“Oh, hey again, Nina!” Ariel said. “Funny running into you twice in one day!”

            “Yeah, um, especially in my apartment,” Nina said with a raised eyebrow. “Did David give you a key?”

            “Of course! What, you think I broke in like a cat burglar? Why don’t you take a seat?”

            “Don’t mind if I do…” Nina said with obvious discomfort at the bizarre invitation to sit in her own home. She took a chair across from Ariel, eyeing her suspiciously. “Can I… do something for you?”

            “I just wanted to let you know I’ve got a fun little solution to a problem you’ve been having recently. A little… extra stink and sweat down below, maybe?”

            “How… how did you know?” Nina balked.

            “Doesn’t matter how I know, I just know. Now, I bet you’re just dying to get those feet free. Seriously, it won’t bother me as much as mine bother you and my lame brother. So go ahead and get comfy.”

            More uneasy than ever, Nina wasn’t going to waste another minute with her hot, tormented feet trapped in these shoes. She propped each over her knee and pried them off. The first one containing a completely inanimate gray-stained insole was cast aside, but when she got to the opposite leg, as she tugged her completely-soaked sock-foot out of the shoe, she discovered the brand-new insole from this morning was gone.

            In its place was the tiny, naked form of David Leeds, shrunken down to a mere half-inch in size. He lay in the squishy crater where Nina’s foot had all but melted its shape permanently into the shoe overtop of his body.

            “DAVID!” she screamed, nearly dropping the shoe, though she held firm, for her friend’s sake. Nina reached inside the wet hole of the shoe opening and pinched her helpless friend as gently as she could between her thumb and index finger.

            On the opposite couch, Ariel had almost fallen to the floor laughing uncontrollably at the surprise and spectacle of her little trick. It was unlikely David even realized he’d been transformed back into a human form, albeit a smaller one, sometime between Nina’s exit from work and this mind-bending revelation now.

            “Huh, that must be a little bit of a shocker. You were expecting a new insole, but instead you find my stupid, whiny “little” brother all stripped down like a perv under your foot,” Ariel said curiously.

            “What did you do to him?” Nina cried in disbelief. She was still unable to fully grasp that she was holding her half-inch best friend in the palm of her hand.

            “Nothing!” Ariel lied. “I told you I’d take care of your little stink problem below, and do you notice it now?”

            Somehow, almost simultaneously with the moment Nina pulled her abused feet out of the shoes, the heat which had lasted all day indeed dissipated in a cloud of steam. A definite odor hung in the room like smog from the collected sweat and grit of her flesh in the shoe, but other than that, Nina’s body was back in equilibrium, at least physically. Her mind was in a much different and more traumatized place, however.

            “David?” Nina whispered, horrified as she began to piece together the possibilities of just how long he’d been trapped down there, and worse, during the single sweatiest day of her entire life. “David, can you hear me? Please wake up.”

            “He’s not dead. You didn’t step on him, if that’s what you’re scared about,” Ariel said. “He’s got much bigger problems to worry about than getting crushed, anyway.”

            “What does that mean?”
            “Mainly because, now that you know that insole was David the whole time…” Ariel explained matter-of-factly. “…you’re going to punish him with your feet on purpose!”

            “What the fuck?” Nina scowled. She patted tiny David in the creased center of her palm, trying to awaken him. She stomped across the living room toward Ariel, who looked unafraid of reprisal. “Change him back, right fucking NOW!”

            “Oooh, wish I could, but I don’t think I remember the spell. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to do what I say and put him right back under your feet, where he belongs.”

            “I’m not going to put him through that again!” Nina cried, her voice cracking. “You can’t make me!”

            David opened his eyes, staring gladly if not sweat-drunkenly up at his best friend’s looming, Goth-chic face which had enchanted him so over the years. For the first time all day, he felt safe, even as he could hear Ariel’s taunting voice beyond the giant caged fingers of Nina’s hand.

            “I don’t have to make you,” Ariel said simply. “Because I may have just laid a tiny little new curse on tiny little David. Go on, take a closer look at him.”
            Narrowing her eyes, Nina examined her naked half-inch friend. Sure enough, she noticed he was seizing. He looked like a beached fish flopping around in desperate search of water again. It appeared he was literally drowning upon the safety of her massive hand.

            “What’s happening?” Nina cried. Her own body shook as well.

            “I told you. You have to put him back down under your feet,” Ariel laughed derisively, obviously entertained by the fact that Nina still hadn’t pieced it together. “He needs the smell from your foot now to survive. Just like I made it so. If you don’t put him down there right now, he’s going to die in less than a minute. Now do it.”

            Panicked, and beyond thinking through the crooked logic of all this, Nina hurriedly threw herself back in the chair. With utmost care, even as she bristled at what she realized David was going through, the young woman brought the hand which cradled him down toward the floor, then lowered her sole arch right over her cupped palm. Just for good measure, she peeled her sock off her damp flesh and flung it across the room, to give him a purer source.

            David, even as he was forced back into the wretched, sour aura of Nina’s foot, could breathe again at last, however reticently. Tainted oxygen inflated his lungs, and he couldn’t help but sigh with relief, even as the gaseous atmosphere pumping into his body now was, once again, pure foot-stink and grime.

            Nina was on the verge of crying now from all the excitement. Her chest heaved as she kept David’s half-inch body as near as possible to her wrinkled sole.

            “That’s it,” Ariel giggled encouragingly. “Really let him breathe it in. Deep. That’s how he likes it.”

            “You’re fucking crazy,” Nina sobbed dryly, unable to look up at Ariel. She raised her hand slightly until she felt David’s puny body squeeze lightly into the plush ceiling of her sole. His tiny chest rose and fell with revulsion as he took in her dank odor out of necessity. As bad as she felt, she understood finally that there was no alternative until Ariel deigned otherwise.

            “Mmmm… yeah, maybe I am just a teeny bit crazy. But you wanna know what else I am? I am having a fucking blast with all this stuff I learned,” Ariel said honestly. She laughed again, then sauntered back toward the apartment doorway. “I’ll catch you guys later, after I’ve learned some more cool stuff we can do to David. So just keep him warm and alive for me, Nina, and remember! If you move him away from there, he’s gonna die, and it’ll be your fault. Don’t try and come after me, cuz I will make you pay for it. But seriously, though, don’t feel bad. He likes it, really! If you don’t believe me, go ahead and give him a poke.”

            The door slammed shut behind the devious redhead. Nina was left in solitude, hunched over the chair with her damp, balmy bare foot slow-cooked for a day in her sweaty shoes now curled over David’s hapless little body. Dark makeup washed in thin streams down her cheeks as she openly cried now in the helplessness of the situation. For a while, she didn’t say anything, only ensuring her hand hovered at a consistent distance from her sole so David could get air. Then, she felt the poke.