The carefree blonde, oblivious to even an iota of the physics-breaking madness taking place on the ground floor, hummed a cheery tune to herself as she slid her bare foot into her waiting shoe by the door. She played with her hair in both hands, tying it back into a mess-free ponytail, while casually wrestling her hefty, size-10 foot into its skin-tight home before a full evening shift at the restaurant. It was a habit she had repeated daily for years now to save time, and could’ve done up her hair and put on her shoes simultaneously in her sleep; the physical act of it was forgotten by the time Mary was headed out into the street.
To Nina and David, however, at such near-microscopic size, this act was akin to planetary forms colliding with enough force to shatter worlds. Once Mary’s naked foot had eaten up the entire infinite cave, there was no light left to guide them. All they had was thrown into piercing darkness and motion propelled by the solar winds of Mary’s moving skin.
They watched the endless parade of her pink sole wrinkles flashing above like the aurora borealis as Mary stretched her toes toward the humble tip of her footwear. Once her digits were comfortably settled in, miles ahead and out of her unknowing prisoners’ view, the young woman caked her arch down into the malleable morass of the earth which was her cottony insole, stained across canyons with aged grease pits of ancient sweat from repeated wearing.
David and Nina were flung with profound force, as atoms outracing light. Their hands separated. In the airborne journey, still beneath Mary’s comfortably planted foot, it was a marvel to each of them that they weren’t dead yet. So small had they become, there was actually room beneath the deep, crested wrinkles of their mutual friend’s wide, meaty sole for them to fly like displaced dust particles.
While the majority of the woman’s peachy land mass of a foot was molded with immovable strength to the earth now, the upturned valleys of her fleshy creases were plenty deep enough for them to exist within at their mite-sizes. David and Nina each landed on the insole again, miraculously still conscious and unbroken. It had to be only through Ariel’s magic mercy that they were allowed to survive such violence.
Mary’s foot was the sky now. That was all there was to it. As it first entered the shoe with the grace and force of a flaming meteor, it now adopted the entire over-world for both David and Nina. There was nothing above except Mary’s gritty, spiral-patterned, creamy-dimpled sole.
This pattern continued for interminable minutes or hours; which one, neither David nor Nina could tell. As Mary took ponderous steps forward in eternal space beyond, the gentle force of her arcing foot propelled them through the stale atmosphere beneath her foot. Somehow, they managed to continually land beneath a puffy sole wrinkle each and every time.
“Getting the hang of it, you two?” Ariel’s voice called out in their heads. “It’s just about time I showed you exactly what it’s like to be me or Mary. Someone who walks through life getting zero appreciation for everything we put up with at work, and way too many idiots who think it’s funny to look down on us. Well, guess who’s looking down on you now?”
David opened his mouth to speak as he was launched another mile along the upside-down, fleshy riverbank of Mary’s elegant, brawny sole-sky. The warm wind whipped by his lips so fast, any sound he produced was instantly lost to the void of the astronomic woman’s boundless wrinkles. There was a veritable side-pocket universe inside this shoe now; the previous laws of nature were abandoned, and only the unknowing machinations of Mary’s mighty heel and destructive toes were in control of life.
“Here’s my personal favorite spell now,” Ariel announced. “As much fun as it is to shrink you two losers, I can honestly say nothing makes me happier than what I’m about to put you two through now with this one. I hope you took a nice clean breath before I brought you here, cuz it’s about to get a little… wet. Let’s see, David was up to one hundred-times the strength of the smell before? Let’s multiply that by, oh, say, ten more? If you survive, I’ll talk to you on the other side.”
David tried to call out for Nina. His arms windmilled uselessly in the space, knowing the odds of actually touching her after they’d been thrown so far apart were less than nil. Still it brought him comfort to imagine his friend nearby in the heart-pounding seconds of waiting almost as tortuous as everything he’d been through so far.
This was the first time his sister had actually said “if” they survived. From the steeliness of her delightfully chewed words, he knew she meant it. In all likelihood, this now was the end for him and Nina.
The heat rose across the entire ecosystem of Mary’s shoe. Like night and day. It was as though the planet had flipped on its axis, hurling the frigid Arctic into the skin-peelingly balmy Saharan desert. Akin to the experience which took place inside Nina’s own unfortunate shoe earlier, the effect was compounded at epic proportions.
Ariel was not playing around this time.
Mary stirred. Grimacing, the unaware waitress paused mid-stride, with a plate of food balanced across one forearm. Her palm was pressed to her neck, testing her pulse, for at least some biological reason to explain what she was feeling now down below.
Warmth, concentrated with weaponized precision inside each of her shoes. More than warmth, in fact. This was so close to scalding that Mary would’ve sworn these shoes had been freshly boiled in a pot of magma just before she tugged them on. Almost instantaneously, she felt her pores opening up for some kind of cooling relief. The first wave of glazed sweat was making its way down the sloped, plush upper platform of her foot in a waterfall and into the cramped space below.
She took another step. Her foot squished into the sloshing earth beneath.
David careened through the in-shoe stratosphere, higher than ever as Mary took longer strides. He was plastered just as noticeably as a speck of dirt in a sole wrinkle canyon. The mere contact with his looming, unaware foe instantly adhered his bare skin to Mary’s. A single sticky droplet the size of a hot air balloon was plenty to entrap him easily in its gooey bindings.
Senses abused and comatose after a full day of inhaling the magically ravaged giant feet of his sister and friends, David’s nose and lips were almost out of feeling. Yet despite that indifferent fraying of his nerves, Mary’s catastrophically cooked foot skin still managed to surprise.
Nothing within the grasp of David’s mind, body, or spirit could even begin to fathom the aroma. The sheer funk. This wasn’t a thing that could exist on earth, in the solar system, or any other planet in the Euclidian space-time continuum he knew of.
No, Mary’s foot stink (if it could still be identified with such a lowly and innocuous word as that) existed in its own different dimension now. Beyond the parameters of 3D space, beyond time, there was only this: the putrid, skin-shriveling, stomach-devouring, water-logged essence of the woman’s entrapped peds in the vast tomb arranged especially for her two best friends.
Sweat rained from the shadow-shrouded, foot-flesh sky like a biblical plague. No natural disaster had anything on the absolute downpour taking place amongst the squishy, nightmarish conditions of Mary’s shoe insole beneath her heaving, red-flushed arch. David was washed from his accidental hiding place amongst the waitress’s sole wrinkles. His body was absorbed into the pearl-like orb of a falling sweat drop. If not for some quick action, he was almost sure he would’ve drowned in that bubble of gummy sweat.