Careful What You Wish For (Chapter 11)

Cody wasn’t sure he even wanted to know what Kayla meant by this, though within twenty minutes of being trodden upon, he had no choice but to find out. Still in human form, and able to limply squirm about like a beached fish whenever the giantess’s boot was airborne and he wasn’t imprinted too stickily against the bottom of her foot, the three-incher was hyper-conscious of the immense tension compacted into his every extremity and bodily region, as well as the utterly suffocating leather-peeling stench of summer saltiness and gym funk all around. And at a certain point in his latest suffering tenure inside Kayla’s shoe, Cody noticed his fingers were getting shorter. There was no mistaking this, as the tips of his digits were afflicted by something that felt like a cross between a searing burn and marrow-deep soreness, as if sandpaper was being used to file down his skin, muscle, and eventually bone, lower and lower, gaining pain-index intensity the more of his anatomy was robbed, until he had only nubs for hands.

It almost seemed a sensory illusion at first, since there was no blood or jutting-out joints to indicate Cody had endured such a mutilation. Yet judging by the shadowy silhouettes, and fearfully rubbing his hands against his cheeks the next time Kayla wasn’t directly stampeding him paper-flat into the boot insole, there was no denying it: he wasn’t breaking down or bursting apart as any ordinary shrunken human should when made to tank so many megaton impacts from a meaty athletic sole the size of a truck. Rather, he was simply wasting away. Melting down like a butter sculpture left in the sun. And every iota of his body lost seethed in him with appropriately cutting anguish that was only worsened by the knowledge that, by the time this ordeal was over, there might not be anything left of him to “feel” at all.

“You know, Cody, maybe I don’t say THANK you as often as I should. Like how showing gratitude is supposed to bring nice energy into your life, or whatever? Some kind of namaste bullshit? Probably some good karma thing, too. Well, then let me say it again. Thank you so much, you hilarious foot-crazy squirt, for making all this possible!” Kayla again telepathically thundered from above. Despite her continued front of sarcastic kindness and positivity, Cody could hear the poisonous slap-happy malice in her projected voice. The added spring in her step, too, made it clear what fun she was having. “By the way, there’s no need to say You’re welcome, Goddess back to me, because I only made this a one-way conversation, so I wouldn’t be able to hear you. I mean, what could you possibly have to say that wouldn’t bore me to tears in two seconds, anyway? Let’s see, where was I again? Oh, yeah. Thank you for realizing what your true calling in life was, freak, and giving ME… of ALL people… the power to make it reality! Seriously, it takes a special kind of mind, someone so pathetically low that they’re only fit for being stepped on, to actually realize that the best thing for him to be is… an insole. Just the part of my shoe that gets squashed on all day for hours and hours, until he starts falling apart. Hey, I always knew you were useless, Cody, but I never could’ve come up with that myself. So, thanks again for giving me the comfiest arch support I could ever ask for! I know that no matter how much it might start to sting you just a little bit, getting your whole body slowly turned to dust like this every time my FOOT comes down on top of you again, that my happiness is all that matters to you. Isn’t it?”

Having wrapped his head around the newest pang-wringing surreality that Kayla had playfully cursed into his shrunken body, Cody was flooded by terror almost as keen as the simultaneous sensations of having his appendages sawed down to rounded stubs just above the elbows and knees. He barely had the autonomy left to move himself around, but still did everything in his power to slow the effect of his decomposition, in hopes that the giantess might eventually get tired of this waiting game and simply put him out of his misery again for the umpteenth time. The little thing tried wriggling himself closer toward the toe section of his owner’s footwear, praying that the slightly-more forgiving pulsations of her digits might not expend his ever-shrinking physiology so fast. Kayla must have noticed this feeble attempt, however, and needed only tip her foot back heel-first and kick the ground hard to send her captive hurtling beneath a weightier province of her mercilessly rising-and-falling foot flesh.

Hours passed with the loathsome slowness of singular grains of sand plunking through an hourglass. Ironically, Cody himself may as well have been made of congealed sand, as pieces of himself were systematically weathered away by the heat, the cramping stress, and the pouncing smush-taut collisions between Kayla’s sweaty sole and that claggy leather boot-basin. Even without a drop of gore to show for it, however, the shrinker realized he just might have met his match in terms of torture below his personal goddess, because he truly couldn’t recall a more painful or drawn-out experience in her clutches prior to this absolute nirvana of existential slow-torment. Smoothed down to his shoulders and hips now, it felt like Cody’s four limbs, even if they reacted more like clay now than human body parts, had been amputated several dozen times over apiece, not just chopped cleanly away at the ends but instead cleaved away in thin slices like lunch meat via that haunting sandpaper-like ache gnawing continuously at his exposed body, which barely numbered at an inch-and-a-half tall now, given his losses. It was like the blind dank oxygen-free atmosphere inside Kayla’s shoe itself was eating him alive.

And all the powerless creature could do was scream and writhe at the depths of rock-bottom pain, until his capacity to express himself even in these two ways was gradually softened to nothing. The noise left his throat and eventually he could only rasp and croak, involuntarily kissing his shivering lips against the ever-descending ceiling of Kayla’s brawny perspiration-slaked sole. Once his arms and legs were gone, his capacity to flail was reduced to a pitiful worming impression, just squinching his abdomen and trying to turn his head away from the repeatedly clapping-together plains of the giantess’s humid ped and ramrod-straight black insole below. But of course there was nowhere for Cody to go, and nothing he could do to diminish his suffering even marginally, once Kayla had decided to stick him in her boot, manifest his shrunken body into an easily-crumbled state, and then simply let the seemingly-elongated hours of the day and her own questionably necessary footfalls bring about his latest end at a leisurely pace.