Fantasy Foot League (Chapter 7)

Cody had a feeling it would come to this from the second she made him hold her shoes, but foreknowledge still brought him no comfort as Kayla gleefully took aim and squeezed the trigger. In uncomfortable consciousness-crumpling instantly, both sandals smacked to the floor, with Cody’s body nowhere to be seen, while the right-side insole – though it appeared largely the same as before in its half-sunken saltwater-stained constitution – was now suffused with the feeling of her weekend slave’s human-translated senses. The only visible change was found in the broad dark-polished crater which served as the depressed cushioning for the ball of Kayla’s foot, where her hybridized victim’s grimly disconcerted face swelled meekly out of the weathered material like a blister. Even while holding the tattered summer footwear from a safe distance, he’d caught a familiar whiff of the uncaring athlete’s exertive leather-soured arch odor, and now that stink was predictably multiplied by tenfold like muggy fumes rising from waist-deep marshland all around his wedged face.

And of course because Cody’s body, excluding this sliver of his shrunken head, actually was her insole now rather than just occupying it, he tangibly itched with the notable sensation of a thousand prior usages’ worth of sweat, toe-pocket lint, and earthy grit all hammered into the fibers of his synthetic matted-down shoe anatomy. He also achingly perceived the rigidly-stamped shapes of her heel, toepads, and especially the ball of her foot surrounding his head like a soggy lakebed, knowing he felt strangely violated by those damp permanently-tattooed underfoot marks in a way that he couldn’t even wrap his mind around. And in addition to his crippling lack of autonomy, no longer having limbs to help brace him for impact, he had to look all the way up Kayla’s again-towering physique from his vantage barely an inch off the ground, while the giantess leered at him with her hands on her hips and cruel smugness behind her gaze. Any second now, he knew, she’d slide her foot over him, but probably take her sweet time to actually finish the job by first using her toes to play pat-a-cake with his defenseless face and forcing him to huff the clammy sweat-unsweetened atmosphere off the hovering façade of her meaty undersole, before finally clapping it down upon him with all her weight for tramping duty.

“You know, on second thought… maybe I won’t wear these,” Kayla contemplatively drawled while stroking her chin, as if only coming to this decision right now. But Cody had an ominous feeling she was up to something and just playing this out to mislead him. “It seemed like a good idea at the time, to have you under my foot in those for two days straight. But now that I’m actually looking at them, and looking at your dumb pathetic crazy-embarrassed little face sticking out of the middle down there, I’m thinking maybe I could do better. A lot better. These shoes just aren’t the vibe I want for this weekend, you know what I mean? Plus, if I have to give someone a fit check, having your shrunken lame-ass head growing off that sweaty spot is just going to bring down the WHOLE look by a few points, at least. Even if you’d be nice and hidden under my foot all the time. And we can’t have you cramping my style like that, right?”

Knowing she expected an answer, Cody muttered: “Right.”

            “Exactly! Yeah, the more I’m talking this through, the more I think you and those shoes are going back in the closet for the weekend. Sorry if that hurts your feelings… okay, not real sorry, obviously, but still just a little bit sorry. Because I know you must spend every single Monday to Friday just THINKING about your weekends with me now, trying to get yourself amped for this. Which makes this kind of a waste for you. But, that’s just the way it goes sometimes,” Kayla said. Even though her words were easygoing, like she was carrying on a normal conversation with a normal non-shoed human being, the golden-tanned giantess’s pure schadenfreude meanness was beginning to creep through her theatrical sarcasm, as she casually flexed her imposing physique and refused to repress a Cheshire smirk. “So, that’s that. You don’t MIND if I don’t wear you this weekend, do ya, slave?”

            Cody knew the only correct answer was sullen agreement, like usual, but he was surprised to find out how much anger he had to conceal. He thought he was more-or-less getting used to his regular enslavement to Kayla and her feet, able to endure her bullying and hold his tongue (unless of course she’d commanded him to lick her soles clean). It had never occurred to him, until now, to think of how weirdly maddeningly selfishly obscene it was for her to make him come all the way here, transform him into her shoe, and then… do nothing with him. Not that he wanted to be used as an insole, of course. Being repeatedly smashed underfoot every other breath by his least-favorite person in the world was a recipe for absolute torture. And yet the idea of the dehumanized passively-stenchy monotony which awaited him in her closet for the entire weekend now – when Kayla could’ve so easily just let him have the time off, if only she didn’t derive such pleasure from his powerless misery at her whim – was its own unique brand of suffering. All she had to do was nothing, and Cody’s life these two days would’ve improved by unimaginable measure, yet she just couldn’t resist messing with him in the most apathetic way.

Was this really that entertaining for her? To basically steal two days of his life away from him, leaving him to stagnate in the sweaty solitary confinement of her unused sandal? Was Kayla really so cold-bloodedly heartless, that in lieu of devising another method for abusing him in-person below the beefy authoritative WHUMP of her insole-flattening barefoot strides, she just couldn’t go through a single weekend without knowing that, somewhere nearby, Cody was paying dearly for her indulgence?

            Yes. Of course she was.

            “No,” Cody replied finally in answer to Kayla’s question. Even though he wanted to impotently scream at her from his lowly paralyzed spot as her sandal flooring, he knew it wouldn’t do any good, nor would it ever for the next year of unearned penance. “I… don’t mind.”

            “That’s what I thought,” she declared, showing a clearer self-aggrandizing flash of her true arrogance, and gave her insole-entombed captive a pouty-lipped smile, as if daring him to challenge her totalitarian rule over his life. Kayla’s voice dipped suddenly to a quicksilver murmur, but every word somehow hurt Cody’s ears still and made him want to rage at her all the more. “Because you do whatever I say, and you go wherever I say. Anything you have, I can take away if I want to. Including your weekend, and your body, and all the ways you ever pretended that you were your own person. You might get to walk around at normal size the rest of the week, but don’t confuse it: you belong to me, every SINGLE day, and you belong under my foot. If I want you there. But sometimes I’ll just throw you aside, too, just because I can. And all you get to do is take it. God, it’s too bad you’re not better at fantasy football, huh? Think of how different your life would be now.”

            Indeed, Cody had been unable to do much of anything except painfully contemplate that exact pointless wonder for weeks now.

            “Did I hear you say you’re not going to wear him this weekend?” Diane’s voice chimed in abruptly from outside Cody’s field of vision. Coming into view and looming beside her step-daughter, the blonde halfheartedly stifled a lyrical laugh as she looked down at him. “Oh, you know I don’t mean to make fun of you, Cody. It’s just… you do look so ridiculous like this. I just can’t help it. Can you blame me? Anyway, Kayla, if you’re not going to use him, I’d be glad to take him off your hands for a couple days. I’m sure I could find plenty of uses for him.”

            “Oh, no way!” Kayla retorted with a smile. “I might not use him this time, but he’s still mine. Get your own slave, if you really want one. It’s super-easy to get a bunch of free weekends out of them, believe me.”

            For several hours afterward, Cody’s paralytic sandal-mutant body laid forgotten in the closet after being carelessly flung inside, just as Kayla vowed. He knew that his vendetta-building frustration at his weekend owner’s choice to leave him stewing in here unused for two days straight, more symbolic of her control over his life rather than a brutal show of the usual underfoot torment, was exactly what she wanted. The angrier he became, the more Kayla “won.” Still, no matter how hard he tried to calm himself and maybe at least sleep away some of the time-killing solitary confinement that yet awaited him for the next two days, Cody could only pitifully fume using the single piece of human anatomy she’d allowed him to keep, with his face still protruded from the leather insole’s sweat-grayed excavation pit formed by the ball of her foot. Powerless, regretful, and bored out of his skull, he resigned himself to the lonely waste of a weekend he was about to experience in motionless discarded drudgery, and did his best to see the minor silver lining here: at least he wasn’t about to get his shrunken face whack-a-moled thousands of times in a row by a titanic superior’s punishing sole brawn.

            Right around the time Cody arrived at that depressing bit of optimism some six hours after he was thrown aside, the door swung open again and there stood Diane, palming the transmogrifier.