If the awkward silence was deafening before, it’s definitely ear-piercing now. You study another few lumps lurch down your mother’s throat in the interlude, her lips pursing tighter and tighter until you can tell she’s chewing it on her lower teeth, probably on the verge of breaking the skin. That might be an indication it’s time to act, for better or for worse.
“Mom,” you utter softly, nearly startling her. “I know I haven’t done much talking… to you… about what, um… you know… all of everything.”
“It’s all right, honey. You should be able to take all the time you want,” she says, clearly having been coached by Dr. Felton. “I’m here for you if you want me to be. When you’re ready.”
“I think I am,” you say, and you can tell this revelation is far more painful to her than it ever was to you. “Ready, I mean. If you… are…”
“Please, sweetie,” she sighs. The tears are already glazing over her eyes, building up in a water wall over her irises and on the verge of tumbling down if she blinks. God, and you haven’t even started yet. This is going to be rough. Not that you didn’t already guess that. “Please let me help you. Talk to me.”
Your throat, dry and sticky, seems to catch on itself as you open your miniscule jawline again to begin spitting up some ugly truths. She knows the basics, of course. Some of the milder forms of torment you sustained in Carly’s “care.” Most of it made her cry. Some of it made her disappear into her room for the night, sobbing as quietly as she could to try not to keep you awake even though you were already lying there in your state of self-pitying insomnia. But you also know that if you have to keep some of this inside you much longer, you’re going to burst like a tiny balloon, overinflated as though Carly herself had those massive lips of hers pressed hopelessly against yours, blowing puff after puff of warm air and dizzingly traumatic recollections into your throat.
“I… don’t really know where to start.”
“Anywhere you want. How about… how it… happened,” your mother says, fighting through with more gusto than you would’ve expected. The emotional training from your doctor is probably all that’s keeping her glued together right now. “Just let it out.”
“Okay.”
The next twenty minutes pass in a haze as you detail the very beginning as excruciatingly as is necessary. Some of it you thought might be more difficult to peel apart in exact terms given the time differential, but you’re shocked at how simply much of it comes out as though the whole six-year affair began just a few hours ago. The fateful trip outside to gather the yardwork tools, the thunderstorm, the surreal trek back inside at your new height after your clothes had fallen around your diminutive naked frame, the sensation of pissing yourself before the towering, writhing mass of your little sister’s bare toes. You aren’t able to get much past the point where Carly first picked you up at less than three inches tall and swore to teach you a lesson before your mother’s eyes begin seeping the salty deluge. Frankly you’re shocked she made it this far. Some of them splash down into her palm, splattering your shins and shirt, but you have to keep moving. Your own knees have begun to wobble as you stagger down against her warm skin.
Next comes the real meat of a story that stretched on into the oblivion of half a decade’s time: the first time Carly exposed you to a now-very familiar form of training as you were pinned under her toes, molded to her soles, forced at first to fill your lungs with her rank efforts, which as it turned out was only a warm-up act for the true act of degrading patronage to come.
“S-so… t-then what?” your mother warbles, her cheeks stained with tears and practically sparkling. She’s putting a great deal of effort into keeping her wrists from quivering, so much so that she has to root her palms down against her thigh and pull herself higher up on the bed, crossing her legs beneath you for added stability. It’s not really helping. You can tell more than anything she wishes the story would end now, but knows just as much she has to allow you to continue. Has to allow these wretched visions into her brain in full.
“M-Mom, if you… want me to stop, I-”
“No!” she almost shrieks, causing you to flinch, and then herself as a repercussion. “Please, honey. Let me in. I just want to be able to understand everything you need me to. Help me help you.”
“Okay.”
“G-go on. Then what?”
“Then she, um… she came back from being outside again. She’d… done more work. And, um… she put me back at the end of the… bed,” you continue, your eyes flashing to the edge of the mattress, able to instantly recall your exact position on the sheets, and more specifically even, what Carly’s feet were doing as they drew closer to you like hungry jungle predators in all their filth and animal attraction. “And she put her… feet out in front of me…”
“Like this, you mean?” your mother intones more confidently than before, sniffling to fight back the receding tears. She unfolds her leg out from under the other, propping her heel up, as her hand lowers down toward it and tips, giving you greater incentive to disembark the fleshy gangplank.
“I… um…”
Blinking, you find yourself face-to-sole with the bare, wrinkled, mildly leathery foot of your mother, not quite the towering beast of Carly’s basketball-suited dogs, but still possessing enough of the same hereditary information that if you squinted, you might convince yourself you’re staring at the feet of your sister again twenty-five years in the future. If you hadn’t been rescued when you had, that might very well have been a conceivable vision in your later life. And after you’ve made that revelation, it’s hard not to gaze at the fleshy contours with the idea that this is no longer your parent but your owner, decades down the line, if you simply hadn’t divulged anything to Sophie and allowed the madness to unfurl for a quarter century more. Before long, it’s impossible to believe anything else.
This is Carly. As she might’ve been.
“Well? Like this?” your mother softly questions, growing more imperious with each syllable, the quivering emotion of before turning to curiosity. “I just want to make sure I understand, honey. Like I said. No need to be nervous.”
“Oh. Right, right. Um… y-yeah, kind of like that, yes, she, um… propped them up. And laid back” you breathe. Unconsciously you reach out, tapping your minute fingertip at a deep wrinkle in Leah’s tanned heel but retracting just as soon as you make contact with the textured flesh as though an electric charge was delivered through her skin cells from a wall socket. The sensation is so painfully familiar it’s hard not to come within range without the same instincts kicking in.
“Okay. So she laid you in front of them,” your mother sighs, readjusting herself on the bed and stretching back, mirroring your loose description of the scene until she’s laying back in the same position that your teenage sister did for the first of many times those years ago. The images of past and future are melding by the instant. “What happened next?”
In another second you find yourself staring up at the twin soles of your older sister… no, no, your parent, her toes bouncing and wriggling with much the same fervor as her daughter’s often did. Clearly, any tension that was keeping your mother’s body in a state of semi-paralysis during the earlier portion of this conversation has dissipated.
You suppose that’s not something to lament. The more relaxed you both are, after all, the easier this will be. Even if it is making you feel increasingly strange to be standing so near to your mother’s feet for perhaps the first time at this size. Though not, as you come to realize, uncomfortable. Certainly you’ve learned to get over feelings like that.
“Um… then… then she asked me to… told me to kiss her foot. To show her I respected her,” you utter. The words come more easily than you expected, too. Even easier than they came when you first detailed the account to Dr. Felton or even Sophie. Why is that? Is it just that you feel bizarrely more at home in this instant as you stare up at a gigantic pair of a family member’s feet?
Not merely a family member, though. Your future. Your lost future. What might’ve been.
Happiness?
“Kiss it?” your mother repeats back, at first sounding like a questioning attention to reason out Carly’s logic, but then the words reach your ears a third time, softer, and more self-assured. Not a question anymore. Not your mother’s words anymore. “Kiss it.”
“Y-Yeah. That’s what she… said.”
“Why don’t you show me, sweetie?” Leah says naturally, not a syllable out of place or a single crack in her tone.
“What?”
“You heard me. I said I want to understand. That’s what you want, too, isn’t it, Jack?”
“W-Well, yeah, but… is it… really n-needed to… to, um…”
“No, it’s not,” she sighs, her feet swaying slowly from side to side and regaining your full attention at every tiny motion of her muscles or flick of a toe, such that her words start to sink directly into your subconscious, only flowering fully there as you study every intricate flex and fold of her sole, the constantly drifting colors of her flesh from a pale white to a flushed pink and every shade in between. “But… you wouldn’t mind showing me, would you, little boy?”
“What did you say?”
“I said you wouldn’t mind showing me, would you, sweetie?”
“N-N…” you choke out, at this point not even dedicating much more than sensory recognition to the sentences dripping like warm honey out of the woman’s lips, sultrier than you’ve ever heard her speak in her your life. Those toes, slender and more dexterous than you’ve never noticed before, bob and weave, curling together and allowing cool air to sweep between the weathered crevices.
“Come on. Don’t be shy. Just give me a little kiss,” she insists innocently. “Kiss Mommy’s foot nice and sweet like you did Carly’s. And then I’ll finally understand. Won’t I?”
“Yes,” you agree, braindead and attuned only to the fleshy walls resting so peacefully before you, in need of a connection only your lips can provide in order to bring this madness full-circle. The logic fits. It has to. Nothing has felt so right in weeks, even. Why should it be wrong? Who’s even asking? Who?
The scent is light, something you would’ve have distinguished from the normal carpet fibers and dust particles that collect into underside of the feet of every giant in this massive earth you now inhabit, but it’s there. The creamy, intoxicating balm of Leah’s lotion thunks against the back of your skull, the lotus-tinged aroma of your mother’s freshly washed feet flooding your nostrils and seemingly distributing to every part of your body, filling you up and allowing you to almost float on the balls of your feet as you advance closer to your pillowy fate.
The texture comes next, of course, as you brush a knuckle against your mother’s skin. The tanned exterior lacks the almost buttery, rippling consistency of Carly’s sun-kissed soles, given the doubled lifetime of experience out in the light contained in these weather-beaten insteps speckled with dry skin and porous former blisters, but it’s still comforting in its earthiness. Besides, it what you’ve would’ve had to look forward to in the future. Placing your palm flat against it, digging your fingers into the grooves of each wrinkle and curve, you allow its motion to guide your own like a waltz. The surface is constantly reforming as your parent moves under your touch, egging you on. Deciding you’re not one to stand in the way of compassion and emotional catharsis, however it’s delivered, you close your eyes and lean in.
Lush flesh meets your lips, inviting your tongue out from between your teeth seconds later as you slake your tiny muscle and its meager volume of saliva over the infinite wall of matured skin and calloused contours. Feeling that old familiar hunger cloying its way back out of your stomach and to your jaws like a plague putting you through its nauseous paces, you alternate puckering your lips against the firm sole and dragging your tiny tongue in between every curved valley of her sole.
“Thank you, Jack,” she coos, euphoric relish evident in her throaty tone as her entire body loosens into the mattress, relaxed by your moist gestures. “I think I finally understand now.” A second later her foot lowers over top of your body, gently pinning you beneath its weight, but it does absolutely nothing to impede your aggressive progress in messily kissing every square inch of skin you can get your mouth on.
You wish you could respond, but all you can manage is a pitiful peep in between breathless pulls of your lips against the humid wall of luscious release disguised as a feminine sole. When your eyes flash open again, just for a blink, you’ve transported yourself years into the unknowable and impossible beyond that you’ll never be able to live, the goddess laying before you no longer bearing the compassionate countenance of your mother but Carly’s, just as radiant and mighty as ever. She hasn’t changed a bit in twenty-five years.
“It’s good to have you home, little bro.”