My skin tingled with the touch of the current that surged through the room as the door opened, completely undetectable to anyone not the size of a grain of rice. However I was a grain of rice, or might as well have been, I was practically invisible to Shannon’s unsuspecting eyes as she strode into the room, shrugging off her bag and shaking her soft brunette hair to flutter down her back in a wave of shiny curls.  I suppose she wasn’t very tall by her own standards, but to me, gazing at her from the safety of the third shelf of her bookcase, she was an avatar, a form of beauty so fit and spirited that even as she intimidated me so greatly by her overwhelming presence, seeing her never failed to leave me breathless.  Like standing too close to the sun, so drawn to it and always afraid of getting burned.  Well, we all felt that way, a yearning that can never be caressed.

She had created a comfortable world for us in her dorm room, innumerable places to hide, but plenty of vantage points as well to just gaze upon her and dream of funny dreams.  But there were those times when dreaming alone was not enough to keep ourselves safely away from the glowing sun…


Pinched within her slender fingers held a man no more the size of a seed, mayhap a bit larger than a celery seed if measured side by side, and squirming as much as a man his size could squirm.  He wanted the sun, like we all did, but he slipped and forgot the dangers when he let himself fall within her vision.  Though the beaming look she probably gave him that lit up her entire face in a shining smile probably held back any lasting doubts he might have had, swooned so completely by her joyful expression of receiving him.

I wonder if he had any doubts now, dangling within her soft fingers.  Oh, my heart was pounding, I just couldn’t help it, but like me he must have known what will happen if he ever let himself be captured.  We were bugs to her, but very special bugs I suppose.  So creatively did she dispose of us, unique and individual for every one she managed to catch.  She held him so carefully within her fingers, not wishing to cause him injury before it was time, and that required a touch that took a long time for her to develop, since her childhood developing the ability to pick us without squishing us I’m sure.

How good she looked dressed in her blue jeans and cream colored sweater, holding her tiny little man so delicately within her warm fingers.  Autumn weather had come on quickly and bared summer skin had to be put away behind layers of cloth.  No longer did her painted toes tease us so from her sandals as her monstrous shoes walked past, but she looked no less beautiful now in her black flats and soft cotton socks, a cozy look if ever there was one.   Given this was her first day in them this season, I wasn’t really surprised when she dipped her heel out of her flats, having decided to commemorate her autumn wear for this occasion as she placed the tiny man within the humid insole of her shoe, just behind the ball of her vast cotton foot.
 
She’d just come from class, so it was rather easy for her to stick him to the slightly moist surface within her shoe, allowing him the pleasure of gazing up at her gargantuan socked sole.  White and soft and warm as a blanketed heater her foot emanating over him in soothing waves as her arch flexed for him to admire.  Of course to him it was another story, for along with the warmth that quickly escalated to the temperature of a furnace there was also the thick cotton scent of her socks and shoe leather, mixed with the humid air of her sole as it washed down on him, smothering his senses into delusion.
 
She teased him, but couldn’t see him coughing and begging her in her shoe, though she might have guessed it.  Looking up at her with red, teary eyes and unnoticed shouts of woe, if only he could have seen how bright her eyes were shining as she played with him beneath her, making more than a few of us hidden in the audience jealous of not being the one to give her such a joyful expression.  She had set him within her personal space, right in her shoe to be warmed and overcome with the sole of her foot.  What a treat this was for such a little bug, to be smushed beneath her pretty white socks.  

Through stinging eyes he gazed up along the deep cotton fibers of her sole that completely filled his field of vision for as far as he could see.  Vast across the horizon and stretching into the heavens beneath the cuff of her blue jeans her foot flexed and swayed in front of him, beckoning to him where his fate would lie beneath its crushing weight.  And then Shannon’s foot touched him, brushed him for the first time as he was made to feel that soft cotton sole as it pressed down upon his body for just an instant, leaving him gasping when all the light went out.  But then her sole lowered again, and this time it did not rise, as it pressed in on him and bore the weight of her feminine foot down upon him through the fibers of her damp sock.  His body resisted it for only a moment when the darkness enveloped him, molded around him and in a swift, almost imperceptible instant, burst him into nothing.  The pressure within her flats only continued to intensify long after he had gone, until every ounce of her weight had made its way back into the bed of her shoe, sandwiching her tiny captive beneath her step.     

When next her foot rose from her shoe, there was barely a stain of him left upon her sock, the shape of his outline just barely visible upon the ball of her foot.  Even that would be washed away with the humidity and friction of her steps rubbing within her shoe, wiping him away beneath the cotton of her socks.  It was a fate we’d all seen before in various forms, and always were the traces of us no less undetectable when it was over, a reminder of our lives and hers, to hide within the shadow cast by the sun of Shannon.