Nell was thoroughly worn out after a day of relay races, but luckily, as always, the shrinkie therapy was doing wonders. She stretched on a bed of stacked towels upon her village apartment floor, laid on her stomach with her rancid, perspiration-glazed soles upturned to the ceiling. An inch-tall person crawled along the handholds of each wrinkled arch, burying their miniature tongues into the cushy crevices.

            Occasionally Nell twitched when a particularly ticklish little mouth or pinprick fingertip irritated her sensitive skin, but for the most part, it was lovely. With a luxurious sigh, she idly pondered if some of the same health benefits would take effect if she showered before letting the shrinkies go to town on her feet? Coach never said anything about that, though, and since it seemed now that half the Olympic village was using this method for recuperation, Nell wasn’t willing to take the risk of reducing her healing. If the shrinkies were as eager as they seemed to swallow up half a comparative gallon of congealed grime, well, who was she to argue with the science?

            “Hey, Nell! Aren’t you coming?” Her relay teammate Patty stuck her head in the door.

            “What is it? I’m… rebuilding my body,” Nell responded wearily. She ran her fingers through her brunette bob cut, then next traced the swollen contours of her quadriceps. Today had been a good day, but in order to have another good one, she really just needed to remain here until the shrinkies had lapped up every ounce of sweat from her soles.

            “We’re about to have the Olympics, remember?”

            Nell frowned, in a slight daze after so much running. “We’re at the Olympics, Patty.”

            “No, no, dummy. I mean the Shrinkie Olympics. C’mon, put some shoes on or something, and follow me. We’re all over in the common room, and it’s about to start. Oh, and bring those two with you.”

            “I haven’t even showered yet.”

            “That’s the point. Hurry!”

            Patty disappeared. Nell shrugged, beleaguered, but not wanting to miss out on the fun, whatever it was that was happening. She peeled the naked inchers off her soles. Then, doing as she was told, she slid the thong of a sandal between her moist big toe and second. Rubber insoles slapping against her wet flesh, Nell trailed down the hallway, with a shivering shrinkie in each fist. It was strange they were shaking only now; maybe they were like little junkies, Nell decided, who went into withdrawal if you pulled them off their source without warning. Who could imagine being that attached to a giant runner’s foot, and one drenched in sweat and toejam, no less? Nell smiled, and stuck out her tongue at them.

            The common room was packed with athletes, most of them track runners like Michelle and Nicole, but a few Nell didn’t recognize. Several athletes were leaning against the walls, muttering to shrinkies in their palms, while others had their human toys sandwiched under heels and grinding into a flip-flop insole. Others were whispering, exchanging money and curses. Nell realized they were gambling on something, but what?

            A circle formed around the center of the room, where two lines of women had positioned themselves on their knees. With six athletes on each side bowed, the twelve Olympians all faced away from one another, and were conspicuously barefoot, with their soles turned up and their toes in merry dance. Every foot, though differing wildly in size, pigment, and motion, all shared one trait grimly in common: each was absolutely sopping with so much greasy sweat that each of the twenty-four individual feet was made to glow under the lights. Finally, eleven inch-tall shrinkies stood on the carpet between the opposing shores of oily feminine soles.

            Suddenly Nell understood exactly what “Shrinkie Olympics” meant, and while a small part of her felt just a smidge of guilt for the little people being put through something that likely wasn’t in their job descriptions, she also knew right away she was staying to see the whole contest. The concept was simply too disgustingly delicious.

            “Nell!” Patty hissed. “You got one you want to throw in the ring?”

            Nell examined the two people clenched in her soft hands. One was still quivering so hard that they looked incapable of walking on their own; the other, though, had gentled down. Smirking, Nell knew exactly who to pick. She leaned over the circle and placed the calmer shrinkie amongst the rest of the naked brethren.

            “Line up, slaves!” Patty barked loudly. The attention of every amused athlete was captured, but particularly that of the nervous competitors below. Breaking to a run, the twelve split off, with one individual each standing at the pudgy baseline of toes, and all of them facing the opposite finish line a couple meters away.

            Nell raised an eyebrow. She hadn’t heard them referred to as “slaves” before, though it didn’t seem an inappropriate name. What else should you call a human-shaped thing which was at the mercy of young athletes, their existence reduced exclusively to gnawing off someone’s heel calluses and sucking down toe grunge? Perhaps harsh, but not wrong.

            “Everyone ready? Stopwatch? Spotters? Photographers?” Patty asked, addressing the normal-sized humans more pleasantly. Several athletes raised hands, demonstrating their phones were ready to either capture video or monitor the cleanliness of the game.

            Nell sunk into a chair and observed the proceedings with keen interest. She’d almost forgotten about the still-quaking shrinkie in her opposite hand; waste not, want not. The young woman leaned toward the floor and slid the miniature person onto the platform of her sandal before lowering her sole down and sealing them under. Instantly, the tiny tongue bath resumed, and Nell rippled with goose bumps.

            “Then I’d say we’re about ready,” Patty announced. She crouched over the start line, studying the shrinkies to ensure none of them had a headstart. Only now did Nell notice each of the opposing giant bare heels was adorned with a piece of string. “Remember, little ones: there are two stages here. Lap one is capture the flag, so just get up as fast as you can. Lap two, though, is more complicated. You will put your tongue down on the toe, and you can’t remove your mouth until you’ve put that flag back at the top of the heel. If you do, you will be disqualified. Clear? Perfect!”

            Everyone held their breath, and Patty blew a whistle.

            “Ready? Set? GO!”

            Like champion track starters, all twelve “slaves” sprinted across the carpet toward the other line of upturned feet, eyes on the prize of the string-flag adhered to the tip of the foot hill.

            Nell’s heart fluttered as she watched her proffered shrinkie take off running for the opposite foot. She had to stop herself in her anxiety, though; this was just for fun, after all, and Nell had taken no bets. It was simply too easy to fall back into those nerves, given the circumstances of their time in the village.

            All the shrinkies reached their assigned foot around the same time, and this is where the real competition began. Watching the twelve each try to conquer the sloped hillock of a fleshy bare foot at once was akin to disorganized mud wrestling. Those soles were so slippery, that most participants had difficulty even getting enough of a grip to ascend, continually sliding back and becoming entangled amongst the miniature moat formed by the toes; instinctively, of course, the participating athletes were only too gleeful to worm their digits about, gripping any shrunken limbs unlucky enough to get lost between the doughy valleys of their foot’s cleavage.

            “Hey, that’s cheating!” shouted a couple of the athletes with stakes in the game, when they noticed this encumbrance.

            “Let it go! You’re keeping it from winning!”

            “Yeah, stop holding it! Interference!”

            Nell was briefly puzzled by their wording until she realized the “it” was the shrinkie.

            After some struggle, though, grasping the spongy foot-furrows carefully, a couple of the miniature racers managed to reach the summit of those concave soles. They snatched their string flags, and rolled back down the sweaty embankment. Nell’s fighter was the third to do so, and she couldn’t help but cheer a little.

            Once again, the shrinkies were sprinting across the gulf of carpet, more spread out this time as several of them still struggled to get out of the twisted toes keeping them rooted like quicksand to the base of the living hill. Multiple girls whose feet served as the obstacle course, in fact, gave no indication they intended to release their captures. Those shrinkies, resigned, had commenced caressing and licking the pale bulbs of tired digits. Aside from those gamblers who’d lost their competitor, most of the athletic audience in the common room seemed not to mind the amusing spectacle. A couple people even dropped in extra non-competing shrinkies, offering these toys to the happily grappling toes for added texture; those engaging in this act had seemingly forgotten about the competition altogether, resorting to the distraction of those athletes with multiple shrinkies pinched in their slimy toes. One of them, a star shot putter that Nelle recognized as Gretchen Bixler, now had the thrashing bodies of four shrinkies clamped in the muscular finger-toes of her beefy peds.

            The rest of the audience, however, was still deeply invested in the conclusion to the race.

            The second lap sounded far more fascinating, to Nell at least. Most had struggled to complete the first task without the difficulty of keeping their lips wrapped over the terrain of sweaty foot; could they do so now, while also steadily pouring a trickle of oozy pore-fluids down their throats? Nell recoiled, but she also couldn’t wait to see whether anyone finished. The pressure was so great, she had to remind herself to relent some of the weight of her sole bearing down on the sandal, with a junkie shrinkie camped in the wet darkness beneath.

            As the first tiny runners returned to the row of twelve feet where they’d commenced the game, everyone fell into a hush, sitting on the edge of their seats. Just as instructed, each competitor stuck out their microscopic tongues and slathered the nearest globe of a bell-end toe; thus qualified to begin the round, they started climbing, dragging themselves mouth-first up the damp incline.

            Nell bit her lip. Her little champion was doing well, only trailing in second now. Maybe they could even win it. Perhaps she should’ve bet something after all.

            This lap, as predicted, took much longer to complete. Several shrinkies were disqualified outright when, if they lost their grip and slid back down the sun-tanned dune of athletic skin, their lips came disconnected from the soggy sole rimples. Those spotters filming the affair called out any rule breakage, and Patty was quick to remove them from the field between her thumb and index finger, to the groaned consternation of the viewers with money in the ring. Most of the disqualified runners were instead wedged directly between a random set of wiggling toes; there also seemed to be some concerted effort, for no reason other than sheer entertainment, to fit an inch-tall slave between each one of Gretchen’s gargantuan toes.

            Nell’s runner, though, remained in the game, even as the competitors were narrowed down to just five who had yet to part their mouths from those mammoth hillocks of milky sweat and rubbery flesh.

            It was hard for the relay Olympian not to sympathize with the plight of those five; the flavors found across the span of foot undersides had to be rank and objectionable in the way of expired food, mucky swamp waters, and distilled vinegar all at once. Not to mention the lingering heat of that skin stored in briny socks and tight shoes for twelve hours a day, likely so sticky even beneath the painted sweat that it threatened to bind those puny lips directly to the giant sole.

            Yet they persevered. Nell held her breath again when her runner was nearing the top, moving a millimeter at a time digging their hands into the grooves of the stinky arch, face still hugged to the slick and pillowy wall. The flag hung from its shoulder.

            Their shoulder, Nell reminded herself. Not its.

            As her competitor claimed the victory, though, by pinning the string firmly to the heel, the distinction of slave pronouns was quickly forgotten. The room went wild, cheering in joy or stomping their feet with frustration; Nell just hoped those who’d lost hadn’t also chosen to store any spectating shrinkies under their feet, because those slaves were unlikely to be useful much in the future if so.

            Either way, this kind of uproar almost reminded her of the Olympic stadiums themselves, in microcosm scale. Which was appropriate, given the tiny runners, and the fact that their “medals” would all amount to the same prize: a night of being glued back to the monoliths of gummy soles, and a belly full of salty foot broth.

            Everyone was a winner in the Shrinkie Olympics, Nell decided, as she recollected her human toy and hungrily shoved it under her opposite foot to be squinched down into the sandal insole. After all, it wouldn’t do to have a pair of feet in a mismatched state of recuperation. The “winner’s” tongue got to work immediately.