Scott’s heart railed against his ribcage and his breathing became shallower as he peered around the corner of the hallway and into the kitchen.

            The coast was clear.  Maggie was nowhere in sight.

            Sighing with quaking unease, he walked into the room, though quickly took cover again behind the island counter.

            This was no way to live.  He’d successfully spent the last twenty-four hours totally avoiding the tyrannical grasp of the towering sixteen-year-old, and but it hadn’t been easy.  She’d been gone most of the previous afternoon and evening, too, at a party with her soccer team for winning the championship.  All he had to do was make it through the rest of today and then she’d be gone at school for most of the weekdays.  Then he’d be safe.

            Until the next weekend, at least, and then he’d have to be on his guard for the next week.

            And the next year.

            And however long he was trapped here.

            He knew he was just fooling himself.  Judy was out of the house for most of the day, so he couldn’t rely on the same docile tactics of before to gain protection from her.  And of course Kyle didn’t give a damn what Maggie decided to do with their older brother.

            Sooner or later his little sister was going to get her greedy hands back on him, and then there was no escaping the bath she’d been threatening since Friday night.  The inevitability of it made the young man even more paranoid than every random sound heard throughout the house that he assumed to be Maggie’s feet stomping around in search of him.

            And though she was no longer a physical threat to him in the house, his encounter with Nancy the day before had put Scott on an anxiety installment plan that was compounding with interest every hour.  Worst of all was that he knew he was just as afraid of the domineering woman’s sultry threats as he was of the fact, in reality, he knew his baser instincts didn’t really want him to resist her advances.  The feeling of her warm, glistening lips pressed against his chest as her tongue slurped with such practiced form along his skin was still lingering in his synapses, and every time he allowed himself to return to the memory for some relief, the criminalizing bulge appeared back in his pants.

            It was turning into a complicated couple of days, to say the least.

            Scott held his hand against his chest and tried to slow his breathing, his forehead clammy from the nerves.  For once, it was something of a burden that his mother had returned him to his maximum height of twelve inches after Nancy had left the day before.  It made him a much easier target for anyone on the hunt for him, especially since the t-shirt and shorts provided for him were an oddly bright blue color like that of a highlighter.  Given how often he was disrobed purely for the humiliating entertainment of the women in his life, any other time Scott would’ve been grateful, but now it was just making him feel like he had Christmas lights coiled around his sides.

            The sudden ringing of the kitchen phone on the wall far above him jolted Scott’s heart back into overdrive, but he managed to stop himself from yelping in surprise.  He was way too tightly wound, and he knew it, but there was also no helping it.

            Out of a desire to further distract himself from the biting nerves, Scott peered upward and squinted in an effort to read the caller ID letters flashing in dim, blocky text.  Blinking to ensure he was seeing correctly, Scott’s heart resumed skipping just as quickly as before.

            “ELLA-STENSON” read the line along with the number as the phone rang again.

            It couldn’t be, and yet he knew it had to be, because Scott’s girlfriend’s number was imprinted obsessively in his mind, along with every detail of her face and the tone of her voice.

            She was trying to connect.

            This was his chance.  Slim as it was, based on the last conversation he’d had with his girlfriend, this was his chance to get some kind of emotional respite, if only through a brief phone conversation.  More than anything, Scott wanted some time to be with his girlfriend in person and try hopelessly to explain all the chaos that had occurred in the last few months, but if nothing else, he just wanted to speak to her.  He just had to hear her voice.

            Before acting, the young man felt a brief flash of panic.  Judy had strictly forbidden use of the phone for him, and though she wasn’t even in the house, the very idea of her marching back in at this very instant still seemed startlingly plausible.

            It wouldn’t be the first time the woman had returned home at the exact wrong moment to witness her son’s disallowed activities and not taken it at all well.

            Throat dry and heart fluttering, Scott forced the risk from his mind and grabbed ahold of the lower cabinet knobs of the counters.  He began pulling himself up with incredible zeal.  If he could just reach the countertop, he would be able to wrestle the phone off its stand and answer.  He wouldn’t need to talk for long, just for a few minutes to hear Ella’s voice, and no one would be the wiser.

            The grips were narrow and Scott could feel himself slipping, but time was short before the phone went to a voice message, and he was determined.  He nearly lost his grasp, but managed to swing his arm up and wrap it around the oven latch for support just in time, made more confident by the continued ringing.  The marble surface of the countertop was in reach.

            He could make it.

            The swift force of Scott’s t-shirt being jerked backward by unseen fingers instantly released him from his tenuous hold on the oven latch, and he plopped the short drop back to the floor.  With an uncomfortable smack he landed on his rear end, the phone ringing in his ears again, but with a blurry distance.

            Batting his eyes and groaning from developing soreness in his body, Scott lay on his back and looked straight up just in time to see the youthfully wrinkled ceiling of pink flesh belonging to the sole of his little sister’s bare foot lowering itself down onto him.

            “Maggie, please, NO!” Scott screeched in desperation as he threw his arms up, knowing he was running out of seconds to get the call.

            His sister’s meaty toes collided with his face and began kneading around his head, encroaching his nose and mouth in a damp crevice of feminine skin.  The girl’s sole happily splayed itself down across her brother’s small torso, entirely unimpeded by his raised arms.

            At twelve inches tall, the helplessly prone Scott wasn’t quite short enough to be completely buried under Maggie’s foot, but with her doughy toes wrestling his head, the ball of her foot teasing to collapse his chest cavity, and her firm heel poised terrifyingly above his crotch, she was able to exert just about all the control she could need over her trembling older sibling.  The pressure she was placing on him was barely a fraction of what she was capable of.

            Heartbroken and subdued, Scott watched upward with crushing dismay between two of his sister’s writhing toes as they casually played with his face.   She plucked the phone from the wall and brought it to her ear, not even bothering to look back down at her defeated brother again as she pinned him to the ground like a rodent.

            “Oh my God, Ella, it’s been so long!  How are you?” Maggie gushed, grinning and giggling excitedly into the phone.

            Coughing weakly against the barrage of earthy stenches emanating from the fleshy undersides of Maggie’s toes, Scott struggled to gain his composure and think clearly enough to find out a way to salvage this moment.

            He supposed it was slightly to his advantage that Maggie had always liked Ella, which was probably what made her willing to pick up the phone in the first place, but that simple fact wouldn’t stop her from making things even more destructive for Scott.

            Nor would it probably stop her from spilling the beans about Scott’s attempted breaking of the rules to Judy.

            That fact alone was enough to halt his struggling altogether in pre-emptive overthrow.

            “Oh, nothin’ much, just lots of school and soccer.  Boys?  Ha!  They wish…” Maggie droned on, scrunching her toes together on the sudden burst of laughter and darkening Scott’s entire world for a sickening second.  As the conversation continued, she placed her free hand authoritatively upon her hip.

            “What’s Scott up to around here?” Maggie chuckled, obviously repeating a question Ella had posed.  As she pondered the sentence, at long last the bratty blonde teen looked downward toward the floor and made eye contact with her brother, winking at his disgusted little face wedged partially between two of her squirming toes.

            She arched the ball of her foot upward ever so slightly, allowing more regular airflow for Scott’s lungs, which he reacted to by entering into a flurry of coughing as he struggled to endure.

            “I wouldn’t really say he’s… up… to much of anything, really.”

            “Maggie, PLEASE!” Scott yelped once he’d managed to choke out a normal breath again, though the cold sweat on his brow continued as he was still keenly aware of the girl’s thick heel positioned squarely over his crotch and ready to drop at any second.  “Please give me the phone.”

            “Oh, you know, nothing crazy.  He just has to do whatever we say, is all.  It’s no big deal, really.  He’s usually less than a foot tall, so there’s not much he can really do to help.  I mean, if he doesn’t do what we say, sometimes I have to teach him a lesson.  But Scott’s a smart little guy.  He’s learning how things work pretty quickly,” Maggie reported gleefully, resuming her complete ignorance of Scott’s existence once again.

            “Maggie, please, I’m… I’m begging you!” Scott peeped meekly, his voice cracking from desperation.  “Please let me talk to Ella!”

            “You want to talk to Scott?” Maggie stated loudly, again repeating what she’d heard for the benefit of the floor-bound sibling, and a triumphant smirk spread over her lips, her eyes glowing with the glorious victory of this moment.

            She arched her foot off of Scott’s body for the first time in the past few minutes, but before he had the chance to try and inch away or even speak, she was lowering it back down again.

            Pointing her flexible big toe downward with practiced dexterity, Maggie perfectly aligned the squishy pad of the toe with her brother’s nearly-weeping face and pressed down, cutting off his means of protest.

            Scott gagged as the cushiony globe of his little sister’s toe caved against his face, flooding every brain cell with an emergent desire to escape and every sense with the foul essence of Maggie’s musky flesh.

            The subtle ridges of her toe print teased poisonously against his lips and he sputtered, desperate for air and release from the girl’s power to make him stay wherever she wanted him.  The rest of his body was freed from the oppressive mattress-like burden of Maggie’s clammy sole, but because her big toe was pressed squarely to his face, he wasn’t going anywhere.

            “I don’t think that’s possible right now, actually,” Maggie continued nonchalantly from far above.  “Scott’s kind of under some new management right now, and I don’t think he’d be able to speak right now.  Yeah, sure, I’ll tell him you called.”

            No.  No.  No.

            The cloying darkness and repulsive scents leaked from Maggie’s pores recycling themselves in Scott’s head like a drug began to settle him into more of a panic.  It intensified briefly as he heard his sister laugh for a few more seconds, before deflating fully at the sound of the hung phone being slammed back into its charger, the conversation concluded.

            Finally, with hope adequately drained from her victim, Maggie removed her toe from Scott’s face and planted her foot down next to the other with a fleshy slap against the hardwood that rattled the floor, a mere few inches from the ends of Scott’s legs.

            “Oh, don’t look so sad, little brother.  It’s not the end of the world.  Trust me, I was doing you a favor there,” Maggie declared, crossing her arms and letting some false concern trickle into her words.

            Scott remained silent and didn’t even bother sitting up from his prone, defeated position before his sister’s statuesque visage that loomed above.

            Even if his hopes of speaking to Ella hadn’t been shattered, and even if he wasn’t now positive that Maggie would be able to hold this little event over his head with the threat of Judy’s awareness, he felt paralyzed to be lying before his little sister.  Gazing down at him, she was so sweetly unassuming and still so full of mad power, like the recklessly omnipotent daughter of a mythical goddess.

            In many ways, she was exactly that.

            “How?” Scott croaked at last.

            “You just let me worry about that, okay?  Now c’mere, my itty bitty boy,” Maggie cooed adoringly as she bent toward the ground and clasped her palm to her brother’s abdomen, scooping him from the floor like a ragdoll and cuddling him against her chest.  “We’ve got a few things to get straight between you and me.”