Tom nodded up at Linda, entirely used to this kind of treatment, and couldn’t even bring himself to feel particularly bad about it. His mother still loved him, after all. She was just following in her beliefs, and doing what she felt she had to as a parent to improve him. Could he truly expect anything more from the woman?
God knew he could use the improvement she was trying so hard to bestow, after all, and this was a truth Tom could fully admit to himself. She still hadn’t given up on him, and he owed her his humility.
Crawling into the deepest corner of the slipper, where Linda’s toes would end up once she’d shoved her foot in after him, the boy obediently found his ordinary resting place whenever he was put inside a pair of his mother’s shoes. If he had chosen a location closer to the opening, Tom only would’ve been prodded to crawl in deeper, so it saved a lot of time to just do it himself. He inhaled deeply, getting accustomed to the stale sweat and acrid aroma that pervaded the space where the woman’s mildly pudgy feet spent so much of their time when she was indoors. It was only unpleasant for the first few whiffs; after that, it smelled as much like home as his own bedroom.
Watching outside, he could see her naked toes curling against the floor, then splaying apart. From just out of view, a spoon appeared with a dollop of oatmeal lumped into its scoop, and then overturned over Linda’s foot, so that its gloopy contents could tumble onto her digits.
She squirmed her toes back and forth a few times, letting the wheaty breakfast splurge its way into the crevices of her skin, and then with a final pivot on her heel, lifted the foot to re-enter the slipper.
Tom didn’t struggle at all as his mother’s massive appendage jammed its way back into the slipper, plunging him against the fuzzy wall and mashing him under the oatmeal-coated toes. At last, getting his bearings, the boy wrestled his way out from under his parent’s foot and set about to do the job he already knew full-well was expected of him. The fuzzy darkness had already enfolded him, but he didn’t need eyes now. One handful at a time, he fished into the doughy spaces between his mother’s soft toes and scraped his meal off her skin, and then shoveled it gratefully into his mouth.
Some of the oatmeal had already plopped into the lint-laden insole of the shoe, and didn’t taste particularly pleasant with the added flavor of old detergent and flaking skin, but he choked it down without much trouble, having had plenty of practice before. Of course, much of the breakfast mush was already infused with the semi-sour hint of Linda’s skin, not yet showered after a night in her somewhat stuffy master bedroom, but as with most of this way of taking his meals, Tom was accustomed and hardly took notice after the first few salty swallows.
The whole eating process took a bit longer than normal, especially since Linda was liable to continue walking about the kitchen as she prepared breakfast for her other three kids, which would interrupt Tom in his punishment as he struggled to keep himself from being pinned too firmly under his mom. It was briefly all right again once she sat down at the kitchen table with her newspaper, but eventually she’d crossed her leg over the opposite knee and was bobbing her slippered foot up and down, unintentionally giving Tom a tumultuous roller coaster ride on a full stomach of oatmeal.
As he bounced between the lumpy, oat-speckled insole and his mother’s aggressive, bulbous toes, the compulsive liar and possible unholy sinner reflected with some bearable level of contentment on his being.
Things could certainly be worse. There was no doubt about it.
After all, there was a lot of perspective required here. It had to be noted that Tom, intentionally or not, was a daily practitioner of the world’s worst moral crime: the violent perversion of pure, unvarnished truth. This was one of the few things society was in almost total agreement on, and Tom had decided long ago that the whole world couldn’t possibly be wrong about something like that.
Plus, it was right there in the Bible in the Book of 3 Peter, plain as day: “Thou shalt not speak an untruth, lest ye be made below thy fellow children.” It was a very popular quotation from the good book, and even in the Baker household, it could be found everywhere from a cross-stitch hung on the wall to Linda’s email sign-off. Tom frankly wasn’t entirely certain where he fell on the question of religion, but he did know that if so many people believed in the preservation of truth, there had to be something to it. His psychological state made it difficult to feel connected to it, yet even so, he maintained some faith in it.
Everyone had to have faith in something, after all. It made sense to put his in truth, even if he had almost none of his own.
Time slowed down considerably as Tom struggled under Linda’s goo-encrusted toes, which seemed far more intent on playing with his body than letting him eat breakfast from between them. He could hear his brother and two sisters far above, clanking spoons against glass and chugging orange juice, enjoying their breakfast at a normal height with normal conversation like normal human beings, without having to scavenge for it in the dark between the smelly folds of their mother’s skin. Of course, that was their reward for the truth, and Tom could respect that, even if he couldn’t help feeling a twinge of envy.
After more than thirty minutes of being flicked below the gigantic plush toes of his mother, slightly spongy now between the gummy oatmeal and leftover night sweat, Tom had begun to grow again, if only an inch at a time. Finally he felt the slippery digits grappling with him and sliding his four-inch frame into the open space between Linda’s big and second toes.
Once her shrunken son was securely in place, the woman slid her foot from its fluffy cave and propped it up on her thigh, where she could observe the boy squirming in her grip in his skin-tight TruPlex.
“I suppose that’s enough for one morning, honey,” she relented with a shrug. She pinched the tiny teen around his waist with her thumb and forefinger and plucked him from between the grimy toes, then wriggled them around to inspect the damage. “Looks like you got most of your breakfast up. Taste better than it smelled?”
“Uh-huh,” he said numbly, managing something truthful, however bizarre it may have sounded.
“Good,” she said, satisfied with his lack of a reduction at this statement. “Maybe next time you’ll tell the truth.”
“Maybe,” he mumbled under his breath.
“Don’t give me that look,” she cooed with genuine warmth as she lifted her shrunken child closer to her face for examination, still keeping him dangled between her fingers. She stroked the tip of one finger along his stomach, hoping to comfort him. “You know everything I do for you is because I want you to learn from your wrongs, don’t you?”
Tom hung limply but not without resolve in his mother’s powerful fingers, his body flecked with bits of dried oatmeal and his now-mussed hair reeking of Linda’s oily toes.
“Yes,” he said, managing another truth twice in a row.
“That’s what I like to hear,” she sighed happily, then leaned closer to the ground, and placed him on its surface next to where her massive bare foot had come to rest, her toes bopping coolly against the floor. She winked down at him before reclining back in the chair with her newspaper. “Now, you’ve got a couple more minutes before you need to leave for the bus. Why don’t you be a dear and pick out the last bits you missed for me, now that you’ve got some light to work with?”
Shrugging, the boy humbly stooped back down and set to farming the remaining flecks of moist grit from between Linda’s toes, indeed happy to be able to see what he was doing. Yes, he confirmed to himself. Things could be far, far worse.