Breaking Up the Hard Way (Chapter 3)

Down below, Brandon’s woes had increased greatly since his girlfriend stood, beginning with the amount of pressure now weighing down into the shoe thanks to the full statuesque mass of his technically-short but now god-sized significant other. Everything below the little guy’s neck lost feeling then. He was just lucky to be stuck between her toes instead of being battered under them like giant drumsticks, let alone the island of her foot itself, which would surely chew him up and spit him back out by the time the walk was over. Brandon tried to soothe himself with thoughts of the pill’s bodily endurance side effects which would prevent him from taking severe injury, up to a point. How long it would take to reach that point was impossible to say, though, because they were only just out the front door, and already Brandon was feeling strain up to his eyeballs, and leaking tears not only from new anxiety but the sheer hair-curling pestilence of the cheesy smell. Worse, each step that the giantess took squeezed the tainted insole like a sponge, causing more dormant sweat to seep up from the soiled ground and flavor the broiling sauna atmosphere even more heinously.

As Esther marched down the sidewalk, the late-summer heat took hold again almost immediately. Not only was old perspiration oozing up out of the insole fibers, but practically gushing from her pores, especially where her foot-flesh was most tightly pressed, right around Brandon. The soupy sweat, merely warm at first, was heating fast in the claustrophobic void, and soon reached a point of discomfort like having coffee spilled on bare skin. The little man winced at the burn of her perspiration on his most sensitive areas. He resumed trying to alert her to stop by banging her toes with his limited remaining agency, though this only seemed to encourage Esther to walk faster.

By the time they’d traveled two blocks, the sweat was rising in temperature just as fast as it was developing more rotten layers of musk, and Brandon began protesting with moans that soon turned to screams. He hadn’t a prayer of being heard in his pain over the crashing chorus of Esther’s feet impacting the earth, of course, but still he made the attempt:

“ESTHER!” he croaked. “STOP! PLEASE! HELP ME!”

“Aw, I love you too, babe,” Esther said in the direction of her shoe, as she felt his body in motion again and mistook it for a hug. She returned the favor by wrapping her toes even tighter around him, hoping he was getting every bit of satisfaction out of this he’d hoped, and trusted all Brandon’s promises that she could stomp on him and still not harm a hair on his head. The hill was visible just ahead, and she looked forward to the trek, especially with the sun rolling toward the horizon.

Below, Brandon’s in-shoe purgatory was rapidly becoming flat-out hell. He a ripped mighty shriek when Esther unknowingly “hugged” him back with her toes, and heard the snap as his arm broke from the squishy compression of her soft, wet, and frightfully muscular toes. Too panged to keep actively resisting the beating, the little man went limp between her digits, hoping to ride out the storm rather than encouraging her to innocently toy with him. This inactivity was his next big mistake, since by the time Brandon noticed his sensation-less body sliding under the ball of Esther’s foot, released thanks to the friction-less slick of her soggy flesh, it was too late to stop the process. Try as he might to hang onto the spongy webbed skin between her enormous toes, the man was no match, and slipped beneath the slab of her uppermost sole.

Right away Brandon missed being stuck between Esther’s toes, because that was paradise compared to this new low. He imagined this was what it felt like to be a car placed in a compactor for junking, with the exception being that it didn’t take repeated stamps to flatten a car. The drug, though it protected him from imploding grape-style after a single underfoot slam, only ensured Brandon remained conscious for each merciless crash from Esther’s sole returning to the ground and sandwiching her fragile boyfriend between ratty swamp-like insole and pink-pale flesh stewed for sixteen hours in salty fluid, toejam, and mud streaks.

The first few steps caused Brandon’s other arm to snap. He would’ve screamed louder, but all the sound was absorbed into the overhanging ceiling of perspiring, brackish sole beef; in turn, every drop of sticky sweat that bled out of Esther’s overheated foot was soaked into Brandon. Though he kept his lips sealed and his lungs clenched, eventually the little man did have to breathe, and especially with his girlfriend’s foot squashing down on his entire body, she inadvertently pumped him empty of air, forcing the helpless thing to open his mouth again for a drowning gasp right as a fresh bead of vile elixir splashed into his jaws. It scorched Brandon’s throat just as badly as it did the rest of his body, and tasted like rubbing alcohol laced with a whole salt shaker and week-old bacteria. He would’ve vomited up his whole stomach if he had the energy.

Mounting nausea was soon the least of Brandon’s desperate worries, though, as he could no longer control his arms to protect them from pinching, and as a result, they smashed to pulp on the next stride. The shrunken man’s silent cry was only another opportunity to be waterboarded by his girlfriend’s abominable dirt-spiked sweat. He might’ve blacked out from pain, which would’ve been a blessing now, but the pill again kept him awake. Under the ball of Esther’s foot, where her sole was bulkiest and first to strike the ground, it was only a matter of time before Brandon began to break down, literally. He felt his organs squeezing into unhealthy shapes, some even sustaining ruptures that felt like knives hacking away at his insides. All the squirming in the world wouldn’t have made a difference, though, against the seismic onslaught of Esther’s foot colliding again and again with his bug-sized self, and soon all he could do was lie still, twitch, and weep as each step caused another bone to crunch or another vital system to bleed.