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“Oh, yes. I think you’re going to do just fine.”

Mitch was startled awake, with the bedsheets clutched around his neck, yet despite this pulse-skipping address by an unknown female voice in the dead of night which had roused him from his REM cycle, the process of opening his eyelids to the uncertain darkness took close to a full minute. Every muscle in Mitch’s body, in fact, labored under the sensation of being soaked in an inch-deep layer of partially-hardened molasses, with the weight particularly centralized over his chest, damning him with bizarre lethargy that couldn’t even be explained by being woken from a dream-state. The reason for this (but not for hearing an unknown voice in his deadbolted one-bedroom apartment) Mitch discovered only when his eyes adjusted to the pitch-blackness just sharply enough to recognize the shapes propped up in front of his chin.

Feet. Even through the all-swallowing shadows of his bedroom, darker than he’d ever remembered it when previously rousing in the wee hours, Mitch knew the shape of a woman’s bare peds anywhere, particularly when they were edged this near to his face, each resting back on their heels and revealing the blemishless pearly-textured sole island plains and starlight-gleaming toeprint pads beneath. They were simply breathtaking. Mitch was so enthralled by this sight, just drinking in as much detail from those mouth-watering pleat-fleshed museum-worthy twin peach arches presented atop his chest, he didn’t even worry for the first few minutes about trying to see beyond their surprisingly-tall silhouettes, which blocked his view to all else. But of course logic, even in his barely-conscious condition, told him that feet, dreamed or not, didn’t just appear on their own, nor did voices sound off without a hostess. By combination of the impenetrable one-a.m. darkness and methodically sifting toes on the upper horizon of these feet, though, Mitch was unable to find whomever had placed the undersides of her peds so tantalizingly near to his lips.

“Don’t try to find me. You’ll only strain your eyes,” the disembodied voice continued. The tone was of a whisper, raspy and seductive, yet the volume contrarily seemed to rattle the walls as well as Mitch’s bones. “And you’re already seeing the only things of importance to you. For tonight.”

This speech chilled the man’s blood and would’ve made his spine arch, if not for the uniform leadenness weighing every inch of him down into the mattress like a mausoleum. Still, he hung on her every syllable, feeling a kind of familiarity, all while knowing he’d never heard or experienced anything like this before.

“Do you like what you see?” she asked.

Pausing to try and catch his breath, to no avail, Mitch almost had to remember how to speak, babbling at first before he wheezed out the question:
“Who are you?”

“That is not what I asked. And your place is not to question me, so you will not do it again. Now. Do you like what you see?”

With that, Mitch felt the same rigidity applied to his lips, sealing them closed as though by hardened wax, while the invisible burden slowing his whole body’s reaction time finally immobilized him completely, statue-still. Deliriously afraid, literally paralyzed by unseen forces, but also entranced by the stranger’s feet and at least 95% sure this was only an insane dream, Mitch did the only thing he could by thinking his response almost to the point of bursting a blood vessel:

“Yes.”

“Of course you do,” she said, as if he’d responded aloud, despite now having less control of his body than a corpse. “That wasn’t really a question, of course, because I already knew the answer. More of a demonstration, really, for you. I have come to collect. You see, you have something I require. Something that I will be taking. Do you suppose you can guess what it is?”

“No.”

Mitch couldn’t stutter when communicating telepathically, but he was so afraid and curious at once, he could scarcely even imagine the shape of that syllable.

“Maybe this will give you a clue, then.” At once, the unseen woman’s right foot began receding from his chest, her heel massaging his torso and thigh as it was dragged back into the darkness, out of sight. Disappointed, Mitch instinctively tried to follow its shape, squinting to rediscover it in shadow, but his attention snapped dutifully back to the still-present left sole yet displayed on his chest: “Do not go looking for it. Just keep watching the other foot. I know you wish to anyway and are holding back for the sake of propriety, but you’re not going to shame yourself here. Not when I already know your every aspiration and yearning, most of them for the very thing you have presented before you. You cannot lie to me, and so you may as well not lie to yourself, and look now at my foot. As deeply as you can.”

Gulping, and deciding to accept that his subconscious was just feeling very creative tonight with his dreams, Mitch did what he indeed was dying to do and fixated on the living sculpture of the foot which hadn’t abandoned him, and he sincerely hoped it didn’t go anywhere. On closer examination, her foot somehow seemed even bigger than when he first noticed those dual soles standing vigil over his sleeping face: not longer and finger-toed in the way of some unusually-tall women’s snowshoe-scale size-16-or-so peds, but just proportionally significant, with more than enough invitingly-soft flesh pith to make him want to bury his face in the no-doubt-tepid creases of her delicate lunar-hued arch. Had he been able to move any part of his body except his eyes now, he would’ve been badly tempted to head-smack directly into that pillowy curve and stay there in bliss until he conked back asleep. It was his own dream, after all, so it wasn’t like he would insult her.

The longer Mitch stared at her foot, the more he began to feel as though he was being pulled across a great distance at increasing speed straight toward it, even though he perceived simultaneously that he wasn’t going anywhere, still rooted stock-still beneath the enchanting authority of her heel. Her already-substantial foot didn’t seem to come “closer” or grow any more expansive, and yet Mitch found himself becoming aware of previously-invisible detail, like his eyesight had been sharpened even more acutely than in daylight. He noticed not only the natural furrows in her ample sole each time her toes so much as twitched, but also the even-smaller texture lines constituting the makeup of her skin at its smoothest, as well as the microscopic pores and whorling gridlines of her footprints, all comprehended at once in the way of constellations.


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