“Hah! Still got it!” Olivia declared. Hands fixed to her hips as she held a steady balance without the slightest hint of effort. She was clearly basking in the physical fruits of a near life-long career in gymnastics as she pridefully observed her shrunken best friend pinched between the toes of her upturned bare foot.

Daniel grunted, not nearly as enthused as the soft flesh of her toes poured over him. By the second, the diminutive liar was marked with their pungent aroma as they palpated and flexed. It was almost a relief when, after a few further moments of Olivia admiring her skill, Daniel suddenly found himself both facing the ground and being lowered toward it along with his living restraints. The five digits suddenly released their grip, leaving him to a rough ten foot fall in the process.

Already bracing on his hands and knees from the drop, the shrunken liar wasn’t under any compunction to let up on it. He was almost certain that Olivia’s ped would be right behind him, ready and eager to mash his body into the brown carpet. So when the shadow of her hovering foot instead removed itself from both his person and the surrounding terrain, he had to struggle to not let his elation overcome. That foot would still be coming like a freight train for him – just not quite yet, apparently.

So, after a moment of enjoying what would likely be the last clean air he’d access for a while, Daniel turned himself over, rising slowly to stand at attention as he faced his friend.

From down here, Olivia was, as always, an impressively intimidating sight. Letting his eyes wander upward after a brief, cautious linger on her temporarily patient feet, they traced up her powerfully defined legs  up until the point where the lightly tanned towers disappeared into the material of her black and pink Nike shorts. That turquoise shirt followed it, hiding what he knew to be equally defined abdominals underneath it, and of course her well-toned arms still had her hands resting confidently on her hips.

There were a lot of negatives to being reduced to this floor-hugging stature: ones far separated from how people usually reacted to the lie-induced reduction in itself. However, the one that topped his list was just how much further the monolith in front of him drove in the sharp contrasts between his own level of fitness and that of his best friend. A monument of pure athleticism versus a lazy little nerd – it was no wonder folks automatically assumed he was just some dreamy stalker following her around whenever they were seen in public.

Preventing a wave of self-consciousness from overtaking him, he finally met Olivia’s gaze once more. Her piercing green eyes, now so far above him, seemed to study with delicate curiosity, and Daniel clued in on why immediately.

“Class” had started, yes, and apparently they were starting with the remedial lessons. If Daniel were to look behind, he would, of course, see the towering couch. The same couch which had just enough ground clearance for, say, an inch tall seventeen-year-old to scamper beneath and just maybe escape what he had coming. Maybe even allow him some time to grow back to his natural height.

It was also a fool’s quest, one which would serve only to test his friend’s patience. He had made that mistake once before a few years back, and the resulting outburst from Olivia had been more than enough to cement it in his mind to never even consider such a thing ever again. No, passivity and acceptance offered a much more preferable experience that he’d gladly take over the alternative to which he’d been introduced on that day.

“Sooo…” Olivia eventually drawled after ensuring he stayed put, giving a light toss of her head to reposition her bangs again. “How ‘bout you tell me exactly what you thought you were accomplishing by not being truthful with Mallory?”

“Well, I mean… you know Mallory, Liv,” Daniel explained upward, almost at a yell. “You know she wouldn’t ever hurt someone on purpose, but everyone keeps acting like she did and she just doesn’t deserve that. So I just… wanted to give her a pick-me-up, y’know? So that she could feel like someone was on her side.”

“But was hurting that other girl something she could’ve avoided?” Olivia probed.

At that, Daniel gulped.

“Yeah,” he eventually conceded. His eyes darting elsewhere for a moment, as they couldn’t quite meet with his friend’s during this his admittance. “It was a tough game. She got aggressive, and it just happened when she made a play. But she was… so upset about it, Liv, and I just wanted her to feel better.” An exasperated sigh recalled his gaze back to Olivia’s face, now shaking back and forth.

“Oh, Danny, you really can be the sweetest, most thoughtful lil’ guy,” she murmured, head still cocked as she considered him. “It’s your best feature, easily.”

Olivia’s words were soft, her little compliment blush-inducing. But most notable to Daniel was that the usual energy in her words was drained, replaced instead by an ominous monotony joined by the sudden flexing of her boulder-sized toes.

Swallowing again, Daniel found his eyes darting furtively between his friend’s increasingly blank face and her even more increasingly eager toes.

“But you went about it wrong here, by not being honest with her,” Olivia insisted at length. “And doing that doesn’t help, Danny. It hurts.”

Daniel had no time to brace himself. In spite of the klaxons sounding in his head, Olivia simply moved too fast, too suddenly for the inherent significance of the one stressed word to click. In an instant her bus-sized right foot surged forward, the gap between her big and second toe aimed squarely at him. The two damp digits synchronized to grasp him between their odorous flesh right near the tips, and what followed was something he could only describe as being driven to the floor by a three-hundred-pound linebacker. The impact fired a sharp, swift pain throughout his back, jarring his person as a whole.

“You hurt Mallory when you aren’t honest with her over something like this,” Olivia chided far above the arching toes that currently held him to the ground. All the while, her digits scrunched together in their best imitation of a bear hug before lifting upward, taking Daniel with them. “You stop her from bettering herself.”

Again, the shrunken liar was driven into the carpet below. He grunted in pain as he was dragged up once more in the tangle of toes.

“You’re one of her closest friends,” she continued, following up with another slam that earned a second groan. And yet again, he was staggered back to his feet. “She cares a lot about what you have to say.”

To the ground again she drove him, this time eliciting a hollowing gasp that did nothing to alter pensive face so far above. Internally, he held on tightly to the fact that this was still a preferable experience to the alternative.

“I know Mallory didn’t mean it, and I’m sure she was super upset about it,” she said, propping him up again in what had become a pattern. “But she’s still a big, strong girl. You know, little guy? And she still let herself do it, and you admitted that much.”

The toes went down, the pain returned, another unheeded gasp floated into the air – followed soon and again by Daniel’s body itself.

“So when you make excuses for her, tell her it’s not her fault, even if it’s to make her feel better? Instead of telling her the truth and letting her learn from it, you just set her up to do it all over again.” This impact came the hardest, mighty enough to upgrade his gasp to a shrill cry. And that did at last earn him something, at least, in the form of a sad little frown.

“And then what?” Olivia asked. Her rhetorical tone rise with the motion of her toes, albeit empty as Daniel had been left lying on the carpet. Yet even after leaving, those digits still hovered overhead, blotting out his view of his friend’s face. “Do you lie to her about it again, Daniel? And maybe again, and then again?”

“What you create isn’t just a lie, Danny, it’s a wound. A festering little wound between the two of you that does nothing but get bigger and bigger, because all it wants you to do is keep adding to it. And unless you try to heal it by sharing the truth, it’ll ruin both of you. Because no relationship can be built around even the smallest lies, even if you mean well when you tell them.”

Those arching toes ceased their air dance, and fell upon him yet again. Of course, Olivia didn’t need all of her digits, didn’t even need two, for what came next.  Her big toe was upon him directly now, driving the tip directly against his torso. Compressing down into him. Twisting. Robbing him of his breath, in itself an almost merciful side effect, while painfully caving in his chest.

“And then there’s what it does to just you,” Olivia carried on, and at this her tone turned ever more sorrowful. Of course, the drilling of her toe didn’t halt, each word matching up with its own little plunge into his body. “What it earns you. Which is why we go through this little lesson like we do, Danny.” One last little twist there, thankfully, though as usual it continued the precedent set before by reaching a higher magnitude of pressure. Again, he cried out, though this time there was no visible frown to suggest the young woman was at all reconsidering the righteousness of her actions.

Especially not as the toe returned, extending fully over him in all its horrible glory, and then sunk down until it was his everything. All he could see, all he could feel, all he could smell, all he could taste. The ridged pad dug hard into his face, strong enough that he would likely be checking for a permanent skin imprint soon after growing back.  And as the clammy flesh mashed into him, the perspiration that coated it began to assert itself upon him more aggressively.

Even after he had the sense to close his eyes, the liquid stung them, mixing in its own special brand of discomfort already provided by its source. And even with a tight-lipped mouth, the gyrations of that all-powerful toe against his lips still managed to part them, even if only slightly. It was enough to allow the salty secretion to pass into his mouth, the overpowering scent of her sour foot enhancing the putrid mouthful even further. And through it all, the toe continued to make his entire body its personal plaything. Mashing, grinding, and bouncing atop him without mercy, its pillowy nature being the only thing mitigating the unforgiving impact.

All the while, Olivia continued onward with her well-rehearsed admonitions.

“I truly don’t like hurting you like this, Daniel,” she informed him for what was not the first time. Her voice raised to allow him to hear even as her big toe continued vigorously smothering him – growing not an iota smaller, he noted, though he knew it wouldn’t.

It was an honest comfort she liked to provide for her little friend, and one that he liked to receive. Throughout the length of her caring diatribe, Olivia herself hadn’t shrunk an inch. Most of his other disciplinarians surely couldn’t admit an aversion to these games without shrinking nearly as small as he stood now.

“But I have to,” Olivia said. “Because I don’t know of any other way to make you truly understand what your lies will do to you if you don’t stop. And you need to.”

One last push exerted against him, harder than any that had come before, and then the dominating digit was finally removed – but if it was for the better, he couldn’t yet tell. Olivia’s foot was, ultimately, only repositioning itself. And in the resulting operation, the poor boy found that his body had disappeared under the ball of his friend’s foot, with only his head exposed, albeit barely. Once again, Daniel was looking up the length of his self-imposed educator’s body, this time from the crevice between her big and second toe, as if his head were simply an unfortunate little pea that had dropped into sweat-glazed partition of flesh.

“When you lie…” Olivia preached to him with fiery green eyes focused squarely on his red, irritated face. “It’s violation itself. In its purest form. Violation of everything good and right. And that’s why people who do it are punished. It’s why they’re made lesser, to match what their lies do to their spirit. But you know that it doesn’t last.”

Something to be thankful for, Daniel quietly mused, only to promptly discover the resumption of his friend’s rhythmic pressing, as if those brilliant emeralds in the sky had had pierced his very mind.

“But there are other consequences, Daniel, and they do last,” the colossal gymnast continued, her voice growing somber. Her mashing lightening. “Consequences of the soul. Consequences that will make what I’m doing right now seem like a day at a spa. Consequences that last forever, Daniel, after you… pass on. And if you don’t stop, if you don’t do better, that’s what you have to look forward to.”

A salty splash, and odorless unlike what he had become used to, graced his face just then. It melded into his eyes in a stinging intrusion that blurred his vision and made it an impossibility to see much further than the lightly tanned walls of the surrounding toes. That was fine, though, as he had no need to. Right now, he doubted that his friend’s vision was that much better, after what had just landed on him.

“And that’s why we go through this,” she stated, and Daniel could swear he heard crack forming between her words. “So that you understand what’s waiting for you. To give you a taste. ‘cause you’re too sweet to end up like that, when you’re just a little… misguided. And all of us… your parents, the guys at school, Mallory… me… we love you too much to let that just happen, when we can still put you on the right track.”

“You understand what I’m saying, right?” she asked following a brief, shared silence that saw the removal of the fleshy pressure upon his form. “You understand all this, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he gasped out after a moment, not being at all dishonest. He understood perfectly well why this was happening. Why his best friend was doing this. Why he was where he was. The “whys” of it were, after all, what truly allowed him to get through this without any love lost.

“Liv?” he called up, to allow her to confirm he wasn’t getting any smaller.

“Yeah?”

“Can we… can we call it here, for today?” he asked of her, allowing himself some small amount of hope. “And see how things go? Please?”

And to his towering friend’s credit, she actually seemed to consider it. Her goliath of a foot even began to unpin, just a bit, though he was merely afforded a look up between its toes and at her face.

At her head, shaking in the negative.

“Oh, no,” she murmured, her voice soft but firm. “No, no, no, no. You know how this works, lil’ guy. We stop when you’ve gone all the way down through the heel.”

And once more, Daniel Stewart’s world was enveloped by the unwashed flesh of his best friend’s caring foot, the teenager taking one last breath as the ball of Olivia’s foot pressed itself into his body.