For Richer, For Smaller (Chapter 17) (Patreon)

Lillian paused, then, taking this opportunity to reach for a tall iced tea she had resting on a nearby side table and languidly slurped from it, while Tony stared up at her in anticipation of the punchline here, whatever it was, to land. Yet there was no hint of a joke here, nor even the façade of marital amorousness. The giantess’s frightening personal tempest of intangible spite and supremacy was only getting stronger, the longer she went without flinching.

“What do you m-mean?” Tony hollowly stammered.

“I mean what I just said,” she replied. “The reason I’ve been doing all this… pushing you the way I have, barely giving you time to rest, and squashing you just about as hard as I can under these pretty feet you adore oh-so-much… is to help you understand the way things are going to be from now on. Which, I guess means it’s me that’s telling you what our future holds, and not the other way around like you just said it would be, but that certainly won’t be the last time you find that I’m going to be… in charge of something that you used to take for granted as all yours. So the healthiest thing for you, little one, would be to start getting used to that idea as soon as possible. Even as I say this, though, I know you’re going to resist. You’re going to whine and scream and carry on like you have any kind of power left over me, even though a blind man could see that you don’t. Maybe you never really did even when you were taller, and I was just too unsure of myself before to see it, but no more. I want everything, Tony. Everything you have or we have is going to become what only I have. Starting with the money.”

Dumbfounded beyond all reasonable belief, and genuinely wondering now if all these weeks of having his durable cranium smushily rampaged over by his spouse’s leaden soles hadn’t permanently tarnished his sense of hearing if not left him with full-on brain damage, Tony at least had to give the giant bitch this much credit: she’d left him goddamn speechless. He’d have been hard-pressed to name another person on Earth who’d ever left him so far afield from his usual dominant position in any hypothetical exchange. Where the hell did Lillian get the ego for a move like this? Did he even really know her at all?

“Oh, I see. So I was right all along,” the shrinker declared, in effort to regain some of the strategic ground he’d lost by his prior bafflement and stuttering. “This was about your allowance. You want a bigger slice of the pie, even though every red dime that comes into this house is because of my blood, sweat, and tears. Well, Lil, let’s just say you went about this all wrong. See, I might have been open to negotiating a bigger stipend for you, if you hadn’t just spent so many weeks trying to piss me off, and ruining the thing I like to do with you the most. So I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline your request for now. Okay, I’m not even afraid. I’m happy to do that. But, listen, you know I can be a reasonable guy. Forgiving, if it’s deserved. I say we put all this past bullshit behind us, and turn things around, starting now. If you just do what you should’ve done from the start, control yourself, and remember who pays the bills around here, then maybe in six months, after you’ve proven that I didn’t make a mistake by choosing YOUR feet all those years ago, just maybe, we’ll add a few more bucks to your weekly-”

To look at her now, Lillian hadn’t been left in any kind of agitated stupor by Tony’s blathering, appearing just as tranquil as she had when he interrupted her balcony reading, while simply allowing him to rant himself near-hoarse. However, the man’s final statement was interrupted by a precise swing from that dangled lavender house slipper, still suspended from the giantess’s crossed leg, as she brought her foot down heel-first like a sledgehammer. Though for an instant it appeared she meant to smack her husband head-on with the shapely pinkish pillar of her verticalized ped, she instead imposingly bashed it down just fractions of an inch in front of his nose, creating an instant wall of flexed underfoot slope to block his already-lowly view to her lounged visage above. Meanwhile, since she’d flared her toes just right to let that bouncy slipper flop outward without coming completely off, the thing balanced upright just behind Tony, immediately placing him in claustrophobic alignment between his titanic wife’s pithy arch and the partially-sunken inner slab of her cushy purple footwear, like he’d just sidled his way between layers of drywall without an escape plan.

“Real fucking mature,” the six-incher spat, staring defiantly at the warm up-close obstruction of feminine sole. “I should’ve known you wouldn’t be able to have a real conversation to back yourself up when you started acting like a cash-grabbing brat. So let’s get something straight, here and now. It’s never going to be your money, “babe.” It’s not even OUR money. It’s mine. And you’re just deluding yourself if you think-”

Tony was cut off again, only this time by far direr force, when without even a sigh of warning, Lillian stood up from the chair, thereby flattening her previously heel-anchored foot and its tipped-up house slipper level atop the balcony surface again, with her runty spouse still caught in the space between. The little guy’s legs from the knees-down still poked out from under her weighty heel, in a comically tragic sense like some wicked witch smashed dead under a fallen house in the land of Oz, but the rest of his six-inch self was now barbarously sandwiched between the unforgiving midsection of her sole and the pliably bowed foaminess of the slipper insole. Gladly, the material making up this toasty lavender vessel was similarly buoyant compared to the many trample-designated mats Tony had purchased to practically carpet the whole house, albeit still thinner and less supportive than those, due to Lillian’s apparent favoritism to these slippers having crunched the softness down to a permanently narrower strip over several years of almost-daily wear. And the matted plushness of the insole aside, the put-upon mini-CEO still had a tangibly vengeful foot resolutely stamped down upon him now, ensuring there wasn’t a prayer of him wriggling free from inside the slipper.

Pushed well-past his boiling point now, Tony might’ve unloaded on his wife with reborn fury and a higher tier of colorful language, if only his lips – along with the rest of his face – weren’t currently cemented so stoutly into this condemning overhang of gigantic yoga-muscular buttery-sleek sole, unable to budge except for some strained vibration. Nothing about his position here ought to have felt much different from his pain-drenched experiences the past couple weeks in particular, as Lillian had begun stepping on him with increased frequency, over whatever terrain she pleased, and with a new brand of pointed concentration that simulated the agonizing impossibility of having his bones and organs somehow squished so tightly together that they began to occupy the same puddled space at once. Yet the fact that she’d just ensnared him inside her slipper smack in the middle of a long-overdue argument, not only beneath her foot but treated with as much care as the tattered sweat-warped insole of a shoe she might chuck back in the closet without even removing him first, appreciably amplified Tony’s ire. And that effect wasn’t just due to the factors of balmy climate and phonebooth-like constriction intensified by this unwanted lodging in a fuzzy slipper.

Every time the six-incher erroneously believed that his personal giantess had discovered a new way to stomp-smother him that planted the maximum-potential heft upon his questionably-enduring frame, she seemed to invent yet another invisible method that made her feel even heavier and more capable of decimating her once-willing victim into a broken man-shaped smear. Like Lillian had somehow been gradually hiding coins in every pocket and opening on her body without her shrunken spouse’s knowledge, with the differences not being felt hour-by-hour or penny-by-penny, yet once that loose change had built into a collection more cumbersome than Olympic barbell plates, the trouncing impacts from her most ordinary strides imparted a near-unfathomable degree of pressure on Tony. And she hadn’t even taken another step yet. Some foolish part of the little guy believed she might have made her intended point already, and would allow him to slide out the back of her slipper by arching her heel up until his diminutive body came unstuck from her hearty crease-textured flesh like an over-large piece of insole-jam fluff. She’d rudely interrupted him twice now, making it clear she was in no mood to talk out their considerable differences at this time, which was ultimately fine by the constriction-dizzied half-foot-high “captain.” The longer she dragged this out, the more he was leaning toward taking any chance of near-future reconciliation off the table, and then kicking her out of the house until she got her head on straight enough to come crawling back.