“I was almost out!  I WAS ALMOST OUT!” screamed Marty as the impact of what had just happened flew through his body.  Pain of unimaginable proportions began to surge through his left leg as Casey’s flesh met her pump when she’d started wiggling her toes, still in the shoe.  The pump’s material had come crashing down on top of Marty’s left leg, specifically the calf.  His eyes had widened, and his entire body went cold for a split-second as the pain of the blow swept through his leg and then his entire body.  For a moment, he felt cut off from the rest of the world, cut off, even from his emotions.

No words could possibly describe how painful everything felt to Marty at that moment.  He was laying on top of his wife’s foot, no bigger than an insect.  Casey had always been so gentle with them.  If there was a person alive without any evil in them at all, it would be here.  Yet, here she was, simply wiggling those soft toes of hers in her shoes, crushing her husband’s leg in the process.  To her, she was fixing a ticklish sensation.  To him, the world was coming down on him, both physically and otherwise.

“W-Why Casey….why?” said Marty, his entire body quivering in shock as his leg was being pushed against by the leathery material of the shoe.  A thousand knives were puncturing his spirit right now.  No, it was a million knives.  Indescribable pain had come through his body, but the physical torture he was enduring was nothing compared to the emotional torture he was coming through right now.  His gentle, sweet wife, torturing him as if he were nothing, and she didn’t even know it was happening!  He started gagging and choking as the pain got worse.

It felt like the shoe was increasing it’s pressure on his leg as the moment dragged on for what seemed like forever.  Marty knew exactly what was going on, despite going into shock and shivering his way out of reality.  The pain was familiar to him.  Being big on sports, Marty had gotten injured often, and he knew what bones being pulverized felt like.  Back in high school, he’d smashed his arm into a set of bleachers while a janitor happened to be closing them up for the night.  His bones began to crack as he screamed to the janitor to stop.  His arm was saved, but that feeling of pain had never left his mind.

He was feeling the same thing, that very moment.  He could almost hear the bones in his legs starting to compress and lose their shape.  The pressure was too much.  The force of his goddess-like wife’s shoe was like a million bricks being dropped, all at once.  His entire body twitched as he heard that sound, that horrifying sound.  There was no mistaking it with the massive surge of pain that followed it.  Casey had just broken his leg, cracks surging through it. 

Marty opened his mouth, trying to scream, but he couldn’t.  The pain of his leg being under so much pressure was far too taxing on his body.  All of his blood was rushing down to the leg to try to soften the disastrous blow that was happening to it, and his energy was, for lack of a better word, gone.  His mouth opened, and air blew out from his lungs, but no sounds were made.  His head quivered and his eyes almost constantly blinking, out of control.  He was going into shock.

The man’s fingers curled into fists and the toes of his non-hurt foot curled inside his shoes, a dozen cracking sounds coming from his joints.  His eyes were tightly shut and he finally got the energy to scream something.  “C-Casey…h-honey…p-p-please….help me…”  Those words were all he had the energy to send out, and they traveled up the woman’s leg, Marty praying that she could, over all odds, hear his cry for help and notice him.  He was asking for a miracle as his pain-filled body quivered, the injury in his leg getting worse for every second that had passed during these last few moments.

Many moments go by and nothing happens.  Casey’s face, lose in the blurred out void above Marty, and didn’t look down.  She didn’t call back to him.  She didn’t move her foot to bring him to safety.  She did absolutely nothing, but begin to sway her foot back and forth in the air.  Her mind was not on anything but her husband, but the tiny plea for help that he’d sent up never made it past her knees.  She had no hope of ever hearing him from where he was.  He was stuck there, and had to find a way out of this mess on his own.

The reality of the situation was coming into Marty’s being as his body went through more convulsions, trying to cope with the shock that was enveloping his body.  He realized what was happening, though.  He was in trouble, big trouble.  Despite the fact that his deeply concerned wife was right there with him, she wasn’t coming to his rescue.  She would simply go about her day and let him hurt, completely unaware that she was causing the man she loved indescribable grief. As he came to realize this, he started to break down, tears running down his face.

Casey slowly stopped swaying her foot and let out a deep sigh as she sat at the kitchen table.  She looked at the wooden surface and used a finger to play with her hair.  Her eyes began to quiver as she thought about her husband, about where he might be.  “Marty…please tell me that you didn’t leave.  Please, just walk out of the hallway and show me yourself.  You’re not feeling well, and you probably want your space, wherever you’ve gone in the house, but…but…I need you, too.  I need to know you’re okay, and that you can count on me to help you.  I’m…going to find you.  Dinner can wait.”

Casey shook her head and began to stand up from the table, planting her feet on the ground.  As her shoe tapped on the hard floor, she’d opened up the area between her pump and her foot, freeing Marty.  However, as she took her first step away from the kitchen, her foot became an incline, and his bug-sized body was, once again, swallowed by her shoe…