Dinner for One (Chapter 9)

“Oh, yeah. Keep making that face. That really sad pathetic crybaby temper-tantrum face you’re making right now,” Kayla encouraged with a widening smirk, while holding up her phone to point at Cody and finger-pinching the screen. “This is going to be hysterical as my wallpaper. Hold really still while I snap this, though. You’re so freaking itty-bitty that it’s already hard enough getting a good look at you, even when I’ve got the camera all the way zoomed in. Ha! Okay, that’s perfect. I’d tell you to say cheese, but that’d kind of ruin the picture, showing what a miserable little bug… well, okay, to be fair, calling you a “bug” is probably giving you too much credit, since most bugs are bigger than you are now, and they don’t get stuck in smelly shoes so easily, either. Seriously, how could you not even get out of a shoe? Either way, I don’t even think there’s a good name for the kind of helpless dinky lil’ sweat-chugging toejam-sucking freak you are now. Maybe a germ. That’s all I can think of. You’re just a gross little disease blob that sticks to whatever you touch and feeds off the muck our feet leave behind for you, with no other point to you existing, except… hmm, nope, my bad. Can’t think of any point.”

Cody stumbled back and collapsed onto his back, too humiliated and furious and malnourished to stay standing under such psychological duress from Kayla. Of course all this was her fault. And, even more predictable, there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop her. He could try begging her to return both his stature and biology to normal again, so he’d no longer be trapped at the oblivious soles of the family, or be forced to stealth around on the hunt for the only sort of revolting grime-slaked underfoot grubbiness that could sate his mutated insides. But Cody had a sinking feeling that while Kayla had chosen to reveal her knowledge to him now, she wasn’t going to help him until exactly when, or even if, she wanted to, no matter how desperately he pleaded. The one thing he could think of now was the transmogrifier. He just had to get away from her and find it, return to size, and then expose Kayla’s cruel not-so-accidental negligence to the rest of the family, no matter how shameful the rest of that confession would turn out to be for him. That was the only way.

“Anyway, I thought about waiting even longer to tell you all this. Maybe seeing if you could make it a whole MONTH or even two, to the point where you’d probably be losing your dumb little pea-brain mind a little, from getting walked on and kicked around and smushed flat so often, and from gargling so much of our foot-dirt that it rots your insides. Because, honestly, I knew that the longer I waited to tell you all this, the funnier and more satisfying it was going to be for me. But, I just couldn’t resist seeing the look on your face any more. Can you blame me?” Kayla cheerfully shrugged. She leaned back on the sofa, then, rearing both her nude gallingly-immense size-9s up over the ottoman horizon. Her beefy golden-tan heels both contacted the stool’s edge with dual ear-splitting THWOOOOMs, somersaulting Cody from the wind alone, and suddenly he had no choice but to look up at her face between the daunting skyward towers of those athletic crease-pithy soles.

“Best of all, though, the fun doesn’t stop now, just because you know that I know you’re down there,” she carried on. “If I was you, and holy shit I am sooooo glad I’m not you, I would be trying a lot harder to find that watch you were stupid enough to lose. Since that’s the only way you’re ever going to make all this stop, and if I just so happen to get lucky and find it before you do? Well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise for you, but with something that tiny, who’s to say there won’t be another oopsy by me, where your toy gets broken, and then you’re basically stuck that small forever. Actually, scratch that, it’s not just basically. You ARE going to be stuck that small forever, with nobody ever knowing or caring what happened to you, just squishing and smothering and STOMPING you a billion times under our big feet, if you don’t find the thing before I do. Hey, don’t feel too down about this. I’m giving you a totally fair shot here. It’s a competition. A game. You like games, don’t you, Cody? Okay, fair, you tend to LOSE games when you play them against me, going off what happened last time, but maybe now will be different. You better hope so, for your sake. Only, just because I’m giving you a fair shot, doesn’t mean I’m gonna take it easy on you, like I have been so far. Since I know where you are at all times, there’s nothing stopping me from just… whoooooops…”

Letting her voice drift off into victorious chuckling, and daintily waving to Cody by way of a good night, Kayla let her right foot plunge abruptly flush with the ottoman. Even if her speck-statured victim had gotten up and sprinted for his life at the start of her diatribe, he wouldn’t have had a chance of getting away. As a result, Cody found himself once again plastered immobile to the bottom of a titanically vast sole, only now with said sole’s owner completely knowledgeable about where he was and his debilitating limits – right as she lowered both feet back to the ground, still with him firmly pressure-adhered, and marched off without another word.

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            Cody spent that long sleepless night painfully regretting the day he’d ever crossed paths with Kayla, while reluctantly restoring his waning strength by nauseously licking up whatever night-sweated scum he could find gummed onto her bare sole. Still stuck to the bottom of her meaty foot as though cling-filmed there, technically the micro-shrinker could’ve wrestled himself free, while the mastermind of his mostly-unseen hardships peacefully slumbered, and the naked sun-kissed monoliths of her peds were equally at rest beneath her bedsheets. Doing so seemed pointless to Cody, however, since she’d trodden upon him and then transported him so depressingly far away from that region of the house he needed to travel in search of the transmogrifier watch, that by the time he hypothetically sprung free from her tremendous brawny-lean arch and spent hours journeying back across the floor to the place he’d lost it, he’d just end up drained and near-deathly starved of energy all over again. And probably an even easier target for Kayla to impede in their “game,” come morning. So, defeated for now but with no other choice except to await a better chance, Cody kept himself conscious by tonguing up the sour pheromonal secretions that lazily glazed the sole of the person he hated most on Earth.

            “Wow, you didn’t even try to get away while I slept, huh?” Kayla laughed, upon waking and checking her phone for his location. “Well, you better try a lot harder than THAT, because if there’s not even a little bit of challenge to this game to make it fun for me, you can bet that once I’ve found the watch first and crushed it into a million pieces under my toe, I’m still going to keep the tracker going, so I’ll always know where you are in the house for the rest of your pathetic insignificant sweat-licking bug life. Just so I can make sure that not a single day ever goes by you don’t regret being so boooooring for me. So, word of advice? Don’t be boring, runt.”