Dinner for One (Chapter 2)

The briny sponge-textured horridness seemed to curdle in his throat as it went down, but Cody had come too far and risked too much to let his gag reflex stop him. Once swallowed, he could tell this hateful sustenance was working, yet because he’d gone so long without offering his body anything to use for real food thanks to Kayla’s cruel tinkering, this one bite in fact just re-energized his hunger. His insides howled and Cody could, disturbingly, feel himself salivating for more, no matter how sickening the actual recipe was. Knowing his odds of getting out safely would be best if he didn’t linger here, the one-incher got to work, suffering as quickly as possible. Every black dripping crumb of toejam he spotted on her prodigious nude foot was reached for and gnawed through like a greedy hamster, though Cody was still anxiously deliberate enough never to actually touch the giantess’s flesh when choosing his next reeking entrée, except with only the gentlest of incidental strokes when needed, as some of the lint blobs were adhered to her body like tar. Occasionally there’d be a seismic side-to-side shift in her foot, or a reformation in those creamy wrinkles making up the tapestry of her sole, but aside from these absentminded fidgets, her heel thankfully never crashed back to the same plain. Cody tiptoed cautiously upon the internal ground of the shoe, too, not wanting to even slightly unsettle its stillness, as Diane might’ve been able to notice a twitch in that musty threading while her toes were pressed so flush against the Tom’s insole just beyond.

Over fifteen heart-stopping minutes, with each second expecting to be nonchalantly squashed dead by his unaware hostess during a routine sole repositioning inside her shoe, Cody had managed to wolf down enough gnarly foot-crud to at least keep his gut from outright roaring. A bit more of his stamina had returned too, but he still wasn’t fully satisfied yet, after having been deprived of these ugly delicacies for so long. He realized, after munching through the seventh or so apple of pungent dribbly toe-crevice pulp that, even as his hunger was abating slightly, his thirst was still far from quenched. Ordinary water, of course, would be as ineffective as drinking air; it had to be fluid leeched directly from one of the giantesses’ sweat-coursing feet, as Kayla had rather smugly informed him during their week together. Though there was at least one tangy droplet contained in each toejam bite he’d taken, that still wasn’t enough.

Cody, holding another slippery portion of palpable filth freshly selected from the garden of Diane’s ruddy arch dimples overhead, realized what he had to do now to get enough liquid, even while the thought of such a luck-tempting option made his pulse double in pace. Drinking from the puddles formed in the uneven footprint-tattooed terrain of the insole would help slightly, but be far less efficient in sating him, as it had surely been sitting there below her foot like mildewy rainwater for quite a while now. At this stage, he’d have to get his beverage directly from Diane. First sucking the current toejam ball free of all its vile brew, and nearly making his throat choke closed in self-defense, Cody chose not to eat these gratuitous dregs of lint and skin-dust left behind, but instead raised the chunk like a shrunken wrung-out washcloth back up toward the slanted ceiling of the astronomic woman’s raw sweat-unctuous sole brawn. Then he scrubbed the dirty fuzz-clump along a scrunched flesh pleat on Diane’s arch as though helpfully polishing it clean, though in reality, he was just collecting his next necessary fix.

With every back-and-forth pass that was required to knead her skin, Cody absolutely expected the unwitting giantess to think she had an ant in her shoe, and promptly stomp him flat. Yet the background babble of rowdy conversation between the delighted foursome above continued on unabated, with only the occasional half-concerned question from one of them thrown out to ask where Cody had gone, but for the time being, it seemed his absence wasn’t so troubling that any of them (most dangerously, Diane) actually decided to go searching for him. While it was just a little too dark to look up and see for sure that the reusable toejam swab was refilled with juices, Cody could feel the gunky hominy bloating in his hand like a water balloon, and knew when he could feel the fat trickles of excess perspiration from Diane’s foot snaking down his raised arm that it was time to drink.

He brought it down to his face next, quivering with abhorrence and dread, then sharply imbibed from the marshy dollop of re-glutted toejam. The acidic concentration of sweat sopped back in now hit his throat like a shot of decayed lime juice and acetone, and tasted of the purified essence from disintegrating shoe fibers and generously oily between-toe pores, but still Cody chugged through it, sinking to his knees all the while, until the drinkable liquid was fully extinguished. Only then, wishing very badly to vomit but knowing he couldn’t afford such an outburst that might alert Diane, the one-inch gourmet opened his panged jaws and shoved the whole greasy wad of toejam in too, masticating and gulping horrendously through this cottony grime-slogged sediment culled from the heedless giantess’s sweltering labors outside.

Though he was pretty sure the humiliation would’ve killed him, and she just as easily could’ve created a new bet for him to lose, Cody was beginning to wonder just a little bit whether he wouldn’t have been better off instead falling to his knees in front of Kayla and begging her like an uncaring god to correct his dietary restrictions.

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            A two-inch-tall Cody crept forward like a starved rat under the shadow of Bri’s bedroom swivel chair, stomach growling and throat parched as he caught the first mealy insole-spiced whiff of the eighteen-year-old’s colossal schoolday-fresh size-6s resting bare on the carpet just ahead. He could hardly believe he was back in these same dire straits, after the incredible risk he’d been placed in at that last family dinner while feasting on filth from Diane’s earth-sodden soles, at which time he vowed to be better prepared for as long as this accidental transmogrifier-induced culinary curse afflicted him. For weeks, he’d gotten along just fine by licking the semi-liquid saline jam concoctions from Ashley’s socks and shoes after every workout and night out on the town, or at least as “fine” as possible considering he needed these substances to survive, yet found them no more appetizing in actual flavor than if he’d decided to make his diet purely of feminine sole grime on a random whim. Shame had caused him to keep this disturbing secret too long, however, and there was no way to tell his happy-go-lucky girlfriend that when she had to leave town for a week for work, she was essentially putting him on a hunger strike. He’d held out as long as he could alone in the house, scraping every last aged morsel of forgotten lint or caked-in dry sweat from all her leftover footwear, but this supply didn’t last long.

            And so here he was, reduced again to stealthily harvesting whatever crusted dirt and sneaker slime he could find, this time off his girlfriend’s now-humongous little sister, in order to stay alive. It wasn’t pretty, but Cody had even less choice this time than before. Regrettably, his gag reflex engaged slightly once he inhaled the sweltering distinctness of Bri’s after-class foot odor – by no means as heinously raunchy as some of the sole-pounding gym stenches Ashley or Kayla could produce, but still with a vinyl and vinegar dash to its moist bittersweetness, with greater emphasis on the bitter part. Yet even as basic logic and his own throat told him not to do this, his GI system was roaring after an entire day without usable sustenance. Checking his wrist-mounted version of the transformative device, and ensuring it was ready to change him again at the tap of a button, Cody cautiously snuck between the makeshift valley of the young blonde’s insteps.

            Unfortunately, until the giantess decided to idly arch her currently-flat heels up and reveal the crease-happy underbelly flesh of either peachy foot, where the ripest selection of disgusting fuel was sure to be found, the two-incher had no option but her toes. All ten digits busily tapped on the rug to a purposeful beat, probably following the rhythm of the music that could be heard blaring from her earbuds even all the way down here, which wasn’t ideal, but at least Cody wouldn’t have to worry about her noticing his touch as easily. Sure enough, standing close enough to her in-motion digits that he could inspect their whole wiggly surface area, from the pearl-white polish on her pedicured nails to the dewy rose-hued gridline prints marking the undersides, Cody could already see several viable meals flakily gummed into the spaces between toes. Though there weren’t any cotton-rich hunks of lighter lint, suggesting the girl had gone sockless to school in her sneakers, there were instead sludgier dabs of gray muck probably dredged up from her battered insoles after so many hours of heat, fabric warping, and sweat re-absorption.