Your mind descends into that deeper place more than it has in the past day.  Day and a half?  You haven’t the slightest idea of how long you’ve been in here.  At one point, out of sheer, unfettered boredom, you starting counting the seconds, keeping a separate log of the minutes simultaneously to test yourself.  It was something to keep yourself occupied, at least.  You managed to reach three hundred and sixteen minutes and then realized you were going to go crazy if you kept it up any longer.

You actually did try to fall asleep for a while there, and in all honesty it probably worked for at least a little while despite the incredibly difficult-to-sleep-in conditions of hanging from a shoestring (so deep is your total exhaustion), but as soon as you feel yourself make an awkward shift in your precarious dangling position in your sleep, you flip around a little bit and you are jolted awake again.  At first, the sensation is like you’re going to fall, and it’s legitimately terrifying in that short moment when you first wake up somewhere odd and forget where it is you are.

                You collect yourself at that point, and calmly remind yourself that you are shrunken, naked, somewhat bloodied, covered in a bite of food from your sister’s mouth (which has now dried in the cool air and become partially hardened to your body), and hidden from view or sound behind a row of towering flowery teenage girl t-shirts in the pitch black of a clothing closet.

                It is at this point, then, you realize how odd it is to categorize the obtaining of your bearings as “collecting” yourself, when once you remember where you are again, your heart rate begins rising again, delving back into the terrible visions you have playing out of what might happen in the near future.

                You have limited activities to partake in while sitting here.  The first one you tried, counting the minutes, began to climb so quickly you felt you had better stop.  The less you know about the time you’ve been in here, you decide, the better. 

The second one you try is swinging back and forth, just to feel the breeze on your face.  Just to feel something.  You try this, and suddenly remember you’ve got food caked on your face.  Figuring you can spare this much, since you’re actually still pretty full from the massive amount of bread mush you ate at dinner, you dig your fingers into the partially encrusted white mulch of bread and liquid peanut butter, flecking it off your hands into the endless abyss below you.  Now, with your face free, you are able to swing back and forth.  This at least provides a feeling of coolness, and it’s refreshing until your body smacks headlong into the wall you are in such close proximity to.  This sends you spinning in all directions on the shoe lace, your hands clutched painfully to your reeling head.  After brushing this off, you decide to not do that again and just sit.

You wonder if you’re starting to go crazy.  You wouldn’t blame yourself, at any rate.  You doubt anyone would.  It seems unlikely that any human being has been forced to go through what you’ve gone through in the last thirty plus or so hours of your life.  You admit to yourself that there’s certainly been torture, and a great deal of it, in the world throughout time.  Judas’ Cradle.  The Brazen Bull.  Thumbscrew Stabbing.  The Street Sweeper’s Daughter.  Chinese Water Torture.  Though you’ve never experienced any of them, and never want to have to, you are aware of one thing about them.  They exist and have existed for a very long time.  Perhaps deeper, they were PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE.

But this: what has happened to you, your near destruction by your sister in so many mind-numbing, incredible ways, have not only been extraordinarily painful and terrifying in many respects, but when wrapped so heavily in the fact that you have no REAL idea of what’s going on with you inside or what’s happened in a physical and scientific sense, the effect is like a dream.  Much of this time with your evil goddess younger sister has felt like a daydream, a haze, one of those dreams where you’re falling… and falling… and falling.

Except this time, you don’t wake up with a gasp in a cold sweat.  You hit the ground.

Drifting off to sleep once again, you find yourself standing upright, in your home kitchen.  Normal sized.  You leap into the air with pure glee.  It’s over.  It’s all over.  And then you see Carly, standing before you, leaning playfully on the kitchen table.  She points at you and breaks into hysterical laughter.  Rage fills your every fiber.  There she is: the one who’s done all this to you, threatened your life so mercilessly, so nearly brought you into the cold arms of death.  Your little sister.  You rush forth, your hands outstretched.  You take a flying leap into the air, pouncing like a lion.  As you flow through the air, everything around you swirls upward in a liquid-like blow-up effect, and suddenly you’re flying straight for the opened, laughing mouth of your sister.  You fly straight over her lips, past her car-sized white teeth with massive shredded body-sized gunk balls stuck between each tooth and in her molars; her mouth continues to grow as you fly further and further in.  You swim through the air of the muggy mouth cave, and land in the back of her throat with a bone-crunching smack, all of it becoming larger and larger.  You feel yourself shrink to the size of a grain of sand, plummeting down Carly’s slick and slimy throat, wide enough to be a wormhole in space, to burn in her stomach forever.

You suck in air quickly as you wake up from the dream, cold sweat dripping from your neck.

You realign your thoughts somehow, and try to review the facts with yourself.  You’ve reviewed them several times over, but there’s nothing else to do, and as it’s science (your favorite thing), it makes sense to try it again.  You were splashed by the chemicals in the lab.  The ones that weren’t supposed to splash you, that supposedly would have proved caustic in prolonged exposure.  Your teacher washed them off with the emergency hose.  But a drop: a single drop got into your eye, and although your teacher washed your eye as well, you could feel it burning into the back of your eye socket for hours afterward, even after you got a clean bill of health at the hospital.  Then, you were struck by lightning.  This is the only explanation you can come up with, as insane as it is.  The lightning actually ACTIVATED the shrinking.  But something, that something being the chemicals in this case, caused it beforehand in a delayed chain reaction.  It’s the only way.  It has to be.  Absentmindedly, you remember when science used to make perfect sense to you.  Before you were shrunk down to be your sister’s play toy, betrayed by the very fabric of science, your best, intangible friend for so many years, it all used to make so much more sense.

Your eye lids close again.  This time, you’re sitting on your bedroom floor.  You look up and realize how gargantuan everything is.  You thought it was gargantuan before, but as you look up, your bed stretches up like the Sears Tower, the ceiling and high shelves so high in the air they are actually blurry; you have to squint to see them, as if looking at a stealth jet flying over the clouds.

Suddenly, you go flying into the air like a popcorn kernel as an earthquake rocks the ground.  You land, but go flying up again into the air and smacking back to the carpet.  You try to grab on, but your hands are far too weak, sending you back up again into the air.  Landing finally, at least several of your bones broken, you whimper, wanting help so much but somehow knowing it won’t come.  Then, you look forward.  Carly’s foot sits in front of you, her big toe stretching up far above your head so that you can’t even see the top.  Her pinky toe rests nearest to you, wiggling slightly, easily larger than a room of your house.  You can see ovular skin cells crossing over one another, the deep chips of her dried toes about as large as your body, the very tip of her nail looking like a stone cliff, hanging slightly downward.  Large globs of mud, actually no larger than dust particles, clinging to her toenail.  You wait.  You look up and see Carly’s face, miles up in the sky, descending toward you.  She crouches, knocking you back several feet in a somersault as she gets near to you, her face so large you can only see part of her mouth, the deep creases of her lips, deep enough that you feel like you could climb in and hide yourself hallway in a fold of your sister’s lip.  They part, and you see her teeth, so white and massive, like landmovers, capable of crunching a building between them.  She breaths, and air so hot that it literally bakes part of your face, covering you in near first degree burns; you clutch yourself in pain, looking upward.

“HELLO, LITTLE BROTHER,” comes the echoing whisper, ripping through your eardrums.  Her mouth curves into a smile, the lakes of saliva grease covering her lips shining and almost blinding you.  “ARE YOU READY TO DIE?  ARE YOU READY FOR YOUR BIG, BIG, BIG SISTER TO END YOUR USELESS LITTLE LIFE?”

“Carly!  No, please!  Listen to me, I’m your brother, I’m a person!”

“NO YOU’RE NOT.  NOT ANYMORE.  LOOK AT YOU, SO SMALL AND HELPLESS DOWN THERE.  I COULD HAVE KILLED YOU WHEN I WALKED IN IF I WANTED TO, BUT I DIDN’T.  KNOW WHY?”

“Why?” you beg.

“BECAUSE I WANTED YOU TO KNOW IT.  I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT YOU’RE ABOUT TO DIE, AND IT WAS ALL BECAUSE OF ME.  YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT TO TRY AND STOP IT, BUT IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN.  I’M GOING TO KILL YOU.  WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT?”

“Carly, please, don’t do this!  I… I don’t want to die!  I want to live!  Please, you can’t do this, you have to let me out…” you yell at the top of your lungs.

“I DON’T CARE!” she bellows, popping your ears (she heard you somehow, but after all, you know subconsciously that this is a dream), “YOU ARE A BUG NOW,” she says, but after a second passes, she quickly adds, “NO, YOU’RE NOT EVEN A BUG.  YOU’RE SMALLER THAN A BUG.  YOU’RE A DUST SPECK.  YOU DON’T EXIST ANYMORE.  NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOU ANYMORE AROUND HERE.  THEY’RE GLAD I’M GOING TO KILL YOU.”

“But… but they do care!  I know it!” you say, defeated and crushed all the same.  Her smile widens, and suddenly her head falls away, smacking you down hard to the ground from the wind, her face disappearing up into the stratosphere, her voice just as booming in your ears.  You look forward and see the sheer mass of your sister’s foot, as long as half a dozen city blocks, stretching out so far it seems like her heel is off in the far distance.

“YOUR LIFE DOESN’T BELONG TO YOU.  IT DOESN’T EVEN BELONG TO ME.  IT BELONGS TO MY BIG TOE!” she squeals loudly with delight.

Her building-sized big toe raises into the air, rubbing along the carpet to reach you, sending a ripple through the carpet and smacking you.  You see her toe print, the spaces between each wide enough for you to fit comfortably in between, along with the rows and rows of microscopic grime lines curving all over the deepest crevices of her toe print.  She seems to be getting larger still, towering above you, so large it doesn’t even seem like she’s a living thing anymore.  Soon her big toe is multiple stories high, stretching up forever, the peachy flesh an endless mass of muscle no-doubt strong enough to rip through the world in her toe creases; you have to turn your head all the way to the sides to see the deep, creased wall of evil goddess toe.  It descends, casting dark shadows over you that are so long, it seems you’d have to run for hundreds of meters to escape the doom looming over you.  You cower on the ground.

“SO, LITTLE DUST SPECK BROTHER, DO YOU CARE WHICH TOE I KILL YOU WITH?”

“P-P-Please…”

“BECAUSE I DON’T THINK I’LL EVEN NEED THE WHOLE FOOT.  I COULD PROBABLY INHALE YOU INTO MY NOSE, AND THAT WOULD KILL YOUR WEAK LITTLE BODY. BUT IT’S YOUR CHOICE.  WHICH OF THE TEN DO YOU LIKE THE BEST?” she says, sending a raucous cackle echoing across the space-like room.

“None of them!  P-Please, Carly, remember me?  I’m not a dust speck, I’m just a really, really small person!”

You see her massive, miles long mouth smile at you, so condescendingly, as if she’s watching an animal make goo-goo eyes.  She clearly means everything she says; she doesn’t believe you’re a human anymore.  “SAME THING.  REALLY, REALLY SMALL PEOPLE AREN’T PEOPLE.  THEY’RE JUST DUST SPECKS UNDER MY TOES, LIKE YOU’RE ABOUT TO BE.”

“CARLY!  N-N-Noooo!” you cry out in anguish, spent.  The toe descends slowly.

“YOU DON’T MEAN ANYTHING TO ME ANYMORE, JACK.  I HAVE NOTHING ELSE I CAN USE YOUR BODY FOR, AND THEREFORE YOU ARE NO LONGER NEEDED ON THE EARTH.  NOW, BE A GOOD LITTLE DUST SPECK AND BECOME PART OF MY FOOT!” she roars so loud it finally deafens you completely and causes blood to gush from your ears; the toe descends on you, your body popping the instant it makes contact, your microscopic guts soaking into the yards-thick toe flesh of your sister like a molecule of water, unneeded and forgotten forever.

You awake again, panting hard, still hanging from the string.  Trying to calm your heart rate, you reflect on the dream while you can still remember it.  The godlike, world-destroying size of your sister.  The things she said to you prior to your untimely demise under her California-sized ped.  You note how odd some of her statements were, so inhuman and uncharacteristic of her normal, more subtle artwork in humiliating you.  You know that if she really did do something like in your dream, she wouldn’t proclaim it so simply as if speaking her mind.  She’d just let you stew in a few snide comments.  However, it occurs to you that this dream must have been a manifestation of your fears of what Carly is really thinking about you as she holds your powerless life in her hands.  You know perfectly well that she wouldn’t need to grow to the size of Canada to feel these things.  You’re already seeing hints of them in her treatment of you.  Last night, she let you sleep in a cup by her bed.  Not comfy, but it was something, and you could see things around you.  Tonight, or whatever the hell the time is, you’re dangling upside down in her closet like a medieval enemy of the state, tortured even in your useless attempts at a calm sleep.

With this new realization born in your mind, two things occur to you almost simultaneously.  The first thing is that you have got to get out of here, somehow, somewhere.  You know it has to be possible, you have a shoe lace, a wall, and clothes with stitching and wool deep enough on some that they could be like rope ladders.

The second thing that occurs to you is how thirsty you are.  Your throat is so dry, it pains you to breathe.  You hadn’t noticed it before, but now that you think about it, the salt of the peanut butter must have accelerated the process of your thirst.  You think.  The last time you had pure water was Friday night.  You made it all the way through Saturday, and received SOME water in the form of food.  You’re assuming it’s partway through the night now into Sunday morning, but then again, you’re not sure.  Maybe it’s morning already.  Maybe it’s night already.  Maybe the day is over.  Maybe it’s the middle of god damned December 21, 2012 and the world is about to be blown sky high.

Whatever the time of day is, you know that, combined with the salty peanut butter mash you ate and the intense, sweaty workout equivalents you faced the previous day, you need water, and you need it desperately.  You had been so focused on eating, you literally had forgotten to be thirsty.  And for the first time in quite a good many hours, you laugh, not because it’s funny, but at the sheer, unbelievable level of pathetic you’ve reached.  Wheezing, it occurs to you that you might die of dehydration sooner rather than later, when one considers how tired and beat up you are.  You wonder if the nightmares you keep experiencing have anything to do with it.  Regardless, it’s time to move out.

You begin scratching off the food bits surrounding you in encrusted chunks.  You’ll need your full range of motion to be able to operate.  With the last little handful, you shove it into your mouth, knowing you most likely won’t be fed for a while now.  Swallowing the now-crusty and somewhat moldy tasting bread mush down, you grab onto the shoe lace tightly and begin to swing.  You’ve sort of forgotten which direction the wall is in, but once you’ve gone in circles a few times, you find it with your feet, lightly enough so that it doesn’t hurt.  This is the hard part.

Now, needing your weightlifting skills more than ever, you climb hand over hand, upward, scaling the plaster wall by pulling your body weight up the shoe lace along the wall for support.  Finally, your arms beginning to feel the strain, you reach your hand out and find the cold, ashy touch of the nail.  You grip it hard, then do a pull-up, yanking yourself onto it.  In the pitch blackness, you have to clasp your hands around it tightly to remind yourself where to put your sense of balance.  You’ve done this before as well, having to stand on a beam with your eyes closed to improve your balance.  It’s just a workout, you tell yourself.  Just a workout.

You twist your legs around the nail like a monkey, clenching so hard your knees begin to go numb but you also know you won’t slip off as long as you keep yourself level.  Slowly and calmly lowering your hands, you feel the soft threads of Carly’s shoe lace and slide your fingers into the knot, deciphering what kind it is.  You have limited Boy Scout knowledge, but you do actually know a couple of knots, and this happens to be a pretty simple one, as Carly’s not exactly an aficionado of such things.  With gentle, controlled tugs guided by memory of the knock type more than sight, so as not to knock yourself off of the thing, you untie the nail, holding the other end of the string in one hand.  At this point, if you fall, you have no bungee cord to catch you, it’s just a seven or eight story plummet into the pitch blackness, give or take a story.

Next comes the damned tricky part.  You tie a quick, small loop about as large as your head into the newly freed end of the lace.  You try to recall what you saw, what you touched on your way into the closet.  The jean jacket.  The button.  You remember that much.  Re-clenching your legs around the nail, you toss out the plastic tipped end of the string that’s not currently tied around you.  You feel it fall downward into the darkness.  Reeling it back in, you try again, tossing it out into No Man’s Land.  Bringing it back, this time you really try to concentrate.  Where was it?  How far from the nail was it?  What level was it at, roughly, with the nail?  You focus, relieving the scene as Carly hung you inside her closet however long ago.  A rough image comes to you.  Taking a deep breath, you plunge the loop through the abyss of darkness.  This time it doesn’t fall.  It goes taut.  You tug at it excitedly, not too hard, but enough to see if it actually did catch the button.  You say a little prayer of thanks for your luck, followed by a little prayer of begging for a safe journey as you release your legs from the nail, swinging outward in a low arc into the darkness of the closet.  Your head smashes into a thick material, feeling rather rough, with creases line it in all direction.  You stop bouncing, coming to a stop.  You feel it.  Denim.  Success.

Now, having to actually improvise your plan, since your master grand scheme only had you making it this far, you think hard, trying not to swing too hard on the button.  Your arms beginning to feel the burn, you grab onto the lace again, clambering upward, straining yourself a bit but pushing past it as a new layer of cold sweat rushes down you.  After climbing perhaps two body lengths, you feel something jutting out from the jean jacket in a bulge.  You push against it.  A pocket.  Deciding that you need some inspiration for what to do next, you feel for the denim edge, then pull yourself up to it and dive inside the pocket.

You land on a cushy, fabric bed.  Your fingers fish through it, finding folds and little lint bits; it’s a tissue.  And it’s then that you get perhaps the most insane idea to ever cross your cursed mind during your lifetime.  You find the corners of the tissue, curling them inward and tying them in knots around your ankles, and then your wrists, creating a cape of white behind you.  You dry swallow a few times, your body starting to feel weak.  The energy expenditure needed to climb that shoe lace has taken its toll, and now that you have a second to catch your breath, you begin feeling sharp pains in your side.

It occurs to you that you might kill yourself just trying to find water in your state of supreme dehydration; you’re burning calories and sweating droplets that you really don’t have to give.  You move your arm out, and suddenly it’s shaking, getting weaker.  You know you have to act now.  Unruffling your makeshift parachute, you yank the fabric fold of the pocket back down so that it’s low enough for you to climb out of.  Taking a deep breath and wondering absentmindedly if this is going to work or not, you jump.  The wind hits your face, smacking you back upward for a second as you fall.  You stretch your arms out, and the parachute begins to catch wind.  You know it’s not enough, but as your arms are stretched, already they’re straining against the pull of the wind to go backward.  But you push outward, perfectly straight, your body taut.  It’s now or never.  Sink or swim.

With a dry croak of pain in your muscles, you feel your limbs give out on you a millisecond before you make your landing.  Incredibly, it was slow and graceful enough that you didn’t die in the landing, although you definitely don’t feel good, especially since you fell flat on your shredded chest.  You roll over uselessly from under the tissue parachute, the ties coming undone easily, as they were loosened in the short fall anyway.  You try to push yourself up, but feel a searing pain in your arms.  Standing up will be impossible, and when you try the same tactic with your lower limbs, the same effect happens.  Your throat, so dry and dusty and in need of water, stings just as badly as your foot ball-molested chest felt as it was scraped bloody.  You don’t even want to breathe, it hurts so much.  Your head swells a bit, swimming in the pain and little emotions now filling your head.  You’re dying.

NO.  YOU’RE NOT DYING.  You press your fingers into the carpet knots and inch forward, using your slightly less exhausted upper torso muscles to do the main heavy lifting, dragging your limbs at your side.  You move along, slowly and eventually you see the thin trail of brighter light than inside the closet from under the door, just in front of you.  You crawl toward it, lowering your head against the carpet as you crawl forward, feeling the wooden frame of the door brush up against your entire back at once as you slide underneath, a fresh wave of cool air washing over you as you enter the humongous hall of Carly’s room.  You look up, weakly.  You can’t see anything, save for the faint outline of Carly’s bed.  Over by the window, you see the shades pulled taught, a set of blankets Carly taped over the bottom section to keep out any light forcing you to guess at what time it really is.  Not that you care at this moment what time it is.

You crawl forward using mostly your stomach and shoulders, like an inchworm, pain scraping through your limbs after the beating you just gave them to escape despite their extreme tiredness.  Even though you just resolved not to give up, the same idea starts coming back to your brain.  You don’t want to die.  You have no intention of dying.  You may even be a little bit afraid to die in such a painful manner as lack of water and overheating.  But none of those things can stop the fact that if you don’t get water in what you would guess to be the next half an hour or less, you’re going to fall asleep.  And there’s a low likelihood that you’re going to wake up again.

Your brain has already begun to accept it, starting to shut down major functions like motivation.  You crawl forward and feel yourself wondering why you keep doing this, after all you’ve been through. What would be such a big deal about just ending it and ceasing Carly’s cruel games of life and death?

You come to rest after bumping into something.  You touch it.  You feel pretty dizzy, but it feels rubbery, but rough at the same time, speckled with harder little spots.  It has ridges as well.  And then, it hits you.  The smell.  It isn’t just a smell wafting through the air.  It’s pungent.  It’s salty.  And it is absolutely filling the air around it in a haze of awful musk.  It’s Carly’s newly used basketball shoes, with her utterly saturated socks sitting in them and hanging over the edge of the shoe, just barely above your head.  You reach up and touch the edge of the sock.  Even the mouth of the sock is soaked. 

And at that moment, you realize what has to be done to survive. 

You squeeze as hard as you can on edge of the sock.  A small fountain of sweat falls to your dry lips.  A full drop lands in your mouth.  You swallow hard.  It’s horrible, just as mind-crushingly bitter and painful to your taste buds as when you had to lick Carly’s actual foot.  Perhaps it’s even worse this time, as before, you at least had the odd but distracting taste of your sister’s foot skin mixed in.  Now, though, the single sensation flooding your senses is the feeling of her salty, stinging, grimy sweat soaking through your body.  You want to start retching and get it out of your system.  But you don’t.  At this point, you feel full control of your gag reflex.  Your body is going to take whatever it can get.  You lick your lips, then reach up and squeeze with both hands.  A shower of sweat falls to your face.  And you lap up every drop of it from your face. 

When that section runs out, you move to a different spot on the rim, inching your back horizontally along the carpet so you can reach it.  You try to think your way through it, as always.  You know that sweat has some minerals, and even lactate, but it’s mostly water; I’m getting water, you tell yourself.  I’m going to live if I just can keep it down.  You almost felt yourself laughing and crying at your predicament at the same time.  Your life is being saved by the perspiration left on the gargantuan socks of your twisted little sister, who ironically has on multiple occasions brought you near death with her feet before now.  Once you make it impossible to squeeze more sweat out of the rim of the sock, you feel some strength returning.  Hanging on to the still somewhat damp sock rim, you pull yourself up and stand, still hanging on, woozy.  Using the threads like a step ladder, you climb into the opening of the sock, ignoring the pain in your limbs.  If the odor was strong a minute ago, it’s downright enslaving now.  Every breath you take in, your lungs are filled with the bitter, overwhelming stench of Carly’s overworked soles, heels, and toes, her foot essentially raping you with each breath just from what it’s left here.  You might as well be swimming underwater in a cup filled to the brim with her sweat.  The processes it had taken to get here, water she had drunk that had soaked into her system, going through her sweat glands, picking up minerals and salts from inside her body, then going to her skin, leaking out her pores like toxic chemicals from a factory as she bounded hard across the basketball court for a good two hours or more.

You retch deeply a few times as you crawl deeper up the tube, consumed in a never-ending wave of your sister’s foul stench.  When you reach the spot where the sock is at the top of the shoe’s edge, you let go, and tumble head over heels into the gym shoe.  It’s like landing on a soaked sponge the size of a mattress; every surface of your body facing the ground is damp, soaked almost right through your entire body.  And God help you, you begin to suck hungrily on the walls of the sock.  The sour tang of the sweat is being fought every step of the way by your senses, and yet you must continue.  You force yourself to continue. 

Then, as you grab hold of each corner of the saturated sock in your teeth, sucking it as dry as you possibly can, the taste and smell changes.  In the beginning, it’s the familiar god-awfully acrid and foul sting to your mouth, as is the accompanying stench surrounding and engulfing you (the difference being here that this sweat happens to have been rotting in this sock for a certain amount of time, becoming very musty and bacteria-laden).  By the time you’re finished with about a third of the sock, though, it’s different.  The taste is becoming sweeter.  It has a salty tang, a tang that goes from repulsive to almost comforting, and with each mouthful of liquid you crave more of the savory feeling in your throat, revitalizing you.  You grimace, supposing this is what happens on a desert island to the average citizen who is forced to eat bugs and feces to survive.  They become accustomed to it and eventually it’s all they know, so they come to like it.  Well, as you realize, you’ve undergone an accelerated process.

You don’t know how long you’ve been in here.  Your skin, already damp from your own sweat, became soaked just from crawling around the saturated sock of your sister.  By the time you’ve gone through most of the reachable sweat easy enough to squeeze out, you’re essentially rolling in the stuff.  You hug the saturated sock to your body and suck away on it.  Not only is your thirst entirely quenched and your strength returning, but as a bonus, all of Carly’s foot execration is cool, allowing your overheated body to regulate.  You close your eyes, realizing how ironic it is that, albeit inadvertently, your crazy and controlling “little” sister has finally saved your life after nearly taking it on multiple occasions in so little time.

You realize you’ve fallen asleep in your sister’s smelly, used sock and gym shoe, because the next thing you know, you’re opening your eyes as light streams into the shoe, gravity shifting underneath you.  You crawl forward and look out the mouth of the shoe, to see Carly’s long fingers pinching the back of the shoe, holding it in the air, looking at you.  Her jaw is dropped.

“J-Jack…” she starts to say, patting the inside of the sock, now mostly dry, with a fingertip.  “You… you got… how-wha…” she begins, continuing to trace the inside of the sock with her finger, comprehending what’s going on.  “You… you didn’t actually… you…” she says, her face twisting up in disgust as it sinks in what you did in this little shoe cave.  “Oh my GOD,” she squeals in utter contempt, covering her mouth with her other hand not holding the shoe.  You can’t blame her; if you were looking at a little gnome person in one of your shoes who’d just drunk gallons of your foot sweat, you’d be a little weirded out too.  The important thing now, you think to yourself, not even bothering to be upset that you were found in your escape attempt, is that you’re alive.

For now.