“I thought you were making the decisions for me now,” Scott huffed against the mashing weight of his mother’s foot bearing down on his chest cavity, more unrelenting than ever. The stench of her unwashed flesh, rich with salt and lint, forced its way down his throat with every rebellious breath, but he was beyond noticing it now.
“I am. Most of them, anyway. But this is something you have to do for yourself,” Judy declared softly as she leaned down over the edge of the couch, looming above as Scott peered up at her between the window of her separated toes.
“What?”
“Your life may be on the right track now, but that doesn’t mean it has to be difficult for you. This, right now, what’s happening to you… it doesn’t need to be like this. Once you take on the right attitude, things could be a little paradise for you.”
“I don’t think we have the same ideas about what makes a paradise, Mom,” Scott said as he wrapped his hands hopelessly around a doughy toe that was flattening itself hard against his forehead.
“Maybe not. But here’s my idea of it, because like most of the ideas that will be affecting you for at least the next eleven months, mine is the only one that you should be concerned with,” Judy said, clearing her throat. “You can sleep in your bed again. Eat normal meals with us. Wear clothes all the time. I can make sure Maggie gives you more of a break. I’ll get Nancy completely off your case. You can leave the house with us, use the phone, and spend time with Ella.”
Scott gnawed his lip. He was still facing oblivion, but compared to what his life was now, it really did sound like a paradise.
Blinking, the prisoner willed himself to remain a resilient wall, even as his mother pinned his doll-sized body down so easily.
He was not going to let her win him over mentally, too.
“And just in case you’ve forgotten that your mommy isn’t stupid…” Judy continued gravely. “…I know my new system may not take hold before you can get through your sentence here. I assume that’s crossed your mind, too.”
This fact had, of course, occurred to him after his conversation with Ella earlier, though he hadn’t expected his mother to acknowledge it as a possibility. That there was still a light somewhere at the end of the tunnel for him, even if there wasn’t for anyone else who couldn’t escape the titanium grip of new American justice in time.
“Right,” Scott croaked, his chest rising and falling more in time with his parent’s lightly perspiring foot as it adjusted his breathing rhythm for him. Judy was offering him the world, or at least as much as she was willing to parse out from her own share.
It couldn’t be this simple. It never was.
“So what is it you want from me, then?” he drawled.
“Nothing even you can’t handle, honey. All you have to do is obey our requests and keep your mouth closed about things you’re not old enough to understand yet. And when the time comes, help make it clear that this way of life is the best for all citizens in our nation’s penal system.”
“How exactly would I make that clear?” Scott grumbled, already knowing the answer.
“Just stand behind me, Scott. Show the people exactly what the world can be like when it runs smoothly under the new system, with your actions and your words.”
There was the kicker.
She wanted a mascot. Someone to help her ensure the lifelong imprisonment of the bodies and minds of thousands of citizens just like him. Someone to dance around and sing her song of perverted justice, to force-feed her revolting dogma to the public. The very idea of it made Scott want to vomit, but his raw fury overpowered this desire.
“And if I don’t agree to play puppet for you?” he spat.
“Then I will just have to find other long-term uses for you, sweetie,” Judy sighed with sudden tenderness again. She reached forward, scooped the PMRD from its open case on the table, and had the barrel wedged between her toes and poking at Scott’s nose before he had the chance to gasp with surprise.
So close up, the emerald flash momentarily blinded Scott and drained him of heat as he dwindled instantaneously down from the size of a doll to the height of his mother’s big toe, her entire hulking size-12 foot increasing from a mere mattress-sized payload to a veritable behemoth of stomping power and wrinkled flesh.
With a twist in his gut, Scott realized his mother had only been able to hit his face with the ray between her toes, as his tiny body was once again left bare amidst a massive bundle of empty garments beneath the heaving ceiling of mature skin.
Already immobilized under the pulsing weight of a squishy toeprint, Scott squirmed helplessly as Judy expertly plucked her trinket-scaled son into the crevice between her big and second toes before lithely lifting her foot back into the air and placing her heel onto the coffee table with a hearty thump.
The ride upward was lightning-fast and practically turned Scott’s organs inside out from the unpleasant rush.
“You came from me, Scott,” Judy drawled calmly as she restfully clasped her hands together atop her stomach and peered down at her hapless offspring clenched nakedly between her toes at a single inch in height. “I gave you life. I raised you, provided for you, and created chance after chance for you to make something of yourself. And now, finally, one way or the other, whether it’s for the next couple years as my little model citizen, or whether it’s… a little longer than that, just making me comfortable, you will make yourself useful to me.”
Scott tried to come up with something to say as he gazed up the humbling distance of his mother’s curvaceous thighs, along her arms and shoulders, and toward her self-satisfied face so far off with its contented grin and patient eyes.
His mind raced as he grappled helplessly with what he now realized was an offer she was presenting to him: a livable length of time spent at this miserable height with a smile on his face and a lie on his lips for all the world to see and hear, not to mention the corruption of his very soul for aiding in the ultimate perversion of legal integrity.
Either that, or he could spend the rest of his days with his mother’s colossal toes embracing him in the sweaty blackness of her favorite high heels.
Scott was practically foaming at the mouth with rage, but Judy handily squeezed the air from his lungs with another scrunch of her meaty digits, and he was forced to hang limply like a crunched leaf in the overpowering vice of feminine skin and muscle, ensconced in the familiar, nauseating waft of toejam and sour flesh at a level tenfold what he’d experienced moments before.
Every breath stung, tainted by the inescapable cliff that made up his forty-four-year-old mother’s eternally domineering appendage.
“So… if you decide to be difficult, and fight back against the inevitable, then you’ll force my hand. Because my voice will still matter most to that disciplinary review board next year, and if I should happen to feel disappointed with your behavior, they’re going to know it,” Judy sighed sadly as she crossed her leg over her opposite ankle and began playfully bouncing her foot up and down, churning her son’s stomach even further. She gave him another wring, this time rolling him over between her dexterous digits and watching him fruitlessly wrestle with the walls of overpowering flesh.
“And your only purpose… your only reason for existing… will be to repay everything I have ever done for you in full,” she uttered. “You will live and breathe to ensure your mother doesn’t regret bringing you into this world. The choice is entirely yours.”
There was a deadening silence. Scott struggled to keep his vision from blurring while his titan-sized parent toyed with him as a lioness over a crippled muskrat.
With effort, he chewed over each word of his mother’s slimy accord delivered with a heaping spoonful of disingenuous sugar. He was well-aware that this was by far the single most honest conversation he’d ever had with his mother in all his life, and the totality of it was almost as overwhelming as the musculature of her titanic foot.
“C’mon, honey. This isn’t hard. Everyone wins if you’d just listen to me for once. I have to believe that deep in that cute little head of yours is the capacity to see reason and act in the best interest of yourself and everyone around you. I know you’ve never used it before, but I want you to try it now and see what happens,” Judy explained with a dictatorial glint in her eye, positively drunk on this moment but nonetheless in full control. “I think you’ll surprise yourself.”
No more words were exchanged as Judy draped her arms over the back of the couch once again and clicked on the TV. The images flashed behind Scott with neon aplomb and he felt like he recognized a few reporter voices, but all he could see was the expanse of his mother’s vertical foot and ankle as she pivoted her crossed heel against the top of the other leg.
Her toes remained firmly clasped to his bare sides, well beyond the point that he’d started nervously cold-sweating from having to stare down at the distance to the coffee table surface, easily a full two stories for him.
The channels were continually flipped until Judy’s name came up on CNN in a discussion of the Shrink Act, as well as a reference to her political intents, which elicited a proud chuckle from the Stevens matriarch as she settled in to listen to the full ten-minute story without budging her toes’ steel grasp on her powerless twenty-one-year-old charge.
Scott had comfortably worked himself into a barely present state where he was able to ignore the precarious plunge that would await him if he became unwedged from his mother’s firm toes. It made it all the more jarring, then, when he realized he had been pinched back between Judy’s thumb and forefinger and was rocketing back over the dizzying expanse of her reclining body.
Half-expecting to pass between them, given how this conversation had been going so far, Scott instead made impact with his mother’s puckered lips with a squeaking smack that lasted a full five seconds as she rocked him against the rounded pink entrance of her mouth.
When she’d finished, she began speaking without bothering to draw him back far enough to make out her eyes, instead letting him take on the full brunt of unfurling mugginess and flung spit that popped from her lips as she whispered sultrily.
“You need to get some rest, sweetie,” she declared, her lips hanging open between paused words, forcing him to drink in the visage of her glistening cave. She ascended from the couch cushion and stood at full height, suspending Scott over a drop to the floor towering enough to give anyone vertigo six times over. “You’ve had a long, long day, and you’ve got a lot of thinking to do. I know it might seem tough right now, and for that I’m willing to be a little patient with you. But… not too much.”
Scott shuddered as he wiped away a few flecks of froth that had been launched from deep within his mother’s jowls.
It seemed as though she had him trapped in every way conceivable.
His own freedom, but only in exchange for helping to put everyone who’d ever made the worst mistake of their lives into an eternal time-out.
“Just remember that this is all for your own good. Everything I do is for your own good. Think on that. Dream about it. And when you tell me that you’re seeing things… mommy’s way… then we’ll make sure you get everything you deserve,” Judy breathed throatily. She punctuated her speech with a final kiss that engulfed Scott’s face into the pillowy gate of her lips. “All you have to do is stop fighting.”
Feeling as though he’d been frosted over beyond human recognition, Scott listlessly waited as his mother lowered him back onto the couch cushion between gargantuan pinched fingers where his makeshift bed sat.
The sound of her authoritative footsteps as she marched away echoed mightily in his eardrums just from their sheer difference in size, but by now, he’d disappeared back into his head. He replayed Ella’s words from earlier in the back of his mind, forcing himself to swallow the fear and illogic of his odds and focus intently.
He would not be beaten. Not yet.
Not even by a woman who had him and now a large portion of the country piled helplessly into the palm of her hand.
His attention was abruptly jerked back into the wildly daunting present when CNN flashed to a new subject, at last abandoning its coverage of Judy’s grandiose exploits that afternoon.
Once again, Scott found himself staring at the static image of the same face from several days before: he was met with the parted silver-blonde hair, the square jaw, and the piercing eyes that dared him to claw back through his mind and remember.
“We’re just getting word on an update for the Walter Brandon and Cambralart Financials story,” the anchor read. “After his altercation with police in Chicago three days ago that resulted in his escape, Brandon was tracked down in a hotel lobby twenty miles away from Cambralart’s primary headquarters. He was reputedly discovered with airline tickets to Quebec. Though a thorough investigation into the magnitude of Brandon’s defrauding scam is only just beginning, the one-hundred-and-seventeen-million-dollar figure initially provided is now believed to be a low estimate. With his personal files in the hands of the authorities, it was discovered as well that Walter Brandon only served as a pseudonym for his crimes. He has now been identified under his real name, Thomas Stevens. More on this as it develops.”
Scott felt his body momentarily go half-paralyzed from the shock, as everything snapped instantly into place, and he managed to breathe into the shadowy isolation of the room through limp jaws: “Dad?”