Carly bounded gleefully up the driveway of the house with her full backpack slung casually over one shoulder and her current favorite navy blue flip-flops smacking against her pink soles with each step.  The immense weight of the bright magenta bag was beginning to make her shoulder sore, but she didn’t care.  School was out, she had most of the afternoon to herself, and she wasn’t going to let anything get her down.

                After all, Valentine’s Day came but once a year.

                “Hey, Mom!” Carly sang gaily as she swung her way through the garage door and into the kitchen.

                “Hi honey.  No practice today?” Mrs. Arton asked, looking over her shoulder before returning her gaze to her book as she leaned back on the couch.

                “Nope.  Coach has the flu or something.”

                “Ah, that’s a shame,” her mother answered.  “Lot of homework tonight?”

                “No.  Why?”

                “That backpack looks ready to burst.”

                “Oh.  Yeah,” Carly answered sheepishly, letting the bag slump to the floor with an unceremonious slam.  “It is.”

                “Careful, honey, I don’t want to have to get this floor redone again,” groaned Mrs. Arton.

                “Sorry.”

                “So what’s in it?”

                “Just some… stuff… from the guys at school,” Carly wheedled.  Grasping the end railing of the staircase for support, she plucked each flip-flop from her feet, wriggling her toes at in newfound freedom.  She pressed a finger between her big and second toes where the plastic strap of the flip-flops had been and noticed a small swollen red mark from the day-long pressure.  Sore as could be.  As much as she loved these shoes, they were kind of a pain sometimes.

                Carly smiled.  It was no matter.  As soon as she got upstairs alone, the problem could be resolved.

                “Did you say guys, plural?” Mrs. Arton asked with sudden concern, running her fingers over her forehead and stroking them through her slightly darker blonde hair that would’ve matched her teenage daughter’s around twenty-five years ago.

                “Don’t be weird, Mom, I’m not dating all of them.  I don’t even know all of them that well, really.  They just want to give me stuff.”

                “Oh.  Such as?”

                “DRUGS, Mom.  Hard drugs.  And beer, so I can get wasted by myself,” Carly spewed sarcastically, rolling her eyes, but letting a smile crack on her lips.

                “You’re hilarious, honey.  Just hilarious.  What is it actually?  Just valentines?”

                “Yeah.  And some presents, too,” the seventeen-year-old social butterfly and basketball star gushed, licking her lips playfully at the prospect of so much loot.  She leaned down to scoop the strap of the backpack up again.  “I’m gonna go open some of them now, okay?”

                “If it’s candy, make sure you save me a couple pieces!” Mrs. Arton called out as Carly began leaping up the stairs two at a time, her brilliant dirty golden locks bouncing against her slender shoulders with each jump.  “Your dad is probably just going to get me flowers.  Like I have any use for those.”

                “Will do, Mom!” Carly confirmed with a giggle before sauntering down the upstairs hallway and sliding into her bedroom.  Closing the door and locking it in one swift, practiced motion, Carly took a deep breath and let it out, leaning back against the wall with relief.

                She was back in her personal world again, right here, where she wanted to be more than anything else.

                Plopping the backpack onto the bed, she immediately made her way over to the dresser and yanked open the second drawer from the top, where she kept her panties.  An assortment of pinks, whites, and purples greeted her eyes, all neatly folded, with a secret lacy one tucked carefully in the back where no one could accidentally see it.  It was worth having on hand just in case.

                There was no movement in the fabric, and so Carly set about sliding her fingertips gingerly over the tops of them, searching for signs of small, insignificant, undeserving life.  When she passed over a black athletic piece, she felt a tiny bump rustling underneath her hand, and she grinned.

                Flicking the panties aside with a middle finger, she pinched her thumb and index fingers together into the folds and plucked out her three-inch tall brother Jack whom she had imprisoned more than two and a half years ago.

                Carly held her naked little prize up at eye level and grinned cheekily, even chuckling under her breath, before shutting her eyes and bringing him closer to her mouth.  She felt him flinch in her grasp, and she knew he assumed he was going inside for a while, but she had no intention of that.

                Not yet, anyway.

                She pressed him to her cushy lips and puckered them softly against his face and chest, murmuring with overdramatic delight and freely allowing a few droplets of lukrewarm moisture from her mouth to leak onto his shoulders.  She kissed long and deep but kept her lips closed, despite a growing urge to open her mouth wider and slurp him inside like a noodle.  Finally, with a quiet smack, she pulled him away and marveled with a grin at her damp handiwork.

                “Happy Valentine’s Day, little bro,” she declared gently, practically singing the words as a lullaby.

                Jack Arton blinked a few times and frowned, trying to decipher his sister’s intentions with this unusually peaceful greeting.  He ran a knuckle down the side of his face and on his chest, realizing the kiss had smeared a good portion of Carly’s glossy rose lipstick along his skin like sparkly war paint.  Although sticky and, at this range, the smell packed a toxic chemical wallop, he was in no position to complain.  He had fully been expecting to be placed on his sister’s tongue and sucked on for a while like an organic jawbreaker, so this was a big improvement to say the least.

                “Aren’t you going to say it back to me?” Carly asked with a frown, her tone darkening momentarily, as her fingertips tightened around Jack’s hips.

                “Yes!  Sorry.  Happy Valentine’s Day, Carly,” Jack hastily corrected.

                “Awww.  That’s so sweet of you,” she said with a smirk.  She deposited her brother into the center of her palm and cradled him in it as she made her way back toward the bed to retrieve her backpack.

                Jack watched nervously from his sister’s gargantuan hand as she set about unzipping the backpack.  An abundance of cartoony store-bought and papier-mâché hand-written valentines alike instantly began spilling out onto the bedspread, but Carly clearly wasn’t concerned with these as she batted them callously down onto the carpeted floor with the back of her hand.

                The sight of all those cards tumbling to the ground, completely disregarded by his sister who had so many admirers she couldn’t have given less of a shit about, was disheartening in a deeply personal way to Jack, and it surprised him to realize this.  He knew it was an odd reaction to have when there were so many other tortures in his otherworldly hellscape of an existence to be upset about, but he couldn’t help it.  He had never given much real thought to Valentine’s Day, especially now that he was twenty years old and primarily had to think about his survival in his sister’s captivity above all else, but in this moment, he felt bizarrely nostalgic.

                The last real “valentine” Jack had been with was in his sophomore year of high school.  Her name was Nicki, and though they’d only gone out about three times, one of those occasions was on Valentine’s Day.  It was a bold move considering how little they’d gone out, but Jack had summoned up the courage and kissed her across the table at the restaurant.  His bravery was rewarded with a forty-five minute make-out session in the back seat of his car later on.

                Now, the only valentine he had any prospect of making out with was the greasy underside of his sister’s big toe after a weekend basketball tournament.

                It was not quite the same, except for the length of time he had to spend doing it.

                With the area of her bedspread cleared, Carly took a seat on the flowery mattress and began rummaging through the backpack pockets until she came out with a small lime-colored tube with a silver cap.  She brandished it closer to her other hand so Jack could get a clear look at the label.

                “Nice, right?” Carly remarked.  “Lotion.  It’s from Dan.  No, no, that’s wrong…”
                Jack observed the bottle, which was taller than him, as it dangled from his sister’s lithe fingers.  It looked expensive, whatever it was supposed to be for, with a prominent coconut image displayed on the polished side.  As his eyes darted to the fine print along the bottom rim, though, and his attention caught on the word “podiatric,” he didn’t need to know anything more to get the full picture of his fate.

                “Sam!  It’s from Sam.  It was pretty funny, actually,” Carly mused at last.  “He was flexing so hard when he handed it to me I thought he was gonna pop a blood vessel.  As if that kind of thing could win me over.”

                “Blue flops today, huh?” Jack quietly mumbled, but in the silence of the room, it was enough for Carly to hear.  She snickered, daintily covering her mouth with her fingers, and shook her head in entertained disbelief.

                “You are just too good, little bro, you know that?  You can tell exactly what a girl needs.”

                “You know it,” Jack responded half-dead already, and without further prompting lifted his arms just as his sister picked him up from her palm around his chest and lowered him toward the end of the bed spread, where her anxiously waiting bare feet were scrunched against the soft sheets.

                The toes of her left foot parted first and his body was wedged between them, his efforts to move back immediately impeded by Carly’s hair-trigger response of clenching him between her doughy digits.

                They stayed like this for a moment, as Carly amused herself with the feeling of the wriggling life form between her toes.  Just when he was considering looking back upward to see what the hold-up was, he flinched at the crack of the green bottle being opened far above, followed by the plop of a viscous white splotch of lotion splattering atop Carly’s big toe.

                “Let’s get hustling, little bro.  We’ve got some other stuff in here to check out too,” Carly encouraged, finally releasing her toes’ grip on Jack’s sides.  She reached into her backpack and produced a heart-shaped box decorated with fake lace and sequins.  Lifting the lid revealed an assortment of caramels and nougats all sealed in chocolate truffles.  “Okay, this one is definitely from Nathan.  Definitely.  I think.”

                Jack wasted no unnecessary time and submerged his hands in the glob of lotion, lathering it between his fingers in preparation for the work.  The swollen strip in Carly’s toe crevice from where her flip-flop strap had been digging against the skin all day was still very apparent, and he needed no further direction.  Taking a deep breath, he pressed his fingers into his sister’s tender foot skin and began working the lotion into it with great fervor.

                He focused first on the swollen patch of skin that had turned raw, not bothering to be gentle with her.  Carly liked her foot rubs rough and to the point.  Any dawdling or feeble gestures on his part would probably end with a toe pressing down onto his chest, or worse, even lower on his body.  He ran his knuckles up and down the length of it and dug his fingers in as deeply as the plush skin would allow.

                When his handful of the lotion ran dry, he simply reached back up into the blob on top of his sister’s toe for a fresh supply.  Then, in order to avoid inevitable prompting from his gigantic client, he began working it into the toes themselves, even though there didn’t seem to be swollen flip-flop wounds on them.  Jack stroked the skin in ardent circles with the heel of his hand and even caressed the underside of the toes, where the blushing flesh was squishy and each resembled giant pink marshmallows.

                At least he seemed to be doing it correctly.  He glanced nervously up the winding length of Carly’s legs and torso up to her face, but she had her eyes closed, and was sighing contentedly as she popped another chocolate between her lips and enjoyed the routine luxury of an intimate toe massage from her older brother.

                All in all, things could’ve been severely worse.  Right away Jack could tell Carly hadn’t had basketball practice today, because the scent emanating from between her dexterous toes was more of an earthy musk as opposed to the rubbery, salted haze of sudor he was normally accustomed to being assaulted with as his sister kicked her sneakers off, peeled away soggy socks, and demanded he start rubbing or face an evening upside down on the inside of the socks as they hung to dry.

                “I think that stuff smells pretty good,” Carly commented as she popped a caramel ball into her mouth and began chewing the tacky treat with some effort.  “Oo you ‘ink ‘o?”

                Jack had to admit the present wasn’t bad at all.  At least his sister’s admirer had sprung for the more expensive stuff, despite it being all for naught with the highly unimpressed Carly.  The coconut aroma, though a little too strong for Jack’s liking at such close proximity, was cheerfully exotic and almost allowed him to forget the degrading task he was currently involved in.

                “God, this stuff is heaven.  Nathan or Josh did a great job picking this out, whichever one of them it was,” Carly moaned with pleasure while her hand began rummaging back through her backpack again.  A few seconds later she produced a small white and brown jar.  “Hey, look!  It’s Nutella.  No idea who it’s from, though.”

                “That’s good,” Jack said, finishing up Carly’s left foot and scurrying over the ruffled sheets to her right one before angry orders could be issued to do so.

                Bringing another chocolate to her mouth, Carly bit into the candy shell and grimaced with disgust.  “Ugh.  Cherry.  Nature screwing with perfectly good chocolate,” Carly condemned, shaking her head.  “I guess Nathan or Josh isn’t winning me as their valentine this year either.”

                There was a big surprise.  Jack tried not to roll his eyes as he set about repeating the strenuous process of massaging the swollen flesh between his sister’s doughy toes on her right foot.

                “You want it?” Carly offered in her most charitable voice.

                Already more suspicious than a schizophrenic in a dark alley on acid, Jack glanced up at Carly’s gorgeously stoic face.  Her eyebrows were raised, she had a smile on her full lips, and there seemed to be genuine earnesty in her alluring crystal eyes as she held the half-eaten cherry truffle between two fingers.  With her other hand, she batted a few blonde locks out of her eyes like she always did.

                He didn’t really want it.  Anytime Jack willingly accepted a consolation prize from his sister, life-preserving sustenance or not, there was sure to be a secret hidden clause that further threatened to crack the very foundations of his already fragile psyche.

                Of course, saying no wasn’t a real option either, and so with all the reticence he could muster, Jack shook his head yes.

                The smile that appeared on Carly’s face was infectious, and she eagerly leaned forward toward her feet with the partially ravaged truffle still in her grasp.

                Jack put his hands above his head to receive the large chocolate chunk, but it was not lowered into his arms.  Puzzled, he gazed up at the sweet and into the clearly visible cluster of gooey burgundy threatening to dribble out the broken shell as his sister’s massive fingertips held it just out of his short reach.

                And then she squeezed.  The effect was instant as her fingers violently squelched the pitiful candy shell into chocolate shards.  A hollow squish sounded out and the cherry filling plumped downward like dead meat, landing right on Carly’s toe.

                Jack recoiled in surprise, examining the gooey substance with distaste as it dribbled slowly down the side of her digit and into the warm toe crevice he had been dutifully massaging a minute before.

                “Well, go ahead,” Carly whispered throatily, the tip of her tongue flicking out from between her lips.  “Eat it.”