Mark wheezed into the vigorously pumping oxygen mask as he was tumbled for the umpteenth step on the underside of Becky’s sweat-lubricated toes. His suit, slicked with a full layer of gummy transudation, made the ride akin to a slip n’ slide, minus the coolness, happiness, and sunlight. The break he’d had a few minutes ago was hardly enough to gasp in a fresh round of untainted air in the world out of the girl’s over-worn leather boot, and before he knew it he was back in this pitch-black tunnel of unbearable heat and sour aroma.

            After Mark’s sister had failed to take notice of his repeated beatings on the underside of her appendage as she gently tramped around the living room with her shrunken brother trapped in her fashionable footwear, waiting for his signal, Joy had taken note of his distress calls on the monitor, and at last requested her two children to halt the task in which they had both failed.

            Soon enough, Mark was relieved of the plush weight of his sibling’s giant toes off his two-inch body and fished out of the tip of the boot by Becky’s trembling, clammy fingers. Somehow she’d managed to find some more tears hidden back in her ducts, and they were flowing again down her raw cheeks as she cradled the boy in her palm, apologizing continually for not noticing him again, even while she was attuning her senses to pick up his bids for freedom.

            And so, with a sigh, an apology, and a moist kiss on the top of the detainee’s little head, Joy had instructed her daughter to deposit the boy back into her boot for another test.

            “I did my best,” Mark mumbled.

            “I couldn’t feel him, honest!” Becky whined, bouncing impatiently. “I tried, I really tried! I almost felt like I was gonna fall on him.”

            “That’s… the point, honey. You can’t be lifting up or he won’t be able to reach you. If this happened for real, you’d be walking like normal,” Joy had said.

            “O-Okay…” the girl sighed.

            “Aim for the spots between her toes,” their mother had insisted, changing attention to Mark. “The skin is softer. She’ll feel it more. You could also try wrapping yourself around one of them, like wrestling. You won’t be able to match her movements, so either slow them down, or go where she’s vulnerable.”

            “Hit as hard as you can!” Becky blubbered meekly as she lowered her cupped palm back down into the briny darkness of her sweaty boot. “Do whatever you have to, Marky!”

            I did, the boy wanted to groan, though he held his tongue. His sister had been through enough trauma already today, and she wasn’t even the one who had been accidentally worn in a shoe. Frankly, he was just about ready to take three or four showers to wash off his sister’s salty stink and then begin the laborious process of forgetting about this afternoon of well-meaning humiliation.

            At this point, this activity was for his mother and sister’s peace of mind rather than his own, which was rather inconvenient, since he was the one being smashed like forgotten chewed gum into the sticky, marshmallow-like terrain of a giant bare foot again and again and again.

            So, the begrudging teen hopped off the titanic teen girl’s hand and made the short but squishy trek once again along her beaten-up instep and wedged himself into the end again, his back arched into the curve, where he’d be safest. Perhaps out of fear that she’d back out of it, Becky seemed to shove her foot into the boot with more force this time, as if she was ripping a band-aid away from her skin.

            Mark was bulldozed helplessly against the wall of the shoe as his sister commenced walking again, very nearly squelching what little disgusting air he’d managed to squeeze out of his breathing apparatus. Indeed, his sister was following Joy’s suggestion very carefully: she was stepping like normal again, as if he didn’t exist, as if she didn’t have a living thing grappling for life beneath her grimy toes.

            At the very least he’d learned a few lessons from the multiple occasions he’d had now to become familiar with the roly-poly chaos of being encased inside his enormous sibling’s shoe. By the rhythm of her booming steps, Mark knew when to expand his stomach and take in a deep breath, then constrict his torso and every muscle to prepare for impact as Becky placed her booted foot back on the carpet. He’d already been trained to recognize by the flicker of a toe muscle which one was going to curl into the top of her foot and which was going to extend, making for a better handhold, or at least the closest one he could approximate when every fleshy surface had become so slick and sticky with nervous summer sweat.

            Hell, maybe this wasn’t entirely useless after all. Though Mark hated the very notion that there was any positive benefit at all to having to spend so much time shrunken and imprisoned in a giant shoe, so he resolved quickly to avoid dwelling on this possibility.

            The boy returned half-heartedly to beating on Becky’s thrashing, worming toes, putting even more force into it until he could feel his shoulders getting weary and begging for a break. With the full brunt of those sandbag-like digits weighing upon him, fatigue came much faster than he’d hoped.

            Grappling with the buttons on his hands for Joy’s knowledge, the boy almost hated to do so, knowing it probably meant they’d have to repeat the activity yet again. He next attempted Joy’s two instructions, first jamming his hand as deeply as he could into the folds of clay-esque skin that webbed between the gargantuan girl’s big and second toes, though in the darkness and rapid motion, it was impossible to tell if he’d managed to reach the deepest corner of the crevice.

            Next Mark tried to hug himself into a digit, choosing the third, as he found it easiest to get all his limbs around it. However, as soon as he managed to curl an arm or a leg about the toe, Becky’s entire foot would clench, or a fresh geyser of sweat would seep through the doughy area between, and his grip would be lost, splashing him back into the spongy floor again to be bounced up against the girl’s mass.

            For all his effort, once again, the pair had seemingly flunked, and they’d almost certainly have to repeat it.

            Gritting his teeth and digesting the last morsel of his pride, perhaps for good, Mark decided that he had had plenty of this exercise by now. It was time to get a little extreme.

            Waiting for Becky’s foot to launch off the ground again, giving him a split second of loosened space and bodily agency, the boy dug his fingers under the body suit’s mask and ripped it and the rubber breathing tube away.

            No longer spared in even the slightest through the onslaught of vinegar-flavored sweat and broiling air, Mark huffed valiantly, becoming painfully reacquainted with the sensory trip he’d been forced through the day before, sans the protective gear. His skin tingled, bristling as salty excretion sopped into his body and burst in massive droplets against his lips.

            Undeterred, the thoroughly spent sixteen-year-old balled his hands into fists and pushed off the tip of the boot’s fuzzy, sweltering interior, throwing himself through the musky blackness until he felt his body colliding around Becky’s nearest flexing digit.

            The grooved pad of her toe was pressed flush almost immediately to his face, grinding unknowingly against his teeth. It flooded his tongue with flaked, soggy skin, and that’s when the boy acted. Parting his jaws, and awaiting the next moment of relatively free motion in mid-flight, Mark chomped onto the dense bulb of his little sister’s melon-sized toe tip.

            Like sliced cheese, the boy felt soggy, flaked foot skin brushing along the inside of his cheeks and melting away into his throat. Fighting the gag reflex, Mark chewed, hanging on for dear life by his jowls and coiled arms, feeling a mealy mixture of ingrained toe-grit along with a choked esophagus-full of lukewarm, oily sweat descend unwillingly down his gullet like the world’s worst medicine. He gnawed, ramming his teeth into the silky spiral of Becky’s toeprint, repeating it for several agonizingly repulsive seconds.

            Just when Mark was beginning to wonder if his churning stomach would be willing to take this abuse of his traumatized taste buds any longer before rebelling, he experienced the seismic event of his sister’s truck-sized boot coming to a stop as it sent him tumbling down beneath her arching, sunbaked instep.