It didn’t take more than a second for Mark to realize this test of his sister’s bodily awareness was worse than he’d already been anxiously anticipating.
Being pinned spread-eagle to the tile beneath the overwhelming terrain of Becky’s doughy foot skin, speckled with a few dots of sock lint and dirt granules, was a veritable cesspool of savage sensations that he sorely wished he could escape from. Unfortunately, with the titanic teen’s foot pressing down so authoritatively, this was entirely out of the question.
Mark puffed his cheeks and stiffened his chest, willing himself not to inhale for as long as he could, but after a few seconds under the boulder-like compression of the ball of Becky’s foot, there was no avoiding it.
A starchy grass stain. A sour ball of toe jam mashed inescapably to her flesh. The bittersweet salt of her sweat. The muggy musk of skin cooped up and roasting in a cottony sock prison for half the day. It all came together in a horrendous mélange of his sister’s more unpleasant and least desirable productions. Coughing did little to aid in the assault on his synapses.
“There you go, honey. That’s it. Go ahead and put a little more weight on him, though,” Joy suggested softly to her younger child. She laid a hand on her daughter’s knee and gave an encouraging little press downward. The pressure being applied through the raw power of the ball of Becky’s foot nearly doubled, and she felt her brother’s fists slapping aggressively against the thick ceiling of her skin.
“Mom!” Becky scoffed, swatting her parent’s arm away and relenting slightly again, though she still kept her tiny sibling firmly pinned beneath her foot. “I’ve got it. I’m putting enough weight on him, okay? I don’t wanna put too much.”
“Honey, you need to know what it feels like to suddenly have a lot more weight than that on him, so you can recognize it and pull off of him the second it happens. You can’t even think about it. It has to be an instinctive reaction. Now don’t be nervous, I’m right here. Nothing is going to happen.”
“Okay, okay, so what do I have to do?”
“Go ahead and… carefully… stand up on him.”
“Mom! I’m not going to… to…”
“This can’t be part of a discussion, Rebecca,” Joy informed, her tone becoming serious as she reverted to her daughter’s full name. “Now. Just keep your balance on the table, and stand up. You don’t have to change the pressure too much, but you do need to know what it feels like. All of this is to keep him safe, remember?”
“Oh. Well, I… I guess so,” Becky said with a nod, steadily seeing the logic in her mother’s remarks, and pressed her palm to the table for support as she rose reluctantly to her feet.
Unable to make out much sound due to the sheer amount of smelly skin and shadow blocking his view of the area above, Mark felt a twinge in his gut as the pressure began mounting harder. But how could that be? She already had him under here, in this sandwich of musk and dead skin between the hard tile and the crushing power of her foot. Surely there couldn’t exist a logical reason to put more weight on him than this.
“I’m sorry, widdle brudder!” the apology came from above as Becky stood back at her full height of five-foot-four, her bare foot carefully grinding down with enough pressure to fully understand the sensation of the unthinkable.
What the hell was she doing?
“Hey…” the tiny teen whimpered, pitifully coming to realize the mounting stakes as well as the mounting pressure from his girl’s feminine sole.
“Don’t be nervous, Mark,” Joy called down to her son, clearly anticipating his reaction.
“W-Why is Becks st-”
“Now, honey, as much as we have to do to keep you safe, you can do your part too. Go ahead and start moving as much as you can. Hit her as hard as you want. It’s not like it’ll hurt, after all,” Joy interrupted loudly, leaning closer to the floor so her minute eldest offspring could make out the instruction from beneath his prison of foot flesh.
“Mom, Becky, please stop this?” Mark requested in a hollow grumble, as the weight of his sister’s skin had squeezed most of the viable air from his lungs. His limbs were hardly available to move, but with what little room he had, he began to squirm against the malleable ceiling of skin.
“He tickles down there,” Becky giggled, then covered her mouth, as though she’d made a faux pas. She quickly switched to encouragement to cover it up. “That’s GOOD, widdle brudder! I definitely feel you trying down there. Are we done yet, Mom?”
“Not just yet, honey,” Joy said. “Come on, Mark. Harder. I need you to take this seriously. This is of the utmost importance. Fight.”
“Please get off me already!” the boy sputtered. By now, the mid-August heat that had been seeping steadily into the house all morning had begun to take its miserable toll. Flattened against the floor, with only her tiny brother’s body as a buffer, Becky’s foot was beginning to work up a glistening glaze of summer moisture, gleaned from every pore.
The slick surface of the girl’s skin multiplied the already pungent aroma into a humid fever pitch, and what little clean air was able to make its way under was lost. Mark’s clothes were beginning to dampen and cling to the sticky behemoth of his sister’s foot, and yanking himself away did little to help, as a fresh batch reapplied the salty adhesive almost immediately.
He was throwing his fists ceaselessly into the firm ball of Becky’s naked appendage and pounding his knees up and down against the wrinkled plain of sole flesh. He was delivering blows as hard as he could into the buoyant beast of Becky’s foot, hard enough that his knuckles were getting sore, and he was thrashing as though he was being tied down for a bathtub kidney theft. Still, nothing.
His insignificant actions went totally unacknowledged, and despite how many times in his life the shrunken young man had been easily scooped up into his sister’s expectant palm and swallowed up by her coiled fingers, being so completely and utterly beneath her in this moment made him feel exponentially more powerless than he had in all his life.
“C’mon, Mom, I get what it feels like already! I wanna pick him up again. Can I stop now?” Becky pleaded playfully, biting her lip and picking absentmindedly at the corner of her mouth with a fingernail. “I get it now, really! I totally know what it feels like to have him under my foot.”
“All right, all right. For… now, that’s enough,” Joy sighed with a shrug. “Your dad should be home in a little while, and then there will be more we can talk about together. Go ahead and stand up.”
Gratefully, Becky arched her foot upward, and with a gleam of adoration in her eye witnessed her brother’s meek three-inch frame unpeel itself limply from the now clay-like mass of her sweat-glazed foot.
With a defeated flop, he remained flat on his back as the monstrous appendage lifted away and padded back onto the tile with a self-satisfied slap that seismically rattled Mark to his bones.
He shivered, suddenly keenly aware of the comparatively cooler air charitably kissing his skin. His arms, shins, and face clung briefly to a flushed hue, as well as the warmth, and a scented faintly of his sister’s unwashed skin and dank day socks. Though this “instructive” precaution for the supposed wellbeing of everyone in the house hadn’t been a contest in the technical sense, Mark almost certainly had emerged the loser.
“Are… you sure that wasn’t too much, Mom? He looks all tuckered out,” Becky questioned pitifully as she observed her sibling sprawled on the ground a few inches from her casually scrunching toes. With the utmost tenderness, she nudged her sibling in the side with a meaty pinky toe, earning no reaction other than a surprised little flinch. “Maybe that was too long. Or… maybe I should’ve been softer on him, or-”
“Honey, believe me, it’s far better that he get a little tired out now so you know how to keep him safe,” Joy insisted, clasping a hand to her daughter’s shoulder to ensure the lesson’s value wasn’t overlooked. “We’ll try a couple more times in the next few days as we get settled in to how things will be working now. I think you’ll come to be glad you got this out of the way now, in the safest way possible, to prevent anything from happening to him. Okay?”
“Okay,” the girl concurred at last with a nod. She nonchalantly brushed her hair over her ear and peered back toward the floor, her hand springing forth to collect the immobilized little teen and get him back where she much preferred him. “Now hold still for me, widdle brudder.”
Mark muffled a defeated snort as he watched his sister’s enormous palm rearing expectantly toward him. Where the hell else was he expecting to go after all that?
“Hold on a second,” Joy cut in softly, placing a hand out to catch her daughter’s descending upturned palm. “We’re doing this right, with as much discipline from ourselves as we’ll be expecting from Mark. So we’re not quite done.”
“What?” Becky questioned, withdrawing her hand.
“Meaning we all have to take this seriously. I wouldn’t expect my kids to believe in the value of something without living it out myself,” Joy explained responsibly.
Grasping the concept, Becky nodded approvingly and withdrew her hand, though now it was Mark’s turn to gawk disbelievingly at his monolithic parent instead.
“Oh, come on,” he muttered under his breath.
“Just hold still for me, sweetie,” the matriarch called out lithely to her son, placing a hand next to her mouth for the illusion of added projection. Her toes, painted a deep red-wine hue, wriggled gleefully as they rose along with the rest of her slender foot from the tile and swept toward their tiny sprawled target. “It’s my turn.”