mary, she doesn’t really think so,” David corrected reassuringly. He winked at Nina. “She’s just lezzing out on you, as usual.”

            “Quit it, you fucker!” Nina snorted, punching him good-naturedly in the shoulder and giving his hair a scrunch for good measure. They shared another laugh, and even Mary had to snicker.

            Ariel returned to the living room, having replaced her bar waitressing “uniform” with more relaxing workout clothes; her knee-high boots were discarded by her bedroom door, leaving her bare below the thigh as she tramped back into the room. She hardly exchanged a look with her insufferable brother or his annoying friends as she sunk back into the last remaining empty chair in the living room. Plopping back into the cushions, she kicked both naked, leather-cooked feet up onto the coffee table at the center of the cramped room.

            It didn’t take long for the odor leaked from Ariel’s sweat-damp peds to percolate around the room. In short order, a soft fog of salty excretion and reeking foot flesh was clogging the room and the lungs of the other three individuals present. Like leather left in water. Mary pretended not to notice, but both David and Nina were sure to cover their noses and twist up their countenances as if they’d sucked on a lemon.

            A few minutes passed in awkward silence. Ariel flexed her toes and arched her soles out in the open, wafting their scent around. The TV blathered on at low volume, casting an alien glow over the mostly darkly room. However, after David had been whispering into Nina’s ear for at least sixty seconds and gotten her to loudly giggle, Ariel exhaled with irritation and forcefully cocked her head to glare at them.

            “What?” Ariel demanded, twiddling a strand of long, distended ginger hair between her thumbs.

            “Nothin’, sis.”

            “Yeah, right.”

            “Well, I was just telling Nina, it’s a good thing we got the complete insurance package when we were both promoted to managers, cuz we just might need it if we get radiation poisoning cancer from your feet.”

            At this, Nina nearly doubled over. She clutched her stomach and cackled, joining David in mocking peals of laughter at Ariel. The redhead, turning a deep rose in her normally pale, thin cheeks, quickly swept her feet off the table and slammed them to the floor. Too embarrassed now to remain in the literally soured air of the living room, Ariel darted toward her bedroom and closed the door behind.

            It took another minute for both David and Nina to recover; they were practically spilled across one another at this point, stomachs heaving joyously from the cruel humor of it. Nina wiped her moistened eyes before any happy-cry tears could descend her cheeks and rub out the layer of dark eyeliner beneath.

            “You guys sure could use the Golden Rule sometimes, you know?” Mary complained. She frowned at them as she leaned down, reaching to her own sore feet and kneading her heels beneath her fingers. “She’s spending her whole night getting aggravated with drunk bar dudes while trying not to spill any drinks on a tray. You think she needs you two making a big deal about it when she has a tiny bit of B.O. after work? How would you feel if that happened to you?”

            “Honestly, I’m just so glad I don’t have that same problem,” Nina commented. She crossed her right foot up and over her left knee, wriggling her black-polished toenails about in David’s direction. “See?”

            “You mean smell, not see,” David snickered. He playfully swatted at his friend’s size-eight foot until she placed it back on the floor. “And no, you’re right, Nina, you don’t have that problem. I guess my sister just has a knack for producing biohazards when she has those stinkers in boots all day and night.”

            Ariel laid atop the covers of her bed, fists clenched at her side, teeth gritted so hard she was on the verge of shaving off enamel. Her fiery green eyes were still alight with righteous fury. It took all she had to keep from grunting melodramatically just to quell the rage.

            Sure, siblings occasionally made cracks at one another; that snide comment of David’s, humiliating her in order to make his friends laugh, wasn’t the real problem. It was simply the last straw in a very tall stack of straw built over years and years.

            He’d always thought he was better than her. Everything, from grade school report cards to track & field PRs to the size of Christmas gifts purchased for their parents, her older sibling took it upon himself to upstage her as visibly as possible. It went beyond a mere brother-sister rivalry. It was just a plain old bitter rivalry, a brutal contest, and one where he’d put himself on top for all the years they’d been forced to live together. David, with his better job and bigger circle of friends and higher income, had the actual, inconceivable nerve to rub that imagined superiority in her face every hour of every day of every year that he was capable. And the awful part was, according to the laws of society, he was doing well and worthy of praise; meanwhile, Ariel was left to slum through the worst job of her life and still be verbally pelted when all she wanted to do was rest. This couldn’t stand any longer.

            Ariel couldn’t explain how she knew, even as she sat up from her bed and moved toward the closet, but she just knew: it was time for a change. As if on autopilot, she followed the prescribed motions of instinct. She brushed past gobs of clothing, shouldered a few stacks of boxes out onto the floor, until at last she came to the dusty storage container of moth-eaten heirlooms and inheritances the twenty-eight-year-old had neglected to examine up until now.

            Most of the ancient items inside were crappy polaroids she’d never look at or pieces of cheap jewelry she’d never wear. However, at the bottom of the stack, the redhead discovered a brown leather tome the size of a science class text book. At first she mistook the book for a photo album, but upon lifting it up and peeling back its yellowed pages, she revealed it to be something else entirely.

            Ariel raised an eyebrow. She drummed her bare toes against the rug. A hopeful, treacherous smile teased across her lips.

            It was worth a try.

David awoke the next morning after a full night’s rest feeling refreshed and prepared to tackle another day in his new managerial role at work. With a salary more than enough to cover the penny-rent of this cheap apartment he shared with Ariel, plus the fact he got to work side-by-side with his best friend Nina, it was easy to find motivation to sit up and hit the pavement. However, he was given pause this particular morning, as he looked to the end of his bed and found his younger sister standing there, clutching a thick-spined brown book to her chest.

            “Uh, Ariel?” he mumbled, clutching the covers around his body. “Ever hear of this thing called knocking on the door first before you come in?”

            “I don’t know. Have you heard of this thing called not being an asshole?”

            “Nice one. How long did you stay up last night thinking of that one?” David chuckled, rolling his eyes as he laid his head back on the pillow. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, now, sis.”

            “Mmm. Actually, I think I’ll stay. I have a couple things I want to get straight with you, before you take it upon yourself to say anything else you’re going to regret later.”

            “Regret? Ariel, I don’t regret anything I’ve said, especially to you, and I don’t intend to start now.”
            “I sort of hoped you’d say that. It’s going to make this a lot funnier now.”

            “Make what a lot f-” David began, at last annoyed enough to prop himself up again and directly address his oddball of a sister. However, his words stopped in his throat when he caught sight of Ariel, now with the leather tome opened up and spread across her forearms to a tattered page in the center. Her lips were moving rapidly as she concentrated intently on the scrolled lines upon the paper.

            “If you’re going for the record in how early in the morning you can weird me out, congrats, you’ve succeeded,” David said. “Now, for the seriously last time, Ariel, get the hell out of my r-”

            A beam of light ripped a crystalline path through the living room, as though a flash grenade had been set off above David’s bed. The young man sputtered, throwing up his hands as he struggled to crawl up to his feet, and that was the very moment he realized what he was looking at.

            The bedroom geometry stretched exponentially in all directions as though through a kaleidoscope, swelling in size to epic proportion; or, more accurately, he and his pajamas had simply shrunk down to the size of a small action figure. The second option was no less plausible but somehow all the scarier.

            Then over the cushy horizon of the bed, David saw her. His redheaded demon-eyed little sister, grinning the widest grin he’d ever witnessed on her stupidly adorable face. From here, still dressed in her after-work pink top and short shorts, her body itself looked to be the size of their entire apartment building. Ariel was an absolute leviathan.

            “HOLY FUCK!” David scrambled backward. The mushy wall of his pillow blocked his path too far in that direction, leaving him with few options aside from leaping off the harrowing height of the mattress, or moving in the direction of his leering sister with her magic book.

            “I wouldn’t try and jump off the bed if I were you, David,” Ariel said sharply, concealing a crooked half-smile. “I haven’t figured out every good trick in this book yet, so until I find the spell about how to make you tougher so I can play harder with your dumb little body, you’ll just have to try and take it easy.”

            “This is impossible…” he crumbled to his knees. David stared at his hands in direct comparison to the billowing runway of his bedsheets in disbelief. He couldn’t have been any taller than four inches right now. Maybe less. He wondered if slapping himself in the face would make any difference. If not return reality to its more comforting stasis, then at least wake him from this creepy nightmare.

            “Ooh, it’s very possible. You’re always making a big deal about how I never did anything with my college degree, right?” Ariel snarked. She took one last glance at the open page of the book and then set it down on the floor. “Well, let’s just say I’ve been doing an awful lot of learning in the last eight hours. So why don’t you come here, so I can teach you a lesson or two?” With that, Ariel hopped onto the bed and began to crawl forward, hand over hand.

            Even though he knew there was no hope of escape, David still did his best. He was almost flung skyward by the relative weight of his sister’s body moon-bouncing him on the mattress. Recovered, he dove beneath the nearest upturned fold of the bedsheets and burrowed through the soft darkness.

            He didn’t make it far before giant, log-shaped forms were pressing and groping into the mattress from above. She’d cornered him. Meeting a wall which he presumed to be his sister’s hand, the young man squirmed helplessly as Ariel’s palm wrapped around him beneath the sheets. Iron-strength fingers coiled without mercy around his hips, pinning his arms to his sides as he was drawn out to open air again.

            “Nice try. But in case you haven’t noticed, I’m the bigger sibling here now,” Ariel explained as she held her brother up to her billboard-sized face. “And the more you put up a fight, the more ticked off I’m gonna get. The more ticked off I get, well… let’s just say it doesn’t go well for you.”

            David, imprisoned in the powerful grip of his giant sister’s fist, watched breathlessly. The redhead leaned her back against the headboard of her brother’s mattress. Then, crossing her legs, she used her free hand to peel back the elastic mouth of her purple socks. One by one, the cottony footwear was tossed off the bed, leaving Ariel’s naked peds to rest in the mess of sheets.

            Putting aside his instinctive need to yell at his sister for putting her dirty bare feet on his personal bedsheets, so close to where his head lay, David realized he had larger problems now. Much larger problems. He wrinkled his nose at the leathery, ghostly smell from the previous night still emanating off the girl’s foot skin; she obviously hadn’t showered.

            “Something the matter, David?” Ariel asked innocently as she delicately folded her feet up upon her crisscrossed calves in a yoga-like pose of zen stillness. Her meaty toes flicked and rubbed. Long, possessive fingers brandished around the young man’s frail body. “Did we get off on the wrong… foot?”

            Still unable to fully process any of the madness that was currently unfolding in his own room, David winced, flashing his sister a look of complete revulsion.

            “I’ll take that as a yes,” Ariel giggled. “So maybe you ought to try making friends again?” She dipped her hand down, drawing David forcibly into the wriggling embrace of her toes.

            Gasping in shallow surprise, David shielded his face a little too late. Without free hands to help deflect the onslaught, he was treated to a concussive meeting with Ariel’s thrashing, marshmallow-textured toes. The bulbed tip of each digit was larger than his head. Her skin was lightly moistened with night sweat, nothing horrendous, but the real crime of it was the smell.

            It was hard not to gag. The aroma was akin to shoving one’s face directly into a recently used jogging shoe and pulling the shoelaces tight around the neck. Though David had been unfortunate enough to accidentally sample the air whenever his sister saw fit to lay her work-ravaged feet up on the table like day-old meat, he’d never been in such close proximity. It was definitely in the top ten most disgusting things he’d ever smelled in his life.

Ariel’s giant toes were working in concert now. They arched and then closed over top of David’s head, hugging him into the greasy folds of spongy flesh. No matter how much he writhed and tried to turn his face away, his sister’s hand was too strong, able to tuck him ever-closer into the row of her toes. The gridded, damp pad of her big toe stroked along his cheek, painting him with the leftover moisture collected in her socks.

            He felt a pulpy chunk of her toejam come loose and cling to his neck. Again, he repressed a gag, though it was getting harder. All David wanted was a clean breath of air. However, such a thing was not forthcoming. Right now it seemed his lungs were inflated exclusively with the wet, mealy odor of his sister’s feet, amplified like never before.

            The redhead giggled as she pulled her brother away from the grappling mess of her toes. She smirked with satisfaction to see the sickness in his face, not to mention the big clump of her toejam glued to his chin.

            “Looking a little worse for wear there, David. They can’t be that bad, can they? They’re just my lil’ ol’ feet, after all!”
            David’s lips quivered as he struggled to come up with a response. For the moment, though, he was simply overjoyed to be taken away from the peachy mass of his sister’s enormous foot.

            “Anyway, don’t get too comfortable breathing normally. That was just the warm-up. I wanted you to start getting used to it, so you don’t pass out later on when the really funny stuff happens to you.”

            The young man raised an eyebrow. He’d given up on trying to fight his sister’s fingers, as they were far too strong, pinched around his hips, wrinkling his meager clothing. Now, he was simply doing his best to follow his sister’s bizarro-logic. What did she mean by “later on” and “the really funny stuff”?

            “Personally, I always think I experience things better with… as much of myself as I can give, you know?” Ariel said innocently. “And I want you to get the full experience of payback for all these years you’ve spent putting me down and making me feel like dirt. So why don’t we lose these little clothes of yours?”

            David, too flustered to react, yet again, went limp with surprise as his sister’s hand opened up. She draped him against her pale palm, while her free hand dove in, fingers pointed and primed for snatching. All too easily, she had the hem of his t-shirt between her thick thumb and slender index finger, yanking it up.

            “Hey!” he crowed, doing his best to keep his arms bent to avoid losing the shirt, but was quickly defeated by Ariel’s far larger, beefier fingers. His shirt was quickly stolen. “W-Why… why are you…”

            “Believe me, David, you’re gonna want to save your energy. Might be a better idea to keep your lips from flapping just this one time, and conserve air as long as you can. Just a tip.”

            “Ariel… you’re… you’re not gonna put me… back down there, again, with… a-are you?”

            “Of course I am, you little moron. What, you think I’d stop just because you whined at me once or twice? We’re not even close to even yet. Now hold still, so I don’t crush your junk on accident.”

            David squirmed nonetheless as his sister’s fingers roughly ripped his shorts down his legs, leaving him only his boxers. With a delicately tucked giant fingernail into the waistband, though, Ariel tore through her tiny brother’s shrunken underwear and flicked them aside, too, giving David nothing but his birthday suit as her fingers closed back around his naked body.

            “Mmm… you’re feeling a little cold, David. Almost like you could use another warm-up,” Ariel commented. Her playful gaze drifted from his face down to the area between his legs; his member hung limply against his thigh, which she’d pinned over with a long pinky finger. Curiously, she braced her middle finger back against her thumb, then lightly flicked the young man in the balls.         

            David convulsed, riding out the hollow pain of a gentle ball-busting. He bit his tongue, preventing a squeal of pain; he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

            “Looks like Little David is still asleep. That’s all right. We’ll wake him up soon enough,” Ariel commented, striking fresh fear into her brother’s heart. She pressed her middle finger tenderly down against her shrunken sibling’s flaccid dick, then drew away. “For now, though, I just want you to enjoy your last few seconds of feeling normal before everything gets a little… crazier.”

            Opening his mouth, David realized he had no response. Even crazier? He watched now with far more abject panic than the last time as Ariel began muttering rapid syllables under her breath. Chanting something. She’d obviously memorized it from the dusty book, which she’d set on the floor beyond.

            The change wasn’t as bright and shocking, but it was still noticeable. David sniffed the air, and couldn’t help but notice something previously subtle now amounting to a much greater factor in the oxygen. The sweet, vanilla-almond flavor of hand lotion, probably something his sister had smeared on her palms this morning. He barely would’ve noticed it before, but now, the sugary smell was insistent. Almost as if his olfactory sensitivity had been altered.

            “Can you feel it yet?” Ariel asked with a grin. “If you can’t guess yet what I did to you, I’ll just give you a hint. Everything’s gonna maybe seem… I don’t know… double as strong up that little nose and mouth of yours now.”

            David smacked his lips, trembling in his sister’s grip.

            “Ooh, I almost forgot. We gotta wake up Little David, too,” she snickered. Yet more magic words were mumbled. She pointed her index finger at her brother’s tiny penis, and in that instant, he felt a sharp yet brief tingle shoot up through his limbs. He flinched.

            “What… w-what did you…”

            “That should do it for the time being. Now, I think you’ve had a long enough break, don’t you?” Ariel questioned. She stroked her chin comically with a thumb and forefinger, then began to unfold her legs. Flattening both her left and right feet with a hard tramp into the mattress, she lowered David as well toward the tangle of bedsheets.

            The four-inch man watched with helpless fascination as his sister’s giant right foot began to arch up from the mattress. Her pink sole, wrinkled and flush, reared up as his body was tucked smoothly beneath the hefty mass of her appendage. Already her foot was coming down, sandwiching David’s naked body between the bed and her massive form. What little light remained spilled in beneath the cusp of her instep pressed to the woolen fabric; everything else was shadow and thick, heavy foot flesh upon the young man’s frame.

            And though, in any other circumstances, David would’ve been much more focused on the horror of his exposed dick being squashed down against his leg by his very own sister’s soft, bare sole, he had problems now which engulfed that entirely. The smell.

            David was certain now he’d never experienced any odor like this his whole life. Not on a farm, nor a garbage dump, nor dilapidated ruins. Right now, Ariel’s giant bare foot had earned itself the top spot by a mile.

            It was absolutely, repressively pungent. So dank and fetid was the hot, humbling environment David found himself entombed in now, he felt as though his nostrils were being plugged by the very essence of Ariel’s foot. The worst part was, there was no softening the brunt of the piercing odor; she was pressing down on him hard enough that he could hardly turn his head away, which did little to lessen the effect.

“How do ya like that, David?” Ariel sang happily from above as she rocked her foot from side to side, kneading her brother well into the richly stinky ceiling of heaving sole flesh. She alternately flexed and arched her sole, ensuring David’s body was continually molded against the rolling weight of her peachy skin and muscle. “You know, I would’ve thought you’d be so grossed out you wanted to throw up or something, but now that I check, I have to say: it seems like you’re really enjoying yourself!”

            Assuming his sister was simply being her usual bratty self, David quit his defenses and froze. She wasn’t just making a joke.

            With spine-tingling horror, he realized that, per the final spell placed by his sibling, his dick stood at half-mast. Despite the eggy, reeking air infecting his body and the constant assault of damp sole wrinkles fondling themselves against his body, the effect was working. He’d gotten an erection from the combination of revolting scent and sensory coaxing.

            “ARIEL!” he screamed, throwing his hands up uselessly against the bucking ball of his sister’s foot ramming down over his tiny face. “STOP THIS, PLEASE! LET ME OUT!”

            However, Ariel had no intention of honoring that desperate request just yet. David continued to ride out the horrendous assault as her foot ground itself from side to side and front to back, roughly massaging him and threatening to smear him into the mattress all at the same time. She was lightly giggling the whole time, adding insult to revolting injury. The briny punch of her odor had gone to his head like a drug. His half-mast had since grown to a full erection, batted pathetically by the creamy wrinkles of his giant sister’s sole; thanks to her spell, it even felt good. David was just about on the verge of tears, both from depression and the sheer smoky effect of her smell.

            When at last the shrunken young man began to think he could take no more of this, David felt his sister’s fingers hooking around his leg. She fished him out from beneath her foot, dragging him upside-down into the air and dangling him in front of her victoriously smiling face. Her eyes crackled with the energy and adrenaline of this vengeful game.

            “Peeeee yeewwwww, David!” Ariel wheezed dramatically. She pinched her nostrils closed with her opposite hand while still letting her tiny brother hang naked in the air from the other. “I hate to break it to you, but you seriously could use a shower or ten after that! You STINK!”

            Too angry and confused to mount a defense, David simply swung limply in the air from his sister’s pinched fingers as the blood rushed to his head.

            “I seriously don’t even want to imagine what it must’ve been like for you, though, after that sensory boost I gave you. Honestly, maybe you should be thanking me. It’s almost like I turned you into a superhero. A pathetic, puny, naked, sad little superhero whose only power is smelling my feet and getting turned on from it!”

            David writhed awkwardly from his inverted position. He watched helplessly as his sister’s index finger extended, the pad of it pressed down against his diminutive erection. She gave it a sporting flop against her much-larger digit. Ariel giggled as she watched it straighten back out.

            “You know, David, I was thinking how you’re pretty useless to me most of the time. You know, how you have no purpose or way of actually helping anyone? Well, you’ll be happy to hear that I figured one out! This spell took me a few tries when I was practicing last night for the first time, so you’ll have to bear with me. This might accidentally hurt you a lot.”

            “Ariel! P-Please, put me down! Make me big again!” David whined, his body shuddering from fear and latent arousal cursed upon him by his sister and her teasing finger. Indeed, the potency of her smelly foot flesh lingered upon him. His skin was ever so slightly soggy from night sweat leeched from her pores.

            “Mmmm, I don’t think so. Not just yet, “little” brother. I’m having too much fun, and we’re barely started. But honestly, I’d feel selfish if I hogged you all to myself. Maybe we should give somebody else a chance? I dunno, how about… Nina?”

            Heart halted in his chest, David tried to cool his racing pulse. Scary as it was to imagine involving his dearest best friend in this insanity, he couldn’t help but feel hope at the notion. Obviously, there was no way Nina would do anything to harm him. She’d realize what had occurred, somehow or other, and put an end to Ariel’s childish cruelty.

            “What do you think, David?” Ariel asked. “Do you want me to give you to Nina?”

            “Yes, please! Please, Ariel! Let me go. I’m begging you. I’ll never make another joke about your feet ever again, I swear!”

            “Ooh, I didn’t say anything about letting you go, I said I’d give you to her. Plus, I’m in a pretty generous mood now. You said you wanted to be bigger, right? I won’t make you as big as ME, obviously, but we can find a compromise. I’ll make you as big as oh, say… hey, what shoe size does Nina wear? Eight?”

            “What does that have to do with anyth-” David began with bitter frustration. However, by the time he made it halfway through the sentence, Ariel had already uttered the magic words. Another flash of light, this time within the shrunken man himself.

            When he regained cogency, David became aware that, against all odds of science, he was somehow perceiving the world around him from all sides. He couldn’t quite describe it as “sight,” because he wasn’t sure where his eyes were, yet he was aware of objects and space around him. This included Ariel’s pale, flattened palm holding him length-wise now, as well as her towering torso above, leering down at him with such satisfaction.

            “Hey, I did it!” she shrieked with excitement. “I guess I’m just a natural at this.”

            Indeed, Ariel had stayed true to at least one promise; she had made him somewhat larger. Less than his former height, but closer to seven or so inches. Still unaware of what else had changed, though, David wasn’t left to guess. His sister hopped off his bed at last and walked up to the mirror which hung from the wall, and held him up to see in her hand.

            If David had been capable of screaming in this form, he would’ve. There stood his gorgeous redheaded psycho of a sister, with her hand held up where his body should’ve been. But he wasn’t. Right there in the reflection of the mirror, he saw not his body but a simple, clean-white tennis shoe insole, complete with specialized padding to bear the full weight of a foot and its accompanying fluids.

            “OH MY GOD!” David tried to cry out, though he only heard the words echo inside his mind.

            “Oh my God is right,” Ariel said smarmily, confirming she could read his mental projections still. “I’m seriously talented at this, aren’t I? Maybe I took the wrong major in college.”

            “CHANGE ME BACK, ARIEL! UNDO IT! I’M FUCKING BEGGING YOU!” David had never felt more simultaneously terrified and ridiculous as his sister continued holding the floppy, ovular flap that was his new insole body up in the mirror. It was like something from a corny horror movie.

            “Uh-uh, not yet! Don’t worry, I will make you a little “man” again at some point, once you’ve learned a couple more lessons. But don’t you remember? I said I’d give you to Nina. And I’m a girl of my word.”

As David attempted to process the implications of this new reality, he fell silent in his thoughts again. From there, he was carried into Ariel’s bedroom, where she set him down on the dresser and proceeded to change into fresh clothes. Notably, there was still no shower taking place, meaning her feet were still just as ripe as ever after a full night shift in boots at the bar followed by a night in tight purple socks draped beneath heavy blankets.

            Once Ariel was dressed for the day, her ravishing ginger tresses freshly combed, she scooped her insole-brother back up and skipped for the door. Outside, she took the brief bus ride over to Nina’s block, and stepped through the folding doors just as David’s best friend emerged from her own apartment building.

            “Hey, Nina!” Ariel said happily. With a wave of her fingers, a realistic, cloned copy of David’s “body” appeared in her hand behind her back, right next to him, making him into a matching set of insoles.

            “Uh, hey, Ariel?” Nina said with some slight discomfort, after their previous meeting last night ended in humiliating laughter. “Listen, about yesterday-”

            “No problem. I can take a joke, you know,” Ariel lied.

            “Ha-ha. Good to hear! So what’s up, girl? Where’d your brother get off to? He was supposed to meet me here so we could head to work together.”

            “He wasn’t feeling super well and wanted to stay in bed. Throwing up and stuff. He’s probably sleeping now.”

            “Ahh, okay. That’s rough, though. I guess the “managing” is all on me today.”

            “Guess so!” Ariel chirped. “Oh, I almost forgot. David asked me if I could drop off these new insoles. They won’t fit me obviously, so they ought to go to you!” She held out her hand and brandished the pair of thin, snow-white footwear accessories.

            All throughout this conversation, David had been screaming wildly inside his silent “head,” or wherever the approximation of his brain was in this magic form. He’d yelled Nina’s name over and over again, trying to direct her attention to him. However, not a single glanced was cast his way until his sister held him out for his friend. Apparently, Ariel could hear him, but no one else could.

            “Insoles, huh?” Nina said. “I mean… I already have some in.”

            “He said you’d say that, and also said I should tell you that these are definitely the best, and are the same kind he uses sometimes when he goes for long jogs. So if you want that extra, um, what did he call it? Top-shelf luxury. Then this is your bet.”

            “That does sound like David,” Nina laughed. She brushed dark bangs out of her eyes as she reached forward to accept the gift. “Well, tell him I said thanks, and to get better soon! I don’t want to run that place all by myself, after all.”

            “Oh, I’m sure he knows you don’t want him far away,” Ariel said somewhat cryptically with a wink. “And I’m sure he’ll be with you in spirit today!” With that, and a final secret look at her brother the insole, the redhead made her way back down the block for the nearest incoming bus.

            “Huh. What a dude,” Nina shrugged as she traced a fingertip down the spongy material of the insole. “Not bad at all. Might be comfy.”

            “NINA! NINA! PLEASE, PLEASE, HEAR ME!” David continued to cry silently. He was just about convinced now, however, that there would be no contacting her with thought nor movement. Aside from his awareness of the situation, he didn’t seem to be capable of movement or even interacting with the world.

            At least, he thought that until Nina’s fingertips were tickling along his papery body. From the touch of her skin, David became instantly cognizant of a note of herbal tea soap and maybe a touch of Mandarin orange which Nina had unpeeled for breakfast. So powerful was the flavor, it felt indistinguishable from putting those very same objects into his mouth in human form. All those leafy, fruity flavors coalesced powerfully in his makeshift senses, and though he couldn’t explain it, just as he couldn’t explain how he was able to “see,” David knew it then.

            His sister had given him the ability to smell and taste across his entire insole-body. Not only that, he was almost certain now, after that simple brush with Nina’s skin, that she’d increased his sensitivity yet again. Double power didn’t seem like enough anymore. It had to be at least five, if not ten times, a stronger smell than before.

            Which could only mean one fate awaited him once Nina decided to “wear” him.

            Unfortunately, too, it appeared she was intent on doing just that. Nina obliviously carried her shrunken, transformed best friend back inside the house and kicked off her tennis shoes. Next she peeled out the blackened, grit-smudged old soles from the base of the shoes, revealing the rubbery hovel below. Once she’d put the twin imposter insole into the other shoe, her hand returned for David. He tried to savor that juicy flavor of fruit juice and tea on her fingers as long as he could, hewing it into his memory, for recall after what he knew was coming now, and couldn’t be stopped.

            David’s buoyant body slid into the shoe courtesy of Nina’s giant hand roughly patting him down. There was a casual scuffle up above as his best friend unknowingly tugged back the tongue of the shoe, loosened the laces, and then balanced on one foot as she gently inserted the white cotton sock-clad toes of the other.

            The weight was the first challenge David was forced to contend with. The ball of Nina’s foot, followed by her heel, crushing down without mercy into his form. He imagined before that such an enterprise would be difficult to take, especially after Ariel applied only the weight of her lower leg upon his body this morning in bed. At this moment, he was feeling the full brunt of Nina’s body weight coming down on him.

            She was by no means anywhere near to overweight, but the girl did have a few healthy curves, the like of which sometimes made David disappointed that she was a lesbian and therefore off limits. Right now, he would’ve given anything for that added ass and boob ratio to go away.

            Nina’s socked foot flattened David’s body firmly and decisively into the hardy rubber base of her tennis shoe. There was nothing to be “seen” now save for the ceiling of fuzzy sock fibers in the otherwise pitch-black, claustrophobic environment. If David was still capable of hyperventilating, he would have; he supposed it was lucky he didn’t have to breathe out of a mouth now due to the magic, because he surely would’ve been suffocated by now.

            He could hear the laces being cinched by her fingers. In the process, her foot was lashed and tightened down ever-stronger against his body. It felt like being squeezed beneath an increasingly tall tower of bed mattresses. His shape was literally contouring to her foot now.

            Nina took her first steps and squished her new insole down with a vengeance. Apparently satisfied with the “gift” from her best friend, the girl set out into the outdoors again to make her way to work.

            Being that she was in fairly decent shape, Nina enjoyed a brisk walk to work from time to time, and this was evidently one of those times. David was treated to every roll of her weight from toes to ball to heel, followed by the brief restful interlude as she lifted her leg, and then it all repeated. Thankfully, the sock was relatively clean, with the starchy scent of downy detergent; combined with the same bubbly soap David had smelled on Nina’s fingers, he was relieved for now to realize she’d at least had the courtesy to shower this morning. How long that mercy would last was anyone’s guess.

            Nina arrived at work, or at least this was David’s guess as he heard the creak of a door opening and closing, followed by the difference in texture beneath her rubber sole from concrete to waxen tile.

            “Hey, David!” a voice suddenly crooned joyously inside his consciousness. It didn’t take more than a second of bewilderment for David to recognize that sniveling, giggling voice. “Isn’t this cool? I can talk to you, wherever you are, so you don’t get lonely!”

            “ARIEL!” he cried. “GET ME OUT OF HERE!”

            “I told you, I will later. Right now, I just want you and Nina to have some quality time. So, how’s the view from down there?”

            “Please, please, Ariel, what do you want me to say? I hate this. I want you to let me go. I’ll do anything you want!”

            “Oh, I’m sure you’ll do anything I want, David. But you’re going to do that regardless of whether or not I help you, just because I have this book now, and the words inside it make you my toy.”

            Again on the verge of frustrated tears, the transformed young man went silent.

            “What, cat got your tongue?” Ariel said. “Tell you what, I’ve been practicing a couple new spells over here at home. I’ll give one of them a whirl, and you tell me your impression of it, okay?”  

            “NO!”

            “Perfect!” Ariel sang. “Just sit tight while I say the words. I won’t spoil the surprise, but let’s just say Nina’s about to get a little… toastier than she likes to be.”

The voice disappeared again, and for a few more precious minutes, David remained in paralyzed stasis. The scent of sock cotton and tea soap were his primary senses, with little else besides darkness to occupy him. He could ride this out, he decided. Only then did he feel the change coming on.

            Heat. All around. Oppressive, overbearing, like that which was felt by pressing one’s cheek to hard-packed beach sand under direct sunlight. Even amongst the crushing, unforgiving weight of Nina’s socked foot, David was not primarily concerned with the physical force any longer. He was practically numb to it. As had been true previously, his focus was placed squarely elsewhere now. Specifically, the smell.

            And boy, did it smell.

            Ariel’s heat spell was working splendidly. Nina’s flesh through the thin sock cotton was turning balmier by the second, as if the ecosystem inside her shoe had abruptly been transported to the climate of the amazon rainforest. Already, a thin strip of dampness was forming in a line down her instep. David couldn’t help but wince internally at the salty addition to his world.

            “What the heck?” Nina muttered to herself as she stood in the back office of the store. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, squinting at the floor. “I’ve only been here like an hour. Did I stand over the vent or something? God, what’s the thermostat say right now?”

            It didn’t take long for Ariel’s spell to take fuller effect with exponential speed. That one strip of slight dampness in the sock quickly spread out across the sloped arch of Nina’s foot. From there, the moisture grew thicker, sponging heavily in the thin cotton layer. It was only a matter of time before David found himself marinating under the thudding mass of the sweat-logged sock and, of course, Nina’s hot, humid foot above.

            The heat and reeking sudor of her peds was only ramping up by the minute. Briefly, Nina considered stripping away her shoes, until she began to tug the footwear off, only to be hit by the instant, rancid aroma of her poor feet. She gagged and shoved her foot right back inside, slamming David anew and unknown back into the insole. Gross as it was, she couldn’t risk turning all her coworkers off with this newfound foot odor issue.

            Could it be the new insoles, she wondered? Surely not. David wouldn’t purposefully give her a problem like this as a gag, would he?

            Meanwhile, David was floating somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. The air was completely rotten, dense with the concentrated, brackish flavors of Nina’s foot. Nothing he’d ever smelled in his life compared to this torment. If he was capable of passing out, he was almost sure he would’ve been knocked cold by the odor, but somehow, Ariel’s magic managed to keep him trapped in the waking hell of this day. It was almost impossible to believe this very same giant dark-haired girl above him just last night had truthfully commented on how her soles tended never to sweat or smell. What a sad irony that was now.

            The shoe was turning into a swamp. Miniscule pools of sweat were beginning to form and soak into David’s body. He could actually experience the stinging salt of her foot juices seeping through his body. Not to mention the ever-present wallop of vile, reeking, warm flesh cooked by sock fabric and magic words. It sunk so deeply into him, half his “body” weight now consisted of Nina’s sweat.

            The smell reminded David of every pungent, fancy, aged cheese he’d ever tasted, mashed together in one place and then drowned in steaming vinegar. Worse, given his new sensory perception, it not only felt like he was smelling this horrid concoction at every instant, but tasting it as well. And unfortunately, inhuman insoles didn’t have gag reflexes or throats, which meant David was forced to endure the sensation of running his invisible tongue hard along Nina’s sole without ceasing, constantly swallowing her sour sweat through his porous body by the bitter mouthful.

            Liquid sloshed in long, tortuous droplets from one end of the woman’s instep to the other, audibly squishing continuously every time she took a step. It sounded like she’d stepped in thick mud, albeit simply by moving her shoes about. Nina turned as pink in the cheeks as Ariel had been the night before. She only hoped no coworkers could hear it.

            David had almost no room left in his brain to hate that redheaded bitch who’d caused all this. All he had now was Nina and her titanic, offensively sweaty foot in the ever-rising temperature of what was fast turning into a literal hellfire pit.

            There was no doubt about it any longer. This was not only the most disgusting, but the purest sensation David had experienced in his entire life. All his other senses, save for smell and taste, had fallen dumb: bowled over by the sheer, unstoppable might of Nina’s musty, pestilential feet flavored of the grainiest salt and earthiest skin. The distilled, molecular essence of the woman’s feet and their wretched odor was being transmitted directly into his brain now on a mainline. There was nothing except David, the giant foot crushing his body into dark oblivion, and its wet, mangy, horrendous taste.

            “How’s it hanging, loser?” Ariel’s voice appeared again in David’s head. “Getting your fill of stink?”

            “A-Ar… Ariellll…” David managed to form words in thought, but hardly had the strength of will or energy now to really scream at his sister like she deserved.

            “Ha! I guess that answers that question. Maybe now you’ll have a better frame of reference for when I’m around. My feet are nothing compared to your best friend’s, huh?” Ariel teased. “Got anything to say for yourself now, “little” brother? Any more funny comments to make me laugh?”

            “F… F-Fuck y…” David attempted.

            “Ooh, aren’t you so clever!” Ariel laughed. “Seriously, you must’ve spent all day down there thinking of that one. Have fun drinking up Nina’s nasty sweat and gunk for the rest of your nasty life!”

            “Mmmff! ARIEL!”

            “Hey, he speaks! Nah, I’m just kidding, David. We’ll have some more fun with you before the day’s over. I’m at Nina’s house now, just waiting for the pair of you to get back for a new game,” Ariel said sweetly. “So I guess I’ll see you and your bitchy friend again soon!”

            David screamed out in the void, threatening his sister to leave Nina alone, but there was no further answer. He was abandoned yet again in oblivious torment beneath his best friend.

            Nina twiddled her thumbs in the office, watching the clock now with anxious intent. It was almost time for her shift to end, and then she could head home for a nice, relaxing shower to cool off her unfortunate feet. As soon as the minute hand hit the top of the hour, she clocked out and bustled quickly for the street. She decided to take the bus home this time, considering how relentlessly sweaty and hot she’d apparently gotten from the walk to work, which was the only real explanation she could come up with for the gross phenomenon.

            The curvy, dark-haired beauty returned home to find her door already unlocked. Cautiously, she stepped inside, placing most of her body weight upon one foot in particular. She could feel the sweat collecting in thick, syrupy pools around the crevices between her toes. The entire insole slurped loudly with the sound of wet suction.

            “Ugh, so not cool!” Nina complained as she peered into her apartment. However, she wasn’t left to fear for long, because she quickly spied Ariel, of all people, seated comfortably on the nearby couch, with her legs crossed and her fingers twirling coquettishly in her red hair.

“Oh, hey again, Nina!” Ariel said. “Funny running into you twice in one day!”

            “Yeah, um, especially in my apartment,” Nina said with a raised eyebrow. “Did David give you a key?”

            “Of course! What, you think I broke in like a cat burglar? Why don’t you take a seat?”

            “Don’t mind if I do…” Nina said with obvious discomfort at the bizarre invitation to sit in her own home. She took a chair across from Ariel, eyeing her suspiciously. “Can I… do something for you?”

            “I just wanted to let you know I’ve got a fun little solution to a problem you’ve been having recently. A little… extra stink and sweat down below, maybe?”

            “How… how did you know?” Nina balked.

            “Doesn’t matter how I know, I just know. Now, I bet you’re just dying to get those feet free. Seriously, it won’t bother me as much as mine bother you and my lame brother. So go ahead and get comfy.”

            More uneasy than ever, Nina wasn’t going to waste another minute with her hot, tormented feet trapped in these shoes. She propped each over her knee and pried them off. The first one containing a completely inanimate gray-stained insole was cast aside, but when she got to the opposite leg, as she tugged her completely-soaked sock-foot out of the shoe, she discovered the brand-new insole from this morning was gone.

            In its place was the tiny, naked form of David Leeds, shrunken down to a mere half-inch in size. He lay in the squishy crater where Nina’s foot had all but melted its shape permanently into the shoe overtop of his body.

            “DAVID!” she screamed, nearly dropping the shoe, though she held firm, for her friend’s sake. Nina reached inside the wet hole of the shoe opening and pinched her helpless friend as gently as she could between her thumb and index finger.

            On the opposite couch, Ariel had almost fallen to the floor laughing uncontrollably at the surprise and spectacle of her little trick. It was unlikely David even realized he’d been transformed back into a human form, albeit a smaller one, sometime between Nina’s exit from work and this mind-bending revelation now.

            “Huh, that must be a little bit of a shocker. You were expecting a new insole, but instead you find my stupid, whiny “little” brother all stripped down like a perv under your foot,” Ariel said curiously.

            “What did you do to him?” Nina cried in disbelief. She was still unable to fully grasp that she was holding her half-inch best friend in the palm of her hand.

            “Nothing!” Ariel lied. “I told you I’d take care of your little stink problem below, and do you notice it now?”

            Somehow, almost simultaneously with the moment Nina pulled her abused feet out of the shoes, the heat which had lasted all day indeed dissipated in a cloud of steam. A definite odor hung in the room like smog from the collected sweat and grit of her flesh in the shoe, but other than that, Nina’s body was back in equilibrium, at least physically. Her mind was in a much different and more traumatized place, however.

            “David?” Nina whispered, horrified as she began to piece together the possibilities of just how long he’d been trapped down there, and worse, during the single sweatiest day of her entire life. “David, can you hear me? Please wake up.”

            “He’s not dead. You didn’t step on him, if that’s what you’re scared about,” Ariel said. “He’s got much bigger problems to worry about than getting crushed, anyway.”

            “What does that mean?”
            “Mainly because, now that you know that insole was David the whole time…” Ariel explained matter-of-factly. “…you’re going to punish him with your feet on purpose!”

            “What the fuck?” Nina scowled. She patted tiny David in the creased center of her palm, trying to awaken him. She stomped across the living room toward Ariel, who looked unafraid of reprisal. “Change him back, right fucking NOW!”

            “Oooh, wish I could, but I don’t think I remember the spell. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to do what I say and put him right back under your feet, where he belongs.”

            “I’m not going to put him through that again!” Nina cried, her voice cracking. “You can’t make me!”

            David opened his eyes, staring gladly if not sweat-drunkenly up at his best friend’s looming, Goth-chic face which had enchanted him so over the years. For the first time all day, he felt safe, even as he could hear Ariel’s taunting voice beyond the giant caged fingers of Nina’s hand.

            “I don’t have to make you,” Ariel said simply. “Because I may have just laid a tiny little new curse on tiny little David. Go on, take a closer look at him.”
            Narrowing her eyes, Nina examined her naked half-inch friend. Sure enough, she noticed he was seizing. He looked like a beached fish flopping around in desperate search of water again. It appeared he was literally drowning upon the safety of her massive hand.

            “What’s happening?” Nina cried. Her own body shook as well.

            “I told you. You have to put him back down under your feet,” Ariel laughed derisively, obviously entertained by the fact that Nina still hadn’t pieced it together. “He needs the smell from your foot now to survive. Just like I made it so. If you don’t put him down there right now, he’s going to die in less than a minute. Now do it.”

            Panicked, and beyond thinking through the crooked logic of all this, Nina hurriedly threw herself back in the chair. With utmost care, even as she bristled at what she realized David was going through, the young woman brought the hand which cradled him down toward the floor, then lowered her sole arch right over her cupped palm. Just for good measure, she peeled her sock off her damp flesh and flung it across the room, to give him a purer source.

            David, even as he was forced back into the wretched, sour aura of Nina’s foot, could breathe again at last, however reticently. Tainted oxygen inflated his lungs, and he couldn’t help but sigh with relief, even as the gaseous atmosphere pumping into his body now was, once again, pure foot-stink and grime.

            Nina was on the verge of crying now from all the excitement. Her chest heaved as she kept David’s half-inch body as near as possible to her wrinkled sole.

            “That’s it,” Ariel giggled encouragingly. “Really let him breathe it in. Deep. That’s how he likes it.”

            “You’re fucking crazy,” Nina sobbed dryly, unable to look up at Ariel. She raised her hand slightly until she felt David’s puny body squeeze lightly into the plush ceiling of her sole. His tiny chest rose and fell with revulsion as he took in her dank odor out of necessity. As bad as she felt, she understood finally that there was no alternative until Ariel deigned otherwise.

            “Mmmm… yeah, maybe I am just a teeny bit crazy. But you wanna know what else I am? I am having a fucking blast with all this stuff I learned,” Ariel said honestly. She laughed again, then sauntered back toward the apartment doorway. “I’ll catch you guys later, after I’ve learned some more cool stuff we can do to David. So just keep him warm and alive for me, Nina, and remember! If you move him away from there, he’s gonna die, and it’ll be your fault. Don’t try and come after me, cuz I will make you pay for it. But seriously, though, don’t feel bad. He likes it, really! If you don’t believe me, go ahead and give him a poke.”

            The door slammed shut behind the devious redhead. Nina was left in solitude, hunched over the chair with her damp, balmy bare foot slow-cooked for a day in her sweaty shoes now curled over David’s hapless little body. Dark makeup washed in thin streams down her cheeks as she openly cried now in the helplessness of the situation. For a while, she didn’t say anything, only ensuring her hand hovered at a consistent distance from her sole so David could get air. Then, she felt the poke.

“What the…” Nina muttered. Out of curiosity, she pressed her best friend’s tiny naked body back up into the tender slope of her sole. Her finger held him in place against her foot, with his body gently molded to the malleable flesh in a snow-angel formation. Slight though it was, she could detect a very distinct, softly pointed sensation from a microscopic extremity.

            David, despite the sweat-fog he was forced to exist in now in order to breathe, found the strength to blush. Now he had a second reason to want to vomit. As if it wasn’t enough to require this torment for life, he was right back in the same biological quandary he’d been in before Ariel transformed him. It seemed his sister hadn’t seen fit to remove the curse on his family jewels yet.

            His tiny erection was squeezed proudly into a smelly crease of pink-flushed foot flesh.

            “Have you got a fucking hard-on, David?” Nina croaked, a shiver running down her spine at the very thought. Out of instinct, she allowed her hand to drop lower away from her upturned sole. In that instant, she felt broiling anger rising at the thought that, after everything he’d been through in her shoe during the day, and terrifying her to her very soul over the responsibility of his life, that he’d actually be sick enough to enjoy it.

            “NO! N-NO! Nina, PLEASE! Put me B-BACK!” David choked. Though he was only a few inches further away from the source of her stink now, the lack of salt-and-toejam-flavored oxygen was shriveling his lungs. He floundered pathetically in her hand as he struggled to right himself, despite his now-raging chub.

            “Shit! Sorry! But…” she cried. Instantly she lifted her hand back up and sandwiched him in a hot, airless space between the firm upward thrust of her wide palm, and the spongy, rancid field that was her ripe sole. “But what the fuck? Why is your dick hard? Don’t you realize what’s happening? Do you even care?”

            “Of! Course! I! Care!” he gasped, gratefully sucking in the disgusting reek of Nina’s unfolding foot wrinkles once again. Too afraid of being deprived of air again, the miniature man pressed his face up into the doughy incline of the woman’s gorgeous sole. He inhaled deeply from her feminine pores, leeching the grimy, life-giving effluvium from the very source.

            “So what is this all, then? Some kind of game? What, you and sister? Do you just play together like this? She shrinks you, and you just… what, get off on people stepping on you and making you breathe in their gunk?”

            “NO! It’s! Magic! Too!” David cried in between hard inhales, with his puny nostrils shoved into the nearest valley of Nina’s peachy foot flesh. He was aware with every hiccupped syllable just how ridiculous it must’ve sounded. “Makes! It! Grow! When! I! Smell!”

            “Oh my God…” Nina mumbled, grasping it finally. She wanted to faint backward into the chair, but knew it would doom David if she allowed him to move away from her sole.

            Nina couldn’t help but feel, by now, the leftover droplets of sweat collecting via gravity into the central arch of her sole. Drop by salty drop, it plunked down and pooled in her palm around David’s body. Before long he was floating in a makeshift kiddy pool of Nina’s foot sweat collected in her hand.

            “I’m! Sorry!” he huffed. Glistening orbs of fresh sweat trickled like miniature rivers down from the valleys of Nina’s cresting toes. They splashed upon David’s face, and though they only increased the potency of the aroma, their flavor also revitalized his lungs.

            “What are we gonna do? Is… is there any way to stop her? Make her undo all this?” Nina asked.

            It took close to an hour to get the entire explanation out, as David could only tear his face from the tacky, lunar terrain of Nina’s meaty sole for a few seconds at a time. Partly because he was too afraid to spend too long away from her skin, and partly because Nina herself, in deference to his frightening new medical condition, continually mashed David firmly but gently into the silky mass of her sole, silencing him. However, with patience and effort, the young man managed to continue snorting disgusting liquid life from his best friend’s giant foot and still explain his wild morning involving Ariel and the mysterious magic tome.

            “I’ve got to find that book, then,” Nina declared solemnly.

            “There’s! No! Way!” he gulped. David trembled now from the intense effort of speaking with so little space for pause in his lifeline. He smacked his chapped lips which stung down to the vein from the continuous smearing of Nina’s gummy, half-dried sweat. “I’ll! Die!”

            “There… is a way, David. But I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

            “What?”

            “Well, we know you can’t be away from my foot, or you’re going to suffocate. So that’s definite. And… I can’t get the book from here, obviously. I have to go find your sister. And since I can’t walk and hold you at the same time…”

            David’s blood ran cold, despite all the bone-melting heat under foot and finger he’d experienced today. Was she really suggesting what he thought she was?

            “NINA!”

            “I’m sorry, David, I really am. I know it’s awful. But I’m going to have to put you back inside my shoe, under my foot, and wear you for just a little while, to keep you safe, while I find Ariel and her book.”

            “NO!”

            “Don’t be scared. I’ll put you between my toes, so I can’t crush you. It won’t be comfortable, I know, but it’ll be soft, and you’ll still be able to breathe in my… foot as much as you want.”

            “I! Don’t! Want! To…”
            “I understand, David, it was just a figure of speech. Now, hold tight. This will be easier if we get it over with. The sooner you’re between my toes and in my shoe, the sooner I find that book, and we can fix this!” Nina said.

            David knew perfectly well he’d have no say in the matter now. It felt pointless to try screaming a protest. Not at half an inch tall, and not when he required near-constant nose-to-foot contact with Nina in order to survive. He felt her thumb and index finger pinching his sides and raking him softly up the sole slope. Crossing the low hillock of the ball of her foot, David’s face was mopped up into the cushier curve just below her toes until, finally, his head was wedged into the opening between her big and second toes.

            “There we go,” Nina whispered. She prodded at David’s helpless naked body a few times as he continued doing the only thing he could: breathing in hard, cheesy air with all he had. Though she understood why now, she shuddered again when her finger accidentally brushed his still-throbbing erection the size of a pinhead.

            David tried not to despair as his world was suddenly clouded by thick white cotton, still soggy from the magical sauna-trip Nina’s feet had received today. The heft of the wet sock sunk over his body, encouraging him to burrow deeper between his best friend’s filthy, greasy toes. There was almost a risk of him slipping like a piece of rice out of Nina’s worming digits, but she clamped them firmly around David’s body, keeping him in place.

            The sock was tugged up to her ankles. The foot was shoved back into the waiting, cramped darkness of the tennis shoe. Lacing back up, Nina exited her apartment with determination in her heart, careful not to place her feet down on the earth with too much impact.

            And David just kept on slurping air as he hugged his naked body into the nearest plush shaft of Nina’s toe. His erection certainly wasn’t helped by the constant, bucking motion which continually masturbated his sensitive member against the oily pillar of toe flesh. All he could do was grit his teeth and ride out the seconds between now and salvation.

            “Hey again, “little” brother!” Ariel’s voice laughed in his head again via telepathy. “Well, I hope you’re happy! I made you a person again, after all. Don’t you want to say thank you?”
            “N… N… NO!” he screamed after multiple stuttered attempts to unglue himself fully enough from Nina’s warm, sweat-sticky toe skin.

            “Well, fine, I guess you haven’t learned any manners yet from all this! That’s okay, though, I’m still gonna give you at least one more chance to make it up to me,” Ariel said. “For starters, let’s just test out a new spell I made up myself, shall we?”

David wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. Did his sister say she made up a spell? That couldn’t possibly not be the worst news to have hit David’s ears today. And it had been, all things considered, the worst possible day for anyone in the history of humankind.

            “Let’s see…” Ariel drawled. “Right now, everything down there smells ten times as bad to you as it actually is. So how about… oh… with every new breath you take in now, we’ll add one more to that number. Sound fair to you?”
            “H-Huh?” David peeped. In his huffed surprise, he felt his lungs contract and expand several times in quick succession.

            “Gotta get a grip on that greedy little nose of yours, David. I know you wanna soak up that nice, stinky air some more, but you’re not gonna make it if you don’t slow down. You’re already at fifteen times the strength now.”

            His sister’s cruel, lilting voice faded out again. David tried to think as he had when he went scuba-diving years ago. Then, he’d learned to conserve air underwater and take plentiful, long gulps from the oxygen mask before pacing them. If he was going to avoid passing out from the sheer brain-curdling mania of this stench assaulting him at a multiplying rate, he’d have to outlast it.

            It wasn’t easy. Even after David got used to slowing his breath to a manageable rate, the inevitable build-up of that heinous foot odor spread like smoke in a burning house. He was too afraid to count his breaths, but he was sure by now he had to be up to at least the thirty times mark. Minutes more passed. Forty. Forty-five. It had to be over fifty now. These desperate, thirsty gasps of air against Nina’s wet, brackish foot flesh were fifty times as powerful as they would’ve been if he’d merely stuck his lips inside her sweaty shoe at normal size and sucked down a briny whiff.

            This smell was something alien now. David couldn’t conceive that anything in the known solar system could actually concoct something so vile and sharp in its pungency to his every nerve ending. Let alone that he’d be experiencing it for such a sustained period of time in secret torture, all by his younger sister’s vengeful hand.

            David, as his eyes watered in conjunction with the generous sweat of Nina’s foot being painted into his skin, attempted to cobble together a way of comparison. Some point of reference for this wunderkind of a human body odor.

            The nearest thing could use to understand Nina’s stench was an imaginary stadium consisting of thousands of women of every age and size, all pumping their legs and arms upon exercise bikes, and funneling each sweet-and-sour drop of their aggressive sweat into tubes. That liquid would be carried to a particle accelerator at the center of the stadium, where every spritz of salty, acidic sweat wrung from hair, squeezed from armpits, and leaked from their feet would be distilled. Then, that chemical weapon of compressed, atomic female sweat belonging to thousands would be poured into a bottle and aged like fine wine for decades in a sealed vault, until this instant, finally, when in all its caustic, dehumanizing glory it was poured over David’s face and down his throat.

            This was, truly, the only way David could comprehend the smell which molested his lungs now with every increasingly musky breath.

            Nina arrived at David and Ariel’s apartment. She used her spare key to enter, undoing the latches, barely allowing the metallic grind to echo in the hall. There would only be one chance here. Obviously if Ariel hadn’t brought the book with her before to visit Nina’s apartment and break the news, she’d have to leave it somewhere; was there a safer place than her own home?

            There was no sound nor sign of life as Nina tiptoed into the living room. She eyed the closed doors and the side hallway, held her breath, and darted toward Ariel’s bedroom. The door was ajar, so Nina simply pushed it open. She found an empty room, the bedsheets neatly folded; laid in the center was a large, leather-bound book containing an atlas-worth of yellowed pages.

            That had to be it.

            Nina lunged forward, not wanting to miss this chance for her poor best friend suffering down in her shoes. To her surprise, however, as her hands clawed and came down upon the broad cover of the tome, her fingers passed right through it and met the buoyant mattress. Stunned, Nina watched as the illusion of the book crumbled away.

            The closet doors swung open, and Ariel appeared from between the menagerie of hanging clothes, with that same nauseating, victorious grin on her pretty lips. She gave her fiery red hair an attitudinal flip as she hugged the real magic book to her chest.

            “Now come on, Nina!” Ariel groaned. “I gave you super easy instructions to follow. What did I say? Don’t come after me, and just keep my brother alive for a while on your stink! Was that seriously so hard?”

            “You have to undo this, Ariel! NOW!” Nina shouted, her hands balled into fists. She stared down the younger five-foot-four girl, noting her more slender frame and less toned musculature. Nina shifted her weight back against one foot in preparation to pounce; in this act, she forgot about David as he was squelched mightily into the swampy insole, spared crushing only due to the alleviated pressure between her beefy toes.

            The half-inch man roared out in the dark, wet void from the weight. In that interim, a zesty splash of foot sweat waterboarded his unfortunately open gullet.

            “Excuse you, Nina, but I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to now. Not with this book. In fact, there’s a couple new things I think I want to do now that I’ve seen you can’t follow simple directions. It’s a shame. We could’ve had a lot of fun, making my brother into our little foot-bitch together. I could’ve been a waaaay better friend to you than David, you know, with all this stuff I can do? But not anymore.”

            “Give me that book!” Nina shrieked. She leapt forward, arms outstretched to tackle Ariel to the ground. However, the redhead simply lifted a hand and snapped her fingers in combination with a silently uttered code.

            Nina crashed head-long into the instantaneously vast expanse of carpet fluff. Flailing for purchase, she turned herself over, noticing that both of her shoes had come flying off. Some distance behind her, she saw David, just as naked as ever, but appearing to be significantly larger than before. In fact, he probably stood almost as tall as her knee. For just a second, Nina wondered at how he’d regrown without the book, until she took a better look around at the towering bedposts, the infinite plain of bedroom carpet, and the skyscraper body of Ariel standing above like a ginger-haired archangel of death.

            David hadn’t regrown; Nina just shrunk.

            A scream roiled but died inside Nina’s throat. She couldn’t even muster the courage to stand up. There was nothing to do but bow low to the earth, her every molecule quaking in fear.

            Ariel stifled a musical laugh. She tapped the toe of her knee-high cowgirl boot.

            “There, Nina. That size suits you much better than your last one,” the redhead said. She set the book down on top of the dresser, so hopelessly up and out of Nina’s reach, there wasn’t even a prayer of it being stolen. Ariel clapped her hands together, shaking her head in delighted disbelief as she observed the two shrunken figures sprawled down on the floor like insects: Nina, at four inches, and David, at an even more pathetic half-inch.

            “I think we three are gonna have a lot of fun together,” Ariel commented at last, when neither of her puny subjects answered. She stepped over to the bed, careful to drop each boot on the carpet with enough force to rattle the bones of her shrunken toys, and sat down. Propping one leg up, Ariel set about prying her calves up the clothen tunnel of her boot.

The now equally tiny Nina, with no Plan B, crawled toward her shrimpy best friend where he still lay in shellshock a few inches back, as they watched Ariel remove her foot from the boot.

            “I hope you two are thirsty!” Ariel sang. She released her grip on the boot and slammed her pale, sweat-glistening naked foot into the floor with the strength of a typhoon. Her muscular toes choked the fibers of the carpet. “Cuz I’ve got a nice, delicious, refreshing drink for you guys that I’ve been working on all day. Why don’t you both come over here and have a taste?”

            Nina looked from David to his sister’s toes.

            “Oh, aren’t you two so funny. You’re both too shy to go first, huh?” Ariel asked.

            Defiantly, Nina stood with hands on her hips, glaring up at the indomitable giantess on the throne of her bed. She laid a hand on David’s shoulder, hoping to comfort him and stand as a team against their tormentor, no matter how foolish it appeared.

            “Why don’t we just say ladies go first, hmm?” Ariel snickered. She snapped her fingers yet again. Her lips fluttered. “Come have a drink, Nina.”

            Nina felt herself go catatonic for a moment before her limbs sprung to life. Except her brain wasn’t sending a single command for motion. She was walking without meaning.

            “What’s HAPPENING?” Nina screamed. Against her will, her body was marching forth like a zombie. Directly toward the monumental form of Ariel’s awaiting bare foot the size of a bus.

            “That’s right, come here, little girl,” Ariel said somewhat needlessly, as the spell was already in effect. “You’re going to get a nice, healthy taste of these nasty feet you seem to hate so much.”

            “WHAT?” Nina croaked. She was fighting her body now, with every fiber of her being, to stop walking. Involuntarily, her tongue licked hungrily along her lower lip. At most, all she got for her resistance was an unsteady tremble in her gait; still she walked, now within reach of the enormous foot with toes larger than Nina’s head.

            Ariel peeled her other foot out of its respective boot and then, too, set that behemoth of an appendage with its searingly warm skin, eager toes, and moist sole upon the earth. There was practically a visible wisp of hot, fusty air rising from the base of her body.

            “Come and get it,” Ariel said. “Kneel.”

            Immediately, Nina’s body obeyed and crouched down in front of the giant woman’s left foot, with damp digits curling and caressing the ground in anticipation.

            “P-Please, Ariel,” Nina begged. “Please stop all this. You can-”

            “Lick. Now,” Ariel commanded simply in soft interruption.

            Like clockwork, Nina bent over so fast she almost gave herself whiplash. Tiny pink tongue fully extended from between her lips, the newly shrunken girl slathered the nearest meaty, gritty toe in her saliva. Encrusted grime assaulted her mouth.

            “I guess this’ll make you think twice before you ever crack another joke about me, huh?” Ariel taunted. She twirled a long strand of silky red hair around her finger. “I think the only one making jokes from now on is me, about you, and how funny you look licking my toes.”

            David remained where he’d been abandoned by his possessed friend. He noticed he no longer required foot-stink to breathe, which was a plus, but the horrible sight before him kept him rooted to the ground in terror all the same.

            Nina’s remaining black eyeliner washed down her cheeks. Her tears came relentlessly, and seemed to be the only bodily function she was currently in control of due to Ariel’s spell. Still she licked. The shrunken girl’s jaw was beginning to ache, her tongue drying out from the lapping frenzy.

            The taste was truly something else. Like a combination of moonshine alcohol, pickle juice, and month-old dirty laundry; all wrapped in a neat, slimy package that currently coated Ariel’s entire foot in liquid form. It passed stickily over Nina’s lips and hotly into her throat. Her gag reflex was almost in overdrive, yet there was nothing she could do. Thanks to the curse, her mouth was compelled to continue lipping and suckling every square millimeter of naked foot flesh for its sweaty resources.

            “God, this actually feels amazing. Why didn’t I do this the first thing?” Ariel questioned to nobody in particular. She rested her hands on the mattress and rolled her neck back in luxurious revolutions. “Seriously, this is the best kind of massage ever. What kind of purpose even is there for people like you two except doing this for me? Get in deeper, bitch.”

            Two of Ariel’s toes spread, revealing the tender crevice between. Nina hacked through the gargling mouthfuls of sweat as she crawled closer. Her sore tongue met the raw, webbed flesh between the ginger’s digits; for an instant, the texture reminded her of red velvet cake, right up until the flavor spiked her tongue again like nitrous. Nina managed to scream again despite having cheeks full of foot sweat.

            “Don’t think I’m being selfish, though, Nina. I’m really not. Here, I’ll even let you test out this whole feeling I’m getting right now. And I have just the tiny person to do it,” Ariel said, finally casting her gaze back over to her half-inch brother, who had yet to take a step during this whole remorseful affair. She raised an eyebrow and smirked. “DAVID! Come over here, put one of Nina’s toes in your mouth, and suck it nice and hard for me.”

            The tiny young man felt no magic compelling his muscles. His sister hadn’t even bothered with the spell. Her booming voice and charismatic dimples were just about enough. Either way, there was plenty of promise in her tone that he would face dire consequences for refusing the command. He had no choice.

            David approached behind Nina, who was still hunched over the altar of his sister’s giant toes with her head crammed between them like a vice. All the while, Ariel’s thick toes thrummed and fondled the shrunken brunette’s unfortunate neck. The four-inch girl’s own socked feet were folded behind her bent legs, soles-up toward the ceiling for the taking. There was no more possibility of revolt or insult in the face of such tyranny; David had to submit or, he realized now, he was going to be destroyed.

            Hands shaking from adrenaline and nearly-numb revulsion, David pulled off her sock. He cradled one of Nina’s toes in his hands like a piece of fruit. Still just as moist and plush as when he’d last touched them, this one took on the size of a plump apricot; were it not for its elegant skin cell texture and tan-flesh tone, he might’ve been fooled. Sighing, and choking back well-earned disgust, David opened his mouth and shoved his best friend’s entire marshmallow-toe inside. Using what little jaw control he still possessed with such a chunky object occupying his lips, he began to suck.

            Flavors he’d experienced while his body was wedged like toejam between her digits now entered his cheeks in tenfold strength. Nina’s adorable orb of a toe was like a full sponge, just begging to be squeezed. Its sweaty juices leaked down his throat almost as soon as David wrapped his mouth around her warm, sour flesh. His painful, blue-balled erection dragged on the carpet as David flattened himself down, feeding off Nina’s meaty toe and keratin nail. Every suck was deep enough that he could practically feel the geometry of her spiraled toeprint stamp against his throat.

            “Wow, if only… if only I’d known how to do this last night…” Ariel uttered dreamily. She was only half-conscious now from the all-consuming power trip of the human toe-licking conga line she’d created. “As soon as David made his cute little joke, I could’ve just snapped my fingers, and poof… you two would’ve been on your knees, one foot for each of you, all my toes in your mouths until the sun came up. I bet Mary wouldn’t have minded a bath, either. A nice yummy treat to end another day in your stupid, pathetic, worthless lives.”

Nina, at the center of this machine of teamwork, experienced a rippling tingle up from her lowest extremities as her best friend shoved her juicy digits over his teeth and sucked with all his life; meanwhile, her own lips were turning raw, robbed of sensation, as she endeavored to press her face ever-deeper into the triangular canyon of Ariel’s sloppy toes.

            The giant woman’s skin had sponged layer after layer of sweat into Nina’s face, leaving her cheeks an ashen smear of Goth-lite makeup and lubricated secretion. She moaned, uselessly, pleading with the universe itself to intervene and sever her invisible binds to Ariel’s writhing toes.

            But of course, no help was forthcoming. Not from the universe, and certainly not from the radiant, cackling redhead at the center of all this silent carnage, who was having more fun today than she’d had in all other previous days of her life combined.

            The joyful group activity carried on for more than an hour. Occasionally Ariel offered another encouraging comment as she languished in the soothing, empowering gift of it all. Nina and David, each with their tongues and teeth wrapped around firm, slimy foot flesh, had no other resistance except exasperated tears.

            At last, Nina paused of her own volition, and rose up in stark shock. It was almost a novel feeling, after so long, to not have her tongue pressed hard into the greasy wall of Ariel’s toe crevice. Curiously, she looked up to see the colossal redhead leaning over the side of the bed, her fingers steepled together.

            “Wow, you’re not exactly on top of things, are you, Nina? I cut off the spell at least half an hour ago. You could’ve stopped any time between then,” Ariel explained. “But hey, who am I to deny you the pleasure, if you’re that into it, after all?”

            Nina hunched over and retched. She vomited thinly into the carpet fibers. This reaction owed only partially to the lingering tastes of sweaty skin and foot grit on her palette; the very idea that she’d spent thirty minutes, at least, licking and nibbling Ariel’s titanic toes of her own technical free will was more than enough to force a stomach evacuation in Nina.

            David required almost another full minute before he even noticed the trio had cut off the toe-sucking train. He still remained faithfully latched onto Nina’s foot, with the full bulb of her toe jammed inside his undulating cheeks. Some prying was required to extract her supple digit from his mouth, as it had only swollen larger from the loving attention of his cheeks and tongue.

            At this point, David couldn’t possibly say which of his emotions and impulses were guided by Ariel’s magic, and which weren’t. He decided he didn’t want to know.

            “That was a lot of fun, you guys. Thanks so much,” Ariel crooned with diabolical sugar-sweetness. “But like I said, I don’t want you to think I’m being selfish here, hogging you two all to myself. Maybe there’s somebody else like me, who also gets tired feet after a long, hard day? Or maybe even somebody who’s having a long, hard day right now? Say… a certain Applebee’s waitress who understands what it’s like to be on your toes all night, never allowed to relax?”

            David blinked. She couldn’t mean…

            “Don’t do anything to Mary!” Nina cried out, pointing an accusing finger up at their giant ginger warden. “Don’t you dare! I’ll fuck you up, Ariel, I swear I will.”

            “Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Ariel said. “Nobody’s going to hurt Mary. Mary didn’t laugh at me, after all. You two on the other hand, well…”

            “W-What?”

            “You might want to take a nice deep breath before this next part. Also, I haven’t practiced this spell very much, so you might end up in the center of the earth instead of where I want you. Now, hold very still, and try to think fresh, clean thoughts,” Ariel explained. “Cuz thoughts are the only thing you’re going to have, for the rest of your dumb little lives.”

            Heaving the book down from the dresser, David’s sister thumbed through the pages. When at last she discovered the right one, her emerald eyes crackled. Her lips moved with supernatural speed. Palms dovetailed together at the spine, she slammed the magic book closed.

            In the same instant, both David and Nina’s worlds went dark. They were tumbling, devoid of compass direction or gravity, yet falling nonetheless. Hard as it was to see in the smoky void, David couldn’t help but realize he seemed to be the same size as Nina again. Were it not for the rippling atmosphere they were currently entrapped within, he might’ve guessed they were returned to their normal sizes. But he knew better than to be so optimistic.

            He reached out for his best friend’s hand. Nina shouted, the sound echoing through the darkness like an empty cathedral. Still, she managed to snatch his fingers in her own. Then reality melted upwards into being, or at least some semblance of it.

            David and Nina landed upon mesh, moon-like terrain. It appeared they were in some sort of subterranean cave; only a pale halo of light from dizzingly high above made its way into this mysterious open space. They threw themselves into a hug; despite the fact that David still lacked clothes, they were too relieved at their apparent survival of Ariel’s spell to care.

            “What do we do?” Nina sobbed, her arms shaking as she held him close for support.

            “I don’t know,” he said, honestly out of answers now.

            “I’m scared, David.”

            “Me too.”

            “Why is she doing this?”       
            “Because she’s fucking crazy and has a magic book,” David sighed. “Let’s just start moving. We have to do something.”

            “What the hell is this place?” Nina demanded. She squinted, attempting to formulate a mental model of their environment. It was nearly unthinkable. The nearest approximation of dark, flaking-rock walls might well have existed miles in the distance. Nothing, except the ground they stood directly upon, was clearly discernible.

            “Hey, I did it, again!” Ariel boomed from the ether. Her voice flooded the anonymous, high-arched hall. “You’re welcome, you two, for not messing it up. But I guess I’d be fooling myself to assume you two would actually say “thank-you” for not killing you. Whatever. You may want to get comfy, cuz you’re about to learn about the real pressures of waitressing. And I’m not just talking responsibility, I’m talking about pressure.”

            “ARIEL!” David called. “How long can we do this?”

            “As long as it takes you to learn,” Ariel said gravely. “I’ll check back on you two in a while. Enjoy yourselves!”

            “What is this, David?” Nina asked. She stooped down, prodding a finger at the woolen, thickly knitted tapestry which made up the ground. “It almost looks like a net.”

            “Could be,” he said. “Didn’t… she say we were going to see Mary?”

            “Yeah,” Nina said. She cast her gaze up to the hopelessly high cylindrical curve of the ceiling, like the inverted hold of a battleship meant for celestial beings. No object in this place was conceivably close enough to touch or reach out for. “But this doesn’t look like anywhere I’ve seen before. There’s no one here, big or small.”

            “Nina.” David’s lips quivered.

            “What?”

            “Nina.”

            “Just say it!”

            “Turn around.”

            Nina, only just now noticing the sudden eclipsing of the solar glow from above, looked over her shoulder and up to the shadowing heavens. In concert, every molecule of her body was paralyzed with shock.

            A shape, more massive than anything either of them believed could exist on planet Earth, was descending. Ovular at first, its violent rotations and revolutions as its forced its way inside the opening of light revealed it to be of a far more complex, softly oblong frame. Five island-sized objects in space, affixed to the front of the incoming giant meteor, rose and fell against the motion of its host. It wasn’t a falling star, though it was just about the size of one.

            “Jesus fucking Christ…” Nina choked.

            “That’s…”

            “…Mary. That’s Mary’s foot…”

The carefree blonde, oblivious to even an iota of the physics-breaking madness taking place on the ground floor, hummed a cheery tune to herself as she slid her bare foot into her waiting shoe by the door. She played with her hair in both hands, tying it back into a mess-free ponytail, while casually wrestling her hefty, size-10 foot into its skin-tight home before a full evening shift at the restaurant. It was a habit she had repeated daily for years now to save time, and could’ve done up her hair and put on her shoes simultaneously in her sleep; the physical act of it was forgotten by the time Mary was headed out into the street. 

            To Nina and David, however, at such near-microscopic size, this act was akin to planetary forms colliding with enough force to shatter worlds. Once Mary’s naked foot had eaten up the entire infinite cave, there was no light left to guide them. All they had was thrown into piercing darkness and motion propelled by the solar winds of Mary’s moving skin.

            They watched the endless parade of her pink sole wrinkles flashing above like the aurora borealis as Mary stretched her toes toward the humble tip of her footwear. Once her digits were comfortably settled in, miles ahead and out of her unknowing prisoners’ view, the young woman caked her arch down into the malleable morass of the earth which was her cottony insole, stained across canyons with aged grease pits of ancient sweat from repeated wearing.

             David and Nina were flung with profound force, as atoms outracing light. Their hands separated. In the airborne journey, still beneath Mary’s comfortably planted foot, it was a marvel to each of them that they weren’t dead yet. So small had they become, there was actually room beneath the deep, crested wrinkles of their mutual friend’s wide, meaty sole for them to fly like displaced dust particles.

            While the majority of the woman’s peachy land mass of a foot was molded with immovable strength to the earth now, the upturned valleys of her fleshy creases were plenty deep enough for them to exist within at their mite-sizes. David and Nina each landed on the insole again, miraculously still conscious and unbroken. It had to be only through Ariel’s magic mercy that they were allowed to survive such violence.

            Mary’s foot was the sky now. That was all there was to it. As it first entered the shoe with the grace and force of a flaming meteor, it now adopted the entire over-world for both David and Nina. There was nothing above except Mary’s gritty, spiral-patterned, creamy-dimpled sole.

            This pattern continued for interminable minutes or hours; which one, neither David nor Nina could tell. As Mary took ponderous steps forward in eternal space beyond, the gentle force of her arcing foot propelled them through the stale atmosphere beneath her foot. Somehow, they managed to continually land beneath a puffy sole wrinkle each and every time.

            “Getting the hang of it, you two?” Ariel’s voice called out in their heads. “It’s just about time I showed you exactly what it’s like to be me or Mary. Someone who walks through life getting zero appreciation for everything we put up with at work, and way too many idiots who think it’s funny to look down on us. Well, guess who’s looking down on you now?”

            David opened his mouth to speak as he was launched another mile along the upside-down, fleshy riverbank of Mary’s elegant, brawny sole-sky. The warm wind whipped by his lips so fast, any sound he produced was instantly lost to the void of the astronomic woman’s boundless wrinkles. There was a veritable side-pocket universe inside this shoe now; the previous laws of nature were abandoned, and only the unknowing machinations of Mary’s mighty heel and destructive toes were in control of life.

            “Here’s my personal favorite spell now,” Ariel announced. “As much fun as it is to shrink you two losers, I can honestly say nothing makes me happier than what I’m about to put you two through now with this one. I hope you took a nice clean breath before I brought you here, cuz it’s about to get a little… wet. Let’s see, David was up to one hundred-times the strength of the smell before? Let’s multiply that by, oh, say, ten more? If you survive, I’ll talk to you on the other side.”

            David tried to call out for Nina. His arms windmilled uselessly in the space, knowing the odds of actually touching her after they’d been thrown so far apart were less than nil. Still it brought him comfort to imagine his friend nearby in the heart-pounding seconds of waiting almost as tortuous as everything he’d been through so far.

            This was the first time his sister had actually said “if” they survived. From the steeliness of her delightfully chewed words, he knew she meant it. In all likelihood, this now was the end for him and Nina.

            The heat rose across the entire ecosystem of Mary’s shoe. Like night and day. It was as though the planet had flipped on its axis, hurling the frigid Arctic into the skin-peelingly balmy Saharan desert. Akin to the experience which took place inside Nina’s own unfortunate shoe earlier, the effect was compounded at epic proportions.

            Ariel was not playing around this time.         

            Mary stirred. Grimacing, the unaware waitress paused mid-stride, with a plate of food balanced across one forearm. Her palm was pressed to her neck, testing her pulse, for at least some biological reason to explain what she was feeling now down below.

            Warmth, concentrated with weaponized precision inside each of her shoes. More than warmth, in fact. This was so close to scalding that Mary would’ve sworn these shoes had been freshly boiled in a pot of magma just before she tugged them on. Almost instantaneously, she felt her pores opening up for some kind of cooling relief. The first wave of glazed sweat was making its way down the sloped, plush upper platform of her foot in a waterfall and into the cramped space below.

            She took another step. Her foot squished into the sloshing earth beneath.   

            David careened through the in-shoe stratosphere, higher than ever as Mary took longer strides. He was plastered just as noticeably as a speck of dirt in a sole wrinkle canyon. The mere contact with his looming, unaware foe instantly adhered his bare skin to Mary’s. A single sticky droplet the size of a hot air balloon was plenty to entrap him easily in its gooey bindings.

            Senses abused and comatose after a full day of inhaling the magically ravaged giant feet of his sister and friends, David’s nose and lips were almost out of feeling. Yet despite that indifferent fraying of his nerves, Mary’s catastrophically cooked foot skin still managed to surprise.

            Nothing within the grasp of David’s mind, body, or spirit could even begin to fathom the aroma. The sheer funk. This wasn’t a thing that could exist on earth, in the solar system, or any other planet in the Euclidian space-time continuum he knew of.

            No, Mary’s foot stink (if it could still be identified with such a lowly and innocuous word as that) existed in its own different dimension now. Beyond the parameters of 3D space, beyond time, there was only this: the putrid, skin-shriveling, stomach-devouring, water-logged essence of the woman’s entrapped peds in the vast tomb arranged especially for her two best friends.

            Sweat rained from the shadow-shrouded, foot-flesh sky like a biblical plague. No natural disaster had anything on the absolute downpour taking place amongst the squishy, nightmarish conditions of Mary’s shoe insole beneath her heaving, red-flushed arch. David was washed from his accidental hiding place amongst the waitress’s sole wrinkles. His body was absorbed into the pearl-like orb of a falling sweat drop. If not for some quick action, he was almost sure he would’ve drowned in that bubble of gummy sweat.

“What the hell?” Mary murmured with discomfort. She shuffled her foot, nearly losing her balance on the slippery conditions inside her moist, enflamed shoe. “It was only supposed to be seventy-five out today!”

            It felt like she’d dunked her entire overheated appendage into a tank of syrup. She pivoted the ball of her foot, grinding her sole down into the shoe, hoping some adjustment would alleviate the steam and swamp. If anything, though, it was only made worse; sweat audibly gushed inside her shoe. A patch of damp moisture soaked along the exterior side of her slipper.

            “Ugh! I so cannot even with this right now,” Mary gagged. Shaking her head, she resolved to wipe it up later when she had a break; there were too many tables to wait on now. “What, did I eat something weird yesterday? God, I’m gonna need, like, eight showers.”

            Inside the shoe, below the peachy, wrinkled skyscape of reeking skin, the sweat-rainstorm had turned into a typhoon. Thick, viscous saltwater rose in high pools which rapidly were turning into lakes and ponds. Before long, as David came flying back down toward solid ground for the hundredth time, he was caught not by the spongy moonbounce of the insole, but the crashing tidal waves of churning sweat. There was actually enough warm, soupy foot-liquid collected around the everlasting expanse of Mary’s shoe that there was no way to avoid it now.

            “This is fricking crazy…” Mary gasped, fanning herself. She hunched over a seat in the restaurant’s break room, her shoes propped up on the chair. The woman could actually witness the shaping of her damp shoe molded like wet clay around her toes. The dark crescent curves of soiled crevices between her digits continued to leak from the inside. An actual drop of opaque sweat trickled in a slow, deliberate path from the tip of the woman’s shoe and down to her heel.

            “Oh my God, I think I’m gonna hurl!” the ditzy blonde uttered to herself as she watched her salty discharge dripping through her shoes. She peeled one slipper away from the rotund heel of her size-10, only to shove it back in just as quickly. The cloudburst of putrefied funk, not to mention the misty spritz of sweat which escaped merely by suction, was plenty to convince her to leave her poor feet inside, for the protection of her coworkers. “Shit, I need a vacation or something!”

            The drawing away of Mary’s heel, only to have it returned with an earth-splitting vengeance, was more than enough to whip the hot tropical storm of her shoe into a true geological frenzy. An ocean of sweat was rising beneath David’s back. Try as he might, gulp after gulp of the stinking, spicy stuff washed down his throat until he could feel his stomach bulging with Mary’s moisture.

            With every alternate step of his miles-high tormentor, he ping-ponged yet again through the black miasma of Mary’s shoe purgatory. He rebounded from the spongy, porous wall of an oscillating sole wrinkle the size of a mountain range, plummeted back down, and skipped across the bubbly, rancid sweat like a pointless pebble on the raging sea. The microscopic young man had entered his own orbit about the surf-and-sky of Mary’s punishing foot. Each dive he took, he found his body passing ever-longer through the bottomless lakes of musty, honeyed sweat.

            In the dark, then, David found his hand meeting another his same size. For a moment, he wrote it off as a mirage in this reverse-desert of unavoidable sweat waves and sticky foot skin islands. However, as he his fingers tightened, he rediscovered Nina in equal inhuman misery. Their palms locked together.

            By now, the billowing tide of sweat had flooded up to the very empyrean of sole flesh. There was no escaping the greedy maw of the formed sea. David and Nina, hand in hand, were sinking like rocks now in liquid so dense they might well have been preserved like flies in amber, if Mary were to halt her godlike steps.

            But she didn’t stop. She carried on her duties in the restaurant despite the sweat sopping through her footwear in glistening rivulets. And so, the shrunken pair of specks drifted ever-deeper into the watery void, their lungs filling with salty fluid and their minds at last enlightened to the extent of Ariel’s accursed mercies. Their bodies and orifices were full to the brim of pungent, vinegary sweat and the accompanying percolation of vile body odors dredged from the worst and hottest of humanity.

            David hugged his best friend, receiving the same embrace in return, as the last pathetic air bubbles ascended from their lips. Consciousness drowned from their very being, and with it, their lives.

            “OhmyGod, ohmyGod, ohmyGod… this… is… so… fricking… gross!” Mary shrieked to herself as she tiptoed up the steps into her apartment building. The entire walk home, she’d felt curious eyes on her back investigating the source of the mysterious sloshing sound effect which emanated from her feet as though she were hopping through rain puddles in rubber boots. Except, of course, the sound only arose from the wallowing of her overworked soles and ripe toes in the high-flooded sweat-sacs her shoes had become.

            Mary kicked her shoes off with a repulsed fervor as soon as she’d entered her home. Puddled sweat sprayed, spilling upon the floor as the shoes came to rest innocuously on their sides. The blonde stifled a scream of pure disgust, not wanting to have a worried neighbor come running and discover her humiliation. Her feet were blushed a ruddy pink, still gleaming with wet, painted secretions.

            “Hey, Mary!” Ariel said happily from the doorway of the apartment, where she’d suddenly appeared out of the corner of the waitress’s eye.

            “A-Ariel!” Mary stammered. She jammed the shoes beneath her coat rack, hoping to hide the mess. “What’s… uh, what’s up?”

            “Nothin’ much. What’s up with you?”

            “You know, same old… tough night at work.”

            “Hey, you know I know how that is, girl!” Ariel said cheekily.

            “Oh, I almost forgot,” Mary said, hoping to deflect the embarrassing topic. “Have you heard from Nina or your brother today? They were gonna shoot me a text at work about where we were hanging out tonight, but I guess they forgot.”

            “Nope, they haven’t said anything to me today. Maybe they’re just not that good of friends after all,” Ariel dropped in casually. She cocked her head, threading her fingers in her hair. “Say, I know it was a rough night at work, but I’m not used to seeing you looking so wiped. No offense. Everything all right?”

            “Yeah, yeah…” Mary sighed. She supposed it was all right to say, after Ariel had been the butt of her brother’s jokes the previous night for the very same offense. “Just been a weird night. My… my feet were just so, so sweaty. I’ve never felt anything like it in my whole life, you know? They were, like, drenched in there! I think my shoe was starting to dissolve or something.”

            “I’m sure it’ll be just fine after you’ve had a nice long bath,” Ariel commented. “That’s what I always do after a killer shift. Seriously, don’t be embarrassed or anything. Having stinky, sweaty feet is just the curse we bear to pay the bills, isn’t it?”

            “Thanks for understanding, girl,” Mary said. She leaned against the wall, one foot propped up on her knee where she could knead her swollen soles under fingertips. “I think I will go take that bath. To be honest, I think sometimes you’re the only one who really gets me.”

            “I got your back, girl,” Ariel said with a wink. She backed away from the door with a waggle-wave of her slender fingers. “And I’ll let you know if I hear a peep from David and Nina, all right?”

For the second time today, David was thrust back into wakefulness with no perception of his surroundings or even his body. He staggered to his feet and discovered Nina, now just as naked as he, floating in an empty space without the aid of atmosphere or rising tides. They were simply hovering.

            “Wake up, losers! C’mon, I don’t have all day. You have all day, obviously, but I don’t!” Ariel’s goddess voice taunted via magical transmission.

            All it took was Ariel’s demanding, singsong voice to tug David fully back into depressing existence.

            “What happened?” Nina uttered at last.

            “Are… are we… d-”

            “Of course you’re dead, stupid. You can’t go swimming in somebody’s sweat, not come up for air, and expect to not drown! Geez, I swear, I should’ve put you out of your misery a long time ago, “little” brother.”

            “So… so this is… the…” Nina said, unwilling to believe they still weren’t free of the redhead’s bonds. She clawed her tiny fingers against her rosy cheeks. “…the… afterli-”

            “Yeah, this is the afterlife!” Ariel said cheerfully. “Well, sort of. There’s a necromancy chapter in the back of this book, so I went ahead and tested out a few things. Basically, you’re not in actual hell, you’re just in… well, the one I made for you!”

            “What does that mean?” Nina cried. She stretched out an arm, making an attempt to swim away in the silvery void. However, as per usual at this size, she could do nothing to affect her position in the world.

            “What do you think it means? You drowned. Then you started to float to heaven, and I snatched you back up, like the toys you are, and brought you here instead,” Ariel explained. “I’d start getting used to it if I were you, cuz the spell I put on you? This whole place? It’s kind of permanent.”

            “David…” Nina said helplessly, searching his eyes for answers. He couldn’t even meet her gaze. His attention was ensnared elsewhere in the necromantic vacuum.

            “David, why won’t you look at me?”

            “Nina, don’t turn around.”

            “Why? What’s-”

            The void dissipated like pea-soup fog as six foreign obelisk-like objects swum into view. David and Nina were slammed body-to-body, limbs entangled, as they were plowed toward a pinpoint in the darkness by the objects which dwarfed them so pathetically, though not so dramatically that they couldn’t name their identities.

            Six feet. Giant, forceful, and wickedly soft as always, balanced on heels as the walls of those upturned soles acted as an impassible barrier for their two inch-high prisoners. Specifically, three distinct pairs of feet, and though the attached legs stretched back into the smoky indistinction of this new hell, David and Nina could tell each twin-set of peds belonged to a different, feminine owner.

            Soles and heels rammed closer inch by claustrophobic inch. David and Nina huddled fetally together as they were cocooned in the encircling prison cell comprised of six unique horrors. With creepily soothing, self-assured poise, the enormous feet began a smearing, caressing dance in slow motion around the tumbling pair of unfortunate best friends.

            The first pair of feet, and the smallest, held a pale, creamy hue, with shallower sole wrinkles. Stubby, cute toes bobbed merrily above. A stale, sweetly-buttery scent masked by musk steamed off the flesh and invaded David and Nina’s nostrils.

            The second pair of middle size with roomy, expansive soles was also the darkest. Bronze-tan gleam adorned the radiant skin. A sharply specific note of herbal tea soap wafted from the skin like the very soles of Mother Nature herself, along with an earthier, dirtier aftertaste.

            “W-Wait…” Nina murmured. “I… I think I recognize…”

            The third and final, and largest, pair of lanky feet was the pinkest and peachiest with a complicated roadmap network of creases and wrinkles crisscrossing over the loping arch of the sole. That puffy flesh smacked of the cruel odors of aged milk and exotic cheese.

            By their powers combined, the three pairs of feet were coalescing their textures and scents in a bitter, inescapable inner globe for their puny hosts. Simultaneously, David and Nina experienced the unique literal identity-footprint of each ped, while also suffering amidst the fog and effluvium far harsher than any one smell alone.

            “If one of you thinks you can tell me who each of these poor, lovely feet belong to, I’ll delay the next spell by a minute,” Ariel promised. “Anybody?”

            “T-This is yours,” David croaked as he was smothered into the nearest size-6 curve of the smallest, milky-white sole. His naked body plastered against the pale, moonlike terrain. “Ariel…”

            “Correct!” his sister giggled. “And what makes this even better is that from now on, anytime you two rub up against that one, I get to feel like I’m getting a little massage in real life! Pretty cool, huh? Don’t be afraid to give me a lick now and again, just as a reminder that you existed once.”

            “Mary!” Nina cried out. She slammed into the heat-swollen wall of their waitress friend’s size-10 high-arch, rolling helplessly up the massive gangplank until she was snatched by the long, moist shafts of its finger-toes gripping her body. “Why?”

            “So you always have something to remember her by, silly!” Ariel chuckled. “That’s two for two. You guys really know feet, don’t you? Now who can tell me that last pair?”

            Nina and David hurtled back together in the center of their cramped foot-hell. They careened in unison toward the golden-tanned sole of the middle, size-8 appendage. Each of their clammy bodies fondled with extreme prejudice over the rubbery, luxurious wrinkles; at the top, their faces squeezed between a happily spreading toe crevice.

            Huffing in the rank air of the flushed flesh, Nina’s lips pried open by sheer pressure as a crystalline bead of sweat pearled upon the tender skin and passed into her tiny open mouth like an apricot from a tree. She wheezed and fought as the hot, oily liquid rolled down her gullet, and then with a nauseated start, Nina understood.

            “Me…” she uttered without sound. If it was possible for her to vomit in this lawless afterlife, she might’ve done so for every waking moment from here on out. “This… is me… this is my… my f-”

            “And that’s three for three! Too bad for you guys, I wasn’t actually going to delay the next spell, which I think you can tell has already begun,” Ariel announced. “The good news for you two is, it’s the last ever bit of magic I’m going to put on you. Isn’t that nice of me! The bad news? Those six feet are going to be the only things you ever see until the end of infinity. Every minute that passes, they get just a little bit smellier, a little bit sweatier, just for you two.”

            David and Nina tumbled through nothingness beyond space and time, where only the titanic feet of David’s sister, their unknowing friend, and Nina herself controlled their undying fates. They rolled over heel hills, wrestled with grappling toes, bounced from balls of feet, splashed through sweat puddles, swallowed dripping sweat, sandwiched between clamping soles, and cloyed for air not poisoned by salty, cheesy, grassy, milky, malodorous skin.

            At the unforgiving mercy of each perky personality inherent in every hungry giant foot.

            “Oh, I almost forgot! In case you two get bored… I made sure your puny sex organs still work! Not on each other, of course, I wouldn’t have allowed that… but if you ever find it’s getting just a little too hot and heavy in there, well… you can show one of those feet some appreciation with those slutty little tongues of yours, and I’m sure they can arrange for a pretty, stinky “end” to your troubles!”

            Ariel’s blissful laughter was the only damning chorus to meet David and Nina’s ears aside from the swishing of sweaty, smelly skin and their own desperate, magically-aroused screams so easily absorbed into the omnipotent inner walls of heavenly sole flesh which would be their eternal resting place in hell.