I raced around a corner, accidentally shoulder checking a person coming the other way. More accurately, I shoulder checked their hip and went stumbling off the sidewalk. “Hey, watch it!” she called after me, and reached for my shoulder. Deftly I dodged the pink haired woman’s hand and continued running toward the library. My study session was scheduled to start ten minutes ago, and I did not have time to apologize, much less deal with her. She was distinctive enough that if I saw her again I could say I was sorry then, but the odds of that were slim.
When I reached the library doors I slowed down and took a moment to wipe the sweat from my forehead before pulling the door open. As I walked I straightened my hair and made sure I was presentable. While I knew studying was not a date, I might be able to get one out of it. My study partner was hot, and rumor was she had a thing for short guys. I would be an idiot to squander this opportunity by looking like a disheveled maniac.
I spotted her just inside the turnstiles, looking up at the ceiling with her piercing blue eyes. Fulda was almost seven feet of solid muscle, wearing a white tank top to showcase her biceps and tight black shorts with the bottoms rolled up put her powerful legs on full display. Her legs came up to my chin, and her huge feet were stuffed into black lo-top Converse. She had her auburn hair in a French braid, and her full lips were pushed out from a heavy sigh. It looked like she had been waiting for some time, and I hurried toward her.
Before I could say anything, the impossible happened: she started to get even taller. At first I thought it was all in my head, as though standing so close to her made her loom even larger, but when I was looking up at the metal button on her shorts I knew it was actually happening. I expected her sudden growth spurt to stop after just a few inches, but it continued, and the taller she got the faster she seemed to grow. For a while I simply admired her while she grew, but as her legs got longer something did not seem right. She should be getting close to the ceiling now but her head was nowhere near it, and since her whole body was expanding proportionally she should have bumped into me by now. If anything, I was getting further away from her, though just barely
With horror, I realized she had not grown at all: I was shrinking! I tried to call out to her as I dwindled along the great length of her legs, but my jaw was practically wired shut and my vocal cords did not respond. When I reached her knees, I became desperate to get her attention and tried to squeeze her calf, but my arms stayed at my side. Utterly helpless, I simply looked up at her as I got steadily smaller, her smooth shins appearing more like sandstone columns at the base of a great tower. I reduced in size below her ankles, and grimly realized my whole body could easily fit under her enormous feet now. When I finally stopped shrinking, I was looking up at the dull rubber spikes along the front of her shoe’s toe.
With the shrinking stopped, I was free to speak and move again. Immediately I began waving my arms and shouting up at my titanic study partner, hoping to get her attention. “Fulda, down here, by your shoe!” I called out. “Please, you have to help me, I shrank!” She gave no indication she had heard me. I was so puny that I could not even get help.
Ironically, if she could see me right now she would probably be delighted. Fulda had always gotten a kick out of how much she towered over me, and now that her shoe dwarfed me there would be no end to her teasing. Climbing up her shoe would be an ordeal, and I would have to ascend the slope of her shoelaces to reach her ankles. Ascending her smooth, sand-colored shins to her knees would be practically impossible without mountaineering equipment, and then I would have to navigate the bare skin of her powerful thighs. Fulda’s chest blocked my view of her face, but I could just see a bit of auburn hair above them. She was easily hundreds of feet tall, if not a thousand, so it was no wonder that my voice could not reach her ears.
She lifted the toe of her shoe, startling me enough that I jumped back. The area under her shoe was like a wide, open cavern with a brown rubber ceiling that had a series of diamonds etched into it. Fulda brought her shoe back down with an accompanying boom, and wind rushed over me as it was displaced. A powerful tremor emanated from the impact, making my knees feel like jelly, and I collapsed to the floor. Before I could recover she did it again, striking the ground with her shoe hard enough to make my insides tremble. Merely tapping her foot created a serious hazard for me, and I knew I would not last long on the floor.
When her foot stopped tapping, I jumped off the floor and dug my fingers into the rubber of her shoe. My arms wrapped around a dull rubber spike, and I braced my legs against the smooth white wall. I moved a hand up to the next row of protrusions and made sure I had a good grip before moving my other hand, then brought my legs into the ridges. It was slow going while I climbed the toe of her shoe, and I began to sweat by the time I reached the slanted grooves at the top.
I placed a foot atop the protruding rubber and reached forward, latching my fingers on the black strip running along the edge. With a grunt I pulled myself over the curve, then stood on the smooth white toe of her shoe. Her foot was the size of the university’s quad, and her shoe stretched before me. The white rubber dipped, giving way to black canvas in a trench between two ridges of stitched fabric. It gently sloped upward, crossed regularly by bright nylon laces as wide as I was tall. At the peak was a billboard-sized logo that read ALL STAR, and beyond that was her tree trunk of an ankle.
Fulda wiggled her toes as I crossed the white rubber, making the ground undulate from the movement. Soft pops made it through the material, and I tried not to dwell on the fact that her joints popping was ambient noise for me. I hopped down onto the black canvas and began my trek upward, barely even having to duck beneath the broad lace pulled tight at the bottom. When I reached the first crossed set, however, I had to climb over them, digging my fingers into the gaps between the nylon threading.
The slope got steeper the higher I went, and I was glad for the frequent handholds in her shoelaces. Progressively, I hopped off one and climbed onto the next, slowly making my way up the rough canvas floor. After the last one, I tried simply walking around the large knot her shoelace was tied in, but found the canvas too steep. I stood atop the thick fiber of her shoelace and jumped, grabbing onto the knot so my body draped over it. As I kicked my feet against the fabric to propel myself upward my fingers started to slip, and I scrambled to make it before losing my grip. Fortunately, I did not fall, and stood triumphant atop her shoe’s knot.
While I worked up the courage to go further, I rubbed my palm over the cloth tag in front of me. The tongue of her shoe was too steep to walk up, and the tag left little in the way of handholds. It was at a slant, but the stitches holding it on were just out of reach. Making contact with her skin was crucial, however, and I needed to reach the top. I coiled my legs and leapt, dragging my fingers along the tag as I sailed through the air. They snagged one of the stitches like a handle, and I managed to maintain my grip when my arm was fully extended and I came to an abrupt stop.
I dangled from the stitch, and my shoulder felt the strain of supporting my entire body. With my other hand I turned myself so I was facing the canvas, then reached up to grab the bottom stitch. Carefully I braced my feet against the canvas and began to climb. My hands moved over each other, grabbing each section of threading several times before moving to the next one while my legs walked up the canvas. To my side stretched black letters taller than I was, driving home how puny I was to her.
At the top, I swung one leg over the front of the tag so I could sit on it. A single line of gray stitching ran along the tongue, providing the only handhold before the top. I set a foot atop the tag, bending it downward as it bore my weight, and leaned against the canvas tongue while I stood. When I was fully extended, I could easily reach the gray stitches and grabbed on. Quickly I pulled myself up, walking up the incline, and stood on the gray thread. The top of her shoe’s tongue was within reach, and I seized it with both hands and began clambering up. Soon I would be able to touch her, and at least make her aware I was here.
Before I reached the top, however, Fulda turned her shoe to the side so her sole pointed outward. My grip was torn away as the horizontal turned vertical, and I tumbled along the tongue of her shoe. Desperately I tried to grab something to stop my fall, but aside from the single line of threading there was only rough canvas there to scrape my fingertips as they ran over it. I fell off the side, and luckily her shoelace’s loop broke my fall. It was somewhat elastic and bounced me off the material to land nearby on the tile floor.
I tried to grab onto it so I could ride it back to the top, but it was yanked away from me when Fulda righted her shoe. It briefly paused with a loud crash, then kept going so the sole was pointing toward me. For a moment I stood there, transfixed by the sheer size of her foot. Her feet were not just excessively long, they were also very broad, and her sole made a tremendous brown rubber wall several times my height. The fall had dropped me beside her instep, meaning the great diamond pattern was to either side of me, and I gazed up at diagonal lines carved deep into the rubber.
She brought her shoe back so it was flat on the ground again, making a loud slap when it landed. A breeze hit me as the edge blue past, and a tremor emanated from the impact. It caused me to stumble forward, and I came to a stop when my hands pressed against her shoe. I looked up, and saw a thick black band just over my head, stuck to the indomitable wall of white, and a hill of black canvas rose from that. Past that her leg began, shooting toward the sky until the inward bulge of her calf blocked my view from going any further up.
Climbing her shoe to reach her leg had been a bust, but there had to be some way to get her attention. I was too small for her to hear, that much had been made clear, and the aglets of her shoelace were too far up for me to jump and grab them. Even if they were in reach, I figured I was too light to pull them down with my weight, and I had no other way to affect them. She would not feel it no matter how hard I pushed on the rubber in front of me, and I was too weak to make myself felt through canvas. Fulda was physically impervious to anything I could do from here, as though I were a mere insect. Scratch that: compared to her, I was a mere insect, desperately trying to get her attention before someone stepped on me.
Her shoe raced backward in a black and white streak, and the curve of its toe caught me unaware. The force knocked me to the ground and caused me to slide over the smooth tile while she raised her leg behind her. She brought it back down, kicking the floor with the toe of her shoe. It made a light thud when the rubber hit tile, sending out small shockwaves and bouncing back up. I watched her gigantic shoe rise and fall several times, the curved rubber slightly flattening each time it landed.
When it ran out of momentum, Fulda’s shoe rested vertically for a moment before she brought it a half-step forward. Her heel touched the ground, leaving her sole to stretch far into the air. To my shock, some of the brown rubber was above me, just where it met the white border around it. If it landed on me I was sure to be smashed, so I rolled to the side. She brought the rest of her foot down with a loud crash, and for once I was glad to feel the earthquake radiating from her shoe. It meant I was still alive.
I got back to my feet and started walking uneasily toward the front of her shoe. Getting around her massive feet was sure to be a long journey, but there was no way I would get noticed here. Her foot spanned the whole length of a tile and then some, and I had to traverse a ditch with grout to get past her instep. Fortunately, while I walked the shoe beside me remained still, meaning I was not nearly crushed by it.
When I reached the toe of her shoe, I looked up at Fulda and tried getting her attention again. “Hey, down here!” I shouted while waving my arms. “It’s your study partner! Please help me, I shrunk!” Still nothing. If I had gotten her number this whole thing would have been over as soon as it began, but I had decided not to ask out of fear of being misinterpreted. The only thing I could think of now was finding something small enough I could drag, but this part of the library was kept exceptionally clean.
Fulda reached to her back to grab her phone and pulled it around, holding it at waist level. She tapped the screen with her thumb, checking the time, and I saw my opportunity. I began waving my arms wildly, running back and forth by the toe of her shoe in hopes of stealing her attention. This might be my last chance to get noticed before she gave up on the whole meeting, and I needed to make it count.
Her cold blue eyes flashed from her phone to me, and I felt a swell of elation. I had done it! Through perseverance and dumb luck, I had gotten a giantess to notice me! To hold her attention I made my movements more extreme, holding my arms out and spinning while I moved side to side in addition to waving them. That was sure to not only keep her attention, but let her know I was a person, albeit a very small one.
Fulda picked up her shoe and stepped forward slightly so her sole extended around me in every direction. I was in the vast cavern beneath her shoe, and a brown rubber diamond on the ceiling was centered over me. “No, wait!” I cried out reflexively, though I knew she could not hear me. I was too small for my voice to reach her ears normally, and with her gigantic foot in the way there was no chance of her hearing my words. Underneath her enormous shoe, the only thing that could save me was a miracle.
Her shoe raced down, the line running through the diamond growing in my view until it was the only thing I could see. I screamed in abject terror, though it could not change anything. Fulda’s sole hit me at full force, and I could not fall faster than her Converse was coming down. My back cried out in pain as vertebrae shattered beneath her weight, and the bones in my legs shattered. After a brief moment of intense agony, it was over; Fulda had squished me beneath her Converse. She raised her heel until her sole was almost vertical, then ground the ball of her foot back and forth. With each movement, she mashed what she must have thought was a bug further until it was little more than an unrecognizable red smear. After that, she gave up on the study session completely and went back to her room to study on her own.
Watching through the library windows, Jackie felt an intense amount of satisfaction when Fulda stepped on her would-be study partner turned bug. No one bumps into her without at least saying they’re sorry. It was a complete coincidence he had been going to meet Fulda, but she expected anyone else would have done the same. Being smashed under an enormous size 16 Converse as though he was nothing was a fitting end for someone so inconsiderate. Jackie chortled, then went on her way back to the Gamma house.