It’s Julia’s socks.  A pair of white Nike socks with pink fabric bands wrapping around.  Running socks. 

                Thick running socks for absorbing perspiration. 

                Pinched between two of her fingers, they come over the side of the desk like massive banners.  Brian and I stumble back and Julia takes the other sock in her other finger, dangling a sock in each hand.  She studies our reactions for a minute, and I can tell she’s enjoying our somewhat leaked disgust.  Then, she releases them from her grip, and they plunge to the desk right in front of us.  They land with a wet slop noise, and several drops of sweat plop off of them to the desk, instantly moistening the ground of the desk in a little puddle.

                And it smells.  Oh, sweet Jesus does it smell.  It’s truly impossible to describe the stench currently raping the noses of myself and Brian.  Both of us stumble back, aghast at what lays before us.  The strong salt current carrying through, dewy grass stains soaked through her shoes, the smell of damp flesh still hanging around them from when they contained her massive feet.  It’s all there, and then the many other flavors of sweat.  It’s like a circus of chemicals parading around in front of us.  A pile of white, fabric, nuclear waste, soaked to overflowing with perspiration from her soles and toes.

                I can barely stand it.  Then Julia speaks.  “My socks are pretty wet from my run, boys.  So, here’s what you have to do.  Before I can put these in the washing machine, they need most of the sweat out.  You’re going to squeeze all the excess out of them…” she says, pausing for dramatic effect.  “By hand…” she ends with a huge smirk and an awful, tyrannical giggle.  She pinches her nose and laughs again.  “Good luck with that…” she says.  Then she leans back in the chair, crosses a leg, revealing her bare foot, still a pinkish color from her recent run, and watches us, absentmindedly curling her toes and cracking them at the joints.  Neither of us moves for a moment.  She nods.  “NOW, or you’re doing the shoes too,” she says, cracking her big toe at the same time for effect.  We shudder and immediately comply.

                I step forward, holding my breath, and gritting my teeth I grip a fibrous line of fabric in the sock and squeeze with all my might.  A fountain of sweat sprays forth, instantly covering my pant legs and part of my shirt.  I leap back in surprise and hear the loud laughter of Julia.  I peer over the sock and see her tilting her head, smiling at me, almost in a mocking fashion.  She’s enjoying this thoroughly.  Brian has discovered the same thing as me, but we move on.  It’s best to just dig in and get it done fast.

                And we work fast.  I figure the fastest way is to do it like mowing a lawn, so with some effort I roll my sock all the way out, as does Brian with the other sock.  Then we go out on our hands and knees down it, soaking ourselves in the foot sweat of Julia, rolling up little sections and squeezing them out.

                “Does it SMELL bad, boys?” she says, giggling some more.  I’m starting to lose my patience.  “Well, does it now?” she says again.

                “Kind of,” I say nonchalantly.  Best to answer her but keep it somewhat neutral.  She laughs again.

                “What, from ME?  You mean THESE feet…” she says, making a particularly loud cracking noise with her toes and regally raising her leg up in the air, her foot above her head where we can plainly see it above us.  I look up, and see her massive foot bending around, stretching, her toes getting some air and moving around like stubby fingers, her pale sole like a high-rise of feminine skin, the long wrinkles in her warm foot creasing in and out, her pink heels like gigantic battering rams.  “… THESE feet made all that mess?  Well what can I say, I run pretty fast,” she says, smiling and flipping her hair back.  She latches her fingers around her toes, bending them, before sliding down to her sole and gently massaging it. 

                “Oh, GOD, that was rough.  Know how far I went?  Four miles.  In just over half an hour.  Not bad, hmm?” she says happily, continuing to rub her foot.  “Pretty impressive, don’t you think?”

                “Yes,” says Brian flatly.

                She turns to me.  “What about you, Jack?”

                “What?” I ask.

                “How far can you run in half an hour?”

                “I don’t know…”

                She chuckles.  “I’d guess around 200 feet…” and she has to take a laugh break mid-sentence.  “Yep, probably around 200 feet.  I don’t really know, I guess, since we don’t do much exercise around here, maybe we’ll find OUT sometime, though,” she says coyly.  She uncrosses her leg and brings the other one up, and begins kneading the toes on her other foot, sighing deeply.  The silence is broken with Brian coughing.

                “Oh c’mon now, Brian, it can’t be THAT bad.  Can it?  Does it really stink that bad?”

                He coughs again and quietly says, “Yes…”

                With that, Julia is pulling her chair closer.  She grabs Brian up in a fist, then picks up the edge of the sock with her fingertips.  “Yes, huh?  Well get a load of THIS then!” she says and releases him into the mouth of the sock.  She then uses that fist to bunch up the opening of the sock, leaving Brian trapped inside.  She holds it up like a pouch of money and shakes it.  I can hear poor Brian coughing a lung up inside the sock.  It must be like a sweatbox in there.  Literally.  And there’s no oxygen flow to counteract the smell.

                “Smell good in there, Brian?” she says, the laugh track continuing endlessly.  I haven’t seen her having this much pure joy in a long time.  It’s scary, but in a different way from earlier.  It’s like a new side of her has become unhinged.  She clenches the opening of the sock for a second in her fist.  She scrunches her nose up, lifting her upper lip.

                “Oh, BRIAN, what have you been doing?  Have you been working at ALL? This thing is still completely soaked!  I mean, look!” she says and squeezes hard at the opening.  Another spray of it comes off.  Of course, because she did it at the top of the sock, I know some must have dripped down in a waterfall style inside the sock onto Brian. 

                I say a mini prayer for him in there.

                “Oops!  I’m sorry Brian, you’re going to be a MESS now, aren’t you?  A smelly little mess…  Just like earlier!  Except the mess came from my feet this time, didn’t it?” she says.  Wow.  She’s just making up jokes at this point.  She’s getting intense pleasure out of humiliating us, Brian specifically.  This is her revenge for earlier without actually causing him physical harm.  It’s better than death of course, but it’s not pleasant to smell from out here, and I honestly can’t even picture the stimuli being forced through Brian’s brain right now.  Both of us have been covered in enough of Julia’s foot sweat to soak into our systems and hydrate us like camels for the next week.

                While still holding her sock containing Brian, Julia’s eyes shift to me and squint.  I see a playful glint in them.  Oh, God.  Am I next?  She smiles.

                “Almost done there, Jack?”

                “Um… yes, I think so.”

                “We’ll have to see…” she says, placing several fingers right in front of me and patting at the sock.  She curls her upper lip, tilts her head, then sighs.  “Yes, I guess that’s as good as it’s going to get.  Okay, you’ve done enough,” she says and giggles one more time.

                “Time to come out, Brian…” she says, and palms her other hand out, while using the other one to grasp the sock.  I see her find Brian’s small form in the fabric, probing through the fabric with her fingers, and she begins to gently poke at it.  Not in a death squeeze like earlier in the day, but it’s enough that she’s ensuring to coat him in enough of her sweat to practically soak through to his bones and disintegrate them.  After grasping at him for a moment through the fabric, using her thumb to move him around, she lets loose, grabbing the toe end of the sock, allowing the tube to flip over. 

                Brian comes tumbling out of the top and lands in her palm, which quickly closes around him.  His face looks dizzy.  She brings him to her nose and inhales strongly, before pulling him away quickly in feigned disgust.  “Wheeewwwww… BRIAN.  The way you smell, you might as well have been in between my toes when I was running!”  She seats herself once again, and raises her foot up to rest on her knee, clenching in between her toes with the hand still holding the sock.  She massages them for a second and looks at them, before her eyes dart back to Brian, then back to her sweaty toes.  For the faintest moment, I wonder if she’s considering actually testing whether or not having him wedged in between her toes would make him as smelly as being in her sock for two minutes… but she doesn’t do it, thank goodness.  She looks back down at me once again.

“You and Brian are going to need some extra bath time so you don’t smell like my shoes for the rest of the month,” she says with a grin, as she begins to toss Brian around between her hands in that playful, absentminded way she usually does with me.