Life Changes (Chapter 7)

“Maybe you’re just lacking the proper motivation to do your job well enough,” Grace thoughtfully stated, stroking her cheek with a fingertip. She nodded to herself in affirmation. “Yes, I think that’s it. There’s nothing for you to look forward to, is there? Nothing on your horizon to make this existence seem any better. Well, it’s all a matter of perspective, David. Everything can become worse when you try hard enough. For example… since you’ve been doing such a poor job at this massage for reasons I can’t imagine, you’re going in my shoe now, with my foot of course, and you can come out when and only when you’ve completed the task to my satisfaction. Yes, I think that’s fair. Do you think that’s fair, David?”

            Stunned, I looked up at her like a deer in headlights. Did I really get a vote?

            “Correct. You have no opinion, because your opinion doesn’t matter,” Grace confirmed with a motherly chuckle. The transformation device, resting on the couch beside her, was suddenly in the woman’s fist and pointed at me again. The barrel glowed, revving up. “Oh, and just to keep things interesting, and to remind you how much simpler things are when you listen to me the first time, we’ll be putting you down to… ah, I don’t know… half your current size? That sounds about right. Hope you learn your lesson, David, because frankly, I get sick to death of having to treat you like a stupid untrained dog.”

            I barely had time to ponder the horrific word “half,” meaning that Grace’s feet were about to comparatively double in size, when the now-familiar blinding flash consumed me and knocked me on my ass again. When I recovered, presumably at my newly assigned two-inch height, I was gazing up at the mirage-like sight of a hand larger than a sky-diving parachute descending on me, manicured fingers flared out like talons. Yep, two inches. Between her clawed fingers, I saw Grace’s deliciously self-serving smile on her utterly colossal face for just a moment before it turned stone-cold again. The woman’s digits collected me between the padded tips, delicately yet with such force I couldn’t have hoped to fight off even the top half of her pinky finger.

            Apparently I’d spoken too soon in deciding who made the more ideal slave-master. Grace may not have had her daughter’s salt-laden BO or greasy muscled soles, but she made up for it with an utter lack of mercy that I simply hadn’t counted on. Kayla liked to pick on me for her own amusement, yes, but Grace wasn’t fooling around. No part of this was a game to her.

            Her hand moved swiftly for the carpeted canyon between the ottoman and couch, where she’d discarded her dark-cherry high heels. Once I was dangled above one, her restrictive fingertips fell away to drop me within. The harsh, light-swallowing cave beckoned as I plunged through the gaping maw, plopped, and rolled down the slick leathery incline toward the triangular toe-point at the bottom of the slide. Above, I saw the shadows flicker as Grace’s toes grasped the lip of her work-worn shoe.

            “Oh Lord, just look how pathetic you are down there, David,” Grace drawled. Her bare foot gradually began sliding back into the heel and blotting out my only escape hatch, but she took her time, sneering down at me between her flexed toes. Seeing her magnificent body towering above, snickering in her utter dominance of me, made me feel even lower than she’d already shrunk me. “Did you ever imagine things would turn out like this, when you agreed to that bet? Let this be a lesson to you, pipsqueak. If you let money be your religion and your god, it’ll blind you to the truth, and become your downfall. Now who’s your god, or should I say gods? Me and my daughters, and no one else. Certainly not the money you were so certain you’d win before you foolishly bet ten years of your life on it. Really, the funny thing is, that amount of money is almost meaningless to me, compared to the inheritance we received. A drop in the bucket, but for you, it was worth everything. And here you are two years later, proving yourself a subpar foot slave at even a simple kissing massage. Though… I can’t say I completely regret the fact that you were greedy enough to take that risk, because I love doing this to you, David. In fact, just between you and me, I even like it when you fail to please me at first in your work. It makes it all the more satisfying when I get to squash you next to repay each and every shortcoming.”

            Despite the stuffy heat present in Grace’s shoe, the temperature rising higher all the time the more of her foot she shoved inside, I was chilled to the bone. It was hard to remember that David was once considered a close family friend, yet now was the subject of open and demeaning ridicule: a kicking while he was, literally, down. I felt ill for him, but even more for myself, at the prospect of what I also had to look forward to for the coming years if I couldn’t keep it together.

            I caught one last glimpse of Grace winking at me in the separated crevice between her big and second toes, and then finally her foot was jammed the rest of the way inside. Like my last trip inside a shoe, I was consumed by muggy darkness, but the experience was more vulnerable somehow; before, as Kayla’s insole, my transformed body was built to handle being pounded by a heavy foot, even if the sweaty sensory experience put me through the wringer. Now, though, I was little more than a bug to Grace, smaller than her thumb, and at the moment cowering in the pointed basin of her high-heeled shoe. The stink of warm leather hung in the stale air, and only intensified once the older woman’s naked ped was fully inside, gobbling up real estate. Not a moment after, I met Grace’s foot, swiftly and without mercy, when her giant toes pile-drove into me like a phalanx of linebackers.

            I felt all the air punted out of my lungs at the moment of impact. The same plump digit which had earlier merely poked me in the back, just to get my attention, and still sent me flying, now encroached until I noticed the wall of the shoe at my back. Pinned in place length-wise across two of Grace’s bulbous toe-heads, I fought either to wriggle my way atop her foot, or underneath, where at least I wouldn’t be bound against the funneled heel-tip shape by the firmest segment of my future mother-in-law’s meaty toes. Yet I accomplished neither, so thoroughly ground into the wall that at only two inches tall, I had none of the leverage required to overpower even one of Grace’s toes.