“Ah, facing your foot.  Certainly a popular choice,” Joann said with a wink, holding out the white foam pad to her customer.  Sally’s mother, meanwhile, was scribbling her daughter’s information onto the card.  “Go ahead and lay your sister on her back here, then.  I can help you get the right depth for her.”

“Does it matter where her arms and legs go?” Sally asked, furrowing her brow as she toyed with her sibling’s tiny limbs under her thumb, even flicking lightly at them.

“It varies, but we find that having the shrinker’s arms and legs spread out as if they were making a snow angel is the best way to preserve consistent blood and airflow.  Already, shrink-riders make it possible to keep your shrinker conscious inside your shoe for somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hours, while the more classic method of just keeping them in a normal pair of shoes without bracing can knock them unconscious in half that time.  Essentially, this will allow you to wear your shrinker for even longer without taking a break: maybe more like twelve hours.”

“Oh, perfect!” Sally gasped.  “That’s so cool.  Hey, widdle one, spread your arms and legs out nice and wide for me.”

Her tiny expression numbed, and her body still reeking after being fused with the stench of Sally’s foot, Amanda spread her arms and legs out in the center of her sister’s giant palm, just as she’d been instructed.

“Awww, that’s my good girl,” Sally sighed, opening her hand as wide as she could to allow Amanda to stretch out.  “A little hand angel.”

Both Joann and Sally’s mother snickered.  Pinching her fingers around the shrinker’s sides, then, Sally plucked her underwear-clad sister from her hand and plopped her gently into the foamy surface of the pad Joann was holding up.  She sunk in slightly such that her body leveled off with the surface.

“That looks pretty good, actually,” Joann commented, pressing a thumb to Amanda’s stomach and instantly knocking the wind out of her without noticing or caring.  “Let’s just check to make absolutely sure she’s placed right.”

“Okay,” Sally said, releasing both hands from the pad to let the woman do her work.

“This will do nicely.  And now, to make sure we have a good reference point for the mold…” Joann said, placing the small tray containing the white foam onto the floor next to Sally’s discarded maroon sandals.  “…go ahead and stand on her on the spot you want her, using the foot you want to wear her under.”

The teen smiled broadly, peering down predatorily at the floor, where Amanda was immobilized in the thick material like a trapped fly between the titanic feet of her twin sister.  After savoring the image of her sibling shrinker so far below for a few more seconds, Sally lifted her right foot from the carpet and cast a shadow over the pad, hovering three inches above Amanda to give her a looming view of the massive sole as it continually arched and wrinkled back up.  Her toes squirmed feverishly.

“That looks like it’s lined up right,” Joann said approvingly, guiding Sally’s ankle with her fingertips in midair as she examined the foot-shaped shadow that shrouded the entrapped Amanda in the sea of foam.  “Go ahead and step on her now.”

Chuckling lightly, Sally obeyed.  The ball of her foot met the white pad with a tiny squelch, her sole arched as high as it would go to ensure she was still aiming right.  Satisfied, she lowered the rest of her tender-skinned appendage, burying Amanda beneath her sole and ramming her even deeper into the customizing material.  She ground her foot from side to side ever so slightly, just to make sure everything had settled in right.

Tiny puffed breaths of terrified air were tickling the wrinkles of Sally’s foot as Amanda gasped for oxygen, now caked in the molding foam as thickly as her sister’s enormous appendage.  Sally could feel her sister’s body clasped to the contours of her sole like never before, and recognized once again what a fantastic decision it was to purchase these shoes.

Ordinarily, the weight of her sole, often soaked with sweat and sock fibers after a long day at school, would mash her sister so thoroughly that she could hardly feel her fighting at all.  In fact, she often forgot she was there for long stretches of time in class until she’d feel Amanda’s chest meekly rising and falling in a desperate bid for clean air.

This, however, allowed Sally to feel everything in incredible, tantalizing detail: Amanda’s limbs swinging against the unforgiving ceiling of her feminine foot skin, her abdomen inflating and deflating at the whim of each step, and her face sputtering for air and accidentally smooching Sally’s sole wrinkles in the process.

Perfection.

She tried not to twitch at the tickling sensation, knowing it could affect the shape of her custom fit, and she wanted it to be absolutely flawless, for herself and for her beloved shrinker.  There would be time enough to play with her down there once she had the shoes in her hands and, more importantly, on her feet, with Amanda’s powerless little body an integral part.

 “Great.  Just great,” Joann said, nodding, as Sally pressed her foot down deeper into the customizing pad, sandwiching her three-inch-tall shrinker sister between the doughy flesh of her sole and the foamy molding material.  The saleswoman pressed down one final time on the top of the teen’s bare foot, just for good measure, earning a spasm from the spread-eagled Amanda.  “That should be all we need to make your custom insole for the shrink-riders.  Go ahead and lift straight up.”

“Okay!” Sally chirped.  Guided by Joann’s hands on her ankle, the teen plucked her foot from the pad.  It left behind a perfectly formed mold of her foot, accurate down to the swirled patterns of her toe prints, and in the center was the insignificant shape where Amanda’s body had been trapped.

The shrinker herself, of course, had absorbed enough of the gooey material that her half-naked body had glued itself to the fragrant flesh that had been bearing down so thoroughly on her, and gone right up into the air as Sally lifted her foot.

Mother and daughter giggled at the pathetic sight, as Amanda’s knees nudged awkwardly at the deep wrinkles of her twin sister’s skin, caked in the white adhesive foam.

“Whoops.  Looks like she didn’t want you to step off of her just yet!” Joann said with a chuckle as she slid the foam pad away, careful not to jostle the footprint.  This caused Sally’s mother to laugh lightly as well.

“I guess not,” Sally snickered.  She crossed her foot back over her opposite knee, ensuring Amanda still had nowhere to go but down if she tried to unpeel herself from the foot, though the stringy bonds of the foam ensured she wasn’t going anywhere.  Sally wriggled her toes, savoring the funny sensation.

“This is a very good print.  We’ll have an easy time making your custom insole with it,” Joann reported as she stood back up, keeping the pad steady.  “Once you have it in whatever shoe you choose today, all you’ll have to do is fit your sister’s body into the opening at the base like a puzzle piece then put it on.  The material is breathable and ensures enough pressure relief so that she can stay conscious for hours on end under your foot.”

“Sounds like a great thing,” Sally’s mom said, impressed.

“It really is.  Now, would you like to go ahead and wipe your foot off and then take a look at some of the shrink-rider designs?” Joann asked as she pulled a small towelette from a packet hooked to her belt.

“Hold on.  I wanna get this.  It’s just too good,” Sally giggled, sliding her phone out of her pocket and opening the camera.  Aiming it squarely at her white-speckled sole, where the pitiful Amanda was still mashed against it in a forced embrace, she snapped several images and uploaded them before stuffing the phone back in her pants.  “God, I bet that gets like fifty likes before we even leave the mall.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Joann said cheerily as Sally accepted the wipe from her.  Curling her soft fingers around Amanda’s side, the girl picked her off her foam-encrusted skin and cradled her lightly in her palm before going to work on cleaning up the sole with the fruit-scented moist towelette.  “I have to say, I’m impressed with how well-trained you have your sister to hold still like that.”

“You must see a lot of shrinkers who haven’t quite learned their place yet, huh?” Sally’s mother laughed.

“You have no idea!” Joann said.  “Just earlier today, I had a woman come in who wanted a custom flip-flop strap so she could attach her nephew to it.  Let me tell you, he was kicking and screaming the entire time I was trying to put him into the slot.  And he was a half-incher, so it was tough to handle without damaging him.  I got him in eventually, though, and they looked fabulous on her.”

“Awww,” Sally cooed.  She said it not out of pity for the boy, but out of admiration for the happy ending to the story.  In her tone, it was evident how much she regretted that her sister wouldn’t fit between her toes on a strap.

“I suppose he’ll just have to learn eventually.  We’ve made sure to teach Amanda how to conduct herself well,” Sally’s mother commented before taking another look at the shelf and addressing her daughter.  “I like this one, honey,” she said, pointing to a pink and violet shoe design on the rack.

“Ugh, Mom, you have no idea what’s in right now, do you?” the teen groaned semi-playfully as she plopped her somewhat cleansed foot onto the carpet next to her sandals and handed the used wipe back to the saleswoman.

“You have a look at our options, and I’ll go ahead and take these to the back for now,” Joann said, accepting the filled in card back and attaching it to the side of the mold pad as she marched back to the staff door of the store again.

“Thanks again!” Sally’s mother called, then rolled her eyes at the daughter she still considered to be a human being.  “Honey, believe it or not, I once was pretty cool.  Everything I wore, I ended up seeing on the other girls a week later, and by then the fashions had moved on.   Believe me, I’m with it!”

“Uh-huh, maybe like twenty years ago, but not anymore!” Sally groaned.  She nudged Amanda and flipped her onto her back, realizing there was still quite a bit of the foam clinging to the girl’s body.  “Oh, I guess I shouldn’t have given her the wipe back yet.  Mom, do you have any in your purse?”

“Sorry, I think I used the last one up during lunch, honey,” her parent said, chuckling at the memory of the need for it.  They’d grabbed some cobb salads and breadsticks at a nearby bar and grille, and during the meal Sally had decided to put her sister out onto the table to feed her.

This of course had quickly devolved into an amusing game of mother and daughter taking turns depositing Amanda into the center of their salads and watching her stumble over the slippery dressing-slicked lettuce in an attempt to escape the bowl.  Whenever she’d get close to making it to the rim, generally some kind of accident would occur that resulted in her being knocked back to the center, like a crouton being kicked with a fork over her head, or Sally’s straw from her Shirley Temple firing a distracting spray of sugary ginger ale and cherry flavor into Amanda’s face.

By the end, the exhausted shrinker’s whole three-inch body was greased with dressing and tomato juice as she lay in the center of the table, humbly munching a hunk off a buttery breadstick Sally had offered her as a reward for putting in effort to the game.  As soon as she’d finished it, though, the woman she once could’ve called “Mom” had picked her back up between a thumb and forefinger and dunked her into an ice water glass to rinse off.

Once Amanda was cleaned, though, getting her out was a bit more difficult.  Her mother first tried simply tilting the drink over her glossed lips and letting Amanda cascade down onto her slimy tongue where she might easily be retrieved, but the ice blocked her descent.  Ultimately the woman had to fish Sally’s tiny twin out by pinning her to the cold wall of the glass with a straw and sliding her steadily up the side until she could plop wetly into an enormous palm again.  Sally’s mother had squeezed her long fingers back around her former daughter in order to prevent her body temperature from dropping too low, but all the same, the event had ended with raucous laughter on the part of mother and daughter, and even the waitress joined in heartily.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have played as messy,” Sally said contemplatively as she observed her sister in her palm, still coated in the foam, then shrugged.  She bit her lip, considering the cleaning options without a towelette.  “But on the other hand, it was pretty funny.”

“It definitely was,” her mother agreed.  “I used to try games like that with my sisters when we were younger.  Putting them in cereal was always my favorite.  But they’d always give up so quickly, and I’d just have to leave them in there for a while and slurp them out once the milk got too sludgy.  I suppose this is what comes from treating your sister so much nicer.”

“I guess so,” Sally agreed, furrowing her brow with intent, then lit up with sudden realization.  Gulping a few times in preparation and undulating her cheeks, the girl inhaled deeply and then spat a precise ball of saliva into the center of her palm, directly onto her sister’s chest.