Mark couldn’t help but feel he’d been ungrateful for the embarrassing, mildly humid solitude of before inside the giant shoe, prior to when Becky and Melissa had entered the laundry room.
Now that he was sharing the densely packed space of his little sister’s favorite mint-green flat with her stocking-stuffed left foot, crowded into the very tip by five squirming, semi-pudgy, sweat-glossed toes each nearly as large as his entire body, he was beginning to wish he could take back his earlier interior complaints.
If he wasn’t so worried for his own bodily safety, Mark knew he would’ve grown quite nauseous by this point, as each step was like an accelerated ascent up the hill of a steel roller coaster, with Becky’s mammoth toes suspended briefly above his frail form, causing him to roll awkwardly against the top of the bulging ball of her foot.
The descent came just as quickly, though, with even fewer positives to focus on. Becky’s foot flexed in midair, her toes splayed upward through the pink stocking and then curling down again, instantly ramming Mark back into the thankfully cushy wall of the shoe, practically molding his shape into the toe-tip. Then came the impact, not quite painful thanks to the lighter touch that came with his sister’s casual dance training plus the padding of the sock, but he nonetheless felt the pressure building up atop his limbs and torso as her toes wriggled back into place, filling the smelly void and making a flesh-and-fabric sandwich out of him.
After Becky had taken around fifty steps and Mark had reoriented himself in the balmy pitch-black well enough to know where his hands were, he began throwing all his effort into punching the girl’s worming digits stretched inside the mealy nylon. Again and again he struck blows, sometimes meeting the airy give of space between Becky’s splayed toes, sometimes landing a blow on the doughy curvature of her big toe, but neither had any effect.
Worse, since Becky and Melissa seemed to be in a hurry to catch whatever show they were so intent on geeking over, they had apparently settled on a brisk power-walk, making it even harder for Mark to manage, let alone try and get his sister’s attention. Eventually he gave up on trying to punch or pinch his sibling’s mashing digits, instead putting all his effort into keeping his cranium shielded from the next musky, wind-stealing brunt force. He was already dizzy enough from the wild blackout ride his gigantic sibling had unwittingly sent him on, and it wasn’t helping having to suck down the noisome flavor of Becky’s swampy pink stocking on every alternate step.
Fifty steps turned to one hundred, then two hundred and three hundred. Mark was trounced with particular oomph into the plastered ball of Becky’s foot when, he presumed, she and Melissa were hopping off the concrete curb and crossing the thin residential road to the next block. They’d almost arrived, at least, though Mark hoped it came long before his bones started to creak.
“I think the front door’s unlocked, let’s just go in,” Melissa said, though the sound of her voice was muffled between the thick green fabric of the flat and Becky’s constantly buckling toes. “Yep, open!”
“Cool. I call the big armchair!” Becky giggled.
“You’ll have to beat me there, then!”
Mark felt the rumble of four stampeding appendages, one of which he was acquainted with now at a seismically intimate level.
Becky picked up the pace as she crossed the threshold into Melissa’s house, pattering through the foyer after her friend by sauntering comically on the balls of her feet through the flats. Entertaining for the two fourteen-year-olds, assuredly, as they set back into raucous snickering upon entering the kitchen, but not terribly comfortable for the two-inch Mark, who felt the full weight of his sister’s enormous marshmallow toes balanced upon his back for just a few split seconds longer than he would’ve preferred, his preference being none.
The tiny teen had been vaguely planning to reattempt his punching efforts once they reached the house, presumably as the girls would have to stop on the stoop for a moment, but the unlocked door meant they were free to charge forward. Mark knew he had to call out again, but his chest was too devoid of fresh air and moisture to summon any words. He coughed, only allowing more of the foul, putrefied fog into his lungs. His teeth caught on a snag of the near-sopping pink stocking, which by now had been scoured across Becky’s gently sweating peds for the whole sunbaked walk over to the house.
Salty excretion was tattooed across the back of his throat as Mark spat the wad of tangled nylon back out, though he still couldn’t do anything about having his entire body immersed into the plush ceiling of his sister’s stocking-clad foot. On these slower, weightier steps now as the girls entered the living room, the boy could sense his body sinking up into the rosy fabric and spongy foot skin, molding into it like clay.
“I called it! It’s like shotgun in a car. You know that, right?” Becky chuckled as she leapt effortlessly onto the reclining leather armchair.
Mark felt the stomach-churning rush of zero gravity surround him and his tight company of titanic teenage toes before he was bounced down against the damp basin of the flat and then up again into the curved crevice beneath Becky’s stockinged toes, where he was immediately glued by the girl’s idly stretching digits. A joint in her middle toe popped loudly, startling the boy and scrambling his sense of direction again just as he was readying his fists to recommence the emergency beatdown on his sister’s toe.
Groaning to himself, Mark decided once Becky noticed him, he was prepared to pay just about any sum of money or chores to ensure this little escapade never was uttered about again in either passing or implication. Though he had a feeling that wouldn’t be enough for the girl, whom he knew cared for him perhaps more than any of her other family or friends.
This probably couldn’t end well.
“Is it okay if I take my shoes off on the carpet?” Becky sang out to Melissa.
“Sure… but they better not stink up the room!” her friend joked back.
“Why do you have to be so mean to me?” the girl sighed dramatically. “They’re not that bad…”
A certain smaller party in the room begged to differ. Mark’s heart fluttered joyously at the prospect of finally escaping the mashing prison of his sister’s toes, just as much as he positively dreaded the onslaught of humiliation that would surely accompany it. Maybe he could quietly get her attention before his sibling’s equally enormous friend caught notice and put the pieces together?
Above all, he had to make sure everyone remained calm.
He heard the thump of his sister’s gigantic fingers on the outside of the flat, squeezing it harder into her instep so the cusp of the heel would be loosened and slip away. Briefly, he found her toes compressing back around him, the netty fabric of the nylon bunching up around him and clogging into his nostrils and mouth again, this time with no chance to cough them up. Mark wheezed, struggling uselessly to bat his fists into her foot as he felt a hot droplet of her rancid sweat bead from between the massive toes and roll over his teeth.
Mercifully, the process lasted only an instant, as the mint-green flat as pried and peeled away from Becky’s appendage and ankle. Out of instinct, Mark clung into the sea of fabric bolstered by muscular toe flesh behind it, wrapping his arms in for security as the shoe was dropped toward the floor below. A second alter, he was hung by his limbs like a macabre Christmas ornament from his younger sibling’s bouncing toes, her foot crossed over her opposite knee.
“Um… Becks?” he peeped uncertainly.
He peeked over the fluffy pink horizon of Becky’s curled, stockinged toes and saw her golden ponytailed hair and bulging blue eyes crest into view. For a moment she blinked at him, processing the image of her two-inch sibling dangling from her digits by the slender footwear and putting the pieces together, and then she shrieked. Loud.
So much for keeping things calm.