Lilliana's Gift (Chapter 5)

Suddenly Haley found herself in a bleary dreamland approximation of her home. Not realizing she was still asleep, the girl happily hopped out of bed and selected a pair of mismatched sherbet-hued socks. She tugged the tight-fitting cotton tubes over her toes and along the slopes of her arches and heels, then snatched her old faithful leather boots out of the closet and rammed her feet within. Only as Haley stepped outside into the sticky mid-90s summer midday did she sense something amiss: a tingle, originating from somewhere between her toes, like the tickle of a dirt-clod or grass blade snared amidst her unwashed digits, only the shape was moving. Maybe an ant that made its way into her boot and had now become lodged in the broiling compacted embrace between socked toes? That even seemed too large a creature, though, and Haley was surprised that, despite the thing’s near-infinitesimal size, she could still perceive not only its form but its exact shape, almost a star, or a microbial human spread for a snow angel.

Then, informed by a source she couldn’t possibly name, yet still understanding the awful truth as severely as she ever had known anything in her life, Haley realized it was David down in her boot. Shrunken, barely-conscious, and glued irrevocably to the inside of her two most delicate toes, it was unquestionably her best friend, as though her foot had received a shot of omniscience in just enough supply to empathetically distinguish his breathing, his silhouette, the positions of his limbs, and even the crumbling of his psychological state due to what had to be, for a being so puny, an unforgiving wasteland of bulbous toe monuments made into purgatory by scorching warmth, atrociously-itchy griminess, muscular flesh-folds, and a greasy reek with potency to rival plagues.

“David?” Haley croaked at the ground, shock ripping through her like a stab wound. Immediately she grasped the leather lip of the boot and tried to rip her foot from its depths, to no avail. It was like the cowhide and sock mesh had all fused together into unbreakable armor, skin-tight, from the calf-down, sealing David inside his personal damnation circle of spicy stink and stewed sweat.

She did her best to keep her toes flared fully apart so her friend wasn’t clenched in the oily breathless duress of her pithy toe pudge, even while knowing that his only source of oxygen would be the brackish mist rising from her pores. Unfortunately, that separation allowed tufts of sock fabric to bend into the concave valley between her digits, as the colorful fibers were inexplicably weighed down already by enough moisture to make the cotton glue flush to her skin. She felt the tickle of a cloudy saltwater bead, a droplet the size of a swimming pool to David, forming from the threads and then plunking in an irritating trickle along the webbed curve of her spread toes, straight toward her puny friend. Instinctively she pinched them together to pop the bubble of sweat and save him, only to gasp and shriek at the realization that in doing so, she was also clapping her shrunken shoe-occupant against the meaty battering ram of her fourth toe.

Gripped by panic, grunting and ripping to no avail at her mysteriously rigid boot, Haley thought the situation could seem no direr, as she continued to sense David wriggling in pain and rightful disgust while she struggled to avoid choking him in a toe-flesh hug or drowning him in festering saline and noisome fog. Then, right on cue, her distress was worsened by an improbable yet resonant voice echoing telepathically in her head.

“H-Haley! Help me, please!” David begged, his voice clogged by tears. “I’m s-stuck in your shoe, between your… t-toes! I’m so s-small and afraid and if you d-don’t get me out of here fast, I’m… I’m g-going to suffocate, or just get crushed into n-nothing. W-Wait, STOP! PLEASE! D-DON’T SQUISH ME! GET M-ME OUT OF HERE!”

“DAVID!” Haley yelped aloud, and redoubled her efforts to yank the boot away, yet only tired herself out from the effort. Never before had she felt such tremendous guilt and pity, and what made it worse was that it seemed to be her fault. If only she hadn’t hurried to stuff her foot inside socks and boots, she could’ve reached him. “Don’t worry, I’ll get you out! Just hang on!”

Thinking fast, she rushed back inside the apartment, yanking drawers open to find tools she might use to rescue her friend. First trying a pair of scissors, then a nail file, and even a steak knife, she hacked and sawed at the leather, but the material wouldn’t bust a seam. In her frustration, she longed to scream and stomp around the room, kicking objects over, but of course knew this would only send David into a more violent atmosphere of pulsating skin and dribbling perspiration, enough that it just might extinguish him.

As she feverishly warred against the leather confines refusing to loosen from her foot and leg, the combination of summer climate, harried movement, and her terror over David’s safety caused Haley’s internal temperature to rapidly rise. As a result, she could feel a fresh mucky glaze beginning to coat her entire foot from heel to toe and in every micro-crevice between, the excreted liquid and accompanying funk of her sweat having nowhere to go thanks to her tight sock, which meant that much of the flow was either becoming mired as a succulent puddle in the base of her boot, or rolling down the lithe slope along the smooth top of her foot, straight toward the dough-soft gaps between her toes like river rapids leading into waterfalls.

Haley was used to this feeling after a long day spent wearing her boots, not minutes after putting them on. And while some filth was inevitable following hours cooping her peds in leather and cotton, usually leaving semi-saturated socks and a slick footprint stamped in grime across the insole, she’d never have expected it in this volume; this instead felt like she was wearing rain boots, the poured-in fluid of her foot sweat gushing up between her toes each time she moved a muscle now. Overwhelmed and defeated at her own powerlessness to get David out, Haley tried to sit still and cool off with a fan’s breeze, but it was like her shoe had begun independently simmering her foot and its microscopic inmate by its own volition, regardless of her actions now.

Trembling, she stared at the bough of her fashionable black footwear, knowing that through less than an inch of material, her best friend was suffering immeasurably, and there was nothing she could do. Unfortunately, her shivering at this notion only caused the gathered rivulets of sweat to coagulate in the dips astride the giant squishy totems of her toes, which meant that the tacked-on little man stuck halfway between was soon submerged in roiling sweat globules every few seconds like geyser eruptions.

As well, she understood that all this frantic locomotion, entrapped temperature, and juicy buildup was only enhancing the already-unbearable stench of her soiled foot for David. Though she gratefully didn’t have to smell it fully herself, Haley’s temporary ESP-like perception granted her just a tiny fraction of its power for the length of a heartbeat, which immediately made her hack and wheeze, her eyes watering from the vile flavor of her own foot-essence, as well as from mounting sorrow in recognizing the hopelessness of her friend’s situation. The aroma had become something truly inhuman in the heat, like a wretched coalition of wet loam, pickle brine, a forgotten dirty laundry hamper, ill-aged milky European cheese, and underneath it all, an omnipotently foul and nostril-rotting musk uniquely her foot’s. How could anyone hope to survive such an onslaught of mortal perfume, sizzling skin-heat, and malleable yet muscular toe terrain like hard-packed earth worming about while soaking up and then oozing yet another sweaty deluge in quantities thick enough to exterminate hundreds of beings David’s size, let alone just one?