“Oh, goddammit, David, now you’re just making me look bad!” Claire groaned with a whiny lilt, rolling her eyes but smiling ear-to-ear nonetheless, as she jokingly clapped a palm across her face in embarrassed response to the gift her coworker was presenting. “Is there some kind of BFF of the Year award you’re gunning for here? Because it’s working!”

“Hey, what are friends for?” David shrugged with a sheepish grin of his own, as he handed over the new lighter he’d purchased for her. Claire had been clicking the old one in vain for several minutes now, while the unlit cigarette hung from her lips like a lollipop stick, as the pair leaned against the brickwork of the décor store’s outdoor loading dock. “I knew you needed a fresh one, so…”

“Well, that’s definitely the kind of pick-me-up I can use today, for sure. Thanks sooooo much!” Claire replied with a grateful nod. Right away she lit the cig and took a lengthy drag, but continued palming the lighter in her bare hand, while that omnipresent Hardy red-and-black work glove flapped in the breeze from her hoodie pocket. “I mean, did you see how much stuff there is to get done today? We’re both going to be beat by the end. So this is going to help for sure.”

“Exactly why I gave it to you now,” David chuckled.

“Okay, I guess I have to admit, at least for today, that you’re more of a Gryffindor than me. Or, at least you’re not a Hufflepuff.”

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with being a Hufflepuff.”

David didn’t say this quite flirtatiously, since he had no intention of trying to come between Claire and her girlfriend Alex, but he also had to admit to himself that he wasn’t about to turn down some platonically affectionate treatment while in her company, which admittedly was at least a partial motivation for having personally acquired the new lighter for her, after he’d noticed she needed one. Plus, while huddled so close to Claire during their fleeting break from the many inventory chores awaiting them indoors, he was given one of the usual indulgent opportunities to study Claire’s ungloved hand from up-close. There was a special kind of relaxing, almost-hypnotic experience in watching her cradle the new lighter in her peachy creased palm like a cherished heirloom, curling and flexing her fingers in and out around it, then squeezing it down against her warm squishy hand flesh, which was already shining with a thin sheen of clammy sweat from the heat of those padded gloves and the labor they’d each already had to endure from the start of this shift.

“You’re too nice, David. What did I do to deserve it, seriously?” Claire taunted, playfully swatting at her friend with the loose glove. She dug the butt of her cigarette against a nearby ashtray until it went out, then slid her fingers back into her work mitt and pulled the Velcro strap taut before securely reattaching it to the wrist.

“You just have to be you,” David said, which was an honest answer and still not intended coquettishly, but hearing the corniness of these words aloud made him cringe, in spite of Claire’s expression remaining one of calm gratitude. Any awkwardness he might’ve felt over his embarrassing borderline rom-com response, though, was nothing next to the sharp and instantaneous alarm that came of having his whole consciousness launched in the direction of his friend, while his body seemed to shrink and then dissipate into nothing. It felt like a combination of fainting to the earth and spiraling toward a dizzying backward freefall up into the sky. Everything happened too fast for David to process, let alone cry out for help, before he no longer had lips to speak with, or limbs to flail in rightful panic. Yet still he perceived everything around him more-or-less the same, including seeing the back wall of the store, feeling the light morning chill, and smelling the lingering ashy flavor to the air leftover from Claire’s use of his present.

But of course nothing was the same, because David’s “body,” or whatever he could call his transmogrified form, was tightly adorned around none other than Claire’s right hand: not just on her glove, but having become it. In place of autonomous limbs, he had five hollow appendages like tube socks, each one filled in and partially inflated by the comparatively thick pillars of his friend’s fingers, though he had no control over them. Where his organs and skeleton might’ve once occupied, there was yet more empty space, which was now clasped snug to Claire’s meaty palm. In place of his skin, hair, or any remotely recognizable human feature was only red-and-black cloth and synthetic leather, engineered to protect the owner and give them a better grip. Simultaneously, he was made to feel the surreal exterior violation of having his body puppeteered by a giant hand, and the miserable claustrophobia of the skin-tight interior as well.

“D-David?” Claire gasped, rightfully taken aback, as he’d vanished in seemingly less than a blink. Apparently going weak in the knees from surprise and horror, she clutched the wall, on the verge of hyperventilating, and instinctively slapped her gloved right hand over her chest as her pulse rapidly increased. “DAVID, WHERE ARE YOU?”

The glove-man had no response except an automatic grunt of distress from the impact of having his contorted body collide with Claire’s chest by the abrupt force of her hand. He could feel her heartbeat thumping like a jackrabbit’s while smothered to her uniformed breast, and he couldn’t blame her, since if he still had a heart of his own, he’d have been on the verge of cardiac arrest from sheer existential shock. This response of impacting her body also had the frightful side effect of showing David that he couldn’t emote aloud, either, since his disturbed groan echoed purely in his consciousness alone, but still only his now-gigantic coworker’s panicking breath could be heard around them.

Which, to him, meant there was no way of getting her attention, no crying for help or just plain crying due to total mania, either of which felt very appealing right now, in the face of such hopeless weirdness. And he didn’t have high hopes about her figuring out what had happened, because who in their right mind could ever have conceived of the fate which had just befallen him? Was there any way to reverse this? Was there still some slim chance this was just some nightmare or hallucination, despite the realism of everything his senses were telling him, or was he damned to occupy this workman’s glove forever? Claire didn’t retract her hand after unwittingly smacking David to her bosom, either, but helplessly clenched her fingers against the fabric of her hoodie, which gave her transformed friend another bizarre lesson in the sense-twisting physics of inhabiting a mechanic’s glove with all his perceptions just as sharp as ever, but none of the outward capacity for intelligent communication or physical freedom to resist being used this way. Her soft yet firm fingers curled inside and around him, alternately furrowing and stretching out segments of David’s faux-leather material flesh in elastic response to the whims of her digits, which clung onto her clothing as though for dear life. She was trembling as she did so, thus vibrating her glove-made friend by proxy, while tightening her white-knuckle grip on the hoodie until she’d manipulated him into a fist, making David feel as though he was being hyper-extended into a curled ball like a trained circus contortionist, only with none of the flexibility.

“CLAIRE! PLEASE! STOP!” David shouted inside his head. Not that he had any greater hope of being understood this time, since the words still didn’t physically manifest, but as his very being was powerlessly locked among the grippable fibers of a padded glove while his good friend unknowingly clenched him into a painfully fetal posture without any way to stop her or escape this heinously odd reality, and lacking any ability to sweat or gyrate with pain as anyone might’ve in the form of a person, there wasn’t much else to do but voice his hysteria to the void and hope someone answered. “YOU’RE HURTING ME!”

“David?” Claire shouted, only this time with concerned wonder, as if she’d somehow heard him. Her righthand fingers thankfully relaxed their taxing hold on her hoodie, which in turn untensed the many automatic pressure points suddenly afflicting David’s new mitt body at every juncture of her joints, knuckles, or even minor texture differentiation in the flesh of her hand. Internally he breathed a sigh of relief to be spared these stressful abuses once her fingers were extended back to a neutral position, at least partially, since the probing infringement of having his whole glove body continuously flooded with the dexterous lively form of her Claire’s relatively-immense appendage was still very much in effect. Though David doubted he could go unconscious in this form, the psychological consequence of having his clothen physique match and contain the exact shape of his gargantuan friend’s hand was equivalent to the violently uncomfortable feeling of trying over and over again to catch his breath in an airless space, but never succeeding. Even as her hand didn’t actively mean him harm, as was technically plush and pithy to the touch on his insides, the cumulative sensation was that of having a raging itch burning across every inch of his body that he wasn’t permitted to scratch.

“Yes!” he tried to yell again. “CLAIRE! It’s ME! Please, HELP! I’m… I’m your… your…”

David didn’t have to finish explaining, though, as he saw the recognition in the giantess’s face, telepathically parsing his stammers, and then looking down at her own shaking hand. Her eyes widened to dinner plate-girth, and David could feel her quivery palm tensing again within him, as she evidently pieced together almost-exactly what had happened in inexplicable seconds.

“Oh, GOD-DAMMIT, NO! ALEX!” Claire roared as if to the universe at large. “You told me this WOULDN’T HAPPEN! He wasn’t doing that! He didn’t DO anything!”

This wasn’t the response David had expected, but then again nothing this morning was proceeding in any way ordinary. What could her girlfriend Alex possibly have to do with any of this? Was it just the understandable amazement of discovering what had happened to him? Was Claire losing her mind just as much as David feared he was too?
“Claire, I’m… your glove!” David numbly offered up, in case it hadn’t sunken in.

“I… I know, David,” Claire soothingly replied under her breath, while shouldering her way through the décor shop back door. She marched with a purpose, making her way to the most distant corner of the stock room, though was kind enough to keep her gloved hand steady in front of her as though her friend was made of glass now. He appreciated her caution, especially after that accidental demonstration of just how much cramping strain she could inflict on his whole body just by bending her fingers, patting her chest, or worst of all, balling him into a fist as though to throw a punch. Once isolated in the corner of the room behind a shelf, Claire removed her phone from her pocket with the other hand, and instinctually began tapping at the screen with her David-glove. These contacts between him and her phone were moderately gentle, but still perturbing, as the transformed man felt like he was having his face forcibly bopped against a window, while her other fingers curled inward just enough for better pointing posture, an arrangement that again distended and wrinkled varying portions of his heavy-duty body to a severely burdening degree.

“Ow!” David moaned. “CLAIRE!”

“Oh, G-God! I’m so sorry, David!” she yelped, almost dropping her phone in the process. There was still breathy unease in her voice, though she still seemed to know enough of whatever was going on here not to descend into total basket-case mode, which David could appreciate, even as fresh questions and worries wouldn’t stop plaguing his inexactly glove-planted mind. “I… I d-didn’t even think, I… don’t know why I did that to you. I know you’re in there. But don’t worry. I’m going to fix this, right now.”

“How? Claire, please tell me what’s going on.”

“I will, I promise, just as soon as I take care of this,” she vowed. “Here, I’m going to take you off my hand, all right? That way I won’t be able to hurt you anymore. I can’t use my phone with my gloves on, anyway. Don’t be scared, David. This’ll be over soon.”

Then Claire pinched the end of the Velcro strap, beginning to tug it free from around the wrist socket of David’s glove form, and right away the transformed creature experienced a sensation that rivaled his friend’s fist-making for borderline unbearable torment. The stiffer micro-hooked fastener side off the interlocking material was being stripped away from the fluffier looping to which it was normally secured to keep her work gloves steady on the job, accompanied by the usual krr-krr-krr as the textile elements were divided. The act of Claire removing this glove was something David had witnessed many times before, and even come to appreciate in a manner of Pavlovian pleasure, as it usually meant he’d have the chance to glimpse his friend’s hardworking bare hand while she texted or wedged a cigarette between her fingers. Yet now, in his awful new state, the doffing of her glove became synonymous with rippling agony. David had few points of useful comparison to comprehend the brutal discomfort of those Velcro sides coming apart by a simple pluck from Claire’s fingers, but it essentially felt like having all the hair on his body speedily waxed off Brazilian-style in a vicious series of skin-welting rips.

David would’ve cried out to her, told her to slow down if not stop altogether so he could get ahold of himself, even as this process seemed a necessary part of being liberated from the deeply-entrenched influence of her hand stuffed so authoritatively inside his five-pointed body. Unfortunately, the intensity of the unvelcroing was so raw, unexpected, and silencing that all he could do was telepathically emit a harrowing exhale for the gladly-brief duration of those hundreds of miniscule Velcro teeth yanking and scraping free from the fuzz of his body where they were previously buried.

Once the strap was loose, not painful but still unsettling to David in the way of a leg suddenly falling numb just as he lifted it to descend a staircase, Claire inevitably pulled her hand out of him. This too came with its own set of curious traumas. Though he counted his lucky stars her hand’s exit wasn’t anywhere near as painful as the Velcro undoing or being made into a fist, it nonetheless felt to David like he was having his guts scooped and drained out through his midsection, since the presence of her appendage had become like the phantom sensation of having any innards at all. Even if an anesthetic effect cancelled out what might’ve turned into more surprise torture, the actual emptying swish of Claire’s hand gliding out, leaving him feeling near-weightless and ungoverned to a degree rather like having a bike’s training wheels yanked off far too early, made for a freakishly brain-bending misadventure, and one that again David was too taken aback to complain about. Though at this point, he knew it was probably just for the best that Claire got it over with.

At least he believed this to be true, until the precise moment when David’s glove-body was left completely devoid of his friend’s hand, and instead gingerly cradled atop her palm in his flimsy deflated status, at which point that contradictory falling-flying acuteness of before returned with a vengeance. David’s being came swiftly untethered from the glove, which would’ve been a welcome change, if not for the fact that his human form didn’t retake shape in the next instant. Instead, Claire loomed mightily above him, far more than she had while he was small enough to wrap around her hand, and David was again sensing her immensity from the ground. Not just at her feet, however, but among and beneath them at once. He wasn’t merely filled in by palm mass and subject to minor finger muscle twitches, as when he’d become her glove, but palpably weighed down by the leaden cotton-swaddled slab of her socked foot, around which he was now worn, having become Claire’s blue-black New Balance sneaker.

“Just try to stay calm, David. Please,” she compassionately murmured to the glove, apparently not realizing her friend’s transference below, while feverishly tapping away on the phone with her now-free hand. Frowning, then, she spoke with desperation and sorrow: “BUSY? Goddammit, Alex, goddammit… where are you?”

“Cl… aire…” David bleakly thought toward her, overcome as he was by the experience of becoming her shoe, but couldn’t voice anything else, because even without physical nostrils or a throat, it felt like his were being stood upon. While the eeriness of having his empty form filled in by one of his friend’s more-human body parts wasn’t quite as creepily specific as when each of her individual fingers was inserted down a different extending tunnel of his glove-body and independently manipulated, that separation was made up for by the brute-force encumbrance of Claire’s socked foot weighing down on the foamy insole tongue of his interior, with her toes idly flaring and scrunching inside the sock as she impatiently tried and failed to get Alex to answer her phone. For the first time since transforming, too, David truly took notice of his nigh-enhanced olfactory senses while mysteriously swapping his consciousness between articles of Claire’s clothing. Though it was still early in the morning, the giantess was dressed more for stability and comfort than climate control, which meant that her socks were already glazed heel-to-toe with a misty sheen of salty sole pore viscosity, not to mention an older, bitterer, more-ingrained musk that was permanently branded along the lining of David’s shoe-body itself from every previous grueling 8-5 weekday use.

“She’s not answering,” Claire apologetically whispered, still in disbelief, right after leaving an urgent callback message to her girlfriend, before returning attention to her glove. “David, believe me, we can fix this, just as soon as Alex answers. I texted her, I called her. I’m even emailing her. I’d send a goddamn owl with a letter, too, if I could. God, I’m so sorry. This is all such a horrible mistake, but you have to trust me, it can all be undone. I know it. Just speak to me, please. Tell me you’re okay.”
While David was mildly comforted to hear the confidence in Claire’s voice that this madness could be reversed, he couldn’t exactly celebrate either, let alone answer her yet, for close to a minute while still attempting to get his bearings as his friend’s work-worn New Balance. Freshly inspired now that she wasn’t looking at her phone, however, he telepathically cried out again:

“Claire… I’m… not… the glove. I’m… down… here. Around… your… f-”

“WHAT?” she practically shrieked, immediately standing on one leg. This did help alleviate some of the pressure from her superiorly gigantic stature, as David’s body was no longer supporting half the giantess’s body weight, but he was still subject to the aromatic mustiness and balmier heat foisted on his insides by Claire’s dangled foot. “I’m so STUPID! I… should’ve remembered that would happen. Why didn’t I just… goddammit, it doesn’t matter now. David, I’m sorry to have to do this, but… I think it’s better than being my shoe, right?”

With that, Claire slipped her hand back inside the glove, yanking until her fingers were fully embedded and the Velcro strap was tightly reapplied, at which point David’s being again metaphysically leapfrogged up from around his friend’s foot back to her glove. Compared to that brief stint as her shoe, David did indeed prefer a form where she wouldn’t have to literally walk on him, but given that Claire seemed to know precisely what kind of magical reality-breaking mumbo-jumbo was going on here while still having not spilled a word of explanation, it was difficult for him to find peace as her Hardy glove.

“Claire! You have to tell me what’s going ON!” David thought to her, distracted as he was again by once again having her fingers fully penetrating each of the rubbery finger-slots which made up the hilly ridges of his retaken glove form. Not only that, but the heat seal created around her hand by the impenetrable material only exacerbated the muggy sponged-out palm sweat now dampening most of David’s insides, thanks to Claire’s anxiety over this catastrophe, ensuring that he felt even the most minor adjustments of her flesh beneath his flexible shape, especially whenever her smoke-zested perspiration momentarily glued his off-leathery terrain into the spaces between her fingers.

“I know,” Claire sighed, hanging her head in shame. “It’s… all going to sound insane, but… it’s the truth, David. It’s Alex. She’s just always been so crazy jealous over me, and a few years ago, she told me she had a way to make sure no one ever took me from her. Goddammit, I actually thought it was romantic at the time. And she said the way to do it was to put a curse… well, not on me, but around me, that would “protect” me from anybody else going after me. Which obviously I thought was just a bunch of bullshit meant to make her feel better, so I let her do it. When she was done, she… told me… that if someone, you know, showed they had some kind of “intentions” with me, that they’d become… something for me to use. To wear, always, even if I took them off, because they’d just become something else on my body. I didn’t understand then why she went so deep into it, but the last thing she told me was that it would only take a day for me to… forget. You know, for whoever had flirted with me to be wiped out of my memory, and just become this thing forever. Which is fucked-up, I know, like something out of a shitty horror movie, but she also promised me that I’d never be hurt by it, and I know that since Alex obviously wasn’t goddamn JOKING about this thing, that she must also have a way to fix you, David. I swear to you, on my life, that you will change back.”

David took all this information relatively in stride. Indeed it did sound insane as she’d warned, but since he was living the proof of Alex’s magic suitor-punishing powers right now, he couldn’t exactly disbelieve any of Claire’s explanation. Most of his bewilderment dissipated, knowing that the actual reasons for his condition were just as surreal as the act of turning into her glove itself, replaced instead by freshened panic. His friend sounded so certain that she could save him, but as Alex still wasn’t answering her phone, there was no telling how long David would have to put up with this mind-warping state, and just how close to that point of no return they might be brought before it was all resolved. Despite the life-threatening importance of turning back before Claire’s memory was altered, though, a lower-order concern nevertheless made David internally flinch, and then telepathically blubber out:

“Claire, I didn’t mean to… uh… you know. Set it off. I’m really sorry if I did something wrong. You’re my friend, and I-”

“Oh, goddammit, David, don’t go APOLOGIZING, when you’re the one who turned into my glove just because Alex is so fucking insecure!” Claire groused. “Of course I know this isn’t your fault. You were just being nice! But somehow what you did was still enough to trigger it. How could you have known about this, though? You couldn’t have! You have to believe me, too, that I would’ve stopped you sooner, just in case, but she must’ve made it so I wasn’t even thinking about her goddamn magic trick until it actually happened. There’s no use talking about it now, anyhow, since we just need to get ahold of Alex. We could go looking for her, even though I don’t know where she-”

“Wait. No. I don’t know if I can… take that,” David interrupted.

The concept alone of venturing out of here almost sent him into a pre-emptive sensory tailspin, just envisioning all the doors Claire would have to push open using him, the steering wheel she’d have to grip, the people she might bump into, and became immediately afraid of the future leather-pinching pressure, climbing oven-esque heat, and concentrated sweat fumes as gritty glove-jam was rubbed off from his body and smeared into her warm skin. And that was before even considering that his friend would probably have to take off her glove to respond when Alex did finally answer her emergency messages, which would again exile him again to the ground, wrapped around her moist increasingly-putrid sock foot as that mushy-insoled New Balance: another hellish variation to endure on top of everything else. If his senses were placed into such wild overdrive just during the simple acts of Claire walking through the stock room or unvelcroing his body from her hand, David imagined the turbulence that would result from a meandering hunt across town for his coworker’s apparent witch of a girlfriend just might push him too far over the edge to be brought safely back, when and if his human shape was ever restored.

Realizing he couldn’t stomach the voyage, the tone of David’s consciousness turned more frazzled and unhinged with every word he thought toward her: “Please. Please, please, don’t. I know we have to find her, but if she’s not at your house, or at work, but we still had to go ALL that way, together, with me like this, I don’t think I could take it. It’s hard to describe, what this… feels like… but it’s bad. It hurts and it’s hot and itchy and it smells funny and… and…”

“God, I didn’t even think of that! You’re right, David. I’m sorry,” Claire soothed, likely hearing the bubbling misery in her friend’s thoughts, and probably correctly guessed that putting his glove-body through more trauma than utterly necessary would only accelerate his mental degradation. “Don’t worry, we’ll stay right here, and be ready for when Alex calls back. Which she will. Listen, I… know all this is a lot to handle, but since we can’t just tell everyone here what’s going on, maybe I should just get back to work? I just won’t use YOU for holding or carrying anything. That way, we’ll stay busy, maybe keep your mind off all this… craziness… and you can still let me know how you’re doing. Okay?”

“Okay,” David sighed within. His preference, really, would’ve been for Claire to hide in an air-conditioned corner of the décor store, with her gloved hand raised and her fingers unbent, so as to minimize his torment. Instantly, though, he chided himself for thinking so selfishly, when his friend was just trying to keep him safe and occupied in her care until his salvation, while also not sacrificing her standing at their place of employment. None of this was her fault, after all. Just bad luck, and the result of an obscenely over-protective supernatural S.O.

For the next hour, David was a clandestine passenger for Claire’s morning duties around the shop. As she’d pointed out, there were a lot of responsibilities waiting for both of them today, and now she’d not only have to pull double duty since he was uniquely indisposed, but she’d have to do it with only one hand. Keeping this in mind, David didn’t hold the slightest grudge as Claire hustled around the store, craftily managing tasks using her left hand, with only minimal involvement from her transformed coworker. In time, he found he could steel himself against the inherent violation he still felt at having her fingers fully elongated through the pipelines of his artificial anatomy, and could even mostly-ignore the smaller gestures like finger-curling and palm wrinkle snags that were essentially unavoidable for someone wearing a glove, even one they weren’t using to carry anything. Claire had at least been right that staying in her presence, knowing that she was aware of him and looking out for him the whole time in this deranged scenario, indeed helped take David’s mind off some of the milder side-effects of serving as protective garb for her hand.

At first he tried to soothe himself with a short bout of comparative psychology, reflecting on that inexplicable attraction he felt toward Claire’s appendages while in human form, the desire he sometimes felt to hold them tightly in his, or feel her fingers stroking kindly across his face. However, even internally admitting this to himself, and recognizing how much he liked his coworker’s hands, it still wasn’t nearly enough to make him remotely enjoy the less-than-subtle downsides of existing as a mitt clasped humidly to an animating five-pronged creature which lived independently inside his leathery shape like a possessed skeleton. Plus, there was also the fact that Claire could read his thoughts whenever he intuited them too pointedly, and in shameful fright of having to explain this quirk if she heard him thinking it, he forced that idea out of his mind, choosing instead to weather the hidden tribulations of a busy workday spent as her glove.

Because of course, even though Claire wasn’t using her right hand for the organizing and heavy-lifting necessities of the job, her left side was toiling so much, that the overheating effects of her efforts were eventually experienced body-wide. Just past the hour mark, David could feel practically every square inch of the giantess’s palm and finger pads turning tacky with pumped-out layers of fusty perspiration, clinging to half his interior surface like wet clay and refusing to release the hold. This again unnerved him, as it allowed him to “see” the exact plush geometry of Claire’s palm and digit segments like a photo negative, as the softer-fleshed side of her hand was practically suctioned by dripping soppiness to his malleable frame. Though this glove-bottled sweat was gladly much less zestily acrid than the sour influx of sock fluid he’d briefly suffered as her shoe before, what it lacked in cheesier toe-grunge flavor, it made up for in that rank melting cowhide odor borrowed from his own foreign body, as the inside of the glove began to weep grayish-black throughout the grooves of her hand flesh like cried-over mascara, only with sweat colored in by the grubby dust of the transformed man’s interior lining, and it absolutely stunk to high heaven.

“Eeeeasy does it…” Claire would mutter under her breath when no one else was around, nodding warmly to her right glove, which helped curb David’s worries to a certain extent, even despite the mounting queasiness from his gradually sloppy interior and its distinct dewy leather B.O. “Nothin’ wrong here. Just taaaaaking our time.”
Goofy as it might’ve seemed for Claire to be lullabying David with these assurances while carefully avoiding the use of her dominant hand, he quickly found he missed her calming croon, when two hours into the day, she seemed to think he no longer required this emotional support system, and stopped speaking to the glove-man altogether. This brought on an odd form of lonesomeness for David, contradictory as that sounded while her sweat-pruny hand was more intimately adhered to his insides than ever. What made him feel most insignificant of all today, though, was the first time Claire accidentally lifted a shipping box using both hands. It wasn’t the heaviest thing she could’ve chosen to pick up, but nonetheless enough of a burden that an entire inward-facing half of David’s transfigured form was abruptly pressurized so hard between the torque of her palm and clawing dig of her fingers in order to support the weighty cardboard prism, that he could actually feel his already-pliant corpus thinning like a wet sponge placed under an industrial presser.

“CLAIRE!” David shrieked in his head, though it took him a full thirty seconds of painfully cumbersome plastering between her body and the box before he could even turn cogent enough to speak. The pressure was not only immense, roughly kneading out the exterior padding of his digit flaps while the friction of the giantess’s damp fingers abraded his insides like a cheese grater, but also caused a great volume of congealed saltwater glossing the whole containment of the glove to be wrung free. For David, this meant having his foamy-flexible black-red outer shell distorted, his disintegrating inner lining ground against tired palm flesh, and miniature waterfalls of dank gray-grimed perspiration pouring down the chute of each finger hole, which eerily simulated the sensation of being waterboarded without finally blacking out. “CLAIRE! PLEASE! YOU’RE-”

“Huh? Oh, goddammit it!” Claire yelped, freezing where she stood, and immediately dropping the box, which clattered to the floor with a breakable crash. For a minute she stood in place, both hands shaking as she held them beside her cheeks like a grenade had gone off in the store. “David, I’m… fuck, I’m so sorry. I… don’t even know… I g-guess it was just, you know…”

“H-Habit?” the glove-person offered, albeit meekly. It was just a relief to no longer be simulating his own pulverization between a stiff surface and soggy flesh, and David definitely didn’t want Claire to beat herself up too much over this unfortunate accident, but at the same time, couldn’t help but mince with greater concern for his safety. “It’s… fine. Just… please-”

“No! Never again. Goddammit, that was so STUPID of me, I just don’t understand why… whatever. It’s done now. Honestly, it… might be that I just need a smoke. I don’t know why I feel like I need one so badly. I’m serious, it feels like I haven’t had one for a whole day.”

“Oh.” David anxiously pondered the usual necessity of removing her glove to hold the eventual cigarette, and immediately sunk into another anxious pit, knowing that as summery-squalid as the conditions of her hand were turning through the morning, it would surely be a hundred times worse to be transferred down to her foot again. “M-Maybe you could-”

“Don’t worry!” Claire apologetically interjected. “I’m not going to do it. For now. And… if I just can’t take it anymore, I’ll use my other hand, so nothing bad will happen to you. No problem. Right?”

“Right,” David repeated, his faith restored, as Claire awkwardly scooped the box back up with only one arm and transferred it to a cart for transport. Surely now, he reasoned, following a mistake like that, Claire would precognitively measure her every move against the potential harm it could inflict on her friend currently swaddled around her firm, agile, profusely-sweating hand? They had to be in the clear now, and any minute, Alex would call back, exclaim her sorrow for all the trouble she’d caused, and set things right.
His hope was even shorter-lived this time, however, when not twenty minutes later, Claire whipped her phone out of her pocket to check the screen, while automatically reaching for David’s body with her left hand. After nonchalantly ripping the Velcro strap off again in one swift streak, giving him a horrific case of déjà vu from the earlier removal, she took hold of the grippy fingertips. Again, a mirror-image of David distorted hand-shaped form was attacking him, yanking and distending on the digit slots as though they were rubber bands, while that skinning sensation around the wrist portion of his form still burned as though recently jabbed and then retracted by hundreds of syringes at once. Tragically, because of the sludgy quantity of baked-in sweat now basting Claire’s moist appendage, which was fracking away whole chunks of her transformed coworker’s pseudo-organs like turf and black tar, some extra pulling was required to separate her hand from its glove this time.

Suddenly David had become a tug-of-war instrument between Claire’s opposing sets of fingers and palms, each loathsomely elastic upward-wrench causing anguish to shoot through him in conjunction with the chronic hair-raising Velcro hurt, while also juicing free yet more of the giantess’s riper sweat that had previously been absorbed into his body. In what felt like an out-of-body experience (even more so than the kind he was already suffering), David found he could blearily perceive both Claire’s hand and her foot at once, his consciousness preparing to jump clothing the moment she’d fully undone him. This gave him a thorough taste from the worst of both worlds: a painful, corkscrewing, skin-stretching bout of suffocating torture as her glove was slowly divorced from her sticky palm, and then down below, even with only a piece of his mind yet transferred, David vividly sensed the murky, lint-laden, grease-jammed hell pocket within what was soon to become his shoe-body, thanks to Claire’s thick-socked foot oozing even more life-scarring pore-pickled liquid across that battered insole.

“CLAIRE!” he telepathically roared for what felt like the umpteenth time today. Bizarre as it had been to be placed in the vessel of a glove or shoe for the first time, this mental division now between wrapping for both hand and foot was as unsettling as it was abhorrently scented and blatantly excruciating. “PLEASE! STOP! YOU’RE – HURTING – ME!”
David’s panic only blossomed when, unlike the last time he’d needed to cry out to Claire, she went right on plucking her friend’s extremities, finger by finger, without even a widening of the eyes to indicate she had any awareness of what she was doing. Just when it felt like his consciousness could take no more slow-motion mangling, the glove was cleaved free from her hand, and David’s intelligence fully possessed the giantess’s left-foot New Balance. Since they were sequestered in an otherwise empty aisle of the shop, Claire unpocketed her phone after looking both ways to ensure the coast was clear of customers and supervisors, then began blissfully tapping away at the screen, just as she would during any other break when her friend wasn’t soul-hopping against his will between her swampiest work clothing.

For seven disgraceful minutes, Claire appeared to surf the web and send return texts – though without any urgency that would’ve suggested she’d at last heard back from Alex – while David languished beneath her, unavoidably huffing the putrefying sweat-buttered fumes from that sock-cloaked landmass of her foot which, even resting stationary, felt as though it was actively bleeding soupy gunk into his insole-tongue again and scraping off toejam thick as raw crystallizing honey. All of this combined so overwhelmed David’s senses that all he could do for the duration of Claire’s phone-playing respite was psychologically retch from the vile atmosphere inside, and again curse his lack of human features, as he could think of nothing he wanted to do more in this moment than open his mouth and vomit several times in a row, if only to purge a fraction of his disgust, which was instead made to settle inside and around him like an acid bath.

“W-Woah!” David had nearly lost track of time until his essence was fired back up from the sneaker into Claire’s reapplied Hardy glove. Reeling still, this downgrade in suffering allowed him enough focus again to try and re-establish the neurological phoneline with his friend, but after shouting her name several times while the giantess resumed work, to no avail, David was faced with the possibility of a far-worse existential gloom than that seven minutes he’d spent effectively licking saturated sock scum off the beefy contours of Claire’s hardworking underfoot. Had she forgotten him already? Were they too late, and his eternity as her most perspiration-brimming garments had begun? Claire had mentioned that the curse wouldn’t let her forget him until a day had passed, yet his normally-caring friend had twice now neglected to account for his torment while performing basic tasks around the store, plus seemed unable to hear his pleas, and they weren’t even halfway through the shift.

The next three straight hours became an interminable wasteland of salt-squirting body-spraining migraine-granting tedium for David. Here and there, he tried again to establish contact, his mental voice withering a little more each time. Claire had plainly lost all track of him or his predicament, and began regularly using both hands to accomplish her tasks. Never before had David considered just how punishing their daily schedule around the store was from the perspective of one’s hand, until now, when ever couple minutes, his body was again placed at the narrowing flat-clasped apex between quavery sweat-stewed palm sponginess and all manner of unyielding cardboard, plastic, and metal surfaces. Every time he thought he’d been squeezed, stretched, soaked, and altogether beaten down so hard that his consciousness would pass into a numbed stasis, or at least he hoped so, she’d flex her fingers into more awkward choreography, make a fist, twist a doorknob, straighten her glasses, or even clap her hands with excitement, which would again heighten and then promptly penalize David’s electrified senses.

Still, what might’ve been strangest about this lengthy arc of time was Claire’s unusual failure to remove her glove at much more regular intervals. Normally she was popping it off every chance she had, to text or smoke or even just air out her warm hand, but David’s coworker didn’t even doff her protective wear for her lunch break today. Not that he was about to complain about this, since the alternative meant carrying her perspiration-pregnant sock inside his empty shoe-shell while getting ruthlessly pounded under the giantess’s weighty stride for hours on end. Still, with what little clarity of mind David had remaining after so many hours of pain and revulsion spent as her glove, it struck him as odd.

“Goddammit, they really need to up our hourly, if they expect us to do this much on our own,” Claire mumbled with friendly commiserating annoyance to her transformed glove-friend, out of the clear blue sky, as she milled about near the back employee exit. “It’s not like I can freaking wingardium leviosa all this stuff.”

“C-CLAIRE?” David squealed with unbridled joy. He even telepathically laughed, despite the ongoing nauseous agonies inherent to being her stuffy pummeled dust-caked work glove, like a shipwrecked survivor who’d just been spotted by a passing barge. “Y-You know me? You can hear me?”

“Of course I can hear you!” she snickered, raising her eyebrow in confusion at the inhuman red-black being snuggled Velcro-tight around her own hand. “We work here eight hours a day, Monday to Friday. I’m pretty sure we’d be pretty shitty at our jobs if we couldn’t even communicate. You know the drill. I do the heavy lifting, and you keep me covered. We make a really solid team, don’t you think?”

Ironically, even though David could finally be heard again, he was left speechless. Joyful as he was to know that his anonymous eternity as her clothing hadn’t begun prematurely, which meant there was still time for Alex to undo this, Claire’s happy-go-lucky response to this rediscovery had thrown him for such a loop that for a wonderful moment, he failed to experience the salty grit-washing sharpness of her hand’s exerted flavor, or psychologically wince as she casually waggled all her fingers back and forth inside him. What was happening here?

“No! I m-mean… y-yeah, usually, but…” David stuttered inside, flabbergasted. “You… do know… w-what’s wrong here, d-don’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, usually we go out back more often so I can have a smoke break and get you some fresh air, but there’s just so MUCH to get done around here, I can barely keep up! Hey, if you’d been born with your own hands to help me carry all this shit, we could be done twice as fast. But you weren’t, and that’s not your fault, David, that’s just how you were made, so we make do,” Claire replied, just as friendly but disaffected. “Look, do you want me to take you off for a little while so you can get a little siesta? Not gonna lie, it’s going to be a little bit of a goddamn bummer not having my partner-in-crime to help me pick things up, but if you really need the breather-”

“NO!” the glove-man repeated in a frenzy, just as Claire pinched the Velcro strap in her fingers.

“What’s gotten into you?” the giantess queried, concerned at first, before adding with a chuckle: “Besides my hand?”

“CLAIRE!”

“Aw, c’mon, you know I’m just teasing. That one always makes you laugh.”

“This – isn’t – real! O-Or… it is… b-but it’s not RIGHT! This isn’t NORMAL! This is all because of the c-curse! Alex’s curse, that she put around you, that t-turned me into a-”

As though her recollections had all returned with the force of a freight train, Claire screamed aloud, cupped her mouth instinctively with David’s duress-laden glove body, and had to steady herself against a nearby wall to keep from outright collapsing. Even before she spoke again, the giantess’s transformed coworker could read the sorrow and horror in her expression again. While it was unsettling, to say the least, that her mind had inadvertently wandered so far from their current plight, no-doubt another side effect of Alex’s anti-cheating measures, David was at least relieved to be back on the same page with his friend, seeing as how she was the only person standing between him and an eternity spent as her sweaty battered-down work clothing.

“Fuck…” she apologetically exhaled, shaking her head, then purposefully used her opposite glove to wipe away the glassy moisture welling in her eyes. “David, I don’t even know what to say. It… that, what I was saying before… just felt so real, it-”

“Don’t worry,” David bravely assured, even though he himself was on the verge of a mental breakdown due to catastrophic worry. “All that matters is that we can fix this before it happens again. F-For good. Please, I know she hasn’t been answering, but can you try calling Alex one more-”

“God-ugh-DAMMIT!” Claire yelped suddenly, wheezing desperately mid-obscenity, and this time failed to catch herself from falling, as she slumped to the floor against the wall, flinching like she’d been sucker-punched in the lungs. Both her gloved hands were splayed out to the sides to soften her fall, which unfortunately for David, meant a swift digit-spreading collision with the hard gritty backroom floor, sped up by the forceful descent of the giantess’s tumbling body mass. There wasn’t even time for either party to remark on this painful gesture, however, as Claire was plainly laboring now to a horrid degree, hacking for breath and uncontrollably thrusting Heimlich-style. Her cheeks seemed on the verge of going blue. “I – ungh – can’t… b-breathe! F-Feels… like f-fucking withdrawal, but – argh – the… w-worst… I could e-ever-”

“It’ll be okay! Just light one up! Hurry!” David coached, abruptly having to offer his friend comfort now, even as his own pangs and olfactory sufferings continued.
Clutching her chest with the other glove, Claire nodded, then scrambled back to her feet and stumbled out the back door into the loading dock. There, she struggled to retrieve the lighter and cigarettes from her pocket while her hands were shaking so hard and her air had become so choked. With the tools balanced against her shoulder, Claire conscientiously chose to remove the glove that wasn’t inhabited by her friend’s spirit, being as delicate as possible with David while pinching the thumb and forefinger portions of his bodily tubing around the opposing Velcro strap. Or at least she tried, but after several repeated yanks on the glove, first to disengage the fabric latching, and next to just wriggle her hand out of its binding, all while grunting with effort and gasping up the last of her air as though it was taken through a straw at the bottom of a swimming pool, the glove refused to budge, like it had been welded to her skin.

“W-Why… won’t – hheeuugh – it come OFF?” Claire rasped in panic. Again she fell to her haunches on the concrete, struggling to hard to breathe while also fighting pointlessly against her left-side glove. David couldn’t answer at first, as it was strenuous enough just having his outer rubbery skin digging and pinching against his mirror-image twin, more ferociously with each second as Claire’s perspiration-gushing hands tremored and flexed within him, and he wasn’t even the glove she intended to remove. Her next move was to pinch the cigarette between her still-gloved fingers, foregoing her usual habit of a barehanded smoke, but before she could even light the end with her friend’s gift, both objects tumbled out of her grasp as though slicked with butter. This forced her to scramble after both slippery objects while still whooping and drooling from the artificially-addictive furor, trying to pick the lighter and cig up one-handed and finding it more difficult somehow than scooping up wet marbles with chopsticks. In a flash more striking than the innard-stretching strain on his leathery physiology or the constant binge of leathery perspiration sponging out of her flesh like a lost sailor’s fatal binge on seawater, David inherently understood what was happening. This was just another insane but intentional piece of Alex’s codependent sorcery, like his clothing-hopping sentience and Claire’s flaky memory.

“Claire, take me off!” David internally shouted, sickened even as he said the necessary words.

“N-No! I can’t – gggrrghh – take it off! It’s s-stuck! And even – urghh - if I could, I can’t put you through-”

“Just TRUST me!” he pleaded, still unable to believe that he was literally begging his friend to transfer his consciousness somewhere far more execrable, but David saw no other choice. “HURRY!”

Surrendering, as her lungs seemed on the verge of collapse, Claire guiltily obeyed, and found that just as her transformed companion had predicted, David’s current body was removed without issue. At least she had the kindness to go through the painful process of detaching his Velcroed extremity and then voiding his insides of structure as speedily as possible, and no sooner did he finish tanking those sensations of fabric skin-peeling and finger disemboweling, when David felt his mind hurtling elsewhere again. Above, he was unconsciously aware that Claire was finally able to pick up the cigarette and lighter in her free hand, hungrily inhaling smoke the instant it ignited like the literal breath of life it had become for her. The relief David genuinely felt for his friend’s safety immediately shifted to the back of his tortured mind, however, as her rescue of course meant a considerable sacrifice from him: a pound for a pound, at the very least.

Only David didn’t re-inhabit the larger, sturdier, rubber-treaded vessel of Claire’s sneaker, as he had more than once already. He didn’t feel a socked entity squirming and clenching as it weighed down the interior tongue that was the insole-portion of his weathered footwear body, grinding off her squelchy cotton-jam and blackening his terrain with her oil-oozing imprints, all thanks to the sizzly heat and unrelenting pressure of her ped. Though horrendous, at least a return to the form of her shoe would’ve been familiar, giving him that precious handicap of anticipating the exact grievousness to come. Yet David felt no precise architecture to his body this time; no contact with the ground; no access to light or air; no scant but valuable free space between her socked digits and his soggy felt-lined insides. The panic, like the sweeping darkness and choking mugginess, settled around him like a fully-saturated blanket, and then David seemed to become those things himself, complete with the identity of a sodden, flimsy, agonizingly malleable being clasped with greater skin-tightness than his time as her glove to firm ever-shifting anatomy. The blind, repugnant, life-stifling moisture and slime-clotting dinginess which previously was only one-half of his experience as her shoe now assumed the totality of this transformative nightmare, and though he had no visual reference to comprehend his position for certain, as Claire scrunched her toes from the relief of her smoke and grappled with David’s floppy fluid-sluiced body into the vice grooves between, the sock-man knew exactly what he was now, and just might remain forever, if the beleaguered giantess didn’t reapply her glove in time.

Industrial-strength musk, a raunchy bouquet of crusted night sweat, grime-reaped textile, and vinegary arch wrinkles flowed in, out, and all around David’s tragically flexible unit. Those five worming digits kept right on shakily fumbling with her friend’s easily-distended tip, warping his perceptions on multiple layers at once as segments of his body took turns being churned, wrung, and then flared back out from those doughy pockets of meager space between thick toe shafts. Her sole flattened the fibers of his stained-gray underside raw, grinding and raking against the sweat-slopped basin of the shoe by aching differentials of an inch, as she struggled to remain stable while sprawled hard against the wall with her lips still wrapped around that cigarette like a scuba tube. Her heel joined in the unknowing beating by occasionally rising off the back of the shoe when she flexed her arch, only to hammer it back to the insole again, twisting and pressing this region of David’s horrifically powerless sock-form until he was quite certain that, given a sustained minute of this treatment, the giantess could bore a hole directly through him by the sheer brunt-force pestling of her meaty heel alone. More than anything now, David would’ve gladly become Claire’s glove and her sneaker again, as well as any other similarly used clothing on her person, just to avoid spending one more moment as her sock.

The effect on the tortured accidental-flirter was so absolute in its deprivation of all his air, light, joy, and thought while plugging each individual microfiber of David’s sock-being with amplified gouts of sticky, humid, malodorous earthy-fleshed suffering that he couldn’t even string a conscious idea together for the first three entire minutes, let alone telepathically articulate his dire requirement for Claire to readorn her hand with that goddamned glove-prison. At most during this initial wind-up of torment as her sock, he managed to screech the first syllable of her name, before the inhuman onslaught of sensations and woes interrupted by stampeding through his consciousness as savagely as though the giantess was actively sprinting a marathon while wearing him, and effectively cut off his mental S.O.S. to Claire, reducing him instead to a time-dilating wallow in the pit of her rank muck-bleeding shoe.

The pain of becoming like a filthy secondary skin-shell to her foot was profound and inescapable, as though David’s mind had condensed the singular first instant of a major injury right as the body started to process it, with the affliction shooting through him on repeat like spider-web cracks in glass. The climate was unconscionable, scorching well-beyond what David supposed he could’ve endured in human form, and even less so in this one. Much like the glove, only to a more miserable degree, David’s shape followed only the whim of Claire’s foot, bending his thin cotton husk into all manner of cripplingly deformed positions and treating him only to textures so soiled that at times it was difficult to distinguish his own waterlogged self from his friend’s drenched sole-brawn. His senses of smell and taste were reeling toward oblivion, thoroughly tasting every gluey jam-coiled ounce of broiling limburger-ripe sweat as it seeped through him from each pithy province of her curvy foot, then was reabsorbed right back through all over again when the doused insole was splashed against once more.

Five minutes oozed into ten. From so far above she might as well have been in a different city, Claire could still be heard taking uncharacteristically full-throated drags from her cigarette, albeit with euphoric relaxation now. Wasn’t this enough? Could she breathe now? Had Alex inadvertently damned her own girlfriend to need constant life support from a cigarette, which would ensure that her would-be rival suitor was relegated for eternity to sop up this foot’s acrid brine-concentrated seepage and absorb its every pounding impact thousands of times a day inside this pressure-cooker sauna of a sneaker? Or, more likely, had Claire’s memory again drifted askew, allowing her to take a calming smoke break out in the afternoon breeze, as she so often did with David by her side, except with her coworker and friend instead banished to the far more hellish equivalent of being between a rock and a hard place while smashed between this raggedy footprint-tattooed insole and her beefy gunk-exuding arch slab?

“Cl…aire… David murmured into the abyss, as his mind seemed to be circling the drain amongst a swirling bathwater cyclone of his friend’s cloudy, sweltering, saline-sludge pore elixir. The dread and disgust of this existence had beaten him down so far by salt and sorrow and cruciation that he wasn’t sure he could come back from it, even if Claire could see through the fog in time to save him, but his options were either make this last-ditch attempt now, or descend into the never-ending solitary confinement of soaking, funkifying, toe-cheesy sockdom as the mummified wrapping around the giantess’s diligent puttied beast of a foot. “Please… put… it… back… on.”

Once again crashing back to reality, Claire was left in too much guilty post-asphyxiation upheaval to even make time to shriek ‘goddammit,’ as she let the cig butt fly and practically broke her own hand in the race to slot it into the glove. Her fingers spread into a neutral posture, though her whole body couldn’t help but shiver while she burst into tears again, as David gratefully abandoned his incarceration in her shoe, and again resumed his original post around the hand he’d once fetishistically coveted, but which now just served as a poetically ironic reminder of his accidental fall from humanity. The difference in intensity between serving as her sock and glove was significant enough that David was able to enjoy the equivalent of a sensory vacation, but as the familiar downsides of Claire’s hand possessing the Hardy tailoring of his body gripped him again the instant his soul was brought back to this higher place, his mood wasn’t much improved. At this rate, with Alex nowhere to be found, and Claire’s memory of his condition fragmenting fast, did they have even a chance of returning David to normal?

Again wiping her eyes with the opposite glove, Claire shook her head, gazing at David with self-flagellating heartache, unable to find the words. Neither could the glove-man speak, for that matter, refocused now as he was on the cloying disembodied intimacy of having a giant hand stuck up inside his padded receptable of a form, while brain-folding scents of rubbed-off rubber grit and fresh dredged tobacco filled in the void left by her ruddy-peach sweat-percolating foot. Just as Claire opened her mouth to attempt apologizing and offering David some uncertain comfort for this increasingly bleak situation, however, her eyes lit up and lips curled with bona fide jubilation. Her phone rested in her other gloved hand, and upon the screen, David could read a name on the caller ID that, despite all he’d been through, made him feel a sudden drug-like rush of hope.

“ALEX! Goddammit, where the hell have you been?” Claire practically screamed into the receiver upon answering her girlfriend’s long-delayed return call, exasperated but relieved above all else. “It – you – that crazy THING you put around me, to stop people from trying to get with me, it went OFF! On David! But he didn’t DO anything! Your fucked-up ritual thing, it… w-what? YES! Please! I’ll meet you at home and explain the rest of it there. Just… hurry! Get there as soon as you human-fucking-possibly can, understand?”

The next twenty minutes was a blissful blur for David, as Claire promptly abandoned the décor shop with less than half their shift to go, hopped in her car, and barreled home. Though earlier they’d feared the consequences of putting any potential strain on David’s glove body, and with good reason, as it seemed they were now in the homestretch of this surreal calamity, the damp elongating joint-pinching duress of serving as Claire’s glove became somehow easier to bear, knowing that it would be over soon enough. All the way home, with David’s friend driving like a maniac, he was showered in more apologies, as Claire alternated between furious rants about Alex’s paranoia and blame over her own missteps during the day that worsened his state, none of which were even her fault. Again and again, David reiterated that he held nothing against her, and though it was hard not to feel some ill will toward the girlfriend’s overzealous dark-magic relationship security system, so long as Alex could set this right again, he was certain the catharsis of retaking human form would eventually soothe all grudges.

“Alex! You have to FIX THIS!” Claire bellowed, practically kicking in her front door. David could feel it was taking everything in her power not to ball him into a fist. “Goddammit, he didn’t do anything wrong! STOP – THIS – NOW!”

“I will, I will!” Alex gasped, as she charged in from the other room, appearing at long last. At least the woman looked suitably remorseful: bug-eyed, rosy-cheeked, and gripping her jaw with both hands like she’d just witnessed a natural disaster rip through the neighborhood. “I’m so sorry! This wasn’t what was supposed to happen! It should never have just gone off like that for one of your friends. He’s… in your glove, right? Just take him off, and I can get everything settled.”

“No! I CAN’T!” Claire squealed, protectively shielding the David against her stomach with the opposite glove. “T-That’ll just make him turn into my shoe or my sock or… or…”

“It won’t. I promise. Not while I’m here. Just trust me,” Alex vowed in a calming drawl, crossing the room and locking lips with her girlfriend for an audible smooch. David wasn’t quite sure he agreed that this was the time for amorous gestures, when Alex had screwed up so badly and his odds of returning to normal were severing by the minute, but the amateur witch’s knowing poise still brought him comfort. Nodding, and looking down at her friend on her hand with an unspoken plea for similar faith, Claire hurriedly unstrapped and removed David. He braced himself for the usual transference down to her foot, but just as Alex had sworn, he remained the empty glove.
“D-David? Are you still there?” Claire muttered, sinking into a kitchen chair to catch her breath.

“Yes, I’m here,” he thought back, and saw the alleviation of her fears, as his glove-body was gently passed into Alex’s hands.

“Whew. Goddammit, I don’t know what I’d have done if we couldn’t fix this in time. But… we… we made it, David! It’s going to be okay now!”

“Of course it’s going to be okay. Why don’t you go have a smoke outside?” Alex suggested to her girlfriend, carefully balancing David’s flat form over her open palm. “This is something that I need to do alone, or else it won’t work. Don’t worry, everything is going to feel totally normal in just a couple minutes. You have my word.”

“Okay. I’m… sorry I yelled so much,” Claire sighed, while reluctantly rising to do exactly that. “I was just afraid.”

“Seriously. Go on. I’ll have this straightened out like that,” Alex said, snapping her fingers for emphasis, and gave her partner a smile that made even David feel almost completely at ease. Since there was no longer a hand or foot molesting his insides, with wall-to-wall flesh sweating like a pig into his disintegrated lining or constant shifting articulations morphing him into every combination of constriction and swell, almost every unseen affliction he’d taken on today had abated. He watched Claire disappear through the front door again with a final winking glance at him, and allowed some of the existential turmoil to subside as well, right up until Alex spoke again, this time without moving her lips or making a sound except inside his consciousness, but with hate-fueled venom imbuing her tone:

“I guess this’ll teach you to try taking things that don’t belong to you. Won’t it?”

“What?” David yelped back, wishing with abrupt trepidation that Claire would return.

“You heard me, you skeevy little homewrecker. You think I don’t know what’s been going on here for a long time? Not JUST today. You’ve had your eye on my girlfriend for a long time. You’re around her all day, working together, and you think because you can make her laugh and smile, you can just steal her away from me.”

“Alex, what are you talking about? You’ve got it all WRONG!” David roared, as the combined nervous terror of the day came rushing back a hundredfold. Here she was, the only person capable of saving him, and her possessive delusions went deeper than he could’ve ever imagined. “Claire is my FRIEND, and that’s ALL! I only gave her a new lighter!”

“I think that’s enough jabbering from you. A glove shouldn’t know how to talk, anyway,” Alex coldly declared, swiping her fingertips across her own lips as if to mime a silencing zipper, and just like that, David felt his telepathic link cut, met by the supernatural equivalent of TV static when he tried to scream at her again. The hostile giantess only nodded with satisfaction at the peace she’d bought herself, before carrying on: “That’s much better. Anyhow, do you really think that somebody who could actually do something like this to you didn’t ALSO consider every single fucking detail of it super-carefully, and do exactly what they meant to do? That’s a hypothetical question, by the way, since you can’t answer me anymore, and you’re not going to answer anyone ever again. Anyway, the point is, this wasn’t a mistake. I don’t make mistakes. It’s not like a mousetrap you could accidentally step on. You turned into Claire’s glove because you got way too close to her. Believe me, I allowed for the curse to leave her actual “friends” alone. That’s why this has never happened before with anyone but you. Which makes you special, or I guess, that means you thought you were special. You thought you were a part of her world. So, it didn’t really matter exactly whatever the fuck you said or did before you changed. This was just the last straw. And let me tell you, David, that I protect the things I love. I love Claire, more than you can know. Which is why you’re never going to bother us ever again. Though, I guess in a way you’re getting what you wanted, because you are going to stay close to her, forever. She must’ve told you that after a day, the curse would make her forget about you? Honestly, that was just something I told her to keep her from losing her goddamn mind, once it finally happened someday. The truth is, it’s already been happening way faster. You’ve noticed it, and so does she – at least sometimes, but soon, as in two minutes, she won’t remember any of this happening, or you at all, for that matter.”

If David still had a physical heart, it would’ve been beating straight through his chest. As his situation stood, his only option now was to cry and yell into the nothingness as though banging on the padded walls of an asylum cell, recognizing that Alex nor Claire could hear him now, but trying anyway, because the alternative was to settle quietly into his limp lifeless glove-form like a mortuary body bag forever.

“It’s just better this way,” Alex continued. “Things will go back to normal, just like I told her, and I meant that. Because the last thing I need is for my baby to feel bad about this for her whole life, when she can’t even do anything about jealous creepers like you coming in and trying to break up something beautiful. I’m sure, David, that if you could still talk, you’d agree with me that you don’t want Claire to have to feel sad or mad about this. It’s not like she could change it. Neither could I, even if I wanted to, because I don’t fuck around when I place a curse to protect the woman I love. But obviously I don’t want to change it, so everything works out! Well, for me and Claire, anyway. And like I told you before, you are still going to be of use to her. After she puts you back on in a minute, thinking you’re just her normal glove with nobody stuck inside it, you’re going to start your new life. A way more useful one, I think, since you’ll be spending it supporting Claire, instead of trying to lead her away from what’s good for her. You seem to understand the rules already, so it’s not like I need to really explain it all to you. If she takes you off, you’ll just go right into the next thing, but spoiler alert: you’re probably going to be her gloves and shoes all day at work, and then when she gets home to hang out with me, you’ll be her socks. Over and over, again and again. And maybe since you were such a whiny bitch-boy, coming at me with all those pathetic lies when you had the chance to confess, we’ll spice this up a little bit, and make it so the heat, the pain, and most of all the smell of Claire’s hard work with you gets double as bad. As in, every single day, that’s going to happen again. Just my parting gift to you, David, for being such a sketchy selfish asshole, going after someone’s girlfriend whenever you think no one is there to stop you, and then not even having the balls to tell me about it, when I’m literally holding your stupid life in the palm of my hand. And from now on, she’ll have you in hers. It’ll be a nice reminder for you to think about, to keep you from getting lonely. Speaking of which, this is the last time anyone is ever going to talk to you or treat you as anything except a glove or a shoe, because the minute Claire comes back through that door, you might as well never have been born, so… try to enjoy this conversation we’re having. Savor it. Because, by my count, she’s going to be done with that after-work cigarette and come back inside, in five… four… three… seriously, David, enjoy it while it lasts… one…”

Right on Alex’s impeccable count, the door swung open, and there stood Claire, looking happier than she had all day, unburdened by the clandestine madness taking place unknowingly before her. To David’s apocalyptic dismay, Claire’s eyeline only rose to meet her girlfriend’s.

“It’s so nice to be home,” she sighed, utterly contented: precisely the opposite of how her poor, magically forgotten, uselessly-screaming friend felt now. “Aww, Alex, did you just fix that snag in my favorite glove?”

“I sure did, babe. It’s good as new now. Better, even. Why don’t you give it a try?”


###


For twenty whole minutes, Claire kept David on her hand in order to test out the supposed mending job her girlfriend had so lovingly gifted to her favorite pair of work gloves. Objectively, he knew he should’ve been “grateful” that she kept her hand inside him even that long at all when the alternative would be much harsher, but the tidal wave of defeatist misery and sensory torture was crashing down upon him too hard now to find even the slightest silver lining, largely because there was no conceivable light at the end of this tunnel. It felt like David had become a ghost, floating among the still-living, yet all the screaming and flailing in the world couldn’t make him seen by someone he cared about so much; in fact, he’d have likely preferred literally dying and becoming a spectral entity, since such beings probably only felt emotional wounds, rather than the drowning flurry of elasticizing pains that also accosted every malleable inch of his corporeal form as Claire’s bulging fingers blithely clawed within him. David’s anonymous future as an inhuman sweat-sogged article of clothing for his gladly oblivious friend now stretched infinitely and abyssally before him, the hopelessness somehow even further emphasizing the skin-stretching salt-dripping limb-swelling antipathy of it all as though the doubling of his suffering had already commenced, simply by having learned that there would be no happy ending to this, or any ending at all for that matter.

Not that David didn’t try to believe that something still could be done, as he telepathically shouted himself hoarse, screaming Claire’s name in between every conceivable variation of a plea for clemency. To not even attempt this, after all, meant going silent and accepting a lifetime of suffering. Maybe there’d been a flaw in Alex’s spell that he might accidentally exploit like a chink in armor? Maybe the witch would hear his cries and eventually take unlikely pity? Hell, maybe the power of friendship itself would deliver him, like they were in some cheesy children’s cartoon? Who the fuck could say; early this same morning, he had no idea that such supernatural obscenity could exist, and now before the sun had even set, he’d been eternally imprisoned in a leathery husk slathered flesh-tight to Claire’s hand, tanking constant micro-hyperextensions to his tender makeup while full-body guzzling flaky palm perspiration and pitifully squealing into the unheard void like a barn animal pried from its mother for meat. Anything seemed possible, despite Alex having vowed to him that nothing was, least of all his escape. Then at last Claire removed her gloves again for the night, stripping the Velcro with a theatrical flourish and yanking the fingers to almost twice their normal length, and David instantly regretted not having better cherished that fleeting trial period as her Hardy mitt. Since she’d kicked off her shoes, too, his prickly consciousness was slugged straight back into her left sock and promptly bludgeoned without mercy into the creaking hardwood floor of their home, now lacking even the modest padding of that sweat-bled sneaker insole from earlier to cushion his fall.

“You really did a great job fixing that tear, babe!” Claire practically swooned. Leaning in for a kiss with Alex, she romantically popped her ped slightly off the floor like a Hollywood starlet, thereby concentrating more weight into the ball of her foot, and coincidentally flattening this segment of David’s internally-roaring form so thin that he could actually feel his fibers separating to a discernible degree like a thready grill distancing her thick sole-pith from the ground by a greasily heated hairsbreadth. “Just when I think I know everything you’re good at, you bring up some new talent out of nowhere! I guess that’s the benefit of being a boring ol’ Muggle who got with a sexy-ass witch.”

At first, in the pit of this cottony-straining anguish while spread like too-thin translucent pastry dough beneath and around Claire’s foot, David’s heart sang with revitalized hope. Perhaps Claire had subliminally picked up some dimension of his continuous wailing terror from below, even if indirectly, which had caused her to recall her girlfriend’s curse, which then in turn might’ve created a mental pathway back to him. Then, a few vomitous saltwater-sponging moments later, as his gigantic friend’s bulbous raw-pink toe shafts viciously clutched his slimy insides, David better processed the flirtatious sarcasm in Claire’s voice, and understood with even greater chagrin what she’d actually meant.

She wasn’t remembering the day’s events, or the fact that her friend was still languishing so unimaginably upon her foot; she was just being her usual Harry Potter-loving self, and in fact was teasingly mocking the idea that she was dating someone with powerful sorcery at her fingertips. Which of course could only mean that Claire once again didn’t really believe in any accursed boundary jealously protecting her from suitors, because the day’s manic tragedies (including her friend’s very being) had been wiped clean from her memory, and David was further than ever from alerting her. He wanted so desperately to throw up, and not just because serving as her thick damp odor-fossilizing sock made him feel like he was having her murkiest pore-dredged foot oils directly injected into his body all at once by a thousand syringes.

“You are SUCH a dork sometimes. Or, more like all the time. You’re just lucky I put up with an adorable weirdo like you!” Alex replied, just as amorously taunting, then gave her girlfriend another audibly passionate kiss while laughing from deep in her throat: a noise David couldn’t help but suspect was maliciously aimed his way, rather than meant simply as playful reassurance for the woman she loved enough to damn David to a lifetime of spasms and stenches. “You silly Muggle, you.”

“I am lucky. For sure,” Claire sighed. “I do SERIOUSLY need a shower, though. Today was just unbelievable, especially because I didn’t have anybody backing me up on inventory. I’ll just go do that real quick and then-”

“No! C’mon, look what time it is. Our show’s about to start. And I’m not going to make fun of the stupid corny stuff they say in a room all by myself! Why don’t you take a shower later?” Alex gasped, grabbing her partner by the hand. Though she passed the gesture off as sweetly-needy request, the crestfallen sock-man below had to guess that the diabolical giantess was yet again disguising another method of deepening his torment as simple endearing girlfriend behavior. Of course the shrunken disembodied creature was briefly elated by Claire’s mention of a shower, which would surely promise a fresh pair of socks missing his current form’s wallowed aroma and omnipresent mistiness, even if he’d still have to endure trampling and distending to the brink of psychological collapse, so long as she went gloveless at home.

If the point wasn’t made clear enough to David already, Alex – who happened now to be wearing a pair of scuff-rimmed red high tops – casually pressed the sturdy toe section down against a surplus cotton tuft of Claire’s musk-distilled sock, as though to kiddingly pin her in place, and dug in hard. In response, Claire only scoffed and shook her head, plainly about to give in to her girlfriend’s wish; below, however, the mood was decidedly different, as David shrieked bloody murder in brain-bending distress. Likely hearing his silent lament and thus spurred on, Alex purposefully dragged her stamped-down high top sole backward across the floor by a full two inches, divorcing this region of David’s fabric-body away from her girlfriend’s plump jam-clogged toes, and making the secret victim feel as though his neck had been rubber-banded out to three times its usual length without ever snapping.

“Oh, fine. You win,” Claire laughed, totally oblivious to the fact that, by saying so, David was made the unequivocal loser. “I did want to see what trashy thing happened tonight, anyway, and it’s just not the same watching a rerun.”

So Alex and Claire cuddled on the couch for their show, while David and their feet were propped up on a stool. This position did come with the most minor of benefits, in that he was no longer actively being walked upon, but the leached filth of Claire’s grody after-work essence remained knitted through his every tightly-laced cotton particle, thanks to Alex’s casual strategy to delay his partial relief that much more. At random intervals, half of his patchy insides were either stuck fast as though by craft glue to Claire’s balmy blowsy-soled skin, or puffed out at an awkward angle especially vulnerable to being grabbed and toyed with between his friend’s toes out of a subconscious need to “do” something with her extremities, never knowing the dank tribulations her slightest movements were causing the unknown being who had pieces of his perception slotted in each of her grubby toe crevices.

Even unpressured by her upright-resting peds, David still ached to his very existence. He’d given up on crying for help now, especially while Alex was close enough to punish him for it again, and resorted instead to counting down the endless seconds until the couple’s TV time ended and Claire took a goddamned shower. While he knew there would still be plenty of sour putrid body-morphing purgatory to come, the brief reprieve suggested by that fresh opportunity to become a clean set of socks was enough to keep David from cracking just yet. When the time finally did arrive, he foolishly held out for the pipe-dream that, when Claire was stripped fully naked for her shower, he might become nothing at all: a comparative sensationless oasis in what was otherwise a vast desert of dire contortion and brackish seepage. Unfortunately, that loophole was closed when David found he instead had to remain as the diaphoretic moisture-sac of her discarded work sock until Claire was through cleaning up.

As they were temporarily alone in the bathroom, he resumed mentally howling for his friend’s attention, though over the cascading splash of the shower and Claire’s off-key singing, he couldn’t even hear his own begging. Then once she’d emerged, dried off, and commenced stretching a newly-laundered white tube sock up her foot, David resumed harrowing service to his friend’s unwittingly brutal monument of a body. His senses were no longer smoked out by that creeping brine-crusted decrepitude of her workday efforts, but any relief he might’ve reaped from the soap was overpowered quickly by Claire shuffling around their home to get ready for bed, before at last trapping her feet and David beneath three layers of woolen sheets for much-needed slumber. Though the transformed man himself knew he wouldn’t be sleeping a wink, smothered as he was between tightly-tucked blankets and the brawny wrinkle-matrix padding of her supple sole, where the air was trapped and quickly made to stagnate. By the time Claire and Alex were gently snoring toward happy dreams, David could smell the grace period of that before-bed shower already fading, as the stuffy sheets and overheated bedroom climate caused the first glossy patina of night sweat to bead along the squishy pads of her toes and central pillow-curved underfoot valley.

Tomorrow, David wretchedly promised himself. Tomorrow he would try again, while at work with Claire, when Alex was nowhere nearby to interfere. He had to believe it was possible to reach her, no matter what the witch told him. After all, there was nothing else he could do.

Unfortunately, as the stale zest of sleepy foot mugginess was finally aired out at the crack of dawn by Claire’s rousing, David’s crumbling determination was again put to the test when she collided him into the carpet, shifted her full-footed weight down, and unknowingly allowed him to taste the first of many compounding retributions to come. Aside from that bittersweet lacquering of night sweat still baked into her soles, the ignorant giantess’s foot wasn’t “dirty” by any means. A hint of her sporty body wash even remained as a twinge in David’s senses, like a single fruity candy hidden at the bottom of a barrel of long-aged mold-brewed grey water collected entirely from Claire’s wrung-out work socks. Yet despite these facts, he couldn’t escape the reality that her roasting body temperature, acidic slick-fleshed zing, and load-bearing burden had all notably upped from yesterday, to the point that David was suffering exactly as keenly as he had before Claire’s shower last night.

While the victim telepathically whimpered throughout Claire’s morning routine hustle, he realized that Alex’s nonchalant threat of doubling horrors wasn’t just meant to scare him. Even as a relatively-fresh sock, mopped with only a meager volume of unconsciously-dribbled sweat, and not yet bearing the grueling force of the giantess’s footfalls when she was in a mad rush, David was currently left in far worse sweltry, pounding, muck-squelchy agony than any lows achieved the day before. And there were still so many hours to go.

“Claire. Please. It’s me. Hear me. I… believe you can hear me. If I just… say it… enough. I… know… you can. You will!” David meekly thought, his silent voice made even quieter by flagging hope, while Claire drove them to work with a lead-footed pedal-to-the-metal vigor. The longer he internally whined, however, the less he even felt like his appeals made any sense, like he was rambling more to a questionably-real higher power than a close coworker. “I’m your friend. I didn’t… mean any of this. You wouldn’t… do this… to your friend. Would… you?”

Back at the décor shop, and now the furthest they were likely ever to get away from Alex’s influence again, David renewed his animalistic screeching just as his inadvertent slow-executioner slipped him back over her fingers as that voodooed glove. For the second day running, the hand he’d once so kinkily admired had become almost the most abominable single creation he could fathom, second only to her foot. Except David would’ve given anything to neuter this experience back to the relatively idyllic complex of stinks and sprains he’d lived through yesterday, back before Alex took the liberty of exponentially raising his despair in every way. Each curl of her long labor-firmed fingers inside his powerless tunnels made the glove-being feel as though his nonexistent bones had been turned to jelly, only with the bracing sting of skeleton-snapping force still incorporated into her manipulations.

“CLAIRE! I KNOW… YOU CAN HEAR ME!” David pleaded, not sure whether he actually still believed it. “YOU… DON’T WANT… TO HURT ME!”

Within an hour of work, the imagined heat inside her glove had climbed so high via the doubling-up effect that David could’ve sworn he it felt like a recently-enflamed coal had been shoved up inside his body straight to the center, imparting the experience of continual dragged-out scalding without any pesky skin-flaying. And then there was the steamy funk of her toiling hand itself, a dosage of once-ordinary palm sweat mustiness that had been concentrated heavily enough as to become unrecognizable at first to David, similar to the mind-warp of looking at a familiar object through a grainy microscope, only informed via his painfully-susceptible olfactory senses written into every padded stitch of the glove.

Even if the flavor didn’t ring a bell at first, though, he was certain beyond doubt that it was the worst fragrance he’d ever taken in – a choking degree of tobacco pungency from microscopic cigarette residue which tasted like a dozen unfiltereds sucked in at once, an old layer of lotion given a chemical sweetness that made him want to wheeze even worse, the rancid leathery stickiness of David’s own remade glove-being being tattooed particle-by-particle into Claire’s salty flesh, and finally the squalid over-exaggerated ripeness of her soft bodily terrain itself. Was this seriously only double intensity? If Alex had told him she planned to up the ante by factors of five, ten, or twenty instead, he would’ve readily believed her now. Every vile fume caged between her giant hand and her martyred friend coalesced into magnificent disgustingness, until he could pointlessly cry out to her no more for the time being, his every thought focused exclusively on the future dream of getting a break from this writhing sloppy inferno.

Which was exactly what he received, when Claire stepped out the back door to check her phone and grab a smoke. David’s Velcro strap was carnivorously shredded away from his body, hurting like a plank full of thick-pronged fish hooks coming detached from his skin in one twisting yank, and then the vacated glove was tucked under her arm, banishing her friend to her shoe. At once, the torturee felt as though he’d been teleported smack into the middle of a rotten bog currently being blown apart by sulfurous-foggy mines, if only in terms of his plagued senses. The reviling cornucopia of unthinkably loathsome effusions down here, much like the smells from her hand, was cosmically foreign to David at first sniff, making it tough to distinguish during the early minutes serving as her shoe just what he was inhaling through every iota of his vessel, except to comprehend that a new odious champion had been crowned.

This was it: the living end.

The blended stenches greeting David here were those of burnt rubber, starchy grass, impossibly-spoiled vinegar, butcher shop flanks allowed to warm and gray, and sock fluff made to fester like a bloated corpse at its most swollen and perspiration-brimming status. As he might’ve expected, the unholy toxic-sweated tinctures taking root here in the foulest terms biochemically possible to craft were immensely stronger than anything he’d huffed as her glove, but of course rescaled from yesterday to a transcendent new height of swampy raunch. Worse, even while leaning against the wall and relieving some of the pressure off her feet, Claire’s foot not only filled David’s new body but also made him feel as though he might burst at the meshy seams at any instant, thanks to the simulated doubling-up of her already-substantial mass advantage over him.

It felt like there was entirely too much of the giantess for David to handle longer than a few seconds, yet judging by the relaxed spew of smoke above while Claire lackadaisically thumbed her phone, through his haze, he had a guess she was going to take full advantage of this break: the kind they would’ve once spent together, laughing and shooting the shit, instead of drowning him in a solar-hot iron-dense sludge fest of oozing sockjam tar. Indeed the force being exerted upon him now could only be understood as the frozen nanosecond between an avalanche of seven-ton boulders pouring down a mountainside atop him, before the actual instant of his gory humanoid implosion, thus bottling all that heft into David without allowing him to break. And as the capper to this supremely repulsive torment, his perception of the temperature had inflated to such a volcanic pitch now that he was certain, if it actually had been this hot instead of just a metaphysical side-effect, Claire’s foot would’ve been promptly deep-fried inside him by the oil of her own acrid toe-picked drainage alone.

“Er… Er… Er…” David mentally peeped, unable to even think (let alone speak) more than the nondescript first sound of her name now. His pleading wheeze was just as much a substitute for the hyperventilating dry-sob he would’ve been traumatically enacting now, if only he still had physiology capable of releasing just a few precious drops of the hurt now destined to play on him forever; rather, the saltwater leaked into him instead of out, flooding the soiled-black pad of his insole tongue with her foot’s weight in blistering nidorous mucus-consistency perspiration gunk. Even when Claire finished her cig and returned to work, gifting him the comparative charity of becoming her glove again, that otherworldly ten-minute excruciation period as her shoe had imprinted so heavily on David’s mind that he couldn’t be freed, even now, and so felt as though he was smelling, tasting, and touching the multi-dimensional terrors of both her hand and foot at once.

And this, he knew, was only the first day of the rest of his life, if it could still be called that.

All day the pattern compounded, with Claire taking more-regular smoke breaks than she had the day before. Her tethered sufferer’s agony didn’t so much switch between hideous tenures as either her glove or shoe now, but merely emphasized one more greatly than the other depending on whatever article of clothing he inhabited for her needs just then, but in no moment now was David ever spared the scents and scourge of either site on the weary giantess’s exertion-generous body. At times, despite his coherency becoming more and more like a flimsy piece of Swiss cheese, David clung to the last-ditch hope that even if Claire couldn’t identify his disappearance or hear his psychic bellows for help on her own, surely someone in the store might pick up on his absence and then ask her why her why he hadn’t reported for duty? Yet not a word or curious look was exchanged between anyone, and business carried on as usual, like David had never existed or ever even needed to do so, and by the conclusion of the longest shift in history, he comprehended the totality of Alex’s erasure job on his existence and worth.

Back at Claire’s home once again, David tried to mentally prepare himself for the hurdle to come. He’d had all day to ready himself for the ultimate tithe of pain to the witch’s jealousy, once his usual prisons were removed. Still, as Claire tossed aside her work gloves and unlaced her succulently reeking sneakers to relax for the evening with her caring girlfriend, David felt as if he’d had no time at all to prepare. In lieu of crying out to Claire any longer, he instead wished sincere apologies toward Alex, vowing to harbor no ill will if only she’d vanish him in human form to the opposite corner of the world where he’d never see or bother the happy couple again. He promised he’d be content even if she made him blind, deaf, paralyzed, and penniless, forced to writhe on the ground in slim hopes of mercy from strangers, as such a fate would still be a euphoric blessing of next to his current lifelong standing. But, keeping her word, Alex made no effort to acknowledge his being, and so David was eradicated again into his friend’s sock, absorbing the combined fusion of all today’s redoubled previous stink-borne desolation from her palms and soles, only now preserved in an even more compact, bendable, hurtable, coarsely-drenched package.

“Peeee-yewwww!” Alex taunted as the couple snuggled together on the sofa for their usual evening ritual. She pinched her nose in mock-disgust, playfully kissing Claire on the cheek, while theatrically fanning her hand above where her hardworking partner’s crossed sock-peds had come to rest. Not that this did anything to lessen the silent abortion of David’s senses that was taking place. “What do they have you DOING at that place, anyway? Rubbing your toes in cottage cheese and dumpster juice while you sit in a sauna all day?”

“Hey, it’s not that bad! And if you hate it so much, why not use some of that fancy-pants MAGIC you’re always teasing me that you can do and just make it go away?” Claire teased back, plainly not believing this was possible in the slightest. “Then I wouldn’t even have to shower.”

“It must hurt your coworkers’ feelings, whenever they get a whiff of your feeties. Or at least hurt their eyes and throats,” Alex said. This was perhaps the closest she would come ever again to acknowledging David’s being again, especially given the devilish slant to her laughter.

“You exaggerate way too much, babe. It’s not like anybody has to smell them except us.”

Caught at the center of a singularity of ultimate sweat-storming repugnance, David felt his consciousness splitting three ways now, tasting his futures all at once as Claire’s glove, shoe, and sock, but this final torment most of all, and let out an unheard damned-soul scream almost strong enough to unsettle an extra droplet of soupy grit from between his involuntary dark goddess’s wet-fleshy funk-smoldering sole ravines. But not quite.