Scott watched his brother, previously a five-foot-ten mountain by comparison, diminishing in the blink of an eye and a flash of that famous poison-emerald green down toward the floor. In a few seconds, Kyle was staggering to his feet, a mere three inches, barely at the level of his older brother’s waist.

            At least, that was the case, until Scott experienced the familiar chill beneath his skin himself, and suddenly he was bumped down from six to three inches, putting him at eye level with his accidental partner in crime.

            He hadn’t felt so close to his brother since that time they’d unsuccessfully tried to sabotage the PMRD four years ago while Judy was out of the house. At this memory, Scott welled with a guilty mixture of pride and relief, even as he felt mounting worry for his sibling. Whatever was coming couldn’t be good.

            Judy stood quietly above, contentedly putting the shrink ray back into sleep mode after she’d handily reduced both of her sons to mere fractions of their previous height. She even hummed a cheerful tune. Barely acknowledging the pair of them marooned below on the carpet like action figures before her bare feet, the woman padded back to her bedroom to replace the device in its silver case, her footsteps thundering back.

            Kyle, clearly still not even remotely adjusted to his new size, tripped onto his side with a pathetic thump as the rumbling of the earth from their parent’s mighty steps caught him off guard. Scott, more than practiced with his shrunken sea-legs, wandered toward his prone brother and offered a hand to rise.

            “Fuck,” Kyle breathed as he grasped his brother’s hand.

            “Yeah. Fuck,” Scott nodded, deciding to spare his sibling the sugar-coating. “Why’d you do that?”

            “It’s… wrong,” he whispered in their fleeting solitude as he stood back up. “It’s wrong how she acts.”

            “You’re telling me,” Scott said, rolling his eyes. “Thanks all the same.”

            “I kinda feel like I might regret this,” Kyle said as the rumbling footsteps returned.

            “Count on that,” Scott hissed out the corner of his mouth just as Judy re-emerged from her bedroom, her attention now devoted squarely to the pair of three-inch offspring trapped on the floor beyond and left to stare directly into the path of those oncoming toes. From one hand, two periwinkle fuzzy house slippers dangled between her gargantuan fingertips.

            For a few tension-rich instants, she simply loomed above her two sons, letting the slippers hover like a baby’s mobile from her hand. She shifted her weight from one heel to the other, alternately clenching her meaty calves, and twirling a finger through the end of her blonde hair. Judy’s lips puckered, not quite into a kiss, but a predatory appraisal of her easy captures below. If nothing else, she seemed to be milking for all it was worth the chance to recalibrate her younger son’s brain to view her no longer merely as his taller-than-average mother, but as a veritable landscape of hard justice and raw power: a feminine symbol of self-imposed righteousness. Possibly even more than that.

            Then Judy’s arm swung forward. It was with enough speed that Kyle flinched, nearly tumbling backward again onto his rear end. Scott only watched with stoic surrender as Judy’s fingers released their soft grip on the cottony mouth of the two slippers, allowing them to fly forth, landing on the floor in spitting distance of her tiny sons.

            “Well, don’t make me wait,” Judy sighed. She crossed her arms, looking with some self-serving pity down on the miniature boys. She nodded toward the disregarded footwear. “Choose one each. Both of you. And get inside. Chop-chop.”

            Scott turned around to face his brother again, recognizing in his face the congealed fear and revulsion he knew he once wore at least once a week some years back, around the same age. In spite of himself, he tried to smile, outside Judy’s line of sight.

            “Uh…” Kyle drawled.

            “Go in the left,” Scott uttered under his breath to Kyle, too low for his mother to hear so far above. He grabbed his brother’s shoulder and gave him a necessary shove forward, putting the gangly sixteen-year-old into motion. The pair began the short but nonetheless harrowing stroll across the carpet span which separated them from the slippers.

            “You can go ahead and leave your glasses on the ground, honey,” Judy said with a note of sharpness to her youngest. She pursed her lips to the side. “We wouldn’t want them to get broken, would we? I’ll get them for you.”

            Kyle, by now just going with the flow, removed his glasses, not even bothering to fold them over the lenses as he set them down and continued striding. He approached the left slipper, as recommended by his brother, and with a last look of forlorn yearning toward Scott, clambered awkwardly over the fuzzy clog platform of it and crept into the musty darkness.

            Only then did Scott, confident that Kyle wasn’t going to cause any larger problems for himself than he already had with his act of rebellion, follow suit. Stepping up toward the right slipper, the one Scott knew statistically to ensure more of a roller coaster ride once their mother neglected the existence of two shrunken lives beneath her feet, he slid inside.

            The wait was a little longer than anticipated. Gentler footsteps sounded outside as Judy got herself into position, but no linebacker-sized toes came crashing in just yet.

            Scott crouched against the broad-toed habitat of his mother’s mercifully empty slipper, getting himself settled into the mushy geometry for a long haul. He laid himself down into a position for optimal acceptance that would limit the strain of the upcoming embrace against the underside of his mother’s giant bare foot. Regretfully, he realized it might have been prudent to try and relate a couple of pointers to his brother on the way to the shoe, but knew this would’ve been impossible. Judy, surely, wanted her youngest, even more than Scott, to experience the distinct sensation of anxious novelty for his crime.

            Beyond, he could hear the telltale cue of Judy’s toenails scraping softly along the roof of the fluffy footwear. She was entering Kyle’s temporary abode. There was no immediate reapplication of pressure, though, as she tangled her toes around her youngest child. Scott barely noticed the tremor as she at last settled her weight down into the unseen slipper, no-doubt with her usual golden-boy ensnared securely, his face caved into the fleshy crevice of the nearest set of grabby toes. He heard Judy sigh with no small amount of joy as she prepared herself for a relaxing hour or three, courtesy of her shrunken son’s body beneath her.

            Her right foot came for Scott next, and unlike with Kyle, it was not nearly so reverential in its entrance. As expected. Scott threw his hands up only just in time to lessen the brunt of his mother’s monstrous size-twelve ped barreling into her slipper and pinning him into the dark wall by a line of muscular digits, bulbous and pulsing with anticipatory vengeance and velvety perspiration.

            Time passed at its usual cruel crawl within the grimy purgatory of Judy’s house slipper. Scott was willing to bet they were nearing the end of the second hour, but it was hard to be certain. Sometimes, it was easier not to try and guess; it made the wait to the end feel twice as long. Occasionally, the young man made himself useful, wrapping his hands around the bulb of Judy’s nearest toe and primping the grooved flesh against his palms, but she didn’t seem especially interested in receiving a massage.

            More often than not, Judy simply rammed him into the plush ceiling of the shoe, which at least was less tiring in the limbs, if not the lungs. Today, she was making an example. No bones about it. No pretentions to courtesy or giving him practice in etiquette to his superiors. Which, all things considered, Scott wasn’t ungrateful for. All his mother’s baby-talk and inflated lies about moral fiber and self-improvement grated the nerves even more so than her pruny toepads grated his skin with their sod and salt. Sometimes, he just wanted her to be straight with him.

            And she was. With both of them, it seemed.

            Curiously, there hadn’t been much activity above, at least that Scott could detect. Ordinarily, Judy’s time in her office was punctuated by phone calls, video chats, or at least runs to the kitchen to put on a fresh pot of coffee. But there was only the pattering of her keyboard and the occasional double-click. Whatever she was working on, the woman was focused in ways she wasn’t usually, and had no intention of allowing or creating distractions for herself.

            Which intrigued Scott. At least, he assumed it did; it was hard to tell, when, in the third or fourth hour of in-shoe prison time, he generally just had to pick a mental topic and stick to it with ferocious interest, lest he succumb to the madness of being continually prodded and sponged by omnipresent surfaces of soggy, linty insole matting and his mother’s greasy, naked toes.

            Scott sighed, the sound lost amidst the squishy white noise of Judy’s digits flopping him about and underneath the gritty ball of her foot. He wondered how his brother was doing. As he’d predicted, more often than the other way around, Judy had her right leg propped over her left beneath the desk, meaning this slipper was the one she absentmindedly bounced and dangled, leaving her elder son in a slick world of constantly uncertain gravity and energetic toe scrunches around his head which felt akin to having his face submerged in a bucket of hot vinegar.

            Still, Kyle had to be faring worse than his older brother, just by nature of lacking experience. It had been two years since the youngest Stevens received any treatment approximating the current situation. In fact, Scott hadn’t even been present for it. And from the sound of it, the offense was nearly as innocuous as what happened today.

            Nearing the end of his first year of college, Scott had rather courageously ended a phone conversation with Judy in some certainly time-out-deserving terms. All that miraculous geography between his campus and his mother’s home filled him with invented confidence. Far enough away that she couldn’t punish him immediately, and just proud enough that she wouldn’t reveal he’d gotten to her. By the time they saw each other again, she’d have settled herself. It hadn’t occurred to Scott that there were still two people within her line of fire when he made such callous comments, and one of those people, he was fairly certain, she saw as the true apple of her eye: her protégé and successor. Maggie wasn’t in any real danger of shrinking.

            Which left Kyle to receive the punishment Scott had earned.

            It was coming together with a little too much clarity for the increasingly dizzy Scott.

            Of course that last shrinkage of his brother had been his fault. How could it not? Scott felt sick, a triple-knotting in his intestines. And it wasn’t from all the crushing weight of those mammoth toes, nor the sensory-cracking barrel rolls beneath Judy’s sole as she utilized the length of his body as a massage rod.

            In this moment, it was difficult to argue with the logic of his mother’s sweltering, handsy digits. He probably deserved it, he decided, if only in spiritual payment for that occasion two years ago that he’d never thought to consider until this precise moment. As the toes reared up for a fresh assault, probably not even noticed by Judy as she casually tossed her foot crossed above her knee, Scott allowed them to grapple him at whatever awkward angles they came. His fragile limbs were pinched into the doughy crevices, his spine bent along the crest of her wriggling, pudgy foot like a misshapen toe ring. His face was ground and dragged along the swampy, well-worn base of the shoe, until it was gasped up into the bottom of Judy’s arching sole.

            Through the layers of skin, scruff, and darkness that pervaded on all sides, Scott could just make out sounds of distress below. Heavy breathing, a cry of surprise, and gagging as Kyle vomited amidst the relentless wrestling of their titanic warden’s motherly toes.

            There was certainly a learning curve here.