Life Changes (Chapter 4)

All around me was ratty darkness now, smelly and imprisoning, except for the opening above, which felt a bit like staring through a tunnel of light toward the afterlife. Above, predictably gawking in at my powerless self with zero empathy or remorse, and in fact a self-congratulatory smirk spread over her lips, Kayla brushed a dark lock of hair over her ear and thoughtfully massaged her cheek. Even now it was hard to accept that I was rendered mute and insole-shaped, trapped in the reeking old gym-sneaker belonging to the giant musclebound woman who would one day be my sister-in-law, while she knowingly watched me suffer in silence like her pet and plaything. Yet regardless of how long it took me to accept, it was real, and only getting realer.

            “Wow, it just occurred to me,” Kayla said. “Tomorrow, I’ll be able to have two man-insoles, one for each of my feet. God, I’ll be unstoppable.”

            Kayla set the shoe on the floor, granting me one last gob-smacking visage of her towering body. Then she lifted her bare foot over me again, wriggling her nude toes to wave farewell, and thrust the whole appendage into the mouth of the shoe. In the blink of an eye, the last of the light was cut off, the shoe went into a wrenching frenzy, and my body was stampeded by bulky toes and the ball of her eager foot.

            The rest of Kayla’s ped slammed inside the shoe, filling up the remainder of the limited space, and sandwiching my whole mutated insole-body between the unforgiving base of the putrid sneaker and the marshmallow-soft yet muscled slab of her giant sole. It was painful, but even beyond physical discomfort, I was attacked by a mind-boggling array of sensory information. Every part of my hyper-sensitive body was being compressed by infinite foot, cut off from light and sound, my every fabric molecule eternally detecting and experiencing the rich odor and brackish flavors of Kayla’s ruddy over-worked skin. I might’ve bellowed at the overload of this ordeal if I still had a mouth. Unfortunately, my future sister-in-law had stolen it and the rest of my recognizable human features, plus my ability to move, and so I simply had to endure being trampled inside a sweaty workout shoe by the cackling, victorious leviathan.

            Then Kayla started to walk, and I started to get the full picture of what my upcoming week would be like. As she arched her foot off the ground to stride forth, mass rolled in a pressurized wave, transferring her full body weight from the heavy heel, up the ample sloped arch, to the thick ball of her foot, and at last the plump dewdrop mounds of her toes before launching airborne. For a precious moment, suspended in midair while Kayla stepped forward, I was spared from being squashed by her foot, though the rotten aroma and cornucopia of salty essence lingered. That relative freedom was short-lived, however, as Kayla’s militant pace brought her bare foot, the filthy shoe, and me all careening down to the floor again. On impact, I could feel the woman’s every muscle flexing through the spongy sole flesh, grinding me into shoe while molding the shape of her own foot into my transformed body like wet cement. Her toes curled down, gripping me and punching in five distinct impressions along the curve. Though muffled, I could just make out the sound of Kayla’s laughter high above, just before the whole process repeated all over again with a mighty lunge and another disorienting smack.

            This carried on for several minutes, though in this dark gritty void where she’d trapped me, it might as well have been hours. I suppose I ought to have been grateful that Kayla was just walking around the room to “break me in,” rather than pumping iron at the gym and only adding extra pounds to the weight imparted through her foot which I had to accept, but it was hard to be optimistic. By the time I felt Kayla’s ped mercifully wriggling its way back out of the shoe, I was seriously beginning to wonder what had possessed me to make that bet in the first place, and only for $10,000. I should’ve asked for more, if not kept my big mouth shut altogether. But it was far too late for second thoughts.

            Her hand reached inside, fingers pinching my edge so she didn’t have to touch too much of her own sweat-riddled accessory. Indeed, my pad-shaped body was now soaked through its every cubic inch with her soupy perspiration, dripping as she plucked me out of the mucky footwear. Even no longer in direct contact with Kayla’s foot, it felt as though she’d inserted her sweaty toes right into my consciousness, and it was all I could concentrate on, except for the giantess’s simpering grin just ahead as she examined me.

            “You make a good insole, Cody. Almost as good as you are at cleaning my feet with your whiny tongue,” Kayla taunted. “I’d love to keep you in there all day, but Mom just texted me and said she wants to use David when she gets home from work in a minute. Now, I could just hand her the real David, but I thought we’d try something else instead, to get you better acquainted with every foot you’re going to be serving this week.”

            Though I couldn’t externally react as an insole, I started to panic on the inside. Ashley and Kayla’s mother Grace was a wonderful woman, always kind and sweet to me in our every interaction, yet it was also through her that I discovered the family’s arrangement with their shared slave in the first place. After walking into the room unannounced, I’d found my future mother-in-law with the shrunken man clamped between her bare feet while she curled up on the couch reading a book. She’d waved off my concern and curiosity, and continued tormenting David with her dirty soles while carrying on pleasant conversation with me. I had no doubt that Grace would’ve been gentle now if she knew who I was, but Kayla had promised my identity would be kept secret during the week-long dare; this would preserve my dignity in the eyes of Grace and Ashley, but also now meant that I would receive no special privileges for being her daughter’s fiancé.

            “Isn’t it nice that we don’t have to share just one foot-boy now?” Kayla enthused. She set my sopping insole-body down on the floor again and pointed the Transmogrifier at me. “Especially after you lose this bet and become ours for a decade, my family is going to double the worship we receive, between you and David. You’ll both be working around the clock, rubbing our soles and licking our toes and getting stepped on and turned into insoles and socks and whatever else we can think of. I can’t imagine a better way for you to become part of the family. Not even marrying my sis.”

            Another flash brought me back to corporeal human form. I seized up, still soaked through with oily sole-sweat and reeking so heavily of Kayla’s own miasma that I might as well have been her foot itself. I could move and breathe independently again, but judging by the ever-larger visage of Kayla triumphantly posed above, I was now even smaller than after my initial shrinkage, perhaps down by another couple inches.