“What the hell?” Mary murmured with discomfort. She shuffled her foot, nearly losing her balance on the slippery conditions inside her moist, enflamed shoe. “It was only supposed to be seventy-five out today!”

            It felt like she’d dunked her entire overheated appendage into a tank of syrup. She pivoted the ball of her foot, grinding her sole down into the shoe, hoping some adjustment would alleviate the steam and swamp. If anything, though, it was only made worse; sweat audibly gushed inside her shoe. A patch of damp moisture soaked along the exterior side of her slipper.

            “Ugh! I so cannot even with this right now,” Mary gagged. Shaking her head, she resolved to wipe it up later when she had a break; there were too many tables to wait on now. “What, did I eat something weird yesterday? God, I’m gonna need, like, eight showers.”

            Inside the shoe, below the peachy, wrinkled skyscape of reeking skin, the sweat-rainstorm had turned into a typhoon. Thick, viscous saltwater rose in high pools which rapidly were turning into lakes and ponds. Before long, as David came flying back down toward solid ground for the hundredth time, he was caught not by the spongy moonbounce of the insole, but the crashing tidal waves of churning sweat. There was actually enough warm, soupy foot-liquid collected around the everlasting expanse of Mary’s shoe that there was no way to avoid it now.

            “This is fricking crazy…” Mary gasped, fanning herself. She hunched over a seat in the restaurant’s break room, her shoes propped up on the chair. The woman could actually witness the shaping of her damp shoe molded like wet clay around her toes. The dark crescent curves of soiled crevices between her digits continued to leak from the inside. An actual drop of opaque sweat trickled in a slow, deliberate path from the tip of the woman’s shoe and down to her heel.

            “Oh my God, I think I’m gonna hurl!” the ditzy blonde uttered to herself as she watched her salty discharge dripping through her shoes. She peeled one slipper away from the rotund heel of her size-10, only to shove it back in just as quickly. The cloudburst of putrefied funk, not to mention the misty spritz of sweat which escaped merely by suction, was plenty to convince her to leave her poor feet inside, for the protection of her coworkers. “Shit, I need a vacation or something!”

            The drawing away of Mary’s heel, only to have it returned with an earth-splitting vengeance, was more than enough to whip the hot tropical storm of her shoe into a true geological frenzy. An ocean of sweat was rising beneath David’s back. Try as he might, gulp after gulp of the stinking, spicy stuff washed down his throat until he could feel his stomach bulging with Mary’s moisture.

            With every alternate step of his miles-high tormentor, he ping-ponged yet again through the black miasma of Mary’s shoe purgatory. He rebounded from the spongy, porous wall of an oscillating sole wrinkle the size of a mountain range, plummeted back down, and skipped across the bubbly, rancid sweat like a pointless pebble on the raging sea. The microscopic young man had entered his own orbit about the surf-and-sky of Mary’s punishing foot. Each dive he took, he found his body passing ever-longer through the bottomless lakes of musty, honeyed sweat.

            In the dark, then, David found his hand meeting another his same size. For a moment, he wrote it off as a mirage in this reverse-desert of unavoidable sweat waves and sticky foot skin islands. However, as he his fingers tightened, he rediscovered Nina in equal inhuman misery. Their palms locked together.

            By now, the billowing tide of sweat had flooded up to the very empyrean of sole flesh. There was no escaping the greedy maw of the formed sea. David and Nina, hand in hand, were sinking like rocks now in liquid so dense they might well have been preserved like flies in amber, if Mary were to halt her godlike steps.

            But she didn’t stop. She carried on her duties in the restaurant despite the sweat sopping through her footwear in glistening rivulets. And so, the shrunken pair of specks drifted ever-deeper into the watery void, their lungs filling with salty fluid and their minds at last enlightened to the extent of Ariel’s accursed mercies. Their bodies and orifices were full to the brim of pungent, vinegary sweat and the accompanying percolation of vile body odors dredged from the worst and hottest of humanity.

            David hugged his best friend, receiving the same embrace in return, as the last pathetic air bubbles ascended from their lips. Consciousness drowned from their very being, and with it, their lives.

            “OhmyGod, ohmyGod, ohmyGod… this… is… so… fricking… gross!” Mary shrieked to herself as she tiptoed up the steps into her apartment building. The entire walk home, she’d felt curious eyes on her back investigating the source of the mysterious sloshing sound effect which emanated from her feet as though she were hopping through rain puddles in rubber boots. Except, of course, the sound only arose from the wallowing of her overworked soles and ripe toes in the high-flooded sweat-sacs her shoes had become.

            Mary kicked her shoes off with a repulsed fervor as soon as she’d entered her home. Puddled sweat sprayed, spilling upon the floor as the shoes came to rest innocuously on their sides. The blonde stifled a scream of pure disgust, not wanting to have a worried neighbor come running and discover her humiliation. Her feet were blushed a ruddy pink, still gleaming with wet, painted secretions.

            “Hey, Mary!” Ariel said happily from the doorway of the apartment, where she’d suddenly appeared out of the corner of the waitress’s eye.

            “A-Ariel!” Mary stammered. She jammed the shoes beneath her coat rack, hoping to hide the mess. “What’s… uh, what’s up?”

            “Nothin’ much. What’s up with you?”

            “You know, same old… tough night at work.”

            “Hey, you know I know how that is, girl!” Ariel said cheekily.

            “Oh, I almost forgot,” Mary said, hoping to deflect the embarrassing topic. “Have you heard from Nina or your brother today? They were gonna shoot me a text at work about where we were hanging out tonight, but I guess they forgot.”

            “Nope, they haven’t said anything to me today. Maybe they’re just not that good of friends after all,” Ariel dropped in casually. She cocked her head, threading her fingers in her hair. “Say, I know it was a rough night at work, but I’m not used to seeing you looking so wiped. No offense. Everything all right?”

            “Yeah, yeah…” Mary sighed. She supposed it was all right to say, after Ariel had been the butt of her brother’s jokes the previous night for the very same offense. “Just been a weird night. My… my feet were just so, so sweaty. I’ve never felt anything like it in my whole life, you know? They were, like, drenched in there! I think my shoe was starting to dissolve or something.”

            “I’m sure it’ll be just fine after you’ve had a nice long bath,” Ariel commented. “That’s what I always do after a killer shift. Seriously, don’t be embarrassed or anything. Having stinky, sweaty feet is just the curse we bear to pay the bills, isn’t it?”

            “Thanks for understanding, girl,” Mary said. She leaned against the wall, one foot propped up on her knee where she could knead her swollen soles under fingertips. “I think I will go take that bath. To be honest, I think sometimes you’re the only one who really gets me.”

            “I got your back, girl,” Ariel said with a wink. She backed away from the door with a waggle-wave of her slender fingers. “And I’ll let you know if I hear a peep from David and Nina, all right?”