Work From Home (Chapter 11)

At this decimation, the little fellow could do nothing to keep his tears from running, but they didn’t move his spouse; if anything, her smile curved wider. Without delay or fanfare, Tamatha dumped him inside the mouth of her damp, fragrant stocking and closed up her office for the night, then carried the garment all the way upstairs while swinging it in circles, causing her shrunken plaything to roll and twist at the inner tip like a bola. Once in her bedroom, since the couple hadn’t shared the master suite for a while now, Tamatha fastened the musty stocking up in the closet without another word to her husband, and without even looking at him, despite his attempts to stand in the cushioned tunnel and gaze pleadingly at her through the nude mesh. Each of his attempts to hold himself upright only resulted in sliding powerlessly onto his back again like a pill-bug and spinning at the toe-section fabric crevice. Tamatha tied the top into a firm triple knot, though both she and her out-of-shape hubby knew that Carl hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of climbing up the slippery inner cavern of the squishy nylon for escape, and even if his will overruled his unathletic form and allowed him to ascend somehow, there was no way down from this sobering height, shrouded in dark with no nearby means of support, for Carl to get away. He was stuck here until she chose to make him otherwise.

The sheer nature of his wife’s stocking, translucent as glass save for the glimmer of the fabric, made for a harrowing view below, that Carl could almost convince himself he was standing in a skyscraper skybox, or even just floating in midair. He wasn’t one for heights, and combined with the heady aroma of day-old perspiration and heat-cooked perfume now bottled tight in the closed stocking like a Molotov cocktail, Carl’s nausea was only building. The pitiful man was actually somewhat grateful when Tamatha shut the closet door, leaving him mostly in blackness, though unfortunately, as she’d hung the stocking at the exact center of the pole, a thin stream of light still came through the crack running along the doorjamb, which illuminated Carl’s elegant, grimy prison anew, and made it so he had to close his eyes to keep from getting sick.

Carl spent an interminable, sleepless night inside the tube of Tamatha’s discarded stocking, hung from a hanger and lofted in the dark closet.

He realized he must’ve managed to find rest eventually, however, because Carl was jolted awake sometime the next morning. For but a brief merciful period in his fitful dreams, Carl had convinced himself that all this size-changing insanity and familial breakdown was only the product of a remorseful nightmare. Because of it, he promised himself, he’d try to make some kind of change in the morning: maybe he’d wash his own dishes at meals, for example, before returning to his online game.

When it occurred to him, though, that he was not only genuinely shrunken and stripped naked, but imprisoned in his wife’s own raunchy-scented stocking from the day before while she watched him, he saw his time for slow amendments to his behavior had long ago run out. Tamatha swung the door open hard, grinning and for a few minutes just admiring the sight of her puny spouse routing at the hellish basin of her nude stocking. In her nightgown still, the woman arched one bare foot against the carpet and pivoted it playfully back and forth, both revealing her creamy upper thigh beneath the cloth and also letting the morning sunlight spill through the distant wrinkles of her flexing sole. Carl, dehydrated and delirious, chose to stare yearningly at his wife’s bare peds below, rather than face the music of reality by making eye contact. Besides, lowly as he’d become, it might’ve been impolite to look the giantess right in the face.

Carl expected some early-morning gloating, now that Tamatha had slept on their new arrangement. Perhaps some fresh zingers she’d concocted in the night to remind him of his place. But instead, the woman simply untied the stocking from the hanger and laid it at the end of the bed while she got changed for the day. When he felt her gaze pass momentarily over him, not lingering, there was something in it that Carl could feel on a visceral level. His wife was undisturbed, even comfortable, with their reformed status quo; not even the physical oddity of seeing a human man marooned inside a monstrous nude-stocking tube was enough to trip her up with a blink now. She neither smiled nor frowned in his direction, merely settling into their routine. The monolithic woman dressed semi-casually in a skirt and colorful top. Despite working from home most of the time, Tamatha occasionally had video conferences or needed to run out and meet with clients, which necessitated decorum. Carl was gob-smacked at his wife’s loveliness, and wondered if she dressed like this every day, or if he’d simply become so distracted in his couch-potato existence that he failed to notice it.

To complete her look, the matriarch pulled on a fresh pair of sleek naked-hued stockings, stretching them out and flaring those black-painted toes, and smoothing out the furrows in the nylon until it sat nigh-invisibly flush to her exquisite skin. When she was ready, Tamatha scooped up the discarded stocking from the night before, again without looking, and slung it over her shoulder to head downstairs.

Back in the office, seated in her throne, Tamatha untied the knot, then tossed the stocking directly under the desk. Spinning in the tangled netting before landing in a heap, Carl was dazed, only uninjured because of the padding from his prison.

“Come out now. I’ve got a lot of work to do, and you’re only holding me up,” Tamatha droned.

On solid ground once again, somewhere under all the piled stocking, the shrunken man foraged for a way out, but found himself lost within moments. While the balmy, semi-bitter mass of spooled fabric was bunched up so chaotically, it was impossible to know which way to go toward the mouth, and which way only led deeper into the plush labyrinth. As Carl crawled through the mesh, he could detect shadows moving above as Tamatha swiveled in her chair, crossing and uncrossing her legs and swiping her soles along the desk leg, perhaps in memory of what sat affixed there the night before. Just when the little guy was ready to surrender and yell for help, he noticed the nylon going taut around him, then lifting off the ground from a particular point: Tamatha had grasped the thing in her toes and plucked it into the air. Bobbing her ankle, the woman managed to shake her husband out of the tunnel with just a few thrusts, causing him to plummet through the opening and fly head-first into the carpet below.

“Put this on,” Tamatha commanded, with a curl of sweetness to her tone that belied the task itself. The woman’s fingers hovered over Carl’s prone, panting form and sprinkled something over him. Upon recovering, her husband found it was a thread, ten times the length of his body. Judging by its rigid structure and sparkling peach-shaded color, he realized it was a threat ripped directly from one of Tamatha’s nude nylons.

“H-How?” he questioned.

“It’s a collar and leash. So you don’t stray too far from your owner.” While responding, the giantess didn’t so much as look down, but jumped right into typing at her desktop. “You’ve chosen to be treated like an animal, so that’s what we’re going to do, sweetie. You can’t say it’s not fitting.”

Carl shakily turned the string in his hands. Indeed, there was a looped end, with enough space for his head to fit through, though the word “leash” didn’t quite do justice to what his wife had just given him. “Noose” might’ve been more apt.

“Oh, God…” he murmured to himself, letting the tears flow again. “S-She’s… she’s going to… oh, fuck, no. Please, no.”

“I’m not going to hang you, you little drama queen,” Tamatha said, as though reading his mind, for she definitely couldn’t have heard his puny whispers. “But I willdo just that, if you don’t slide that end around your neck right this second and leave the opposite side where I can reach it. Chop-chop, now. We’ve got to work on heeling you, darling.”

His hands trembling so hard he could barely operate, Carl chose to listen to his wife’s candied threat and pulled the stocking string around his neck. He yanked it snug, until it felt like coiled rope. Even with so thin a specimen of Tamatha’s nylon, the texture and scent had become deeply ingrained in Carl’s mind, and he instantly felt as though he had an entire stocking choked around his windpipe. Setting down the opposite end of the string, he stepped reverently away, humbler than ever, and watched with mounting horror as Tamatha leaned down, pinched the opposite end, and proceeded to lace it into the dangling seam of her left nylon with one hand. While her ped arched off the ground, the underside was revealed to have a strip of nylon expertly cut away, running from the ball of her foot down to the heel. The opening was thin, and almost imperceptible due to the web-like translucence of the stocking, but her husband could track the narrow peachy strip of exposed flesh displaying a sample of porous skin and sole furrows, aiming upward like a pathway to heaven.

When she was finished tying the opposite end of the string, Tamatha’s fingers returned contentedly to typing above, though as her foot also resumed its absentminded fidgeting, Carl felt his noose alternating slack and straight with every scrunch of her toes. Her ebony-black painted nails shown through the nylon when her digits curled down. He gulped. If he wasn’t already watching the every muscle twitch of his wife’s gargantuan feet with keen determination, he was now.

“Good morning, Ms. Perkins! Yes, I can see you!” Tamatha said. Her tone was bubbly and energetic as a morning songbird, and despite his compromised position, Carl couldn’t help but instinctively let himself feel relief at such a dramatic shift in his wife’s voice, even while he was leashed to her giant foot. However, gathering the courage to look up through the glass surface far above, he realized his towering spouse wasn’t speaking to him, which should’ve been obvious by the pleasure in her words, but rather speaking to her computer screen.

“Fabulous. My Skype connection is often very shaky. Our company’s so-called tech-wizards are not worth what we pay them, if you ask me,” this Ms. Perkins responded, her voice carrying down to the floor even if Carl couldn’t see her onscreen. She was curt, cutting, yet amenable enough to suggest her own brand of warmth. “So glad we finally worked out a time to discuss those figures you sent me. Oh, and by the way, call me Barbara. All of my friends do, and unless these numbers are lying, I think we’ll come to be very good friends.”

“This should be a productive meeting, then, Barbara,” Tamatha agreed. At the end of the sentence, her timbre rising, the giantess angled her foot taller off the ground, anchored by her heel, and reached her toes as high as they would extend. Her sole straightened and her long toes separated, testing the nude stocking seam and tugging the dangled string close to its tightest capacity.