Happy Birthday Blues (Chapter 4) (Patreon)

Fate seemed to have a cruel sense of humor, because Ted put his all into becoming known when Alexis walked toward them. Screeching, waving his arms, and punching Molly’s sensitive toe-skin, the little man thought for a moment he’d been discovered when Alexis’s cold eyes passed over the target. But he realized she was only sizing up the birthday girl’s foot, not studying its minute details, while preparing the sandal to be filled. In a heart-breaking flash, during which Ted shouted his loudest, Molly’s ped flew toward the strappy metallic-colored footwear he’d chosen just for her. No one raised a voice to point out the conspicuous millimeter-tall victim clinging like a flea to that sun-glazed pocket of lightly-stenched, buttery-soft flesh. As Molly dutifully flattened her sole and pointed those digits, they winnowed together, closing the gaps and fossilizing Ted again between the spongy humid walls of her toes.

Enclosed in sightless funky-scented void again, his body stretched in a spread-eagle position between the twin pillars, Ted felt his sister fidgeting to apply the other shoe to her remaining foot. Then came the inevitable slam of both her sandals striking the carpet. Feeling the immense vibrations wracking Molly’s digits, spanning from her hardy heel, all the way up her supple arch, and to these dewdrop-tipped peach toes, Ted had to guess his colossal sibling was walking around the room, to test out the fit of the shoes and show them off to her friends. There wasn’t much to go on in the darkness, aside from the pattern of mass and pressure building up in her flexed extremities, only for gravity to vanish when her loosened foot soared up for another step. Each elegant lift and each crash landing was felt by Ted in his every atom, and he was beginning to feel like he was at the epicenter of a magnitude 7 earthquake. Never in his maddest dreams might he have imagined the destructive powers of his own big sister’s foot, yet here he was, finding it out for himself.

When by surprise Molly’s toes splayed especially far apart, bending and blanching white from pressure, Ted realized his sibling was arching her foot against the ground, heel-up, like a model pivoting on the runway. Her copper sandal had all but vertically capsized. Distantly, he heard the laughter and applause from the party guests. Then, in a move that made the shrunken man’s heart leap into his throat, Ted came unpeeled from his sister’s toe flesh. Though he’d been thoroughly adhered to the wall after so much rubbing and twisting, a layer of slippery sweat, invisible to all except insects, had painted itself into the crack between Molly’s toes. That lubrication was all it took for Ted to fall away and land hard on the basin of the leather sandal: an outcome he’d hoped deeply for earlier, but which now presented a major threat. Ironically, he was far safer when firmly affixed among the grip of his sister’s delightfully squishy, muggy toe pads, rather than separate, where the single tap of a toe or a slant of the shoe could send him to Kingdom Come.

In a panic, Ted tried to grab hold of the rawhide-like ground which formed the sandal insole, or his sister’s own prodigious toes still bucking with each step. Even though those same digits might well squash him dead in one pulse, they were also much safer for holding him compared to rolling around under her foot. His efforts were in vain, however. While Molly took another lap around the room, Ted tumbled like a loose marble between the lower curvature of both pillowy toes, and soon found himself sliding beneath them all, narrowly avoiding the down-trodding blow of each digit when it came back to rest again on the insole. Unable to control his movement, Ted just had to shut his eyes and hope for the best as he spun head-over-heels along the row of all five toes, coming a hair’s breadth away from being squished by each of them in turn whenever Molly strode. The meager pinky toe, which alone came to roughly the scale of a hot air balloon next to the millimeter-tall sibling, almost bashed him into human paste.

By unlikely chance Ted somehow prevailed, however, and was just about to count his blessings, when Molly wandered back toward the couch to more golf-clapping from her friends. The spritely brunette resumed her cross-legged seat, and began immediately to loosen the binds around her sandaled foot. On his knees, Ted watched from below upon the platform of the insole, his heart in overdrive, as his sister’s vast godlike fingers pried apart the straps to liberate her foot. Slowly the space within the open-aired footwear widened, leaving Ted trapped on the falling stage of the insole, until the entirety of his sister’s sole was hovering overhead.

Tremoring with horror and reverence, the tiny young man stared in shocked wonder at the tapestry of living foot, the hilly flesh-plain alternately smooth like untouched ice cream, then quickly stippled with adorable creases and furrows whenever she flexed her arch again. Her every wrinkle formed a river unto itself, a tesseract of vivacious hues from a pale yellowy bend, then a flushed orange-pink when her skin turned rosy again; her heel had the unmoving sturdiness of a planetary wrecking ball, while those toes engaged in absentminded play, the bulky big toe crossing over the slender second and compressing.

All of this took place just out of reach, displaying the raw deadly force Ted would experience if his sister chose to slap her foot back into place against the insole, with her miniaturized sibling unknowingly and helplessly abandoned in between those massive shapes. Of course, as Molly began removing the footwear, Ted’s destination instead seemed to be the floor way below, perhaps even riskier than the thought of being quashed yet again by a falling foot the size of a small island. If his sister simply let go of the shoe once her foot was evicted, he and the sandal would bounce off the carpet, likely flinging Ted catapult-style toward doom, if not simply allowing him to be pulverized beneath the rubbery treads when the shoe came to rest.

“You’re taking it off already?” Alexis complained at Molly. “You barely had a chance to break them in!”

“I guess that’s true…” Molly said.

“You make those work, girl,” Tara relented with a smile, winking at her too.

“I still hate sandals, but they’re all right on you,” Jessica snorted.

“They look really great on you, Molly,” Stephanie supportively promised. “Go ahead, keep them on!”

“All right, all right,” Molly sighed, laughing again. “I’ll keep them on! I want Ted to see me in them, anyway, since he put in so much effort to make this special.”

Rather than refasten the straps of the sandal, however, the girl kept one fully on, while the other shoe, one that just so happened to contain her unwitting brother, was left to dangle haphazardly off her foot, which had begun to swing like a drunken pendulum.

Gripping the grainy platform of his giant sister’s insole as best as he could, Ted tried to hold steady and channel whatever pieces of rock-climbing expertise he’d heard secondhand from Tara over the years. By finding irregularities in the leather texture, the shrunken fellow was able to keep himself from sliding down the slope toward the ground, suspended only by the thong grasped in Molly’s dense tree trunk-like toes. Yet, all the climbing knowledge in the world couldn’t have prepared him for his sibling’s ankle-bobbing, because most mountains weren’t in a constant state of wobbling, and as the giantess happily and obliviously scrunched and flared her toes, playing with the new shoe like a yo-yo, Ted inevitably lost his grip.

Shrieking, he tumbled backward down the hill, bouncing along it each time his sister gave the sandal another flop upward, thus causing him to rebound back and forth between the cowhide platform and the cushy flesh-rimpled ceiling of Molly’s naked foot overhead, all while careening nearer to the end of the line. Ironically, Ted would’ve given anything in this moment for his sister to slam her foot back into place in the sandal, no matter how much it hurt to be pile-driven under her weighty heel, because at least it would save him from a plummet.

Yet no such thing occurred, and at the last second, the little guy grabbed hold from the back of the sandal, just under the heel, his body hanging through the window formed by stylish criss-crossing leather straps. As Molly was still seated with one leg propped over the other, chatting merrily with her friends at such a continuous din that there was no hope of anyone hearing even Ted’s noisiest wails, he just had to hope that someone would spot the insect-like being riding bronco-style on the back of a shoe precipice. Again, fortune didn’t smile on him in this way, as the colossal girls were far too preoccupied with gossiping and joking about matters not related to the miniature survivalist they had no idea was seconds away from falling to quadriplegic doom or, worse, landing fine, only to come under the shadow of Molly’s new shoe, allowing Ted to be smushed into two gory dimensions by his own birthday gift to her.

Serendipitously, however, random chance just barely saved his neck. Rather than wrench her light-tanned French-tipped toes a final violent time into the thong in such a way that her brother would cascade toward his demise, Molly gracefully loosened her foot’s grip on the dangled shoe, lowering it toward the floor. Of course, the descent was still a rush for Ted, but mercifully nonlethal, and he held tight as he could during the drop, bracing for impact.

When the leather husk thunked against the carpet, Ted lost his grasp and slammed hard into the floor below, but from close enough that he was only left sore. Breathless, he gazed one final time up the dizzyingly steep hill of that sandal, still hung like an oversized ornament from his sister’s pretty ped, and realized there wasn’t time for celebrating. Sprinting away as fast as he could just before Molly could force her foot back into the sandal by slamming it dramatically into the ground, he avoided getting caught under the treads, but the wind-blast force of her stomp still left Ted airborne.

When he landed again, weary and then shocked at just how far he’d flown, the shrunken man looked up to find he was now cowered beneath Stephanie, right as she and the other girls prepared to try on their first choices of footwear. At first he relaxed, since his sister’s childhood friend was by far the kindest person present, and would surely be the most attentive and quickest to help him before any harm came to him, given her probable-attraction to him, but then he remembered that none of that would mean anything if she didn’t see him in time, and her foot would still land just as cruelly upon him as the harshest bully’s. Especially because, considering her more full-figured shape and pudgier blanch-pale soles, it would be an especially crushing end if Stephanie’s hefty foot was misplaced.

Confirming this, Ted was alarmed when the ginger giantess, having kept her bare foot hovered in midair while easing it into a high heel, suddenly brought it crashing down on one side, the spike-heel stabbing the carpet like a spear meant to rupture a fortress wall, while on the opposite flank, her still-bare foot, plush and fair and doughy as ever, came down with the force of a whale, walling the shrunken young man between insteps. Those plump toes wriggled and her entire ped rocked from side to side, giving Ted nervous glimpses of the wrinkly underside, turned a peachy-yellow due to the pressure bearing down on it while she grunted with the effort to cram the other foot into a high-heeled pump.