For Richer, For Smaller (Chapter 31)

Seconds later, from the depths of her shoe, Tony could hear the TV click on. Then came the telltale dinking sound effect of menus being scrolled through, which steadily turned louder as he felt the giantess relinquishing a fraction of the rigid sumptuous-fleshed tension instated into him by her sole, but again only enough that he could perceive sounds from the outside world in better clarity, yet still lacking the capacity to separate his eternally arch-kissing lips from her foot and scream bloody-murder for attention from these questionably-competent police officers. Surely a conversation with the shrunken man himself was all the proof they would actually need to blow this case wide open, yet they still hadn’t asked to see or speak with his pancakey dehumanized remnants yet while he was incriminatingly stress-adhered to this insole and absolutely bursting to tell his side of the tale. Instead, the cops must’ve turned to witness whatever Lillian was projecting on the television screen. And though Tony still couldn’t see anything but the living flesh-creased atlas of his wife’s cherub-smooth sole in near-blind shadow, the noise he heard next created such a vivid photographically-recalled image in his mind that she might as well have been streaming the footage directly into his stamped brain and electrocuting all his corresponding sensory memories for the fullest-possible experience.

The little guy heard his own voice addressing his wife in a conversation from more than a month ago, cautiously reopening communications after that fateful mishap in the laundry room, when she’d impulsively barefoot trounced him for the first time: an event which had become the catalyst that wrongfully shifted control in this relationship, and Tony’s life itself, over to Lillian. She’d recorded that goddamn makeup talk between them? Tony was aware of the security cameras Lillian had referenced before, but this sound was too crystal-clear to have come from any of the equipment affixed to certain ceiling corners around the house. There was no doubt in his mind now that she’d set up a high-def camcorder in the living room on that night ahead of time, before the six-incher even entered the room to set things right. Knowing he would come to find her. Knowing their chat would end with her stepping on him for real, hard, and unforgiving, in the way she intended to from that day forward. Knowing, for whatever reason, there might be a need to have their mostly-dishonest heart-to-heart immortalized on film, whether as a legal defense or just in case the power-trip was potent enough to make her start rewatching this footage as personalized porn.

From his dark lung-flushed embankment beneath Lillian, then, Tony auditorily relived that conversation, while the two cops observed it onscreen so clearly that they might as well have been present in the room when it took place. He heard himself faking an apology, and his wife promising to start embodying the proper foot-goddess he’d always wished her to be. Then came a fast-forwarded zip on the footage, during which time the giantess began to rock her actual sole back and forth atop Tony, subtly swelling and flattening the ball of her foot over and over as if mocking him for the in-and-out rhythm his airways could no longer perform while pinned beneath her. When the video was allowed to play again, he heard his own voice from a month and a half ago once more, albeit unintelligible this time, speaking only in a language of gawping grunts and horny moans while Lillian gratuitously led a single-step parade on top of his diminutive shape, reaping new plainly-savored bleats from her spouse each time she pressed down harshly enough to nearly mold him into the doughier epicenter of her undersole.

This scene, no-doubt as provocative as it was informative to the officers, was even more effective at plumbing Tony’s depths and dredging up the exact degree of strain he was feeling on that night, when he’d rolled right over and let himself go along with Lillian’s supposedly new-and-improved trampling reign. The experience being played back now on the TV, rough as it probably appeared to an outsider, was a luxurious liquid-soft massage by comparison to the treatments he received today. Unfortunately, though, Tony was not only currently stuttering his way through a PTSD-thickened fever dream of sense-blunting recall from that past night, but also still languishing through the kind of existence-leveling ache which had already plagued him so continuously for weeks upon weeks. In essence, it was like the shrunken martyr had manifested two bodies for himself now – the real one, and the imagined one being conjured in his mind by the video, with each able to feel everything at once. And both those Tonies were getting the shit stamped out of them by their giantess spouse right now.

Lillian clicked ahead again on the apparently-extensive logs she had saved of their fetish-fouling sessions together. The footage played in shorter clips thereafter, but the message was always the same, and only strengthened with each additional frame shown to the police. Tony listened to his past-self grimacing and sputtering his way to a face-footprinted climax on a terrifying loop, recorded hour after hour, day after day, week after week. As time wore on, the quality of his voice in this footage turned croakier, weaker, even sadder, reflective of the breakdown transpiring in his spirit, as well as inside his ever-squatter supine form, razed down into a lesser dimension by the powerful never-ending heave of Lillian’s sole. But there’d still be a squeak of unwanted pleasure as the sexual punctuation mark on these excruciating experiences, no matter how heinously burdensome, with Tony’s damning whimper heard between the flesh-to-flesh sole slaps and the floor-pounding tread thump of whatever footwear she had him crammed within that day on-film.

And during each and every instance of these freakish home videos, which were exhaustively screened for Tony’s would-be savior cops as proof of his willingness to become Lillian’s underfoot pain puppet, the little six-inch shell of a man felt those moments reincarnated in his head. They came on so intensely that he truly couldn’t shake that agony-redoubling illusion of living in two equally-wretched shrunken bodies at once. No step upon him heard in the footage escaped his notice, or failed to drag the shrinker’s consciousness screaming back through time itself, forcing him to repeat all those same skin-stretching organ-enfolding bone-powdering echoes of his wife’s most ruthless reunions between his floor-splayed body and her deific ped. All she had to do was play a montage of kinky recordings, and every last occasion she’d ever meaningfully smushed his puny self underfoot before was given new haunting life. Of course, the unmoving constant throughout this hellish greatest-hits trip down memory lane was the “real” Lillian’s foot, still positioned over Tony right now, sweaty and tropically-balmy and so euphorically creamy-tender in texture that the stationary weight-compacted violence it managed to commit upon him should’ve seemed impossible.

But it wasn’t impossible. Nothing was, it seemed, so long as Lillian had Tony in her shoe, and his very soul so condensed into a flattened singularity that it might as well have fused with her foot for the rest of his meaningless little life.

“Oh, I almost forgot about that one! That was such a lovely date night. You really can tell Tony was feeling, shall we say, romantic on that day. Now, I do have plenty more… keepsake videos like these, but I think you get the idea. And I don’t want to take up your entire day just showing off how in-love I am with my husband, and how in-love my husband is with my feet,” the giantess adoringly reported, and suddenly the TV clicked to silent black again. Which mercifully relegated Tony’s focus back to his actual body, instead of experiencing the triggering trauma of those videos at the same time, though that wasn’t saying much, considering where he still found himself. “But, I understand. This kind of proof only counts for so much. You’d like to hear it from Tony himself, wouldn’t you? Because I’m sure he’d be only too glad to let you know exactly what it means to him, being so small under my foot, without a care in the world except the next good feeling the love of his life will give him. Does that sound all right to you, Officers?”

“Y-Yes, ma’am, that… would be very helpful,” the male cop awkwardly stammered. He sounded understandably more taken aback by the things they’d just watched onscreen than he’d bargained for when stepping into the home, though the man’s neck-clammy flustered tone suggested his surprise went even deeper than befuddled awe of the domestically bizarre.

“Where might we find him?” the other officer asked. “Your husband.”