Scott Stevens was falling.

            In the darkness he held his eyes shut and his teeth clamped together to avoid biting his tongue.  His arms were crossed over his chest solemnly, as though he’d been arranged in a coffin for burial, his legs straight and his breaths only in rare intervals where it became necessary.  A pair of white boxers was all that clothed him, along with the form-hugging ankle bracelet used to keep track of his movements.

            Besides that, he was adrift in his mind.  Primal.

            It felt to him like being a resident of Deep 6.  All that surrounded him was nothingness.  A void.  He could exist on his own merit, whatever that may be.  Nothing was there and nothing could touch him.

            Scott was an island.  Content and alive.

            Convincing himself of this wonderful illusion was the only oasis the three-inch-tall young man really had in between pulverizing slams from his younger sister Maggie’s sweat-drenched toes as he remained pinned under her steamy socks in the tip of her soccer cleat while she sprinted across the field.

            This wasn’t an irregular location for the twenty-one-year-old shrunken ward to find himself in Maggie had gleefully decided to start wearing her tiny brother in her shoes during scrimmages with the team earlier that month and it had already become a favored location of hers to store him.  He had almost gotten used to it by now, and had learned the requisite survival tactics to avoid coming out of the misadventure with more than a few swollen bruises.

            Still, this was the championship game, and Maggie was out for blood.  She had been competitive all her life, and the fact that she had a human being curled up like a lemming under her soused toes wasn’t going to impede her aggressive ferocity in the least.

            In fact, it was probably even more inspiring to her.

            The last three months of Scott’s life had been nothing short of a dive-bomb into heretofore unexplored depths of human mediocrity.  After drunk driving and nearly ending the life of a woman, and extinguishing her unborn child’s existence, Scott had been sentenced by a rabid public and bitter jury to indefinite imprisonment.

            With some maneuvering from his up-and-coming politician and lawyer mother Judy, however, he had dodged the bullet of prison and instead accepted an alternative bullet square in the eye: he was to be shrunken down to a height of one foot, or even less if his family so chose, and be placed under house arrest, legally compelled by any reasonable service request his caretakers made of him.

            His mother Judy Stevens had placed a lockdown on his entire existence.  The law already mandated that he only leave the house once a week, but otherwise, she ensured that Scott was an entity exclusive to the confines of her home.  Every day was spent with him at her general disposal on whatever chores she could come up with, and when she ran out of things for him to do, he could usually manage to snatch a few minutes of tortuously paranoid free time before his sister found him and took her turn.  He had no computer access and could only use the television if there was no work to be done and no one else wanted to use it.  His bedroom had been converted into a storage closet, leaving him to sleep on the living room couch with nowhere to go for privacy.  There were no phone calls and no visitors either, though frankly the young man had his doubts anyone would want to take advantage of either option even if his mother allowed for them.

            And the first opportunity for parole was not for eleven months.

            So now he was here, with the full support of the judicial system and the American public, stuffed into the shoe of his sixteen-year-old sister as she pounded the pitch in pursuit of her teammates.

            Blonde, popular, and an increasingly stellar athlete, Maggie had benefited perhaps more than anyone else out of the novel custody arrangement.  Slightly short for her age and unhappy with it, she instantly became a towering titan in the presence of her older brother, and had never been shy about letting him know.  This legal decree had only cemented her ability to lord over him whenever she pleased.

            She took particular delight in personally stripping him down to his underwear like a doll and waving goodbye to him at the bottom of her cleat as she reared the maleficent form of her over-eager foot above him, usually already glistening with a glazing of sweat before it even managed to mold itself around his papery body.

            It was getting harder and harder for Scott to convince himself he was floating in his private nothingness as his little sister’s steps became slower.  She paused where she stood to assess the situation on the field.

            Her sock, colored a festive yellow for the team’s jerseys, coddled his body oppressively from all sides.  The stench was omnipresent, foggy and tangible in its sticky haze, and though Scott had trained himself to absorb as little of the odor as possible while trapped in these gulag conditions, there was no real escaping it when Maggie’s toes were affixing him down like this to the worn-out base of the shoe.

            The writhing weight of them absolutely immersed him in their essence.  Salt, sharp and cutting in its tang, but also the aroma of muddy earth and the girl’s water-pruned flesh met his senses and walloped them.

            It was the absolute epitome of human musk, unforgiving and unapologetic.

            Just like Maggie herself.

            The thick fibers of the sock soaked up the pungent floods of sweat like a sponge, and Maggie was not one to hold back, especially for the championship game.  When Maggie laid her toes down upon Scott, letting the sock bury him in an avalanche of squelching cotton, it was like being submerged in a wading pool while wound up in a burlap sack.

            No room to escape, no room to breathe, and barely room to exist.

            The volume of moisture was unrelentingly cruel, dribbling in cold rivulets from between the fit teen’s massive, swollen toes and pooling around the base of the shoe before sopping up into the insole, and into Scott himself.

            Given how Scott was positioned so that his body was stretched under all five of his sister’s wriggling digits, he didn’t miss much of the action.

            His hair was a matted mess, his underwear was dampened through, and Maggie’s partially dried foot sweat was caked in a gummy film across every square inch of his body.  It was her loving signature on her favorite doll.

            It made him itch from every angle, particularly where sweat had soaked through his boxers and made its way under his crotch, but he dared not move to scratch.  At any moment, Maggie could take off running again, sending him slamming back and forth under the heft of her toes and the squishy floor of the cleat, and he would be forced to flop around at her random mercy in the violent darkness until she held still again and he could get his bearings.

            He had learned this the hard way on several occasions, at least three of them already during this game.  Well into the second half and with the score tied, he wasn’t taking any chances on moving again.  He just had to hold it, close his eyes, and let himself re-enter the isolation of the blackness.

            The beautiful bliss of being alone in his mind.

            “Hey little loser,” Maggie snickered as she knocked the heel of her removed cleat against her wrist, letting her brother tumble awkwardly toward the light at the end of the dark, smelly tunnel.

            Scott jerked back into full consciousness, blinking in the harsh dying sunlight.  He hadn’t even realized his sister had taken her foot off of him and out of the cleat.  The coach had apparently called a last-minute timeout, and Maggie had found some privacy from the crowd on a bench behind a storage shed to remove her shoe.

            With a sigh of pitifully undeserved optimism, Scott decided he must’ve been improving at his technique of blocking out reality.

            He rolled off the lip of the scuffed black cleat and landed in her soft, expectant palm like the prize at the bottom of the cereal box.  Righting himself as she cupped him closer to her enormous and inescapable face for examination, he realized his boxers had started slipping down his thighs in the downward shuffle.  He quickly grasped the waistband in his fingers and tugged it higher, although they were still squalidly drenched from the salty wash he’d received under Maggie’s busy toes, and the feeling was wildly unpleasant at best.

            It was Scott’s desperate wish to remove his boxers at the earliest possible second and wash himself off for some relief from the itching, stickiness, and abysmal feminine BO that had been stamped and soaked all over him.  Of course, as he gazed up at Maggie’s laughing blue eyes, her grin barely holding back a cackle at the sight of him sprawled in her hand, he knew there was no way in hell that would happen.  Not willingly.  He still had his pride.

            Somewhere.

            He was pretty sure he did, at least.

            “Eww, you weirdo!” Maggie snarled with false disgust, wrinkling her nose cutely at the sight of the tiny young man in his soaked underwear.  “Did you pee your little panties?”

            “Boxers,” Scott corrected under his breath.

            “What?” Maggie snapped cheerfully, though her tone was forceful.

            “I said… I said I didn’t.  I promise,” he said more loudly, averting his gaze.

            “I guess it is pretty wet down there, isn’t it?” she seemed to concede, peeking with one eye open into the end of the shoe, before quickly withdrawing her face from the opening and coughing loudly.  “Wow.  Okay, I guess kinda smelly too, huh?  But what can I say?  It’s the championship, and they need me doing work out there!”

            “I guess they do, don’t they?” Scott answered neutrally, with just a touch of encouragement to appease her.

            “You look pretty uncomfortable with your undies like that,” she cooed with sudden gentleness and care sweetening her words.  She tilted her head as though affectionately examining an adored pet.

            Scott knew that in his sister’s eyes, this was just about as high an honor as he was going to receive.

            She brought the tip of her finger under Scott’s chin and lifted it just enough to make him look directly at her looming face again.  “Do you want to take them off?” she chuckled, the familiar calculating smile returning to her lips.