Dinner for One (Chapter 8)

But of course, he wasn’t fast enough. Cody ran as though pursued by an avalanche – which wasn’t too far off from the truth, because once he’d landed under here courtesy of Bri’s toe-spreading, he was only ever a split-second and a randomized heel-drop on Ashley’s part away from being placed back in the same predicament. Not even an Olympic sprinter could’ve gotten away in time. Yelping in protest, more against the universe itself than his unaware girlfriend, Cody went down hard under that cascading sole heft just a short distance from the backend of her foot.

The wind was knocked from his lungs, the world went dark, and his unbroken body was helplessly splatted against her skin under a contracting muscle-shifting plain of marshmallowy dirt-sprinkled sole. Though Cody squirmed to resist the immovable ceiling stacked atop him, hoping against hope that he could loosen himself enough to outmatch the suction of her foot and be left behind when she started walking again, he knew better than to wish for such things by this point. At this unbelievably small stature, lacking any notable strength or weight or agency, his choices might as well not have been his own: his total insignificance meant he was subject at all times to the dominating whims of humongous feminine feet whose owners had no clue about his strife beneath them.

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            Truly starting to believe now that there must’ve been some kind of curse on him, Cody more-or-less caught his breath for what felt like the first time in more than a week, as he gulped apprehensively at the steep precipices making of the boundary of the massive living room ottoman where he was now trapped. Could he really not catch a damn break? He’d spent seven life-draining days in Bri’s dance shoe, directly experiencing the smashing toe-tapping torment of her sweat-drenched practices as bookends to this desertion, and then capped off that barely-survivable wringer by not only failing to disembark from the giantess’s barefoot strides in time to search for the transmogrifier watch, but found himself helplessly passed along – apparently without any of the family’s knowledge – from Bri’s gargantuan sole to Ashley’s. Following yet-more oblivious trampling beneath his girlfriend for the remainder of the evening, he at last came exhaustively unpeeled from her verticalized size-6 foot once it was propped like a living wrinkle-walled high-rise that felt like it rivaled the Burj Khalifa for scope.

Now, after a lot of chatter and laughter between the four giantesses that failed to acknowledge Cody’s presence, all of them retired to bed, leaving him in the dark to contemplate a painful jump back toward the floor, followed by a fatiguing many-mile trek back to that distant patch of floor, where the device that could restore his size might-or-might-not still be there. Though even a leap from here to the ground shouldn’t have killed him, considering the number of times he’d fallen almost that distance while being walked upon countless times under Bri and Ashley, Cody was so depleted now – dizzied, battered, and starving for that same repulsive diet of pulpy vinegar-squelched toejam – he couldn’t be absolutely sure that a plummet to the ground wouldn’t just conk him out cold, especially when there was still such a long journey between him and salvation. He’d thought things were hopeless enough while stuck in that dance shoe for all those blurred-together days. But even now, out in the open and not technically imprisoned by leathery foot-redolent walls, Cody felt further away from escaping this unseen ultra-puny ground-bound hell than ever. At least it couldn’t get worse, though.

“Boy, you sure are having a week down there, aren’t ya, runt?” Kayla’s voiced echoed through the room.

Cody had gotten so used to being undiscovered by the monumental members of the household, even when he was right under their noses – or rather right under their feet – that he’d essentially learned to tune out their voices, knowing those booming giggle-filled articulations were as specifically intended for himself as a random faraway thunderstorm was. This time, however, having believed he was alone for the night, the micro-shrinker not only took notice of these words, but was chilled to the bone when he saw Kayla emerge from the shadowy doorway, seemingly while looking directly at him with an amused smile on her face. Being recognized as a living existing thing once again after all this time spent in delirious filth-thirsty anonymity while glued to pounding soles and unknowingly jailed inside shoes was a startling experience, as if he’d suddenly been robbed of invisibility, or been pulled into a parallel dimension altogether. Kayla only broke her gaze on Cody’s mite-speck form to consult the phone in her hand, while marching steadily forth with thudding strides that tremored the ottoman landmass beneath him.

“Yeah, yeah, I know where you are. Just get over it already,” Kayla dismissively remarked. She took a seat on the couch where Ashley had reclined for most of the evening, and stared with what felt like godly omniscience at the exact spot where Cody was humbly marooned and pitifully reviewing his bleak future. He almost had to wonder if this was a hallucination, unlikely as it should’ve been for her to find him so instantly in the dark, maybe brought about by his body’s renewed gnawing for another grungy lint-juicy smorgasbord of undersole scraps. Cody was just imagining things; that had to be it.

“I’ve actually known where you are the whole time,” Kayla continued, making it tougher and tougher to buy that this was only a mirage. Though she was gloating, she seemed to purposefully keep her voice level and casual, as if to better undermine Cody’s suffering for the past week. Still, her wrathfully smug grin betrayed how much she was loving the effect this revelation must’ve had upon her now-speechless audience. “Not by myself, obviously. I mean, you ARE so crazy-ridiculous itsy-bitsy right now, you pretty much blend right in with all the dirt and dust that gets stuck on our feet, and nobody even notices you. Literally. It’s just a cool little feature that comes with the tracker that I stuck on you right before I let you grow back to normal last time. You know, after that bet you lost, and you had to live down at my feet for a while? Yeah, I know you didn’t forget that. Anyway, I gotta say, seeing everywhere you’ve been going this week… and all the hilarious places you’ve gotten stuck… in real time on my phone has been way more entertaining than anything else I could’ve been watching. Like, forget streaming. This is top-tier content. God, what an insane messed-up accident that you still need to eat and drink all the slimy sweaty crud from between our toes, just to stay alive, even if I let you go back to normal. What a big OOOPS by me that definitely wasn’t on purpose, right? Cuz that’d be sooooo mean of me. But, hey, I guess you should be thanking me for that little whoopsie-daisy after all. Think about it. Because after you got stuck in Bri’s shoe for all those days in a row – which, seriously, I could not stop laughing about – you would one hundred percent be DEAD right now, if you still needed actual food to keep going, instead of whatever stinky grody toejammy nastiness you could scrounge up in there! Anyway, I can’t hear your voice to know if you’re actually thanking me right now, since it’d be like trying to listen to a mosquito buzzing except even more annoying, but… I’ll just go ahead and assume you’re saying it. Probably real pretty and sweet-like, too.”

Cody froze up, staring back at the astronomic Kayla in shattered shock. It felt like he’d gone numb, frigidly cold from disbelieving horror and blazingly hot from impotent rage all at once, leaving him with a more-staggering sense of discombobulation than even the heaviest naked-arched strides he’d lived through while getting pancaked inside Bri’s anarchic perspiration-swirling shoe mid-dance. He thought he’d already achieved the worst depths of subhuman powerlessness while lost on the floor beneath the energetic island-soles of unaware demigoddesses, trampling all over him without a care. But it turned out it was possible to feel even lower: in this precise moment, with Kayla lording literal-weeks of secretive domination over him, while the supremely-diminutive Cody had nothing he could do in response but cower, shiver from despicable foot-hunger, and bitterly squeak all his bottled emotions.