For Richer, For Smaller (Chapter 20) (Patreon)

By what surely had to be the second hour of this in-shoe horror show, or the second goddamn week of it for all Tony could perceive in his fractally-warped sense of pang-addled time, he was getting treacherously close to losing his grip. To put it lightly. Over the lackadaisical span of each and every pounding traipse of quashed tonnage that the giantess bequeathed to her supposed life partner without pity or remorse, the shrinker felt himself cycling through a mental rolodex of ever-evolving vendettas: Against the small-minded dweebs at his company who’d designed the shrinking technology without a more analgesic contingency plan for high-pressure emergencies. Against all the yes-men and subordinates who hadn’t questioned the timing of his usage of these permanent advancements on his own body before it was too late to delay. Against the manufacturer of this lavender slipper for not creating something fluffier and better-protective that would stand up to its hypothetical use as a torture device, which had now made it just as inviting for a lay-down as a bed of nails. Against himself, for failing to control his wife and therefore his poorly-captained household more effectively, though he got over that one faster than the others. And against Lillian most of all, for being such a lowdown selfish maniacal cash-grubbing advantage-thieving foot-whoring bitch who thought she could squeeze some unearned capital and all Tony’s erotic yearnings out of him in one fell swoop. That grudge stuck best of all.

Though just as persistent and, in the moment, seemingly-infinite as these bone-deep grievances was the wholly penetrating tactile torment of being trampled for so long and so heartily within the confines of a dark stuffy atmosphere-capturing shoe, the walls of which seemed to be closing in tighter on him by the minute. Tony had begun this Sisyphean stomp-fest with that questionably-real illusion of having his shrunken melon-head gradually gooshed down beneath the woman’s gigantic weighty ped until liquefied brain was ready to burst out of every skull orifice like coconut milk from a cracked husk. That sensation, literally impossible to acclimate himself around, not only refused to numb by even a fraction of its crushing pain percentage over one hour and into two, but was now actively metastasizing further down through his unfortunate half-foot-tall frame like a rapidly-spread infection.

Muscle fibers below his skin, if he trusted his on-fire senses, were still unnaturally elasticizing like beef jerky tugged into the shape of strung-out saltwater taffy, not just elapsed around his cranium this time, but all the way down through his chest, stomach, arms, groin, and legs. In the throes of foot-imprinted agony suffused into his every organic layer, Tony couldn’t help but imagine himself as one of those eerie crimson-toned musculature dummies displayed in science classrooms, only with so many chunks of once-strong tissue shredded away that it came to better resemble the latex corpse of a large red balloon full of puncture holes.

And it wasn’t just the bones loosely helmeted around his cerebellum that seemed in jeopardy this time from so much truck-hefty treading under Lillian, but instead each vulnerable readily-lost puzzle piece of his skeleton was felt emphatically and individually with a sharpened awareness he never thought he’d be sensitive enough to appreciate. It was like every structural contour was being smashed into straight-line rigidity. He wouldn’t have been surprised if his marrow was on the verge of oozing out through shattered cartilage like fruit juice through a split stem in a plastic drinking straw. Tony was all too familiar by now with the crucifying ache of his ribcage seemingly ready to curl in on itself and then totally flatten out like comb teeth under the umpteenth-thousandth step his titanic wife had taken upon him today. That impression was more compounded than ever before now, as the bulky zenith of each slipper-thudding press back into the floor for the giantess’s next lumbering launch made the six-incher legitimately believe that the rubberized frontside of his ribcage bars were being folded in on the backend curves, effectively squishing all skeletal dimension out of his torso on a stride-by-stride repeat basis.

Hour two morphed hideously into three. How all the vital organs that were nestled between the shrinker’s bouncily constricted bones had managed not to rupture yet, he couldn’t have said. Sure, his durability had been demonstrably improved as a shrunken lifer, but who was to say that physiological insurance didn’t merely apply to the outer layers? His flesh, his muscle, and maybe even his bones could withstand and reform more-or-less anew after a herculean trampling effort from Lillian’s slipper-clad warpath, but maybe if all those defenses were ultimately breached, his lungs and stomach and kidneys and whatever-the-fuck-else was hurting so oppressively in there right now would burst apart just as mortally as any trodden-upon insect’s. But then again, perhaps his innards had already begun to pop one at a time after all, and he just didn’t know it yet; his discomfort-clogged brain might have been so preoccupied with comprehending the sheer brunt of both a gargantuan meaty arch and weathered foam-slip insole collapsing in on his body from all sides, that his awareness couldn’t even catch up fast enough to alert his conscious nerves that everything necessary for survival within him was currently being pummeled into pulpy prune juice. Not that he could’ve done anything to alleviate this process, even if he did feel every entrail erupting asunder in sequence.

The magnitude of torturous pressure being squelched into him was absolutely astronomic now. Tony’s body had become like a sponge in every sense, and not just for its softened flimsy-floppy physical susceptibility to the terraforming power of Lillian’s foot. He feverishly believed himself to be absorbing every iota of pain she was compressing into him as though it was a gushing fountain’s worth of water on par with the base of Niagara Falls, and his insignificant six-inch form was but a porous yellow hunk of kitchen sink cellulose wedged inside her house shoe. That turbulent waterfall current of footbound contraction soggily violated through every cubic micrometer of himself, bled out the other side, then came rushing right back into him the next time he was scrubbed against the same recycled puddle of relinquished distress by another controlled stomp, ensuring that mammoth proportion of unearthly soreness was imposed again and again through his body, front to back, up and down, and in every direction at once.

“Well, little one? You’ve had some time to think down there. A good, long while. And I’d just love to know what’s going on in that adorable squishy head of yours right now.”

Lillian must have taken a seat on the bed, crossed her leg over her knee, and batted her fuzzy lavender slipper away to retrieve her husband’s borderline-comatose body with such fluid flippancy that, as had become a trend for Tony’s blurred senses, he didn’t even recognize the point of transition between that last stamp beneath the supple immaculate-peach paradise island of her sweaty dictatorial sole, and his bracing liberation back into the outside world. Though he certainly didn’t feel particularly free yet, with his wife’s fingers still lashed possessively around his body, and her gaze boring into his. It was only after his stinging retinas readjusted to the light that he could look down his half-foot frame with clarity and confirm that he wasn’t now a sludgy viscera splatter cupped in Lillian’s palm like bloodied ground beef, but in fact still himself: tense, veiny, flushed almost as purple as her slippers, and unstoppably quavering due to the lingering riptide of carking pangs that still haunted his every extremity. But still human-shaped, and miraculously intact. He even noticed the damp chafing of several orgasms’ worth of trampling aftermath in his boxers, all experienced while pressed in Lillian’s slipper the last three hours, though naturally those accidental flashes of unappreciated pleasure were but drops in an ocean of harsher sensations, and might as well have been waking wet dreams.

“Take your time,” the giantess added in kindly murmur, when Tony failed to reply within the first tremulous minute of his reintroduction back to oxygen, sunlight, and a basic shred of humanity. Her fingers thoughtfully rippled and refolded back around his body as if brandishing a queenly scepter, not using any harsh force, but still just stimulatingly enough that the shrinker instinctively winced at brushes of her digits more cautious than butterfly wings. “But, don’t take too long, either. As you always like to remind me, time is money. And it would be simply divine if all that time you just spent getting squashed under my foot had put you in a more generous mood. Because money isn’t everything, little one. Not to you now, especially, because it’s all mine. I only need a little more cooperation from you, a few pesky strings of numbers and letters, and everything will start to be all right again.”