Baker's Dozen (Chapter 6) (Patreon)

In this moment, I was reminded of that occasion long ago when I’d foolishly jammed my whole nose in Amber’s post-work sneakers, only amped to a hundred times that strength.

One tiny whiff flooded my airways from nostril to lung with atmosphere that was tangibly boiling-hot and slimy, as though the humidity had increased by 200%. Writhing with revulsion, I was trapped in a coughing episode while attempting not to choke, but there was no choice but to inhale, or otherwise suffocate. Every slightest breath felt like inflating my body with a spectral force consisting entirely of Amber’s squalid, fusty, gunk-crusted foot. I had truly never smelled something so utterly loathsome, a far cry from the fact that I once willfully tried to enjoy these same flavors in an exponentially lesser degree while sporting a pants tent.

Then she commenced walking again at a rapid pace, causing me to tumble around the shoe’s interior from toe-tip to arch-valley, and what’s more, every time that gargantuan foot nonlethally squished me, what little oxygen I’d painfully collected was squeezed right out, forcing me to achingly sample the pungent saltwater air even sooner before blacking out, though at this point, going unconscious might’ve been a blessing. If not for the fact that I still had a feast of baked garbage to eat off my ex’s grubby foot.

“Ooooh, yeah, that’s the stuff,” Amber cooed in a jokingly sultry tone, as she continued strolling around the shop, stomping me into submission. “Seriously, take a BIG gulp. It’s like a fine wine, Oscar, so sniff up as much as you can before you drink. Then again, you probably always would’ve preferred smelling and sipping on the liquid dripping out from between my toes than any kind of liquor. Am I right? Yeah, in case your brain is too small now to guess it for yourself, I bumped up your sense of smell, too, but only to triple strength. We want to save some fun for the rest of your life, after all, don’t we? So we still have to save some surprises for later. Seriously, you probably can’t even realize how good you’ve got it now. You’re about to spend every waking moment buried under the things you love most on Earth, and I basically turned you into a superhero on top of that! Now, use those super smells and super tastes for good, little boy, and save the day by cleaning out the rest of my shoe, or else you’re gonna spend all night in a fight you can’t win against my heel. Under it, that is.”

By the second half of Amber’s shift, I fell into a zombie-like pattern of simply tanking the overwhelming stench and nauseating zest of each scone piece, worming my way around the hovel without even a shred of dignity left. I managed to get good enough at maneuvering myself, using the glow-light as a guide, to track down food, but the fullness I soon felt was the least of my worries. It seemed Amber’s magic was keeping me from becoming used to my sharpened senses, even after hours of exposure. Each crumb of scone I meekly swallowed still hit my throat like fresh bleach, scorching all the way down, and every meager breath I dared inhale made my lungs want to shrivel black as her insoles from the smoky perfume that was her foot odor. Not only this, but the microwave-like air was only getting balmier by the minute, heating me past the point of fatigue and, worse, making Amber’s foot sloppier than ever thanks to the rising temperature.

As she had promised, each scone chunk became harder to chase down the longer I took, as a steady rain of sweat drooled through her sock fibers from out of her plump soles, which washed the crumbs around and broke them into smaller pieces, requiring me to work harder to catch them, and once I finally did, concentrating the rancid flavors even more. After a while, the brain-swimming heat had made me so drowsy, not to mention caused my nose and mouth to constantly crackle with the miasmic scents and mealy flavors I was required to pump through them, I could hardly tell the scone leftovers apart from the standard jam and greaseballs which populated the underside of Amber’s sock. Because of this, even with the glow to see my path, I still ended up eating a solid amount of foot-grunge without even a speck of bread mixed in, a fact I learned by only being somewhat disgusted by the flavor, as opposed to the tenfold throat-ripping burn of the cursed scone. And that was room in my tiny stomach I did NOT have to spare.

“Oh, bad guess, foot-freak!” Amber would gigglingly scold me when I accidentally wasted time by eating a splotch of pure dirt and sole-skin cells. “See, I told you that you could survive off that stuff! Bet it tastes better than the trash, too. Really, I’m just getting you trained for the rest of your life, since this is the last time you’re going to get to eat anything made for real people. Since we both know you’re not a person anymore, and shit, maybe you never were. I mean, what kind of a dummy ignores the whole woman right in front of him, and just focuses on the disgusting part that’s down by the ground? You never gave the rest of me enough attention. No, you just always wanted to get my shoes off. Well, careful what you wish for, Oscar. You can’t say I didn’t give you everything you ever wanted. Now, you better hurry up and find the real crumbs, because it doesn’t count when you eat that other stuff, though… I’m not going to tell you NO, either, if you love eating the nasty balled-up crap from between my toes so much! Who am I to stop you?”

When I sensed Amber’s shift ending, I simply laid prone in the center of her insole while she stepped on me, crashing down and steadily molding my taped-up miniature shape into the insole, which was now soaked with enough moisture to feel more like beach sand constantly falling under a tide of foot-sweat waves. Next to actively chasing and bingeing enchanted foot-flavored crud in this desert-like heat, simply lying still and letting myself to be continually stamped upon was actually relaxing by comparison. I couldn’t tell whether I’d managed to eat up the full serving of garbage my ex had left me to eat, though even if I spotted more, I would’ve probably burst if I force-fed myself another bite.

Battered by a monumental slab of soggy-socked arch, boiled in the stagnant sliver of shoe-air, with my airways and intestines twisted thanks to the infection of heavy foot-salting they’d received, I failed to notice the transition between getting squashed in the glowing purgatory of Amber’s giant DC, and being poured out onto the carpet. I should’ve been glad to be freed, to breathe clean oxygen, to feel air conditioning on my skin, and to no longer have the weight of her foot stomping and kicking me around the puddled insole like a stray pebble in her shoe. But the fact was, I could hardly distinguish these horrific sensory experiences now from a less-agonizing existence. Either by magic or simply by traumatic memory, Amber had made it so impossible to forget the pressure, the heat, the flavor, the scent of her gigantic foot that I was feeling it just as strongly even while separated from the source.

Had she broken me now? I really couldn’t tell, but I also wasn’t stupid enough to believe Amber wasn’t capable of making me long for any release, including death, from this shrunken sweaty-footed life. She was showing herself to be more powerful as a schemer, an enchantress, and especially as a hard worker with the rank grime-slogged feet to show for it than I’d ever imagined.

“Jesus Christ, that stinks!” Amber angrily grunted, as though the stench of her shoes was somehow my fault. She pinched her nostrils closed, then waved a hand over the humongous abandoned husk of her high-top shoe. Instantly the glow, and presumably the stink-spreading heat, vanished. “Thank goodness I can make that part go away whenever I want. I’ll have to remember to switch off the spell at the end of the day before I take you out, so I don’t smell any of it myself. That’s your sick fetish, after all, not mine. Anyway, let’s see how you did today keeping my shoe clean! You were SO impressive yesterday, Oscar, eating up everything I threw in there off the floor, like the obedient foot-bitch you are, but I guess I didn’t expect anything less from someone who’s so desperate to be around my feet, you’ll let them be your food, drink, and shelter forever.”

Done mocking for the moment, Amber peered into the darkness of her shoe while seated above me. My heart stopped, watching her expression change from a discerning frown to a creeping smile.

This must have indicated I’d won, which of course would mean an even more insurmountable task for tomorrow, but for now it seemed I had earned a slightly-less miserable night just stuck in a box with socks, rather than strapped down inside them against her bare foot. For one second I allowed myself some optimism at this silver lining.

However, my scrap of hope was quickly stolen back when Amber turned her shoe down to shoe me the interior, as well as displaying the dark-sodden underside of her socked foot. There I saw there were still enough scone crumbs littering the fuzz that it hardly looked like I’d done anything, even though my gut was cramping with bakery trash. But what did she expect? Some of those pieces were almost as big as my entire body on their own.

Evidently, though, Amber didn’t care about the impossible mathematics of eating a scone-piece quadruple my size. And the grin she was now wearing wasn’t due to acceptance of my success, but sheer joy in the face of my failure.

“Tsk, tsk, Oscar! I gave you ONE simple job today, and you couldn’t even do that! Do you know how many jobs I had, running around the shop and ringing up customers? What the hell were you even doing with all your time down there? I assume mostly just relaxing and sniffing up all the air that you pretended was gross but really made your sad little penis hard as a microscopic rock,” Amber accused, leaning low over me until I could feel the wind of her breath. “Just when I thought you couldn’t be any more worthless. The one thing on Earth you’re any good at in life, sucking the nasty shit off the bottom of my foot, and in ten whole hours, you can’t even do that right…”

Still bound, I was powerless to stop what came next. Her fingertip extended, flicking at me off the pad of her thumb so my taped-up body was flung helplessly a few inches across the carpet. I would’ve flown even further, but I was stopped when the giantess brought her mammoth foot slamming down on top of me, stopping my arc. I was pinned abruptly in place to the carpet under the festering, water-logged mass of her ped, pressed harder than I had been all day in her shoe. Then she began to twist it back and forth like I was a cigarette butt she intended to snuff out. Naturally, the smell of her foot resumed its prior strength while I huffed directly from the soggy cotton, if not even more cloying, flooding my briefly-liberated lungs with the harsh stink of her labor all over again. Beyond, I heard the rustling of damp fabric coming unpeeled from her sweat-wrinkled skin as Amber removed her sock, while still keeping me clamped beneath the ball of her foot just below her cushiony toes.

At last she released the pressure, but just enough to let her sock slip off the meaty pad of her sole, and the second it had cleared her toes, her foot crushed me yet again, this time with the naked, pinkish, oily brunt of her callused arch. The scent only increased now, without the barrier of her worn-out sock to “protect” me from the might of her foot itself, and Amber wasted no time in grinding me against the carpet, letting me feel the sweat-slickened ridges that made up the micro-grooves in her pale flesh. This assault turned devastating quickly without any more magic required, leaving me in a hacking and spitting fit while failing to deal with the overload of feminine pestilence entering my system. I’d thought that maybe having her socked feet out in the open for a couple minutes might help dilute the fragrance, but it turned out the real punch of gnarly flavor was trapped inside Amber’s sock all along, ready to blast out like a geyser with every flex of her sole.

And if the smell wasn’t enough, the abrasiveness of her gently-blistered foot skin scraped against my tape binds, which were already loosened from a day spent soaking in lukewarm sweat puddles, and ripped them free. While I was technically no longer tied from neck to ankle now, I still had no chance of getting out from under Amber’s foot until she wished me to. Now I could feel her exposed foot plastered over every part of my body, a sensation I would’ve once dreamed about, but which only made me want to puke more as I was violently spun and rolled every which way.

The longer she rubbed her sole into her helpless one-third inch shoe-dweller, the more I discovered the tape adhesive being replaced with a different, but just as gloopy substitute. While Amber’s feet were nude now, they were still layered with muck from a day spent standing and melding with her socks, and even worse than usual due to the enchantment she put on her own shoes just for the sake of tormenting me. Sweat-treated baking flour was scattered as a graying powder in the creased ravines of her sole, dried mud clods dotted the fleshy canvas like chocolate chips, and thick gooey strings of black toejam were smeared into her skin from the toe-shafts all the way down to her heel.

“Looks like you’re pulling a double shift today, loser,” Amber growled in a way that made her seem almost godlike while I remained pinned beneath her foot. “Better good to work, huh?”