“Scott.”

            The voice was filtered through a layer of soggy stocking fabric and squirming toes, but it cut through nonetheless. Its owner wasn’t one to let her words go unheard, no matter how deeply her audience was buried beneath her.

            “Scott. Are you listening to me?”

            More insistent now, the voice wouldn’t be stopped until a response was given.

            Scott Stevens turned himself about in the space, ignoring gravity and instead giving his vulnerably naked body to the squishy balance of taut nylon that imprisoned him so tightly.

            “I hope you know, sweetie,” Judy Stevens said with a sigh, once she realized she had her eldest son’s attention at last. Sitting in the driver’s seat of her car, she’d slipped her left foot lithely from the black pump and propped it over her opposite knee in order to get a more direct view of her shrunken offspring. “I hope you know I take no joy in doing this to you right now.”

            At this announcement, it took every ounce of strength Scott had left not to roll his eyes back into his head a full three rotations.

            Given his current position, stripped of all clothing, squeezed beneath his mother’s toes inside her stockings, and roasting in a stew of flesh and leather, only now given fresh air and sunlight after five hours straight in her shoe, it was tough to take her words at face value.

            Still, he concluded it was in his best interest to pay her all the attention she wanted now as she wriggled her toes up and down, continually wrapping themselves back over him in a muggy embrace and clamping him even further into the wall of moist nylon.

            He cringed as his crotch was teased against the doughy pad of Judy’s big toe.

            She certainly did nothing to shy from this discomforting offense. In fact, the grinding of anonymous body parts and skin seemed only to increase as Scott fought to cup his aching junk away from the hulking mass of his mother’s toe.

            Embarrassment was something of a foreign concept to the woman.

            The sticky summer heat was wearing heavily on both of them. Even with the car window rolled down, and for Scott especially, down in the trenches of his mother’s footwear, it was a very special brand of unpleasant. With skin on skin from nearly every angle, both bodies produced a steady flow of sweat thanks to the upper-eighties temperature.

            It was tough to even make sense of the sodden tangle of Judy’s toes and Scott’s limbs. Any logical person would’ve resorted to sandals on a day like today, and indeed the woman often did for fashion’s sake, but then again she had her reasons for this choice today.

            The hapless young man had luckily retrained himself to ignore the walloping stench of salty sweat and rancid foot skin hours ago. Still, every time Judy’s mighty weight would press him back into the stocking, stretching it out and releasing its sour musk anew, he was forced to experience every flavor yet again.

            Hot, balmy air, clouding each desperate inhalation with acrid moisture: so sickeningly familiar and yet simultaneously fresh. Scott was an old pro at breathing strategically while shrunken and trapped inside an enormous shoe; however, when Judy was this intent on awakening her son’s senses with each and every briny smash into her water-logged clothing, there wasn’t much he could do to stop her.

            He was going to take it, because she had decided he would.

            At just an inch in height, it didn’t take much for those meaty digits to exhaust Scott in more ways than one. Today, though, the reeking effluvium of Judy’s overheated dogs was the least of his worries.

            This particular stint in his mother’s heel hadn’t been a particularly restful one as she stalked about the house, barely avoiding putting full pressure on the front half of her foot. He was just lucky she didn’t put him under the appendage responsible for working the pedals in the car. Little mercies were few as it was.

            Even when she was sitting, though, Judy’s foot was constantly off the ground. It bobbed and rotated to the whims of her ankle as she hummed some jaunty older tune Scott didn’t recognize. Impromptu roller coaster rides were nothing new to the twenty-two-year-old shrunken house arrest prisoner, but considering he didn’t have to experience one in nearly six months, it was a bit of a shock to be plucked from the couch cushion between his mother’s fingertips, not only nude but half the length of a human thumb.

            He had been deposited into the cascading tunnel of Judy’s stocking moments later with nary an explanation. The rapid approach of her plush appendage into the nylon, filling the void with her wrinkled sole and powerful heel, was just about all the answer he needed to grasp her mad reasoning.

            Not that Scott could ever truly get used to being worn in the dark, musty depths of a shoe with a set of monstrous toes mashing him down again and again and again on every step. Especially since those toes tended to belong to a close family member. He suspected anyone in past, present, or future who could get used to such a thing had to have a screw loose.

            “I’m sure you must be disappointed in yourself right now, Scott,” Judy said after a healthy pause ensued. The inch-tall Scott simply stared up at the looming billboard-scaled face of his mother through the webbed fibers of her stocking.

            Concentrating on keeping his titanic parent’s big and second toes from pulling him completely into their doughy crevice was taking up most of his energy; defensive rhetoric wasn’t coming very easily. It wouldn’t have done much good, anyway.

            Though he didn’t want to admit it, Scott was indeed disappointed in himself, though not for the reasons his mother wanted to believe, and certainly nothing he’d ever willingly share.

            Judy Stevens leaned further back in the leather seat of her car, allowing her crossed leg a little more space before the steering wheel. She pursed her lips, trying to read her son’s expression.

            “After all…” she continued with incredible calm, even gentleness. The same sugary tone she always resorted to when disciplining her children, as though none of this tortuous fanfare was any more unusual than wagging a disapproving finger in protest. “…I thought we’d come to a little agreement the day of my campaign announcement. Was I wrong about that?”

            Her toes momentarily ceased toying with Scott’s flailing legs. This allowed him a moment to collect himself beneath the arch of his mother’s sweaty digits. The young man awkwardly fought against the damp fabric, eventually slipping further down the massive expanse of Judy’s slippery size-twelve and becoming pinned under the ball of her foot.

            Right where she wanted him, evidently. After a full decade of physically stamping the rebellion out of her son by shrinking and storing him in every type of footwear, Judy had become impressively skilled at changing his location on her body with barely any input. Especially when he was small enough to be overpowered by a single immaculately-pedicured toe.

            “Well?” she pressed, obviously expecting an answer. “Was I?”

            Holding the rest of his body as steady as he could, Scott rocked his head emphatically from side to side to signal a “no” but didn’t speak up otherwise. His throat was a little dry to conjure up a particularly confident verbal response. Dehydration had settled in by the fourth hour or so inside Judy’s pumps, and he didn’t feel like letting his mother see him as any weaker than she probably already did.

            “I thought so,” she said, nodding her head as though only just now confirming it to herself. As if she suspected for even a single moment she could be wrong. “I believed we could fix up any problems there are between us. That if you just showed some initiative and started working with this system that’s designed to improve you, instead of fighting it every step of the way like a child, things could work out for everyone. That we could both get what we want and finally have an understanding between us. That I could help this whole country, and you could be back on your own again. And I still believe all those things. Don’t you, honey?”

            Shaking his head this time would’ve been more difficult, as Scott was already finding himself pinched once again by his mother’s two largest toes. Their combined musculature was wrapping him into an especially pungent cradle. Judging by the aggressiveness of this new assault, the question was obviously rhetorical. In fact, it was as though the words were coming from the mouth of a completely different woman.

            Scott was rather accustomed to this kind of contradictory treatment, and hardly paid it any attention. To any outsider, though, it might’ve appeared backward as Judy rambled on so positively with that sultrily persuasive tone of hers that had made the forty-five-year-old United States senatorial hopeful a formidable opponent in any debate; meanwhile, her foot was hard at work preventing its tiny stocking passenger from making a single coherent response.

            These conversations between mother and son tended to be very one-sided. Even though Scott had been on his best behavior for the past year as he’d awaited his first disciplinary board review to determine the effectiveness of his shrunken house rehabilitation, he didn’t anticipate that dynamic changing anytime soon.

            Judy was not one to let someone else win, her children above all others, especially not when she possessed a legally mandated tool that could shrink them down to an inch in height, out of their clothes and quite often out of their dignity. The Portable Matter Reduction Device made for a nice bit of shorthand in their relationship.

            “I think you must believe in it, too,” Judy concluded for the both of them. The only sound in the car now was the soft scrunching of her nylons against Scott’s writhing, toe sweat-slicked body. “So it makes it all the harder knowing that I have to punish you now for your behavior, after you were doing so well for so long.”

            She glanced up to the rearview mirror, at last pulling her gaze away from the amusing sight of her miniaturized son struggling to remain upright in the grip of her toes and rumpled of stocking fabric. Judy brushed her carefully maintained blonde locks over her ear and wiped a finger at her recently applied rosy blush. She and Scott had to exit the vehicle soon and make a somewhat public appearance, and she was determined to look her best.

            The woman peered out the tinted window. Just across the walkway was the Adams Reduction & Rehabilitation Clinic, newly constructed less than a year prior thanks to the generous checks of the Techilogic Corporation and its industry titan CEO, Emily Brookes. The place was one of many acting as a shiny corporate-colored vessel for the various Shrink Act counseling services around the nation. They offered targeted group therapy and personalized corrective programs in exchange for legal recourse and other services.

            The building’s gleaming ceiling-high windows and silver pillars beckoned in shrunken patients consisting of adolescent deviants and hardened criminals alike, where they could be offered a safe space to talk and heal together through the process of their size-controlled probation. Or, if they were in need of just a little more aggressive education, they might be paired with a specialized counselor for some time in a shoe or any number of other uncomfortably cramped locations. If it wasn’t the most well-funded clinic in the country at present, it had to be near the top.

            Scott’s recent board review, his first after a long year at home, had ordered the young man report to weekly discussion and related activity sessions as part of a sentencing program that now allowed for more lenient hours out of the house.

            Still, even without this mandate, Judy would’ve been among the very first to sign her son up for the place.

            She’d been trumpeting the benefits of healthful reintroduction of shrunken offenders to society for nearly her entire political life. Plus, in her steadily ramping Senate campaign based on a growing effort to restructure the country’s penal system, it certainly didn’t hurt the family’s image. Her youngest, Kyle, was a bright sixteen-year-old already receiving early invitations to tour Ivy League colleges, while her middle child Maggie was lined up for a summer internship with the Adams Reduction & Rehabilitation Clinic itself managing shrunken inmates in “corrective” programming.

            All that was left to work on was Scott, and Judy had been busily molding him for the better part of his life.

            “I suppose you’ve had enough for now, honey,” Judy commented soothingly, looking back to Scott again and slowing her foot’s motion to a halt. She watched her son slide down the sweaty slope of her arched foot and into the cushy center of her sole.

            Before he could slip any further, she poked an index finger into his stomach, securing him squarely in place. He could practically melt into the malleable pink surface.

            She puckered her lips, blowing him a kiss with a smack of her red lips: “So maybe we’ll just have a little pep talk before your time-out is over, hmm?”

            Gritting his teeth, the shrunken boy looked up once again to the sweetly grinning countenance of his monolithic mother. He’d been engaged in psychological warfare for the past twelve months with the woman who’d given birth to him more than two decades ago, and his firmly held belief in freedom for himself and for his siblings was all that really mattered.

            What was one more little chat?