Life of an insole slave:
I can’t say things are easy living as an insole. But it’s pretty much all I know. At the age of fourteen my family fell behind on the rent and I was taken as payment. My mum screamed and tried to stop the police from taking me but it did not good. I was dumped in a big cold empty room in the police station. I was chained flat on the floor and chair place by my head.
A tall black female police offer with long dark hair dark purple painted nails walked in and sat down in a chair. I could smell the lather of her new boots mixed with a faint dirt smell form walking abut outside. She looked down at my terrified face. “ What is your name?” she spoke in a very posh upper class London accent.
“It’s Paddy mam” I said trying to cry. 
“Wrong” she snapped down at me. “ You have no fucking name, you are nothing , you will never be human again no one will ever call you by your name again you are just something to sock up foot dirt and soften foot falls!” 
In that moment I knew what was coming. We had all herd the story’s….. poor men and woman changed in to insoles to be placed in rich girls shoes! A living hell from which there was no way out.

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I stare out of the thin film of plastic that wraps around me. I have been placed on the third self and can there for see my refection in the merrier people use to try on shoes in. The way I look is shocking. I look like any old insole. Well ok you can make out the faint outline of a face. Eyes and nose under the toes and math ( tonging lolling out all the time) under the heal. But you have to look close. I have been here all most a year now without selling. Insoles from all around me have sold and I have been picked up and put down many many times. I guess I believed that this made me reedy for what would come when I was sold. I was very very wrong. 

A hand reached out of nowhere and plucked me of the shelf. I could not see anything about the hand until I was laid down on the counter and could look up at the woman that had been holding me. She was about 19 or 20, sri Lankan, with long black hair and very impressive bust. She was talking to a fat blond white woman who was pricing up the five or six pairs of shoes she was buying. Their voices where muffled but I could still make out what they were saying. “ Its just my last pair of living insoles got worn out so fast” The Sri Lankan girl was saying. “ I mean I do lots of walking and dancing on them but if I am paying five pounds for them…” 
Five pounds! Was that all my life was worth to these woman! 
“How old where your last insoles mam?” 
“ I think they were a marred pair in their seventy’s….why?”
“ Well that might be it the old ones where out fast. This one is fourteen or fifteen and the girl in the other in sole is nineteen I think. What did you do with your last pair mam?
“ I put them in the trash when they got holes in them….” 
“Ok its just that you can recycle them now so even in five or six year when you where this pair out they can get melted down and made in to something new” 
“Good Good” The woman picked me up and started to walk away with out even looking down at me.

The girl stopped by a chair in the center of the shop and reached down and pulled of her boots. I could see her hand messing with the plastic and then she ripped it! I could breathe fresh air for the first time in a year. I tried to speak to beg this girl for some kindness but I could not make a sound. I could only lay there in her hand as she lowers me down to the opening of her knee high leather boot. The boot was fear lined so the closer I got the stronger the smell and heat levels became. .

As I slipped past the rim of her boot something broke in my mind. I think I had been blocking out what this meant for me until now. The next five or six year I would just be an insole. No life outside of this girls shoes, no one to love or care to me or even to talk to. Just years of being trodden on and ground underfoot in the build-up girt and stink of this girls shoes. The worst part was that if anyone found me in here they would not care! There was nothing I could do to make anyone see that this was wrong that I was more that something to absorbed foot sweat and dirt. And then when that hell was over I would just be thrown in the trash…..to rot forever on a landfill. 

The lower I got in to the boot the damper the air felt. I could taste the build-up of foot sweat in the boot and the heat must be 20 times hotter than it was in the shop. So much for fresh air! When I hit the bottom of the shoe thing got even worse. I could fell the bits of floor dirt and old dried toe jam that was on the floor of the shoe start to sock in to my back. I can’t even explain it but it felt like it was rising out of her shoe and in to me. I wanted to vomit and yell out in shock and fear at this disgusting event but nothing would happen I could only lay there as my light was cut off as she started to put her foot in the boot without a care in the world for me. 

Her bear toes touched the heal part of her insole ( aka me) now as I have said my tongue is on the heal part and it is all ways stuck out so that I can taste anything that rest on it. Her five huge toes planted on it and dragged them self’s across smearing cold sweat and bits of dirt from the shop floor over me. To tell the truth her toes where very clean at that moment but as it was the first time that had ever happened to me I did not see it that way. 

Then came her sole. My god the pain as it dragged its self over my tongue. Then her heal planted on it and flattened it down crushing in to the skin on the heal of her foot so all I could taste was her foot. One eye was mashed under her big toe , my nose was in the crevice between big toe and second and my other eye was under her second to last toe.I could kind of see as her toes only covered half my eye but the pain was untrue, I could not close my eyes and I could tell her might weight pressing down on to them making them feel like they would burst under her. The smell of her foot filled my nose. Right now it was not to bad kind of musky but still fairly fresh as she had not been sweating that much. But the fact still remained right now her foot was all I could see,smell and taste. 


Then she stood up and I found a new kind of hell.