Dinner for One (Chapter 11)

For a while, Cody hoped that her suspicious behavior of circuitously tramping to and fro around the living room while snickering under her breath would draw the others’ attention and force her to leave him alone for now. But Kayla only had to insist she’d just received a funny text from someone whenever her stepmother or sisters curiously questioned what was so comical. Knowing she was just toying with him now, but also too afraid of her vengeance if he didn’t at least “try,” the micro-shrinker tumultuously kept up his near-hopeless run across what may as well have been a minefield. In fact, Cody might’ve had a better chance of braving a literal minefield, because in this scenario, he instead had a sky-reaching giantess thwomping leadenly across his path over and over, ensuring no square millimeter of carpet was safe from her influence, with treacherously spacious footprints that would’ve put the blast radius of any explosive to shame.

“Uh, are you trying to step on something over there, Kayla?” Ashley innocently asked, at long last.

“Nah, I just thought I saw a bug,” Kayla calmly remarked.

At the same time, her attention was fixated below, as she kept her left foot in ominous suspension barely a quarter-inch off the ground, with her biggest digit fully flexed and in prime position to crunch an insectoid invader against the plump sweat-crystallized spiral of her toeprint’s underbelly. This wasn’t strictly a lie on her part, though, since there was indeed no actual bug currently subjugated beneath her toe, but instead Cody himself – overshadowed, trembling, and pitifully aware that Kayla only had to let the globe of her big toe descend that much further to sticker him back against her foot. No matter where he went, she could catch up, and do this to him all over again. That was the message she wanted driven into his head as though she’d stomped it in there herself.

“But it’s not a bug,” Kayla clarified to Ashley, and snarled in disdain. “It’s… just nothing.”

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            In the distance, Cody saw the docked vessels of the entire family’s vacant shoes, and allowed himself a determined smile, even though there was still more than a mile to journey down the hall. This was the closest he’d come yet to reaching his destination in the three harrowing days since Kayla revealed her cheerfully cold-blooded manipulations, which had rendered him a thirsting strength-sapped desert wanderer, unseen at his invisibly-micro stature by anyone in the house who might’ve actually wanted to help him. Cody had fought hard in that time, barely sleeping and only eating enough loose foot-scuzz granules to keep from collapsing in hunger, on a constant death-march toward the province of floor where he hoped to find the transmogrifier watch. At least six times now, he’d come within one room of possible regrowth – or rather, Kayla had let him reach that point – only for the spiteful golden-tan giantess to stalk through, using the tracker to follow him, and thrown him wildly off-course.

Sometimes she was content just to step on him right away, imprinting him hard enough to stick against the musky grooves of her ample sole, and then scrape him back off on a carpet a “short” distance away that, for Cody, added the equivalent of several miles’ walk to his trek. Other times, however, she wasn’t satisfied just painfully inconveniencing him this way, but first bullied him with another molasses-slow rampage that halted his progress, left his ears ringing, and his body repeatedly pinging airborne from the tectonic rumble of her bare footfalls. And then, to cap off this nonchalant persecution, Kayla would scrunch him into the pliant underside grip of her burly perspiration-marinated toes and leave him affixed there for several hazy skull-concussing hours of roundabout trampling, before Cody was at last permitted to begin his life-or-death expedition again from scratch in some random far corner of the house, wherever she flicked him loose with another whispered insult.

This time, though, Kayla’s pompous hubris had gotten the best of her. Even while aware that Cody was still loose and doggedly hiking at all times toward the spot he’d lost the watch, she was confident enough in her eventual victory to leave for an afternoon workout. Now, the micro-shrinker was closer than ever, and he wasn’t going to spoil this chance. Brimming with resolve, Cody achieved a runner’s high, sprinting tirelessly and without pain toward the far-off rows of jumbled cliff-height women’s shoes, yet he steadily sensed them getting closer. This was it. He only needed to find the device, slap it back on his wrist, and reverse himself at long last back to normal, so he could finally deliver Kayla all the payback she’d earned. His focus was so narrowed upon his goal, scanning the hardwood for the visual distinction of a size-changing contraption lost among the treaded-in clumps of soil and lint, that Cody didn’t hear the car pulling up outside. But he definitely noticed when the front door thrust open dead-ahead, and a certain astronomic well-toned brunette stamped across the threshold with a smile on her workout-flushed face as she squinted directly at his precise location on the floor.

“Oh, look. You’re still trying to find your favorite toy before I do, just so you can grow back up and not be stuck down there for the rest of your sad little life. Hey, that’s exactly what you were doing when I left! Seems a little boring, if you ask me. What, don’t you have other hobbies, squirt?” Kayla taunted at full volume, as there wasn’t anyone else around to hear her addressing a lowly speck-human below.

She crossed each sneaker-clad foot in turn across her gym-pumped thighs and unlaced them, then made a point of dropping both emptied vessels from up high, so they landed among the family’s other shoes with a pair of bracing CLOMPs that still affected Cody, even from far enough away that there was no possible danger of falling beneath the treads.

“I mean, sure, I guess there’s not a ton you can do for fun while you’re that bananas-freaking tiny, but maybe you just need to get creative,” Kayla continued. “You know, like collecting all the sweaty juicy toe-crud you can pick off our feet whenever we stomp you around, and then, I don’t know, making fancy art sculptures out of it? Plus, the best art is the kind you can eat, if you ask me. Or in your case, have to eat, even though it probably makes you wanna hurl your guts out every time you take a bite, knowing you just have to drink the sweat and eat the dirt off our feet, because I made you like that. And like how I’m also going to MAKE you be a permanent piece of living dust, once I get that thing first and crumple it apart, and then you have literally nothing left to do as long as you live except suck the nastiness off our soles, get the life smushed out of you every time you get in our way again, and… probably cry your dumb little eyeballs out. That sounds about right. Anyhow, Cody, obviously I let you get this far, just because it was starting to turn into a real snooze, giving you so many chances, and you still kept making it so easy for me to stop you. And, honestly, I wasn’t TOTALLY sure this was the spot where you lost the watch, which kinda made it hard for me to look for it before, but I figured there was a good chance, since this was where you were stuck in Bri’s shoe for a whole week. So, thanks for telling me for sure! Because you seem just a little too excited to keep coming toward this same spot for no reason. Well, unless the reason is so you can climb inside our shoes and eat all that smelly stuff off the walls, but we both know you wouldn’t be able to get out again if that happened, and even you’re not dumb enough to get yourself stuck there for another week. So, I guess this is kind of the end of the game, isn’t it? One of us is gonna get the transmogrifier first, and you’re either gonna get it and grow back to being a person again, or I’m gonna get it and make sure the only thing you see for the rest of your life is the bottom of somebody’s foot. Oooh, I wonder who it’s gonna be, don’t you? The suspense is just killing me! And it’s probably killing you, too, because if you fail at this, just like you fail at everything else? You’re basically not going to exist anymore, which means you might as well be dead to everyone you’ve ever known, except the one person you hate the most in the whole world! Kinda funny, right? Well, I think it is, anyway.”