Happy Birthday Blues (Chapter 2) (Patreon)

Ordinarily, Ted would have lit up to see that beaming grin of his sister’s pointed in his direction. But it wasn’t pointed at him, nor were her friendly brown eyes; they were pointed to the area above him, meaning he was perfectly invisible to her.

Molly set a soft, peachy bare foot down on the carpet as she reached the loft and assumed her full height over her unseen brother below. A mirror-shine French-tip pedicure outfitted her adorable toes. Gulping, the young man watched those toes the size of city buses scrunch against the earth, then lift along with the immense length that was the rest of her foot, and set down some incredible distance beyond. A single stride for her, but for Ted, it was akin to witnessing the extension of celestial bodies.

“Geez, Mom, you were right!” Molly called out, unable to hide her smirk. She wandered and gazed around the neatly decorated loft in appreciative wonder. “Ted did go nuts for my party!”

Her voluminous voice nearly popped Ted’s eardrums. He doubled over, clutching the sides of his skull.

“I told you so!” Isabel called out cheekily in answer.

“I guess that’s the last time I even half-doubt ol’ Teddy, wherever he is,” Molly said. “Ted! TED! Where’d ya go?”

The young man pressed his back hard against the wall of the shoe box, the way one might lash themselves to a tree during a hurricane. He felt the earth trembling from his sister’s humble, thudding footsteps. It was a struggle just to stay standing.

“Hmm, he must’ve slipped out for some reason,” Molly said to herself, twiddling her thumbs. She cupped her hand around her lips. “Mom, what was this big surprise from Ted you were hyping up?”

“Take a peek next to the presents, dear!”

Ted’s heart fluttered. Frightening as it was to have his location increasingly targeted by his leviathan of an older sister, it was nonetheless comforting to imagine this weird waking daymare might soon come to a comforting end. He wouldn’t have to run out into the terrifying open space of the room; she was coming to him.

“Next to the presents? I thought I looked by th- oh my God!” Molly remarked, eyeline snagging on the shoe boxes. Her tone rose from zero to sixty in one half-squealed syllable. She went from gently pacing the living room floor, dragging her petite toes along behind, to launching herself toward the pile of presents at gleeful, breakneck speed.

Her feet slammed concussively into the carpet as she ran across the room. The seismic roll of it beneath Ted’s legs instantly wiped him out, flat on his face; he was just glad to have the grainy carpet fibers to soften his fall. However, in the same breath, he felt the gale force wind of his sister’s average-sized body sprinting toward the row of shoeboxes. Something like a typhoon, the mere rush of it picked up his body like dust and slammed him into the shoe box, then, as if by centrifugal force, he bounced back out, several dangerous inches away from the relative safety of the cardboard wall.

Ted scrambled to his feet and looked up, just as his body was swallowed by all-consuming shadow. Light drifted in refracted strips past his eyes as the glow of it dripped between Molly’s titanic, naked toes. Her foot arched, and in the next instant, it was coming down.

Coming down on Ted.

There was no use running in either direction. It was like watching a storm cloud made of plush, wrinkled sole flesh descending from on high at all compass points. In this instant, the underside of Molly’s foot was the sky. Paralyzed, Ted opened his mouth.

“MOLLY!” he screamed. No matter whether this was a dream, and he still clung to that piece of comforting unreality, he couldn’t stay silent any longer. His body wouldn’t allow him. You couldn’t die in dreams, right? “MOLLY, I’M DOWN HERE! HELP!”

Every puny decibel of Ted’s voice, of course, was absorbed into the ceiling of bowing foot flesh. And he knew it. The globular bulbs of her toes wriggled and bent as Ted made a desperate last dash for the relative safety of those digits. There still was little chance of not being squashed amongst those thrashing toes, but at least his chances were higher than being directly beneath the crushing, unthinkable mass of Molly’s elegantly arched sole. Closing his eyes as the tidal wave of a foot made landing on the carpet, Ted flung himself as far forward as he could reach.

Molly set her foot down firm and flat on the ground as she crouched nearer to the earth for examination of her surprise birthday gift.

“Holy…” she breathed in shock as she set a hand on the nearest shoe box and lifted the lid to reveal its stylish contents. Her voice shook with excitement and even some latent emotion. “Did… did that sweet little stinker actually do what I think he did? Did… did he actually… go out and do the thing for me that I wanted since… since I was fifteen?”

Had Ted been able to hear these words, he would’ve been beaming with heart-swelling pride to hear his sister so touchingly enthused over his present.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t hear a word, because he was entombed beneath the ever-so-slightly arched geometry of Molly’s looming, bare toes. Arms crossed to his chest, he held catatonic, too terrified to flinch and risk being mistaken for a flea to be squished. The soft, living architecture of the girl’s toes flexed absentmindedly above her brother’s body as she inspected the row of shoes.

“I don’t believe it. He went all out. Just… just for me?” she whispered.

Just then, a doorbell tolled throughout the house, announcing a new arrival down below.

“Oh!” Molly said cheerfully, perking up even more than she already was from her brother’s thoughtful gift. “Somebody’s here!”

The birthday girl stood up again, absentmindedly curling her toes for purchase on the carpet and easily launched herself into a prance toward the stairs, a peppy spring in her step. Unable to keep herself from grinning after such a thoughtful surprise, Molly had decided to dispense with her usual taunting at her brother’s expense. If he was kind enough to give so freely all so she could have a lovely decade-long wish come true, she was perfectly willing to give up all sarcastic glibness. Maybe she’d even plant a sloppy kiss on his cheek, likely embarrassing him in the process as her friends arrived, but Molly didn’t even care.

Had she known what was transpiring down near the floor, she might have changed her tune. But she wasn’t aware, and so bounded down the stairs to answer the doorbell, blissfully unconscious to the fact that, at the moment she’d so naively clenched her French-pedicured toes together in order to stand, she’d gathered a very particular specimen up from the fluffy forest of rug fibers. When her digits splayed apart oh-so-briefly and ground into the carpet, Ted watched the ceiling of foot skin dropping swiftly, separating and fitting into a canyon around him. Long before he had the chance to try making another run for it, the impressive valley of his sister’s toe-cleavage had squeezed inward, clutching the beaded tips of her toes against the ball of her foot for maximum support. As a result, he now found himself stuck in the intensive sandwich of intra-toe flesh, right in the clamped crevice, as Molly happily bounded down the stairs.

Ted was just lucky that he’d been accidentally snared at the most tender location on his sister’s thankfully-soft feet, or he might’ve been turned to a stain right after her toes slapped into a vice around him. But it was still hard to be optimistic. Immobilized, all he knew now was darkness, stale oxygen-free void, and doughy toe flesh swelling from above, below, and all around. A pulse thumped through the living walls, both from her heartbeat, and the natural flexing of her smallest muscles, which nonetheless now had the capacity to implode the millimeter-tall Ted if they wrenched too hard. Her every step created an impact that rattled Ted to his bones, much more extreme than the tremors he’d experienced from across the room. Whenever Molly’s gargantuan bare foot hit the floor, her toes gracefully enclosed again, almost like an embrace of her unknown brother, though the contact felt more like a boa constrictor’s tug to the shrunken man.

He might’ve been disgusted to find himself trapped so intimately against his own sister’s foot, as indeed there was a lingering aroma of aerobic perspiration with a hint of lavender soap, but the threat to his life created by being imprisoned between her toes definitely trumped that concern. When Molly reached the stairs, though Ted couldn’t see or hear where they were, he could guess, as the rhythmic loping of her foot became far more violent, her soles pounding each step on the way down. Ted experienced full-body whiplash on the descent, unable to hold onto anything for support nor fight against the grasp of his sister’s second and third toes which now held him in thrall. He was so dizzy by the time she hit the foyer again, Ted was quite certain that if his sister opened her toes for any reason now, he’d just tumble out like a rag doll and be left on the floor, to be vacuumed up or, more likely, stomped to a red splotch by whichever titanic family member came striding toward him next.

Molly answered the door, discovering all four of her guests gathered on the other side. Next followed a chorus of amiable happy-birthday cheers, jubilant squealing, and criss-crossing greetings as the quartet of twenty-somethings were all invited inside the home by Molly and her mother. Again, Ted was wise to no specifics of what was happening in the world outside his giant sister’s restrictive toe-prison: not what they were saying, or even who had arrived. Mercifully, the newly twenty-five-year-old had yet to either crush him between her toes, or splay those digits wide enough to maroon her brother on the minefield of the front hall floor, but this was a small blessing at best. As Molly chaotically turned in all directions to hug and greet each of her four friends, she gymnastically veered on her heels and the balls of her feet. This set her toes into a squirming storm, wriggling and spreading against the tile.

Ted was nearly blinded by light spilled in between his sister’s outspread toes again. Unlike what he’d expected, though, he didn’t plop straight to the floor once she’d open the valley again, because after keeping her brother wedged so tightly between her toes for only one terrible minute, Ted was pinned into the side flank of Molly’s slender digit with no additional pressure whatsoever. It was like being molded into a wall of clay, and almost as malleable. Gasping for air, Ted fought to tilt his head high enough to spy the faces of the mile-tall-plus beings beyond. It was truly like existing in the presence of mythic deities; though they technically shared the same space, particularly all of their own merrily shuffling feet the size of cruise ships compared to Ted, the girls’ humongous grinning faces were high enough above as to be in a different stratosphere, somewhere heavenly. The shrunken man wailed for help, well-aware that his loudest cry would be drowned out by the giantesses’ slightest whispers. Not a soul noticed him, and once the hellos and reintroductions had settled down, he caught the booming commentary from his sister announcing that they’d all head upstairs for the party now. Leading the way, Molly charged up the steps, once again closing the gaps in her toes and re-sealing her brother in the coffin of marshmallowy foot flesh.