Deviant Downsizing (Chapter 2)

Easing back against the couch cushions, Lori shut her eyes and let out another fatigued sigh, while her hair simultaneously flashed from blue to a hotter shade of pure-white – an indicator that she was managing her biological pyrotechnics now, probably stifling an involuntary flame-up. As a forty-year-old deviant, she had expert enough control over these impulses to keep them completely internal, except for that shift in her follicle color and a modest-but-noticeable uptick in her body’s output heat. Noticing this tic, Mason couldn’t help but envy his mother’s virtuoso mastery over her power. He wanted so badly to believe her when she said that he’d get to that level eventually too, but it was difficult to convince himself when the world around him was so imposingly ginormous for the time being.

For better or for worse, Mason’s self-pitying consternation faded quickly into the back of his mind for the first time today once Lori really began to make herself at home again. His attention turned rapt, forgetting all his own troubles and zeroing exclusively upon his immense mother as she reached toward the floor to hook her thumbs into the backs of her size-14 olive-green work flats and pry them loose for doffing. As Mason had subconsciously known already for many years, and now understood in much more visceral terms since his shrinkage, Lori had a highly-specific post-teaching ritual she always followed to a T. Upon coming home, without fail, she dropped everything in the front hall, then before washing up or carrying out a single chore, she deservingly indulged in a much-needed lounge right here in the exact middle of the sofa. After settling in for a few minutes, like she’d just done, she next peeled her poor aching feet free from those boat-size slip-ons they’d been hotly imprisoned within for the duration of the school day, kicked them away, and then inevitably-

“What a day that was,” Lori wearily huffed, as she finally did precisely what Mason had been furtively waiting for. Reclining deeper and spreading her arms over the back of the cushions, the giantess hoisted both her now-nude feet up above the coffee table surface and promptly thumped them down, there just a pebble’s throw away from her son’s dollhouse refuge.

At once, with those liberated peds propped upright on her heels for maximum relaxation, Lori’s gigantic soles became meaty crease-squiggled monoliths unto themselves, from Mason’s insignificant perspective. Of course, much like his mother’s staggering full-body stature, he was latently aware prior to his accidental miniaturization that she had some pretty darn big feet. Even with as little thought as he’d previously paid them, it would’ve been tricky for him to stay completely ignorant while those thick-arched dexterous-toed size-14 twins were pounding authoritatively from room to room. But now, small as he was and serendipitously using this same table for his main shrunken residence, Mason had no choice but to daily take in the full overwhelming splendor of his mother’s work-abused feet, the both of them bearing overhead like a duo of sweaty insole-filthy idols.

Even having been exposed to this oddly-intimate view every day since his downsizing, the boy was nonetheless somehow startled anew each time by the sheer vulgarity of Lori’s dirty overheated moisture-smeared arches. Granted, considering the giantess spent all day at that poorly air-conditioned school, standing in front of a whiteboard or hustling across the building, it was perfectly understandable that she would return home every day with her feet a tad worn-down: that undersole geometry warmly ruddied pink from impactful pressure, her toes imprinted with gritty flat-scraped dreck like leathery mud, slathered over every pore down to the heels in an ever-refreshing glaze of perspiration, and uniformly fuming with a pungent salt-cured odor that had been stagnantly preserved in those shoes right until this very moment. Lori was only human after all, or rather only deviant, and Mason knew it would’ve been downright unfair of him to hold such temporary and completely-ordinary imperfections against her. Especially when she was only working this hard to ensure he had a roof over his head.

But then again, much like the woman herself, nothing about his mother’s feet could be called “ordinary.” They belonged in a league of their own in terms of super-size, intimidation factor, and last but not certainly not least, the obscene degree of grungy steaming saltwater-soaked degradation they always achieved by day’s end. There was no way around it: Lori’s peds were absolute horror shows of filth. And all of this was because of her deviant gift. Mason had always known intellectually – and now more practically, as he watched the results literally drip down the wrinkly façades of her sole flesh – that his mother’s regular maintenance of her pyro-charged body’s power surges involved suppressing outbursts that might manifest as roaring blazes if left untamed, and instead minimized them down inside herself, until that heat exuded out through certain parts of her body in dramatically-lesser fractions.

Yet over the course of a day, even those skillfully-smothered flare-ups added up, meaning that distinct areas of Lori’s body (primarily her huge feet, as it turned out) were made to contain an unprecedented sun-breathed personal climate. Being a pyrokinetic prodigy, these intense temperature shifts never harmed or even bothered her too greatly. Still, for that reason, Mason’s mother was constantly walking around as though she’d just spent the whole day with her soles cooking inside an oxygen-choked mist-sizzling sauna, and even more so while she was expending all that physical and mental energy at work. And with that exceptional heat came also the suitably-extreme side-effects of generous skin-saturating sweat, a constant noxious leather-soured funk, and an inexplicable dirt magnetism that seemed to collect all manner of toejammy soil-flecked detritus that so much as touched upon the hot pliable terrain of Lori’s foot flesh.

Being only an inch tall, with the proportional sensitivity that came along with such diminutive bodily features, Mason couldn’t escape this raw reality, no matter how much he loved his parent and appreciated everything she did to protect him: her colossal size-14s, particularly right after work, were far and away the most stomach-churning sources of hyper-vivid disgust he’d ever encountered in his young life. The palpable heat wafting away from her broad soles, even now, made him feel like he was standing before the wide-open maw of a giant woodfire oven, with the sweltering atmosphere so biting that it actually shortened each breath he drew. The sight of every plastered lint-glob or overlapping trickle of acrid sweat adorning her pruny reddish-pearl arch, viewed from so close, made Mason’s gut twist with revulsion. And naturally that ensuing shoe-burnt aroma radiated off her feet just as effusively as the heat itself, curdling in the boy’s nostrils with perverted notes of vinegary insole lining, damp earth, and spoiled dairy. Even standing six inches away on the doorstep of his runty abode, halfheartedly holding his breath, Mason’s lungs were still piped full of that flat-freed ripeness as though he was snorting the squalid essence straight from Lori’s rosy skin through a gas mask and hose.

Hardly three minutes since the giantess had kicked off her shoes and let her barking dogs out to rest atop the table, seemingly oblivious to her son’s queasy exposure while in such proximity, he started weathering some severe results, just from existing so near to those monstrous feet. His throat and belly felt like they were tied in knots from the festering stink alone; his own body temperature rose by bounds to more closely match hers, as though he’d suddenly incurred a fever; he even began to develop a frosting of perspiration himself, though Mason couldn’t be sure if he was just sweating on his own from the heat, or if that was in fact sticky condensation poured out from Lori’s soles, now gelling on her one-inch son’s fragile form. And on top of those tangible physiological reactions, the level of green-faced repugnance he felt just from beholding these feet was a sickness unto itself, encouraging him to sprint as far away as possible so he could wheeze and gag in peace.