Baker's Dozen (Chapter 3) (Patreon)

WEDNESDAY

Just as she promised, Amber wasn’t content to give me another “easy” day clamped unmoving between her socked toes and the shoe’s inner wall. Instead, rather than nudging me to the tip with her stubby toe-ends, she carefully lurched her foot as high as she could while feeding it into the mouth of the high-top. I cowered on the tacky ground, watching in disbelief as my giant ex brought her socked sole above me, centering the swollen ball of her foot directly overhead, before bringing it crushing down. Again I expected to be liquefied on impact, as was a natural reaction to the sight of a boat-sized foot falling, before recalling that I was invincible when the thick rounded pad of her sole which marked the peak of Amber’s arch smashed me flat.

Once she took her first steps, too, it was clear that today would be much different than yesterday, and unthinkably worse. No longer could I coast along, letting my focus slip away while I let Amber’s toes keep me secure. It was tough to forget about the fact that, with every stride, there was a colossal ceiling of weighty sock-cloaked foot flesh compounding me into the repugnant insole again and again. Every stomp was like a full-body slap, oppressive and terrifying, not to mention exponentially smellier, since not only was Amber’s sole a much more potent hotbed of sweat and filth than her toes, but the wall of her high-tops was much cleaner than the flaking saltwater-stewed floor.

Knowing I’d only make my ex madder by ignoring her orders, I did my best to reach up and lovingly rub the very same socked sole that was simultaneously beating me senseless with repeated stamps. Of course this work was only possible during the ascendant rise of a step, in the second-long window when Amber raised her foot before colliding it with me again. I couldn’t imagine my effort was doing much to actually help her, but it was my only hope to avoid an even more hellish punishment later. Plus, I understood now that the real pleasure for Amber wasn’t my microscopic hands rubbing through her sock, but the knowledge that she had me right where she wanted, and there was no escape.

Just riding to the bakery brought unending anguish. I’d never thought it was an especially long trip from her house to work, but that was before I had to occupy the thin, reeking space between Amber’s foot and the car gas pedal. My ex-girlfriend also happened to be a rather aggressive driver, accelerating quickly and making the engine rev, which of course for me translated to an especially powerful pump from her burly socked foot each time she wanted to zoom onward, and that was often. I couldn’t tell whether she was driving just as ferociously as normal and I’d never realized, or speeding purely to have an excuse for grinding me to the point of numbness while putting the pedal to the metal. Likely both.

And though the journey there was a nose-poisoning burden, I realized upon arriving for Amber’s long shift that I should’ve been grateful for that time in the car. Yes, it meant getting pounded every time she stomped the gas pedal, but at least there were periods of gentler pressure, such as when she was waiting at crosswalks, and after all, her feet didn’t have to support her full body weight while seated in the car.

Conversely, I was in for a truly taxing beat-down at the bakery itself. For the first hour, though it felt much longer, I was pancaked continuously into Amber’s sole as she strolled restlessly around to complete her tasks. Again I heard the faint roar of ovens dinging and customers ordering in the high-up distance, but it was even more difficult to make out from under a damp cottony sole like a trash compactor rather than while pinned to the shoe wall by her toes.

Of course I was also now occupied by the gnawing hunger and thirst I felt. I hadn’t received anything to eat or drink in more than a day now, and on the rare occasions that Amber stopped creating thunderous ear-splitting thooms from her every stride by standing still, I could actually hear my gut gurgling madly. I recalled her cavalier explanation that I wouldn’t have to worry about getting my meals any longer, since I could consume whatever was present and be nourished, which at first had seemed just a mocking joke about the possibility of me debasing myself enough to eat the juicy gunk and linty debris smeared over Amber’s foot flesh after a long day. Now, though, having had it proven to me that she wasn’t kidding about my shrunken invincibility, I realized too that she really did intend for me to drink her sweat and eat her ratty toejam for sustenance. Luckily, this repellent thought gave me enough nausea that it took my mind off the hunger for a while.

Almost as though anticipating my dilemma, though, Amber chose to grace me with some light and a hint of fresh air about two hours into the shift. I heard laces coming loudly unlooped, followed by the pressure relenting all at once when her sweat-sagging sock and giant foot along with it peeled off the shoe basin, rising out of the hole. Of course her high-top insole was so worn and sludgy, it stuck to her foot and me as well for a few extra seconds, before slapping back to its position. I too stuck involuntarily to the fibers, having been so thoroughly trampled that my body attached limply to the moist vinegar-and-bread-scented threads. Plopping face-first into the floor of the footwear cavern again, I looked up toward the light, and gratefully gulped down a few swallows of delicious oxygen that were now only 80% tainted by feminine saltwater instead of 100%.

Looking down on me with bright lights wreathing her head like a halo was Amber, smug as ever. She combed a few stray locks of dark hair over her ear and grinned so wide her rosy dimpled cheeks seemed to inflate.

“Hey, Oscar. I was just getting a breather, and figured you might want to do the same,” she said, which was such a charitable gesture compared to her previous behavior, I already knew there was a catch. Sure enough, she raised a chocolate-brown muffin up into my view through the portal of her shoe. The baked good was dented on its soft upper crust. “Also, thought you might be getting a little hungry. Now, eventually you’re gonna have to get used to eating and drinking whatever you can find down there, or else you’ll starve and it’ll be your fault not mine, but until then… I’m going to help you out. Why don’t you say thank you?”

“T-Thank you,” I stammered, too delirious and afraid to say how I really felt.

“That’s a good boy. See, this muffin got dropped on the floor. Right in a real dusty part near the corner, too, so no five-second rule. It’s not fit for a regular-size person to eat. But, seeing how your alternative is to eat the sock-crud out from between my toes, I thought you’d just die of happiness at the chance to eat this instead. So what do you say? Have you earned a little treat?”

Much as I hated to admit it, even the sight of a partially-crushed dirt-flecked chocolate muffin the size of building next to me was making me salivate. Humiliating though it was, she was correct. I’d eat a hundred dropped muffins, dirt and all, if it meant delaying the command to chew and swallow the literal grit baked into her sweaty sole beef. So I bobbed my head yes.

“Great! Thought so. God, what a loser you are,” Amber chuckled. Digging her fingers through the top of the muffin, it began to reshape while raining crumbs down into the shoe. I dodged to the side as cocoa-scented lumps landed all around me, noticing some of them were sprinkled with floor-dust and tracked-in soil. Yet I could hardly care. “Only thing is, I have to get back to work now, so if you want to eat this, you’ll have to take it to-go. But you don’t mind, right? Oh, and by the way, you’re going to eat EVERYTHING I give you from this, and if I find a single bit of muffin still on my foot when the day is over, I’m going to tape you face-down to the bottom of the shoe overnight.”

This casual last factor alarmed me into new panic, but there was barely time even to get a glimpse of the dozen-or-so crumbs and where they were. Amber’s socked foot was already cruising its way back into the shoe. In an instant, the fluffy chocolate crumbs, which were filthy enough to begin with from hitting the bakery floor, achieved a new level of degradation when my ex-girlfriend’s prodigious toes squashed them to stains hardly distinguishable from the slightly-more-inedible bits of dreck also decorating the underside of her sock. Darkness, heat, and head-spinning stench immediately overwhelmed me again when Amber slammed her weighty arch down atop me and the muffin bits, albeit leaving just enough space this time that I could crawl around the smelly trench of her sodden insole to find the pieces.

It wasn’t easy. With no light, I could only even identify the chocolate-dirt caked on her foot apart from regular dirt by sticking my nose straight into it, sometimes even licking to confirm. More often than that, I ended up tasting a squishy lump of congealed lint spiced distinctly of earth and pruny foot-skin.

Even the actual pieces of muffin weren’t that pleasant to discover, though. While they did have a strong whiff of chocolate, and a hint of food made my belly growl, every muffin crumb now consisted mainly of foul grunge, considering it had not only been thrown to the floor (which I now suspected was done on purpose by Amber just so I’d have something more disgusting to eat), but trampled and smeared along the bottom of my ex’s foot. Granted, the day was barely a quarter of the way over, which meant that her foot was comparatively dry, but at my third-inch size, it was hard not to notice the volume of sweat and liquid-fuzz that had seeped into the chocolate.

Perhaps saddest of all, I had actually conceived of an idea like this not long before our break-up. Once, after much convincing, Amber had allowed me to pour a little chocolate syrup on her feet after a less-stressful day at work, which I’d mostly licked away, slightly repulsed as well as aroused. That may have even been where she got this idea, so in a way, I only had myself to blame.