Work From Home (Chapter 14)

Tamatha ended the call and set her phone aside, yet her other hand didn’t halt in its graceful, violent dance with the pencil. Carl, trapped between his giant wife’s fingers and foot, was kept going exclusively by the possibility of salvation from August tonight. He felt the pressure from the pencil eraser relenting at his back, but the great yellow pillar twirling in circles around him still. With each revolution, Tamatha gathered more of the noose-string around the pencil, until there was none left to dangle limp between the wood and Carl’s neck. His eyes watering again from lack of air, the shrunken victim flailed, then wrenched his wrist under the tight loop of the collar, only just managing to keep himself from choking out while Tamatha gave the pencil a tug, ripping out the line from the seam and at once suspending her tiny husband off the utensil like an infant’s mobile. The giantess’s closed hand rose, lifting the pencil toward her face and with it the thrashing pipsqueak tied to the end.

Fading fast, Carl swung drunkenly on the short end of the stocking-string, its identity still belonging just as strongly to the warm, flowery-cheese mesh of its parent cloth. Through the blur, he could see his wife’s billboard expression coming closer, her gorgeous eyes flashing neon variations of aquamarine, her blonde locks sweeping like cataracts of gold, her full lips narrowing to a cooing pucker. Her nostrils flared and she exhaled. The pencil rose and fell.

“Not a bad morning, dear. And I meant every word I said to our oldest little girl,” Tamatha told him, reserved yet giddy under the surface. “You’ve really shown me you have what it takes to work for me. I must say, this morning I’ve been accomplishing quite a lot with your help, and I don’t think it’s an accident. We’ve had it wrong for so long, honey. I doubt we were ever meant to be husband and wife. Let’s face it, there was no equality there. Me, doing all the work, while you do nothing and take what you want, like a dead limb? Employer and employee suits us far better, I think, and will allow us to become our best selves. All I can say now is: welcome to the team, Carl. I’m so happy to have you, and I think you’re going to feel more useful than ever before, serving me and Blair from below, never seeing or hearing or feeling or breathing much of anything else except our stockings, our shoes, and our feet, for the rest of your miserable selfish little life. So… I guess that’s lunchtime, then?”

The concept of spending forever under his wife and daughter’s catastrophic soles was starting to feel more and more like reality to the little man, as lunchtime led into a long afternoon of emailing and conference calls for Tamatha that made it seem as though time itself was stretching out like an infinite piece of elastic. Whether Carl was being slowly shoved down the silken tube of her stocking to have his body gripped between her toes, or simply having those sweat-caked threads abrasively grazed across him while his giant wife kept him adhered to the bottom of the desk with sticky tack, every minute he expected her call it a day, and he could finally have another rest before they started it all again the next morning. Being imprisoned in her stocking while hung in the dark closet was uncomfortable and far from ideal, but after spending an eight-hour-plus workday being manhandled by Tamatha’s greasy soles, Carl longed for any kind of solitude again, if only fleeting, so he could recharge just enough for his soul to survive another grueling day, then another and another, until he simply and inevitably expired under the foot of his beloved spouse or dazzling daughter.

But that reprieve didn’t come any of the first hundred times he expected it, making it continually more difficult to withstand the brutal punishment beneath, around, and inside of those sleek nude stockings, not to mention the beefy peds themselves lurking within and just aching to tame, milk, and excoriate their pet shrunken man in new profound ways. The impending arrival of August still served as his last shred of motivation. When at last Carl stared out through the fibers of the stocking while being ground under the ball of Tamatha’s foot, and noticed her crossed leg had tipped him so the fading sunlight trickled in through the stale garment just so, he thought it was a mirage. However, he next heard the telltale musical cue of the computer shutting down, and felt in his bones the earth-crunching brunt of his wife’s soles impacting the ground to stand; he’d made it through his first full day working from home. And it was more horrifying and sexually enlightening than he could’ve ever dreamed.

Carl continued serving as Tamatha’s passenger while she and Blair prepared dinner for August’s visit. Though he could only pick up on bits of conversation whenever his wife arched her foot or padded across the floor to reach the pantry, since the rest of the time he was being gently squashed flush with the kitchen tile in muted darkness, the diminutive man could tell that the two gorgeous leviathan women were decidedly not discussing his recent employment as an eternal slave to their feet. In fact, they weren’t even mentioning him at all. He found this surprising, seeing how their household had just experienced such a jarring and significant change. But then again, as Tamatha had told him before and then proceeded to literally hammer into his tiny brain with her sole, this wasn’t a distortion of their norm, but in fact a rebalancing of their family into a more correct arrangement.

Tamatha and Blair were so comfortable just brushing over this major event, and rather than talk about how best to utilize their new organic sole-soother, they discussed how their respective work days had gone. If anything, they sounded far more cheerful than usual, and unencumbered by some unknown element that had previously held them back. Carl could tell now he was that element, the lame limb that, once severed from his prior role as a regular man in the family, freed up Tamatha and Blair to be their better selves. It made him feel lowlier than he had in all his life, and that included the eight hours of foot-jizzing torture he’d spent today and last night, yet Carl also couldn’t help but resignedly acknowledge that things were, indeed, better for his wonderful and utterly deserving wife and daughter. It would surely take August’s shock at their treatment of him to rouse them from this state for just long enough for him to state his case, begin a life-long apology for his transgressions, and commence making things right in a way that hopefully didn’t involve him spending the rest of his days being battered by punching-bag toes, massaged into flesh wrinkles, lotioning his family’s soles with his pathetic seed, and replacing every puff of oxygen in his lungs with rancid stocking-spiced funk. She was his last vestige.

When, through the cusp of blackness and sound-eating foot-flesh weight piled atop him, Carl heard the doorbell ring far off in the distance, his heart managed to sing. He heard the thumping patter of Blair’s feet carrying her toward the foyer. Tamatha stayed rooted in place, but slowly peeled her foot off the ground, starting from the tender flank of her instep and working sideways across the arch. She was ever-so-subtly granting her entrapped husband this narrow access to the world outside, albeit through the flossy layer of impenetrable stocking clasped over him and her sole like a popped chewing gum bubble.

While the front door was opened and Blair giddily welcomed her elder sister, Tamatha began to tap her other foot just a stone’s throw away from where Carl was stuck under its opposite. He felt the ground tremoring, reverberating through the wrinkly, stinky, creamy landmass of her sole and in turn forcing his body to quiver at the same frequency. The little man counted the seconds with bated breath, both out of anxiety and because the crushing heft of Tamatha’s sole pinning him down kept Carl from drawing full inhalations. Then at last he saw Blair’s familiar bare peds strolling back into view, and immediately behind her followed a pair of marginally-larger, elegantly outfitted feet belonging to someone else. Carl crawled and wedged himself micro-inch by micro-inch along the tipped underside of Tamatha’s foot, dragging himself toward the crack of light where he might view the mile-high family unit.

There she was. Beautiful brilliant August, with her blonde hair done up in a bun like she so often had it, fashionable dual hairsticks stabbed through the golden bob at the back, and complemented by those bold thick-rimmed jet-black glasses: the ultimate brainiac hottie look, and one embodied by the confident young woman in every sense, and then some. Even more than her mother or sister, August was an enigmatic old soul, a believer in the philosophy of blind justice, and the one who would see Carl through this.

He considered crying out to her, flagellating and begging for mercy, but knew his voice would not carry that high, and that Tamatha could silence him with an innocuous shift of her foot to ensure August never heard a peep or caught a glimpse of the creature below. So he bided his time, throughout the rest of the dinner preparation, while the three girls chit-chatted up a storm, not even skipping a beat to explain his absence from the room. Carl supposed he couldn’t feel wounded at that fact; August had no reason to question where her father had gone, since he already spent so much of his life strapped into his gaming chair behind a closed door, even before his size was robbed and his eldest child moved away from home.

Still, it was an agonizing wait for his chance to make an appeal to August. Carl had never realized just how unnecessary he was to the equilibrium of this family. It might have broken his heart if he’d noticed sooner, while there was still plenty time to try and make amends, but now that he was down here, forced to experience the mood as well as a variety of other unusual torments and sexual dehumanizations, it didn’t just break his heart. Carl was simply broken altogether.