For Richer, For Smaller (Chapter 19) (Patreon)

Tony meant to croak “WAIT!” just before the woman put the slipper back on. He intended it with such passionate desperation, in fact, that he even thought he heard himself say the word, just before speaking became an impossibility again by the pounding reunion between Lillian’s house-shoe underbelly and the ground below. But he’d only actually belched the most pathetic of pleading non-English rasps, as his respiratory system was still too trounced by the giantess’s earlier footwork to manage anything but measured gulps. And regardless, only now as his warden rolled back in the chair and then stood upon his ill-prepared little body again within her mighty fur-lined slipper, did it truly sink in for Tony that she wouldn’t have heeded him even if he did vomit that word out in time. She was absolutely serious about this, and apparently out of her fucking mind.

The grinding ache of being walked upon as Lillian’s slipper inmate was so cuttingly recent in the six-incher’s abused sensory memory, since she’d barely taken him out of there for even a minute of respite to demand ownership over his entire wealth before cramming him right back inside, that he foolishly believed he might be able to steel himself marginally better this time against the curb-stomping onslaught of idly-paced tramples to come. Once again, though, Tony was decidedly incorrect in that hope. Instead he found the moment-to-moment pain of being used as a living slipper insole so soon again to be leagues more potent than the tenderer skull-hammering aftermath when he could begin to feel his own body again as something other than a stompable voodoo doll for all Lillian’s punishing frustrations. Plus there was the added strain of the yarn contraption she’d made just for him, assuring that Tony was plastered compactly up into her sole from the get-go thanks to the harness’s sock-like tensity, rather than waiting on inertia and sweat to do the job. His limbs were also robbed of their ability to flounder, keeping him permanently splayed like a starfish until such time that she saw fit to slip the red-cloth apparatus off her foot again. Whenever the hell that would be.

Of course, she’d told him exactly how long he’d have to wait – three hours – before being graced with another opportunity to give her all his banking passcodes, and by extension his entire fiscal manhood. She’d said it very clearly and without malice, so he’d be sure not to mistake what was in store. Yet the length of time Lillian had just forewarned seemed so outrageously endless in Tony’s mind, when even the short multi-minute sample he’d received before between the balcony and the office felt like ten times as long at least, that the significance of it hadn’t begun to register for him yet. The longest and worst test he’d endured up to now was that yoga session this morning, for “only” a single hour, and even the individual moments of that meditative-albeit-exertive foot-squashing exercise were much tamer compared to what he was feeling down here in her slipper. She may as well have said he’d be in her slipper for three days straight, and the shrinker would’ve been equally as mired in a harrowing type of mentally-paralyzed stasis, unable to think more than a heartbeat at a time outside the next immediate instant of oppressive air-purging joint-purpling undersole condensation.

Time itself seemed to dilate into a non-moving sludge now. Even though empirically, its passage could’ve been counted in the exorbitant number of steps Lillian took while wearing her husband in her house-shoe, if only the little guy had enough spare brain cells left to track that part of reality outside this stuffily confined super-heated sliver of miserably pressurized existence between the giantess’s nude sole and tamped-down slipper.

Whatever amount of capital his company had poured into developing the shrunken subject’s virtual invulnerability, Tony realized much too late, it evidently still wasn’t nearly enough money. Jesus Christ, why hadn’t he paid one of those eggheads a couple extra million to design some kind of built-in morphine supply that kicked in when the shrinker’s durability limits were tested by an especially grudging giantess’s foot? Why had he been so fucking idiotic not to somehow foresee that possibility, extreme and unlikely as it seemed at the time, and account for it when he still had the chance? Yes, his procedurally-improved anatomic constitution kept him intact throughout these barefooted one-woman stampedes, which was the reason he was even still awake and alive, instead of turned into an unrecognizably gory roadkill splatter literal weeks ago when even his trample-thirsty mere-mortal self couldn’t handle the pound-for-pound stress of a six-and-a-half-story-tall giantess’s full weight standing on him without remorse. But now more than ever, Tony felt like the opposite of invincible. He felt weak. Sickly. Frail. Even bendable, like a lump of wet clay pressed underfoot that Lillian might remold into something entirely new and inhuman at the slightest cruel whim.

Many times before this in-slipper consequence took place, Tony thought he knew what it felt like to flatten beneath his spouse, like his meat-sack vessel of a body was being industrially pressed into sheet metal, only to come out on the other side without any bruises or scrapes as souvenirs to show for his suffering. This time, though, the six-incher was prepared to bet just about every dollar he had – HIS dollars, not Lillian’s – that a more-physical degradation result of so much repeated tromping was now befalling his brittle insides, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.

Most prominently, Tony felt like his poor skull had been transformed to have the softened structural integrity of a cantaloupe, with its shell valiantly holding out at first while it was squeezed by uniform feminine arch compression. Yet eventually the sphere began turning to a misshapen ovoid, while pulp and juices sloshed within, ready to erupt against Lillian’s wrinkly lotioned flesh once the husk was finally penetrated and cracked wide open via determined heel-crushing. At first the shrinker wondered if this constrained re-sculpting of his most-important bones might cause his eyeballs to spout right out of the sockets, but the longer the effect wore on, his greater half-serious concern instead became whether his blinded peepers wouldn’t recede all the way back into his scrambled skull, while gray matter came oozing out instead like spilled oatmeal. His pain-prickling nose felt ready to crumple into a stumpy pig snout. His lips seemed about to fold permanently behind his teeth just to make more room. Any three-dimensional character in his countenance felt as though it was being gruesomely sanded down to a measly two dimensions, flat and empty as a cheap Halloween mask from all possible sides.

The omnipresent strain of Lillian’s stepping atop him made it feel like Tony’s personal volume of muscular tissue, especially around his face, was being removed piece by piece. But rather than leaving gaps below the skin, the organic material that remained was instead just stretched further to cover these losses, making everything between his skin and bone feel like a rubber band stretched so far that it was seismically tremoring on the verge of a catastrophic snap. The hypersensitive harm that accompanied all these contusing maladies to every neck-up feature felt like a combination of fired-up stovetops hugged around his cranium, and a sustained lightning strike bottled inside him at the painful split-instant of the eternal bolt’s electrifying contact. And though time was still essentially unknowable to Tony while taking every foot-contained ounce of downtrodden vendetta his wife had built up toward him over the years, even in the back of his crushed-down mind, he knew that this three-hour financial reconsideration time had only just begun.

As far as Tony could tell from his subterranean shoe-void, Lillian was spending her early afternoon exactly as she normally would, walking about the house in her cozy slippers and tending whatever required her attention. Though ironically, she may have even been doing so at a more lethargically easygoing pace compared to her usual harried efficiency to clean and cook and self-maintain on a schedule: padding around with lazily rolled arch rises at a breezy yoga-zen tempo that absolutely did not translate to a more leisurely experience for the six-inch man below her in any way, shape, or form. For the first time in many weeks, she was evidently beholden to no timetable but her own, still fixing a meal for herself, tidying up as she pleased, and watching TV, yet every listless on-and-off arch-mashing into Tony and the beaten rag of her slipper insole carried with it the momentum and anguish of twenty jogging-speed pattered footsteps on the balls of her feet. These were deep steps, measured and purposeful as anything Lillian had ever done to appease and now punish her shrunken spouse.