Even as Scott felt his mother’s gargantuan middle toe lifting off of his stomach in the dank tip of her massive leather heel, finally allowing regular oxygen flow into his lungs, it took him a while to start breathing normally. He had been experiencing the overpowering strength of Judy’s toeprint through the dark stockings tapping absentmindedly against his chest with the weight of dozens of sandbags, and he had long ago resorted to barely inhaling tiny gulps of air, in order to prevent the muscles in his abdomen from becoming too sore for him to move.
He waited breathlessly for a few seconds as he found himself alone once again in his mother’s shoe. Admittedly, any sort of break from his usual five pink and pudgy sausage-shaped roommates was a usually a good thing, but at this moment, Scott was even more mortified. It meant a conversation was coming up.
The conversation.
From the point when she’d placed him in her shoe at the courthouse and driven home without many direct words to her tiny son, Judy had treated Scott with a cold yet almost ambivalent negligence. Her toes had hammered aggressively against his body as he rested under them in her shoe, but that was normal. There had to be something more coming.
It worried Scott immensely. The last time he had come anywhere near to committing such a crime of social justice as this was the summer six years ago when he’d egged the house of a sports rival with a group of friends. Judy had read him the riot act twice over. In fact, he was almost certain she had improvised some additions to the riot act. Unless, of course, the original riot act included a clause about said rioter being plastered to the sunbaked skin underneath his mother’s foot and continually slapped against the rubber insole of a flip-flop she was dangling off a pool chair.
Scott knew better than to clamber out of the shoe himself. At one inch tall, the descent from the mouth of the shoe would be technically possible down the front slope, but far more treacherous than it was worth. Judy knew this, and had obviously left him there purposefully to stew in his own thoughts.
At one point, the monumental palm of Judy’s hand, which to the one-inch-tall Scott was practically the size of a circus tent canopy, came into view and blotted out the light, robust feminine fingers clutching the shoe on either side.
Scott tensed his core and prepared for liftoff as the shoe was carried weightlessly through the air. He couldn’t even see Judy’s face as she laid the shoe down and her hand flew out of sight again, though he had a hunch he was now parked on top of her bedside table, because of the loud clack he’d heard from the spike of the heel hitting the wood.
The ceiling visible through the opening of the shoe above seemed marginally closer, although to Scott it still seemed like looking up at an infinite morning sky. After this transference to the table, though, nothing else happened.
She was going to let him stick it out a little longer. Great.
Scott tried to focus on the faint sounds from the rest of the house that he could perceive from this higher vantage point. There wasn’t much, given the way his mother’s padded shoe acted as a sounding board. By closing his eyes and holding his breath, though, Scott was able to pick up on enough. A few seconds worth of listening proved to him that he wished he hadn’t heard at all.
“But Mom, you said I could!” Maggie whined loudly from somewhere outside the room. “You promised.”
“I know I did, honey, but you’ve got practice right now, and…”
“Then I’ll take him with me! He can ride along in my cleat.”
“I think we’re going to hold off on that for now. Remember, he can only leave the house once a week? I’d prefer you took him somewhere without quite so much kicking,” Judy responded.
“But Mom…” Scott’s sister groaned again, audibly stomping her feet. Despite being sixteen years old, she had never fully outgrown her brattier elementary years. “…I’ve waited so long to be able to play with him. It’s not fair.”
“Just relax and go to practice, Maggie. I’ll worry about what’s fair. You can see your brother later.”
“But then I’ve got Ashlynn’s party later, and I’m not taking my lame little brother to…”
“Big brother, honey.”
“…whatever. Lame big brother to the party.”
“Well, then, I guess it’ll just be me and Scott tonight. You can catch up with him tomorrow morning. Now come on, move along, before you’re late again,” Judy said, before quickly adding. “And I want to know there are going to be adults at that party, all right?”
Scott breathed the most tentative sigh of relief, but with the end of his family’s conversation, the cold silence settled cumberously back in.
The waiting was unbearable. Beads of anxious sweat collected on his brow and the nape of his neck, although it was already hard to tell how much of it was his and how much of it had been slathered unceremoniously across his body from between his mother’s toes.
During the drive home, Judy’s dark stockings had accumulated a colossal amount of sweat that had collected distinctly into crescent shapes in the fabric crevice between each digit. As her massive foot shifted from side to side, kneading the heavy liquid-laden stocking fibers along Scott’s body in a rough scrubbing motion, he developed stinging rug burns that were quickly soaked up with salty residue trickled from between his mother’s tremendous toes.
To say the least, his nerves weren’t helping matters at all. Sure, he’d dodged a bullet in the form of Maggie’s busily occupied evening for the moment, but for how many days was that little get-out-of-jail card going to save him? His mother would only be able to say no so many times before the rebellious Maggie would just scoop her tiny brother up when no one was looking and take him anyway.
Off in the distance through the house’s walls, he could hear the car squealing off down the driveway. He was safe from Maggie for now.
His mother, however, was an entirely different story.
Judy’s immense face finally appeared in the opening of the shoe. Her long blonde hair was slick from a fresh shower, and she was wringing a towel the size of a parachute around it as she stared down into the footwear, her face completely stoic and calm as she slid her long fingers through wisps of wet hair, raining down a soft mist into the shoe with each pass.
For a second, Scott’s heart leapt back into overdrive. The talk was coming. He knew it. At long last.
It wasn’t even the accompanying punishment of her words that Scott fully feared anymore. Being jammed between his mother’s enormous toes or under her vast, creased sole was a hell he had endured countless times before, and though he hated it with passion like nothing else in his life, it was predictable. He had learned the tricks necessary to endure with his body and mind intact.
But at this moment, as mother and son made eye contact through the relatively narrow frame of Judy’s shoe opening, nothing could be expected. Scott tried not to tremble as he stared into the blank visage of his mother’s deeply swirling eyes.
Still nothing happened. Swallowing hard and deciding to make the first tentative move, Scott began crawling steadily up the velvety incline of the shoe.
The surface was slightly greased with sweat leaked from his mother’s gracefully arched sole, though this coating was beginning to harden into more of a sticky film, making the climb easier for the tiny lad.
He reached the top and placed his hands against the hardened backing of the shoe, trying to get the best glimpse of the towering behemoth that made up his mother outside. He could barely see anything above her stomach level from his position on the table, but as his eyes traced up her tightly wound hot pink bathrobe and toward her neck, still glinting faintly with dampness from the shower so far above, he could feel the sickness creeping into him.
He almost felt nauseous, and he didn’t even have a monstrous set of toes sweating like greasy pigs onto his battered body.
God, why wouldn’t she just do something?
“Are you going to put these back on?” Scott called out at last, the words coming out less like a question and more like a wandering utterance of barely quelled horror. His throat was so dry he could barely disconnect each word.
Judy raised an amused eyebrow and changed the direction she was twirling the towel around her hair to dry off. She smirked. “Do you want me to, honey?”
What the hell kind of game was she playing? Scott frowned a little, but Judy looked totally serious in her question.
“No thanks.”
“Thought so,” Judy said, finally pulling the towel away from her damp hair and tossing it out of sight with a flop onto the bed. “Now why don’t you come out of there so mommy can see you better?” Her hand quickly lowered toward the shoe opening after releasing the towel, her thumb and middle finger descending into the warm hovel of her heel again and shrouding Scott in complete shadow with her palm looming ominously above him like a maternal UFO.
Scott held perfectly still as the two walls of finger flesh the size of peachy mattresses closed in on either side of him, allowing them to overtake his inconsequential weight like that of a paper clip and bring him soaring into the air and out of the shoe. He had learned long ago he was far better off just trusting his motion to Judy’s careful and surprisingly loving grip on his brittle form.
Still, it was hard not to shake as the ground that had already been far below seemed to spin downward into a vortex of blurred carpet fuzz. As Judy held her son pinched between her supple fingertips at chest height for a few agonizing seconds, Scott was treated to the stomach-churning sight of the drop to the ground.
The fuzz of the luxurious pink robe poked out invitingly around the rotund landscape of Judy’s covered breasts, but as Scott’s vision traced the spiral downward toward the ground and to Judy’s freshly washed bare feet, it felt like the carpet had become an entirely zoomed out view of Google Maps, apparently under attack by a colossal Judy.
Scott shut his eyes and tried not to let his shaking become known to Judy, but this was quickly remedied as he felt himself being placed in the safely leveled center of his mother’s massive palm.
This had to be it. As soon as he looked back into those imperative eyes, Scott knew a vocal tirade would be unleashed against him unlike any he had experienced before. His mother’s background in legal practice had made her a formidable persuasive speaker, and when she had her debate victim cowering in the very center of her palm at an inch tall, there wasn’t much hope of avoiding total emotional wreckage.
Scott tried to bide his time as long as possible. Rather than peeking upward, he crossed his legs together and began gazing across the smooth, creamy surface that sloped into a fleshy dune at the heel of his mother’s hand near her thumb. One of the three major creases in her hand was directly beneath his rear end, and Scott chose to look directly down at it, tracing the squishy indent with his eyes and counting the seconds until he was forced to look up.
It didn’t take long.
“Scott, honey,” Judy drawled warmly, her voice collected and steady, her thumb delicately pressing itself against her diminutive son’s back to get his attention. “We need to have a little chat.”