I am launched into the air. I was thrown with a little spin so my body is now spinning uncontrollably. I am briefly able to look down before I flip around. I see what looks like a thousand foot fall and a wall of waiting hands. I close my eyes and hope for the best.

After a few very long seconds, I feel myself crash into a hard but mushy surface and bounce away. It must have been a girl trying to catch me. I continue to fall as I’m hopelessly knocked back in forth by the girls’ fighting hands. Eventually I feel myself knocked especially hard by a hand and slam into a soft velvety fabric. I open my eyes to see that I am on a couch and at least a dozen hands are reaching for me. Before I have time to respond, I’m grabbed by a brown haired girl much to the disappointment of the others.

“Back away from him, it’s my turn now,” she states with that she sits down on the couch gazing down at me. The other girls hesitantly back away.

“Now little one,” she says playfully. “I want you to rub my feet.”

I am dropped a considerable height, maybe for them only three feet, but for me more like five stores. I land butt-first onto the carpet and topple backwards, causing some giggles behind me. She moves her feet to the left and right of me and looks down at me expectantly. I comply. I don’t really have much of a choice.

“What are you doing to him?!” I hear a voice shout from among the wall of girls. Suddenly a girl pushes herself forward. It’s Emily, the girl who had criticized that Rebecca girl before for grabbing you too hard.  “He may get hurt.”

“Don’t be silly. See he’s fine,” your tormentor replies as she shakes my body with her foot to prove that I’m “okay.”

“Why would you have him rub your feet? He’s a person just like you or me, you know!”

“No he isn’t. Would I be able to do this to an actual person?” She lifts her foot up and kicks you, lightly for her, but you fly backwards. She quickly scoops you back up and draws you back to her before any of the other girls can grab you.

“Emily, please. You’ll get your turn when you can do whatever ‘humanitarian’ things you want with him, but respect Ashley’s turn,” Amy intervenes. Emily was then slowly pushed back among the rows of girls, so she couldn’t interfere.

“Thanks Amy,” responds the girl. “Now I remember telling someone to give me a foot rub.”

Without further ado, I walk over to her right foot, and she lifts it up onto her heel.

“I want you to rub my sole first.”

I walk underneath this gigantic pink cave and begin to rub. Each movement seems to tickle her and cause her foot to shake, kicking me onto my back each time. She’d respond none too patiently to the break in the foot rub, and I’d have to get up as quickly as I could to resume. Slowly but surely, I finished her sole.

“Now for the rest of my foot…”

But before she could finish her orders, I feel something latch on to my leg and drag me across the floor. It’s another girl’s toes, which must have grabbed me from underneath.

“You took too long. Your turn’s up,” she explains.

I try to struggle as I am dragged across the rug, but it’s of no use. My legs start to burn from the tension, and finally she lets go. I lay there panting too hurt to move. Soon I see a dark figure hovering above me. I realize that it’s her foot.

“You had better move quickly.”

The foot began to come down on top of me. Suddenly my animal instinct rushes in, and my tiredness temporarily subsides. I manage to roll out from underneath just in time to avoid the foot from crashing down on top of me. I get up and begin to run away from this killing machine in a desperate attempt for some peace. But before I run more than about twenty feet, I feel a rush of air as her second foot comes crashing down a few inches in front of me. I don’t have time to stop as I crash into the pink sticky surface and become stuck to the side of her foot.

“You’re going to kill him!” Emily screeches. I couldn’t see her because my face was plastered to this girl’s foot.

“Yeah Chelsea, be a little more careful with him. We want him alive so that the rest of us can play with him,” Amy reprehends.

As they are talking I try to wiggle off of her foot but can’t. The smell is unbearable. I try to hold my breath to prevent it, but I can’t hold it very long and get a stronger whiff of it once I have to catch my breath.

“I’m sorry. I guess I got a little carried away. But look! He’s stuck to my feet! I can feel him trying to wiggle his way out,” Chelsea responds.

She lifts me and her foot high into the air. I realize that it might not be the best idea to try to free myself from her foot since I’d fall.

“I thought so little man. You don’t want to leave my nice sweet feet,” she plays. “But you’ll have to get off eventually. I know the longer you stay there, the harder it’ll be for you to want to depart from them, so I’ll have to cut you off now.”

Why couldn’t you do it while I was on the ground, I think to myself, but I guess that would defeat her fun.

I feel something scratch my back from behind me, and I realize that it is her big toe from her other foot, prying me off. This is quite possibly the most inefficient way of getting me off. Her toe can’t grab me properly but can only rip and scratch me off. I’m sure she picked this method just to torture me.  Each scratch delivers excruciating pain to my back but only causes a little bit of my front side to rip off her, which feels like ripping off a band aid except across the entire body. Eventually I fall off and land head first onto the rug. I smack against the ground. My body can barely move. I feel hurt all over from being scratched, ripped, and dropped. To make matters worse, the pains of dropped the first time and being dragged revisit me as well like a bad family reunion.

For a moment or two I close my eyes and just lay there, hoping this is all a dream and that there’d be an end soon. I try to forget about everything, my bleeding legs, the cuts on my back, the cuts on my front, my head-ache, my hurt shoulder, and remember when life was good.