Thomas hadn’t really ever expected the shrink ray to work - not for real, that is. It was just supposed to be a fun little project that he could daydream about fulfilling his secret fantasy with. But when his test actually reduced an apple in size - he could barely contain himself. Being a 17 year old kid with a massive interest in shrinking, of course, it was obvious what he had to do next. He had to use it to peek at his incredibly attractive neighbor, Jane Delaney, a woman in her late twenties or early thirties - who often sunbathed outside and threw his young mind into all manner of hormonal chaos.

The ray had a window before it could be fired again - it could shrink things again almost immediately, but growing them back required a lot more charge - he’d have to be a little careful. He put together the barest whispers of a plan - if he was about to be spotted, he would simply shrink down more, and then grow himself back once the threat of discovery was gone. And once he had finished his escapade, he would simply grow himself back to normal size and walk home as if nothing had happened. It would all be worth it to see Ms. Delaney undressed in her full splendor, he told himself.

He hadn’t even waited a day before he decided he had to put his plan into action. Shaking with excitement, he waited until his parents had gone out for errands on the weekend, and stole over next door. He had planned on shrinking himself to about a foot to start, and climbing in through the mail slot on the front door - of course, his clothes wouldn’t shrink with him, so he had pretended to be going for a swim - wearing just swim trunks, he’d be able to stash them at the side of the house by the bushes.

His ears burned red - what if someone saw him stripping naked in the hedges? But he shook his head - there was nobody around, and soon he’d be way too small to notice, he reassured himself, pressing the trigger on the ray and zipping down to a mere 12 inches in height - the mail slot turned out to be a decent plan, getting him inside without issue, though he did get the wind knocked out of him on the jump down onto the floor. His heart racing, he quickly fumbled with the cobbled together prototype and shrunk himself again, this time reducing himself to half an inch. He dwindled down to the hardwood floor, the seams between the planks growing larger and larger until they resembled trenches, and he could see the minor imperfections in the wood magnified a hundredfold, the smooth wood floor looking like the surface of the moon to him now, cratered and gouged like some sort of vast alien landscape.

He shivered a little in anticipation - it was exciting being so miniscule, he could hardly contain his excitement. He knew that Jane’s room was on the north side of the house - and he started to make his way there, tiny feet making painstakingly slow progress along the hardwood floor.

He hadn’t accounted for one thing. Ms. Delaney wasn’t home. She had left to go to the store, leaving behind her niece - Amber.

Amber was about 14 years old, slightly younger than Thomas - and he soon felt the monumental tremors of her footsteps on the hardwood as her socked feet thudded carelessly against the landscape. Thomas instantly felt a shiver of terror run down his spine, and it sunk in just how small he really was. This was no longer an exciting fantasy - it was dangerous, tangible, and reality. He turned, expecting to see Ms. Delaney in all her goddess-like glory - but instead, he found her niece standing in the doorway. She was a tall, willowy girl, with long, silky blonde hair, deep blue eyes - and she wore a pair of short, tight fitting jean shorts, with a white t-shirt to match. On her feet were a pair of dirty, mis-matched socks- one striped pink and white, the other a faded, dingy polka-dot pattern. 

In a wave of panic - this was something he hadn't even considered as a possibility - Thomas squeezed the trigger on the shrink once more in an attempt to avoid discovery, reducing his size from half an inch down to a mere 1/8" in height. The air seemed to rush past his ears, and he couldn’t help but feel a sense of exhilaration at his newfound size - he could see every little detail down to the finest grain of the wooden floor, and it was surreal to see everything so magnified.

He felt the fear of being caught was over him - this wasn't the woman he had been fantasizing about, it was her niece! She was probably going to call the police and have him arrested - what would his parents say? What would his friends think? He certainly didn’t want to end up in jail, or worse. So he shrank himself even further, shrinking down to a mere 1/16th of an inch, and hid in the cracks between the boards of the floor. Amber's footsteps thundered across the hardwood, her socks squeaking loudly against the wood. The noise was deafening, and he cringed, feeling the vibration rumbling through his body.

Amber stepped right over him, and he saw the light slowly eclipsed by her socked sole as she took an oblivious step forwards over his hiding place. Frozen in place with fear, the 14-year-old girl's foot was at least 200 yards long to Thomas, and it loomed directly above his head. He could feel the heat radiating off her foot as it passed overhead, the fabric of the sock visibly dirty and moist. Time seemed to slow to a crawl for Thomas, and he watched with wide-eyed fascination as her socked foot came ever closer to his hiding place in the filthy, dusty crevice between two floorboards. He could smell her foot, the sweat and dirt mingling as it neared. He could see her bare skin through the fibers - he could see all of her pink, silky smooth flesh. His heart raced as he realized that Amber was about to step right over where he was hiding - and that he wouldn’t be able to stop her.

It happened before he knew it - he could see the shadow of her sock brushing the edge of his hiding spot, and then suddenly - it came down. Her foot landed heavily over his tiny place of refuge, sending vibrations shooting up his body like an earthquake.

- T H U D -

 Miraculously, Thomas was unscathed - pressing his tiny back as hard as he could into the dirty crack in the floorboards - small enough that he wasn't crushed underfoot, spared the fate of a smear on the floor as the pink striped sock covered his entire field of vision, trapping him in the narrow rut of the floorboards. Completely enveloped underneath the dingy, stained fabric, he was stuck, unable to move - trapped beneath Jane Delaney's niece's dirty sock, if only for the span of one footstep - to him, it felt like an eternity. The floorboards creaked around him, the fabric rasping loudly in his ears - the entire spectacle nothing more than a girl taking a single step, but to Thomas? It was life or death. He was trapped in the tiniest of spaces, with the scent of her sweaty feet wafting over every inch of his tiny body, the heat radiating over him in the confined space, stray fibers brushing against him. There was no way out.

And then, just as quickly as it had begun, it stopped. She had never looked down, never even paused. She simply took a second step, then another, and before he knew it, she was gone. He took a deep breath, and tried to calm himself, trying to reorient himself to the fact that he was still alive. He was safe, and he should go home. This whole endeavor had been a mistake!

When he finally pulled himself free of the cramped space, he couldn't help but look down at his hands - they were shaking uncontrollably. He could barely believe what had happened - it was so surreal, and yet, all too real. The very idea of being squished flat beneath someone else's foot like an insect was nauseatingly terrifying to him. He shivered as he walked unsteadily towards the door - he needed to get away from all of this, and fast! He desperately wanted to take shower, and scrub his skin until the memory of those filthy socks faded from his mind. But first, he’d have to grow himself back to normal size - or at least enough to reach the mail slot. However, the charge level on the ray meant that would take quite some time, and he would have to wait for it to recharge fully before he could use it again - and he'd be stuck at whatever size he wound up at until then. It was a gamble, but he wanted to put this all behind him more than anything. So, foolishly, he rushed it.

Thomas held down the trigger, reversing his shrinking as much as he could - which turned out to be not very much: only growing him to about 1/4 inch, from his previous 1/16th of an inch. He grimaced - that wasn't nearly tall enough to reach the mail slot, his only avenue of escape. He tried to calm himself down, telling himself that things would work out - he just had to wait a little longer for the ray to recharge. Then, he could grow himself back to a foot, slip out the mail slot, and forget all about this stupid plan.

However, he didn't count on Amber coming back while he was waiting. He hadn't expected her to return so soon - he was only planning on staying shrunk for about 10 minutes, tops. As he sat there, trembling in fear on the floor, Amber came walking through the front room - her socked feet stomping heavily on the hardwood floor as she went. Covered in dirt and dust from hiding deep in the crack between the floorboards earlier, Thomas looked more like some sort of insect than a person - his skin was covered in filth, and his eyes were wide with terror. At his current size, he wasn't able to hide as well as before - he would stick against the pattern of the floor, and Amber would surely see him - and that might be the end of it.

He could only pray she walked another direction, and he could re-grow himself before she came this way. But he wasn't that lucky. She stopped in the middle of the living room, directly across from where he was crouched. She looked around slowly - then focused in on him. She seemed confused, and slowly started approaching him - almost like she was trying to figure out what exactly it was she was looking at. She took a step forward - and then another, her socks shaking the very floor beneath the boy’s tiny legs. She stopped when she was about a foot away from him, and simply stared.

Slowly, her confused expression morphed into one of distaste - revulsion, even, and she exclaimed - much to Thomas' horror: 

"EEEW! A bug! Gross!"

Her voice was like thunder in the shrunken voyeur's ears, almost enough to pop his miniscule eardrums. 

Thomas felt his heart drop - this couldn't be happening! He had been mistaken for a bug?! How could she think that? He was human! He had no idea how he was going to get out of this  - he was clearly too small for her to recognize him as anything but a bug. He watched, stunned as she raised her grimy socked foot to stomp on him - his tiny body shaking in fear.

His only hope was to shrink himself down again, to become small enough to avoid being crushed like he had before. Amber's disgusted expression looked down on him, the teenaged girl preparing to end his entire life under her filthy sock - time seemed to slow to a crawl, and Thomas shuddered at the thought of his impending death. The teenaged girl brought her foot down, and Thomas squeezed the trigger on the shrink ray longer than ever before - drastically reducing his size faster than he thought possible, shrinking himself down to a mere 1/32nd of an inch - a mere fraction of his previous size, he was practically a grain of sand. He shrank himself further still, shrinking himself so tiny that he disappeared entirely beneath Amber's foot - he was completely hidden from view by the thick fabric of her dirty socks. His shrink ray went flying out of his hand as he lost control, leaving him powerless to return to his normal size - he absolutely had to retrieve it! The fibers of the teen girl's sock were each like massive tree trunks to him, each strange thicker around than his entire body - a normal sized person wouldn't even be able to make out the individual threads, but to him, it was a maze of dense, ominously curling structures that weaved chaotically and interlocked randomly. He was actually trapped inside the weave of Amber's sock, like a maze made of fibers - and in the chaos, his shrink ray had fallen somewhere below him, clattering onto the floor.

Amber, thinking she had trapped whatever gross bug she had seen under her pink-striped sock, started to twist her sole side to side, making sure it was dead. She was completely unaware that she had just stepped on her teenaged neighbor - the boy had shrunk himself down to such a minuscule size that he was literally embedded in the fibers of her sock, and she had no idea that he had just shrunk himself down to a mere fraction of a millimeter.

Then, he saw it - his shrink ray - sliding underneath Amber's big toe on the floor, just out of his reach. It was just a speck of dust on the floor now, almost impossible to see unless you knew exactly where it was. He stretched his tiny fingers out as far as he could, reaching for it - but he was too small. With a grunt of disgusted exertion, Amber twisted the ball of her foot down against the hardwood floor, and Thomas could only watch in horror as her socked big toe came down onto the ray, and it began to crack and spark. The housing crumpled, the wiring shorting as it fired a last beam due to malfunction - striking Thomas once more, this time shrinking him even further, and destroying the ray for good. The ray had fired without any regard for charge, and to his horror, he shrank from 1/32nd of an inch, to 1/256th of an inch, and then to 1/512th of an inch - before the ray sputtered out and was completely obliterated under her toe. He heard an earth-shattering proclamation that he barely understood - it took him the better part of a minute to decipher it at his pathetic size. 

"Good riddance!"

 Amber exclaimed. The force was enough to temporarily deafen him completely as she lifted up her foot, looking at the debris of the shrunken ray beneath her, assuming it to be nothing more than the corpse of the 'bug' she had crushed. She glowers, kicking the shards of the broken device under the rug, leaving Thomas to process his new fate in the virtual landscape of fibers that her sock had become to him.

In the blink of an eye, it was over. Thomas was now a microscopic particle in the fibers of Amber's sock - a tiny, insignificant speck beneath Amber's disgusting, smelly foot.

His whole world came crashing down around him. All hopes of escape, all possibility of growing back to normal size, were all dashed in the span of a single step. This wasn't how it was supposed to go! He was supposed to snoop on Jane - he just wanted to peep on his hot neighbor while she changed!

But now, it was over. There would never be a chance of escape or rescue. And he couldn't help but feel like it was somehow his own fault - like it was some sort of karmic retribution for his stupid scheme that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. His heart ached as he contemplated his fate: He'd have to live out his days imprisoned within the microcosm of Amber's smelly socks, forever.

He dimly noted that his senses were amplified by his size - the sound of her feet stomping on the floor echoed cacophonously inside his own head. His brain had trouble focusing on individual sounds as they overlapped together. He noted the acrid, rotten scent of her foot odor. He tasted dirt caked on her toes as he breathed in stale air from her foot. He could feel each individual thread of her socks pressing against him like massive tree trunks as he slowly slid his way down between her toes, his body so minuscule that he was practically a speck within them. The whole situation was surreal to him - he was a living being inside someone's dirty socks - a total stranger's dirty socks.

It was all he could do to keep from crying as Amber stepped over to a pair of worn-out sneakers, about to put her shoes on. She would never know that he was trapped within her socks - she never even knew his name.

He noticed the teen girl slipping on her sneakers, a well-loved pair of black Converse All-Stars. They were stained and muddied with dirt, muck, and grime. The soles were cracked and worn, the canvas fabric loose and frayed, the tongue torn and fraying. They were disgusting beyond belief - and he was going to spend the rest of his life trapped deep within them, living out his remaining days as a microscopic mote in the tight confines of her smelly socks, trapped inside the thick ovens of her shoes - like some kind of wretched parasite. 

He almost felt like he was being eaten alive by the girl’s body as he slid between her toes, buried in the mucky inner crevices of these disgustingly dirty shoes. He could hear her shoes squeaking as she laced them up, feeling the familiar vibrations through the fibers of her sock. He felt the temperature rocket up as she pulled on her sneakers - but there was nothing he could do. She was walking right out the door, and he wasn't getting out - not now, and not ever. He was doomed to be imprisoned underfoot for the remainder of his days - however short they may be, stuck in this microcosm of stench and filth. He would never see Jane Delaney in that lingerie that he had been hoping to spy on.

Thomas knew it without a shadow of doubt now: He was no longer human. In reality, he had become so small and insignificant that all trace of himself disappeared entirely in the dense fabric of Amber's socks. As his tiny, microscopic body slipped deeper within the weave of her socks - he realized he was being dislodged, flung into the sock towards her foot itself- freeing him from the fibers and sending him towards the incomprehensibly vast plain of Amber's bare sole, where he would be confined for his remaining days. He felt like a speck of dust, drifting aimlessly along in an endless expanse of filth. His senses were at their maximum capacity; every sound seemed to reverberate off the walls of her sneaker to his own ear - they sounded like thunderclaps. Everything smelled foul and stale - the air felt toxic to him, a miasma of sweat hung thick in the stale dampness. The odor was overwhelming - he gagged as his senses were overloaded with smells that assaulted him from every direction. He slipped into the space between her second and third toe, feeling the slick skin of her toes against his microscopic form. His tiny naked form flew between the horrid canyon formed by her two toes the odor growing almost tangible as he his the web between them, and Thomas' fate was sealed: He would live out his days in this cesspool of filth, being broken down slowly by Amber's sebaceous secretions and be subjected to vile odors until eventually he'd become food for some horrid foot fungus, or worse.

Now that he had been freed from within the fibers of her sock, he found himself in a new microcosm - an entire world between two toes. He could hear Amber's heartbeat through the soles of her shoes - it was pounding in a steady rhythm that filled up his tiny mind. He could taste the acrid, fetid odor of her foot odor wafting from her sweaty feet into his nose. It smelled like sour vinegar and cheese, a pungent sourness that flooded over his tongue, overpowering him in its rancid potency. Wherever he went, whatever way he slid deep inside her toe crevice, she always covered his tiny body with her mucky inner crevices; he was never able to escape from the foulness invading his very pores. He gagged as he breathed in her pestilent odor, finding it so repugnant that he felt like he might die from disgust alone. He couldn't even tell where smell and taste began anymore - everything seemed intermingled together into one horrendous combination of sensory torment. He was being cooked alive by her body heat, baked in the oven of her sneaker, brined in the sweat that seeped from between her toes onto his tiny form. The whole situation made him feel nauseous, but there was nothing he could do about it: He had no choice but to give in and endure.

A week later, Thomas was able to attend his own search party, buried like a dead skin cell between Amber's toes. Jane had insisted Amber help look - it was what you did for neighbors, after all - and she had begrudgingly agreed, rolling her eyes. The search party yielded nothing, of course. Nobody would have thought to check for a microbe between a fourteen year old girl's toes. A week later, he was declared missing, assumed dead. But, his torment went on much longer than that. Slowly, he was broken down by the acidity of her sweat and moisture; over time Amber's poor foot hygiene led to her developing a nasty case of athlete's foot fungus - the white, itchy patches started to appear between her second toe and third toe, beginning at the ball of her foot.

Slowly, Thomas was digested by the fungus until he became just another type of food source for her fungus-infested feet. His last days were spent as part of the fungi between her toes. By the time she had flown back home and gotten a stern talking to about proper hygiene, Thomas had long since been consumed by the teen girl’s foot fungus - not a single trace he had ever even existed remained, save for a discarded pair of swim trunks in the neighbor’s bushes.