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Story Notes:

Here’s another (very) short story set in my Oversight universe that I’ve just had sitting around for a while and finally decided to post while I continue working on A Little Blackmail 5 and Julia.  It’s basically a fun little in-shoe tale.  In the timeline, it takes place two years after the implementation of the Shrink Act.  Please enjoy!

Kevin gasped as his entire darkness-flooded world seemed to come apart at the seams.  His body, sweltering in the airless heat, was sandwiched between the filthy worn-out insole of a black pump and the heavy ceiling of his teacher’s wrinkled, swollen foot.  As her pink sole peeled slowly away from the base of her shoe, he felt his arms, which had practically molded into the doughy ceiling of her skin, remain adhered to her heavy appendage for another moment before he plopped into the black basin of the footwear once again.

            He lay there at two inches tall, unwilling to try something as useless as getting up, and squinted as a crack of light was allowed in once the woman’s sole had arched high enough in the air.  It was practically blinding after he’d become accustomed to pitch-black, though it was merely from the humble glow of the energy-efficient bulbs that hovered above the desk in her office.

            The dim allowance of vision briefly illuminated the fleshy ripples of Courtney’s sole like soft mountain ranges on a road map as it loomed above him.  He watched the wrinkles bend and change shape with the tiniest of muscular shifts, forming new patterns in her skin.  A dance of light and malleable flesh, done without thinking, and all for him to witness and be rightfully intimidated by.

            A gloss of foot sweat was uniformly smeared across the uneven terrain of the forty-two-year-old’s massive foot, from her heavy heel, along her arch, over the hill of the ball, and down to her meaty toes, which were concealed in the dark tip.  As he studied the titanic appendage, he could make out the shape of his tiny body as though it had been painted on: the only place on the expansive sole that was clean of her salty excretion, because it had been absorbed directly into his own skin through oppressive, crushing contact.  It was just as belittling as ever to have to be reminded of precisely how small he was beneath the woman.

            This reprieve of light and stale air didn’t last long.  Courtney was extremely practiced with this treatment of her student, allowing him just enough time to get a few good gulps of semi-fresh oxygen into his lungs before he was returned back to the darkness.  Slowly, her sole arched and began to descend again until it squelched the light from the shoe and made contact with Kevin.  The heft of the mass of skin, sticky and repugnant, molded back around its miniscule occupant.

            The shrunken fifteen-year-old sighed, not with hopeless defeat, but with simple surrender as his body was smashed tenderly back down into the greasy insole, the bulbous influx of his teacher’s skin filling in every available pocket of air as she slipped the shoe back on fully.  He was far too used to this now to let it get him down.

            Not too much, anyway.

            It had to be admitted.  At the very least, this summer was shaping up to make all previous crappy seasons look like an island paradise by comparison.  The last summer had been spent working at his grandpa’s apple orchard, carrying baskets of the produce back and forth across a field.  The summer before that was spent at school as he uselessly tried to make up time for failed classes.  The one before that away at summer camps so boring they made a season feel like a year.

            But this.  This beat them all.

            Thanks to a new educational rehabilitation program endorsed by the Techilogic Corporation, Kevin was facing a summer of being shrunken down by a Portable Matter Reduction Device and worn inside his teacher’s shoe.  An entire summer.  Nine weeks of being trapped under her pungent sole or flicked between her dexterous toes.  Sixty-three days of being stood on, sweated on, and stamped into a black oblivion by Courtney’s feet, either garbed in stockings, socks, or simply in their naked, doughy glory.

            He’d tried to get out of it, but his parents, spurred on by an introductory offer from a local branch of the company that allowed for an attractive discount on the new summer-long program, agreed.  Already at their wit’s end with their consistent disappointment of a son, they were ready to try just about anything to make a turnaround: including, it seemed, putting their shrunken child into the hands of a woman who’d earned the whispered nickname “Sergeant” from many of her students.  Courtney Foster, Kevin’s algebra teacher of the previous year and newly trained Shrink Act warden, would make a healthy stipend over the summer in return for implementing a Reduction & Rehabilitation “therapy” program designed to instill a new work ethic in its academically and behaviorally challenged participants and squash, literally, any complacency out.

            Techilogic was responsible for more than arranging this unusual teacher-student relationship, though.  The very company that had invented the conveyance that made this diminutive hell possible had recently put out into the market a medication it had been developing with the armed forces for the better part of a decade.  Originally intended to make soldiers immune to harm, the pharmaceutical product known as Sizac had been found to have its admittedly insubstantial effects exponentially increased such that it became useful when the patient was shrunken.  The smaller the subject, the more potent the effects, meaning that anyone under the effects of a PMRD who had taken a dose beforehand experienced far less pain and, best of all, were rendered virtually resilient to any but the most egregious forms of punishment.

            Of course, unluckily for someone like Kevin, the existence of such a product meant his teacher could wear him in a shoe and stand her full weight on him without any ethical qualms or legitimate risks of crushing.  All his parents had to do was powder a double dose of Sizac into his breakfast every morning before dropping him off for wearing duty, and the young man came away without a scratch or bruise after a full day of being smashed again and again and again under her powerful foot.

            During the summer, Courtney worked several jobs as a part-time summer school teacher and at a local magazine publisher.  Given how thinly she was stretched, sometimes the hourly range was more like 5-to-9 than 9-to-5.  For her student, nearly every second of that time out was to be spent with him at two inches tall and pinned under the sweat-sluicing ball of her foot.  Breaks were scarce, usually just consisting of Courtney lifting her foot partially out of her shoe for a few minutes, or if she was feeling generous, her entire appendage.  At noon, he was removed for thirty heavenly minutes to scarf down scraps shared from her lunch, as well as to humiliatingly take a bathroom break into a condiment cup while she turned her back, and then he was deposited immediately back into the shoe without exception and often without conversation.

            Kevin had learned quickly that weepy groveling to his parents would not get him anywhere.  Evenings and weekends could occasionally be counted on for a desperate break wherein he had to study to prepare for the coming school year, but more often than not, Courtney would find uses for her charge during this time away from her job and put him back on duty.  Sometimes this meant being tucked into her house slippers while she sat back with a mug of coffee on the couch.  Sometimes, even, this meant riding atop her foot inside a soaking sock while she went for a run or used her stationary bike: a very particular kind of hell that made the days at school and the office look a little less bleak.

            Currently, he was midway through week two, though it felt far more like decade two.  And perhaps the worst part of this two-month nightmare was that the entirety of the blame had to be placed on his miniscule shoulders.

 

Chapter End Notes:

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And again, I know I've got a lot of stories on my plate right now, but this one's already complete, so I promise it's not taking up writing time.

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