Thunder.  That’s the sound we awoke to.  But not regular thunder, the kind of thunder you’d hear if a… slap? maybe? was amplified about a billion times.  Erika, Kaylee, Katherine and I had been hanging out in Erika’s living room, waiting for our friend Jennifer to come over.  We had made it a ritual to get together every Tuesday, have a couple drinks, maybe watch a movie.  It was the only way we’d found to keep our sanity over this boiling hot summer.   However, I felt like I was losing it, as the the three of us tried to piece together just where the heck we were.  The last thing we remembered was trying a new beer that Kaylee had picked up some place in Vermont, then feeling sleepy… then we woke up here.

    Tired, sweaty, and exhausted from work, Jennifer made her way down the street.  While she loved going to Erika’s, she did not love traveling there in 90 degreee heat in August.  Luckily, her office had a fairly relaxed dress code in engineering, so the long haired brunette was clad in comfortable in a comfortable shirt, shorts, and slip-on sandals.  As she got closer to Erika’s, she was looking forward to sitting back in the cool air conditioning.  She glanced down at her pink painted toes, wincing as she realized that due to the heat they were a bit sweaty.  “I hope they don’t smell too bad…” she thought to herself as she opened the door to let herself in.

    As we stood up, and began trying to get our bearings, the slapping thunder continued. Was it getting louder?  Was the ground beginning to shake?  The ground we were standing on was brown, the same color as the hardwood floor in Erika’s apartment, but it seemed to go on forever, but was that… furniture?  Giant furniture?  Suddenly, Erika let out a scream.  “Oh my god, look behind us!”  About a 100 meters away, on its side, stood what looked like a massive… flip-flop?  From our perspective it seemed about a 100 meters tall, too.  It looked a lot like the black flip-flops that Erika had been wearing earlier, when suddenly it dawned on us.  We had shrunk!  Doing some quick math in my head, I estimated our height at around 1 mm. How had this happened?  Was it that beer?  Fear began to fill my heart as the thundering slaps got louder, as I realized what, or rather who, they must be.

    As she entered the apartment, Jennifer didn’t bother to call out that she had arrived. Everyone would be in the living room, and if the movie had already started she didn’t want to interrupt them.  She paused briefly and then decided to take her sandals off, her feet sweaty and a bit red from the walk over.  Making her way first to the kitchen to grab a drink, she noticed a new beer in the fridge.  “Hmm, I’ll have to ask Kaylee if I can try one” she thought to herself, grabbing a Heady Topper instead.  “Erika always has such good beer.  Must be a quiet movie though, I can’t hear anything” she thought as she stepped into the living room.

    “Oh my god, we’re going to get stepped on!  Like bugs!” Kaylee sobbed to herself, hysterical, as Erika tried in vain to comfort her.  The three of us had been sitting on the couch, while Katherine had been on the other side of the room, near the door.  “Maybe we’ll get her attention!” said Erika, Kaylee biting back with “based on the size of your fucking flip flop, her big toe is about as big as a parking lot, but I’m sure she might notice the little stains we make on her sole”.  While Kaylee and Erika squabbled, we had no way of knowing about the drama unfolding on the other side of the room.

    The TV in the living room was on, and Netflix was open, but her friends were nowhere to be seen.  Huh. Jennifer made her way over to the chair across from the couch, and flopped down.  They’d probably just gone to get more snacks.  Seeing the remote on the floor, she reached down to grab it, and while bending over noticed a small bug by her toes.  She frowned as she lifted her big toe over the bug and brought it down, crushing it into the pad.  She brought her foot up to her lap and bent closer, trying to get a look at what she’d just squished.  Erika would need to know so she could buy the right insecticide, after all.  As her face got closer, her eyes widened.  Was that a… tiny person?  Was that Katherine!?

    Katherine had awoken, alone, to a thunderous slapping noise.  A bit sharper than her friends, she’d quickly realized that she’d shrunken, that the enormous monolith next to her was a leg of the chair she’d been sitting on.  The noise had gotten louder and louder as the ground began to shake, until it shook so much she was unable to keep her bearings.  Then, it stopped, and she looked up.  Before her sat a peach colored wall, about 10 meters tall, with something pink overhanging the top.  Katherine suddenly broke out in a cold sweat, as the wall lifted, and moved over her accompanied by a wave of moist, sweaty air.  Having recognized the wall as a toe, an enormous toe, likely belonging to Jennifer, she began to scream and cry as the big toe replaced her sky.  “Jennifer, please, don’t squish me, don’t squish meeeee” she squealed as the toe lowered, growing larger and larger in her vision.  Throwing her arms up in a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable, she folded backward briefly before being crushed with the tiniest crunchy squelch, the flesh of the toe spreading as Jennifer pressed it into the ground.

    Jennifer was in shock.  She’d stepped on her friend!?  How had she gotten so tiny?  Were her other friends tiny too?  That’s when she noticed the four opened bottles of that beer she’d seen in the fridge.  Where Rebecca, Katherine, and Erika shrunk too?  How could people shrink!?  They’d need her help!  What if she’d already squished them?  She examined the rest of her sole for any telltale smears, and then the other.   Relieved she hadn’t actually squished them, she returned her attention to the friend she’d already squished into smear, albeit one recognizeable by the white sweather Katherine always wore.  Grimacing, she brought her thumb over her toe and smeared Katherine’s tiny body away into nothing.  What to do now?  Calling the police seemed out of the question, she’d read enough sci-fi, and didn’t want to be hauled off to some government lab to answer questions and disappear.  Maybe she could take care of them?  She got up, watching carefull where she stepped, and made her way to the junk drawer in the kitchen.  Locating a magnifying glass and a piece of paper, she thought about where to start looking.  The beers had been over by the couch, so best start there.

    As we watched from the floor, the titanic form of Jennifer thundered her way into the living room.  Suddenly, closer to us, there was a tremendous slam as Erika’s flip flop fell over and crashed into the ground.  With a grim look on her face, Erika suddenly declared “I’m going to climb my flip flop.  It’ll be easier for her to see me on the black surface.”  Erika was the most athletic of the three of us, and honestly Kaylee and I didn’t really think it would work, so she set off alone.  We watched as she sprinted over to the side and began scaling the foam near the toes, quickly making it the 10 meters or so to the top.  While we watched her, the thundering had continued after a brief respite.  Suddenly, it stopped, and we noticed a shadow hanging over us, and turned around.

    Down on her hands and knees, Jennifer began searching for her friend with a magnifying glass.  It wasn’t long before she noticed a tiny figure with a shock of red hair, next to a black flip flop.  Rebecca!? Lowering the paper, to the ground next to her, she saw another figure, “must be Erika or Kaylee” she thought to herself.  Watching the specks that were her friends clamber onto the paper, she sat down on the couch, and raised it to eye level.  “I’m so glad I found you guys! What happened!?” she exclaimed in a soft voice.  As she pondered just how to communicate with her friends, just for a moment she forgot that Erika was still missing.  Fidgeting a bit, she slipped a leg off the couch, and felt a flip flop under her foot.  Lost in thought and worry, she absendmindedtly scrunched her foot into it.

    Erika gazed in horror as Jennifer lifted her friends, and not her, and sat on the couch.  She was standing in the imprint of her own big toe, whimpering, and glanced down at her feet, trying to come to terms with the situation.  Looking up, one of Jennifer’s legs slipped off the couch, and her titanic toes impacted the heel of the flip flop.  Realizing what was about to happen, Erika began to scream as Jennifer’s foot slipped into the flip flop.  She made it to the edge of her toe print when she was knocked to the ground, and pulled backwards about 10 feet, accompanied by a crunching, squelching noise, then intense pain.  Her scream going up in pitch, she gazed down at her legs, which had been crushed and mangled as Jennifer’s toe scrunch pulled her back.  She had just enough time to realize what had happened, and glance up at Jennifer’s toe coming down again to crush her into her own toe print, before everything went black, the flesh of the toe turning a bit white as Jennifer anxiously scrunched it into place.

    Sighing, realizing she had no way of understanding her friends, Jennifer considered her options.  She couldn’t call the police, she could… take care of them?  For how long?  Forever?  What life even mean like, for her friends this tiny?  Jennifer was, above all else, a practical person, and rapidly came to the conclusion that, for all intents and purposes, her friends… no longer existed.  Sure, maybe these little mites were the same people she knew, with thoughts, with feelings, with memories.  But honestly, she had no way of knowing.  For all she knew, the shrinking process had ended up making them the same as any other bug.  Gazing down at the paper, and at the sole of her foot upturned towards her face, she finally decided what to do.  She lowered the paper to sole of her foot, curled under her on the couch, and tipped it over, dumping her friends onto it.

    Kaylee and I screamed as we slid down the paper we’d climbed onto.  What was Jennifer doing!?  Suddenly we were free-falling, until we landed on a soft, damp surface with a smack.  There was a sweaty smell in the air, and the peach colored surface moved a bit, sloping up behind us and continuing down in a ridged plain to some boulders the same color.  A voice, the same incredibly loud voice Jennifer has spoken in before, suddenly sounded down “sorry Kaylee, sorry Rebecca, but I just think this is for the best.  Sorry if my feet are a bit sweaty”.  Her feet?  Suddenly, it all made sense.  We’d been deposited on the sole of Jennifer’s foot.  Kaylee began to scream again when all of a sudden the ground moved, and ther ridges (which I now knew were the wrinkles of her scrunched foot) suddenly got larger.  As Jennifer unscrunched her foot, Kaylee screamed as she fell over on her side.  As the foot scrunched again, she attempted to get up, but found herself caught between two of the larger wrinkles.  Screams getting shriller, accompanied by cracking noies, she disappeared from view.  When the scrunch ended again, her crushed body, smeared into the sole with blood, was revealed, still twitching, reaching out with a trembling hand. 

    Her friends hadn’t landed where she wanted.  Given that she’d decided to squish them, doing so between her toes seemed like a good bet, especially since they’d complained about her sweaty feet in the past.  She’d misjudged their lightness, and they’d ended up on the ball of her foot instead.  Jennifer began scrunching and unscrunching her sole to try and tumble them down to her toes.  After the second scrunch, she noticed some red on her foot.  “Oh shit, did I squish one already?” she thought.  “Must have caught her between the wrinkles.  Oh well”.  “Whoever is left down there, Rebecca or Kaylee, this will go a lot easier if you just walk down to my toes.  Come on, don’t make this hard.”  After a few seconds, she noticed the last tiny form making it’s way over the ball of her foot, towards her toes.  “Good girl.  I promise this won’t be so bad.  Certainly better than getting crushed in a wrinkle!”

    Tears ran down my face as I made my way across Jennifer’s sole.  I’d left Kaylee’s crumpled form on the plain I now recognized as the ball of Jennifer’s foot, still twitching and bleeding out, guttural sounds ocassionally escaping from her mangled body.  Once I’d gotten a little ways away, Jennifer granted her the mercy of death, her enormous pointer finger coming down to smear her completely.  I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t mad, I was… Awed.  Hysterical. Slient.  Broken.  As I made it to the gap between the ball and the toes, I heard the titanic voice again.  “Go on, between the big toe and the second”.  I began climbing down, still crying, when I lost my balance, and tumbled into the embrace of the toes.  “Good girl.” I heard once last time as the walls began to move, and I was enveloped by hot, sweaty flesh on all sides.  Hopefully my end would be quicker than Aman-.

Crunch.

    Jennifer watched as the last of her friends walked to her own death at her titanic toes.  While she was a bit sad, she’d be lying if she denied the rush of power she got from knowing that her friend’s last moments would be spent being crushed by the lowest part of her body.   When the speck made it to her toes, it suddenly tumbled down to the gap between them and the ball, and Jennifer quickly scrunched again.  Picking up the magnifying glass, she found her friends body stuck to the side of her second toe.  It was Rebecca, after all!  As an arm reached feebly out to Jennifer, as if to beg for the mercy Kaylee had already been granted, Jennifer slowly started bringing her toes together one final time.  She almost imagined she could hear Rebecca’s tiny pleas, when her toes came together.  Wiggling them back and forth a bit, Jennifer leaned back and put on The IT Crowd.  She might as well enjoy the AC for a while, it’s not like anyone was going to be around to bother her, and finally she’d ge tto pick what was on for a change…