Emma’s bare foot dragged across the polished wood floor. With a feigned look of pity, she lifted her foot and looked down at the shrunken man cowering beneath her toes. His cries for help reached her ears, but she pretended not to hear him. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and she wasn’t going to pass up this chance to have some fun.
“I can’t believe they let little bugs in this house! You’d think they would have it nice and clean for bid day…”, her voice trailed off as she lifted her foot once more.
Lying on his back, David looked up at the gigantic foot far above him. He knew that he had to get up, to move his limbs and escape from the giant woman in front of him, but he could only feel a paralyzing pain throughout his body. By common sense alone, he should have been dead by now. The blonde giantess only weighed in at 137 pounds. Four stomps from her bare feet wouldn’t have done much to David’s 190-pound body, but at his new stature, Emma was the size of a mountain to him. A mountain that had tried to crush him flat with its full weight.
*Smack!*
For the fifth time, Emma drove her size 8 into David’s miniature body. This time, she decided to try a stomp and twist.
Once more, David’s world turned to black as his girlfriend’s flesh surrounded his body, pressing him into the wood. He felt the wind leave his body as his ribcage was crushed to dust, and cried out in pain as new bones broke with each twist of Emma’s foot. As the light returned to his eyes, he desperately wanted to believe that this was all a dream. That this time, he would open his eyes to see his girlfriend lying next to him in bed instead of using him as a stress ball for her feet. In fact, it had to be a dream - the fact that the same bones had broken five times told him that much.
The smile on Emma’s face told him otherwise.
He had seen that playful grin before and the memory brought a newfound terror to his mind.
During their second year of dating, David had asked to stay at Emma’s place for a few days because of a cockroach infestation in his house. The request seemed innocuous enough, given that they had already been sleeping together for more than a year. Emma’s request that he wait an entire week to hire an exterminator seemed odd, but she eventually talked him into it while he stayed at her house. He had tried to ask her why it was so important for him to wait, but was repeatedly met with a short “You’ll see.” The rest of the week seemed to pass by as normal, aside from one other small anomaly - David hadn’t seen Emma take her shoes off the entire week. She wasn’t usually the type to wear shoes indoors, but David assumed she was just trying something new - until she asked to spend the day at his house.
Knowing better than to question his girlfriend about the roach situation anymore, David let Emma have her way and drove back to the house. As if on cue, a cockroach scattered across the floor as soon as the duo stepped inside, and Emma’s sneaker was quick to rise into the air. David watched the smile creep across her face as her light blue Nike turned the bug to paste.
“And this is why I wanted to come here today”, Emma said nonchalantly.
Confused, David began explaining to her that she wouldn’t be able to get rid of them all like that. He stopped mid-sentence as he began to take in her facial expression.
The smile on Emma’s face was both playful and menacing. It reminded David of a lioness before she kills her prey - did his girlfriend come here just to squash bugs for fun?
“I know we can’t get rid of them all - that’s the point. We have a house full of living things that I can torture and kill beneath my feet. Why waste the opportunity?”
David couldn’t believe he was hearing this from Emma. In all the time he had known her, she had been the personification of the “girl next door”. He couldn’t imagine such a sweet and docile girl - HIS sweet and docile girl - torturing another living thing. But believe it or not, she was standing in front of him with another roach pinned beneath her sneaker. She had it pinned to the ground, slowly applying pressure as the guts began to seep out… and then she stopped. It was still alive, squirming, but unable to walk, and Emma’s smile just grew bigger. She placed her foot back on top of it, slowly rocking it back and forth until there was finally one last *squelch* as she put her full weight onto the foot.
Emma’s laugh proved her ignorance of David’s disapproval.
“Come on babe, lighten up a bit. I mean, what other bugs are strong enough to torture like that?”
“I really don’t think we should be doing this…”
Emma reached down and slipped her Nike off, holding it up to David’s face.
“Smell.”
The odor of Emma’s feet had reached David’s nose before she could even get the shoe all the way off. He pushed back at the shoe and started to pull away.
“You know I hate feet, Emma. Get that away from me, and why does it smell so bad?”
“These things have a sense of smell too, you know. Haven’t you noticed me adding an extra mile to my daily runs this week? That I haven’t taken these shoes off in seven days?”
David was nauseated from the smell, and tried convincing her that it was time to go.
“We can’t… they’re living things too, Emma. What if it was someone like me on the ground?”
Emma shrugged and took a step with her pink-socked foot.
“Smoosh”
He spent the rest of the day watching his girlfriend torture and kill the bugs. He watched as she put them inside of her sweaty Nikes, squished them beneath both socked and bare feet, held them between her unwashed toes, and walked on top of them while they were inside of her sock.
It was something that he had put out of his head until this very moment.
As soon as he was shrunken inside of the Delta Zeta house, he knew that he just needed to find his girlfriend and he would be saved. Even after being stomped on, he knew that he just needed Emma to recognize him.
But now, that memory was playing on repeat inside of his head. He had forgotten just how cruel Emma had been to the bugs in that house. He wanted to believe that she would recognize him and save him, but a single word in particular was ringing out in his thoughts.
“Smoosh”
“Smoosh”
“Smoosh”
As the scene played over and over again in his head, he saw a sudden shade of blue in the sky and recognized that he must be hallucinating. Instead of Emma’s bare foot hovering above him, he now saw the same blue Nike from that day.
Another hard stomp.
Emma’s foot fell immediately to his left. The sound of rubber hitting wood blasted his eardrums, and the gigantic Nike checkmark to his left told him that it was no hallucination. He remembered now that she had worn those shoes when they left for bid day. He cursed himself, as she realized she must have left to put them on as he was lost in his thoughts. He had missed his chance for escape. The shoe was once again lifted into the air, and one word rang out before he was pulverized beneath the rubber sole.
“Smoosh”
If David’s body was on fire before, it was in Hell now. He felt each individual bone in his body melt to dust under the rubber of Emma’s shoe. The squeaks of her shoe against the wood blew out his eardrums as she twisted left and right, and dragged him back and forth. With each movement of her shoe, new cuts and lacerations appeared on his skin. This had to be the end. He had to be dead.
But Emma’s face emerged once more as she removed the pressure. David surged with emotion as he saw how much fun she was having with this. Until this point, he had toned our her girlish giggles, but they had now erupted into full-blown laughter. The smile beaming across her face was bigger than any he had seen in their relationship, and her eyes revealed her thirst to watch him suffer.
He made one last effort to call out to her, to let her know that it was him under her foot.
“Emma… plea…se…”
He closed his eyes and expected to be smashed once more, but a sudden wave of relief swept over him as Emma reached down and picked him up between her pointer finger and thumb. She held him up at face-level, and the two made deep eye contact for what seemed like an eternity. David started to speak, to tell Emma that it was him and to beg for help.
The voice of the giantess cut him off.
“I’ve known it’s you this whole time, so you can stop begging me for help now. I’ve got a real-life shrunken human being at my disposal, and it seems like I can play rough without breaking you too. This isn’t something that happens every day, so I think you’re demoted from boyfriend to foot bitch.”
Anger and sadness simultaneously swelled in David’s throat.
Emma sat him in the palm of her hand and watched patiently. Stomping on her shrunken boyfriend was fun, but it was time to take a break and watch the tears roll.
“Y…You…Our relationship… How can you treat… your boyfriend like this? You can’t just… throw all of those years away.”
“Well, I guess you could say I’m breaking up with you. Or more appropriately, just breaking you. I don’t really have much use for a boyfriend at your size anyway.”
Emma made a tight fist, crushing David in the palm of her hand, her fingernails digging into his torso like swords.
“Can’t consider you a person when I can just make you go smush like that, either. If you look like a bug and smush like a bug, I’m treating you like a bug. Now dry those tears, I’ve got something special for you since I know you can survive being stepped on.”
Emma sat down and set David down on her left thigh, exposed by the short jean shorts she was wearing. As she reached down towards her right foot, David should have known what was coming next.
Her hand returned holding a thin pink sock that David could smell all the way from his position on her leg. He immediately recognized it as THE pink sock.
It was a wonder that this sock had no holes in it, because Emma wore it for any kind of physical activity. Runs, volleyball, tennis, hikes, class - this sock had seen it all. Shortly after the roach massacre, Emma had decided to completely stop washing it. After her performance that day, David could only assume this was to torture bugs in some odd way. And today, he knew that he was the bug.
Emma masterfully held the sock open with one hand, while holding David above it with the other. As he hung over the sock’s opening, Emma took a long moment to gaze into his eyes. She was in love with the expression of terror that stuck to his face. This little bug was fully sentient and aware of what was about to happen, and that excited Emma like no other bug before. She was now capable of psychological torture instead of just physical torture, and the power was intoxicating. Something that had once been considered a human was about to be used as the insole of her Nike. She didn’t know how her boyfriend shrunk, but she was already looking forward to an endless number of ways to torture him. She really hoped that he could survive inside of her socks and shoes.
“In you go”, the cheery tone was almost ironic as she dropped David into the open sock. A fleshy intruder immediately followed, and David struggled to breathe in the years-unwashed sock. She straightened her leg out and wiggled her toes.
“Tell you what, little guy. You get the honor of being the first to clean that sock in years. If you lick it clean… and my foot, too. Lick my sock and my foot clean while you’re in there, and I’ll try to find a way to turn you back to normal.”
Both parties knew that there was no chance of Emma helping David at this point, but he found a command from such a powerful goddess difficult to deny, and his tongue began touching Emma’s flesh.
He was engulfed in further darkness as he felt Emma’s foot slide into the Nike. With one single step, he knew that his pain was just beginning. He had prayed that Emma’s real insole would be soft enough to give him some cushioning, but he once again felt the full pain of being smashed under Emma’s foot. And this time, there would be no breaks in-between the stomps. She gave the ground a light kick.
“Just wait until we go for our runs!”
Emma started to wonder what had happened to make David this small. She vaguely remembered filling out some sort of questionnaire about shrunken men for Delta Zeta at the start of the semester, along with every other hopeful girl. She thought the questions seemed out of place, but couldn’t deny that she enjoyed describing how she would torture the shrinkees. For David to shrink on bid day, in the Delta Zeta house nonetheless, made Emma wonder if it was somehow related. She did think that it was odd for each girl to be required to bring their boyfriend, or closest male friend if they were single.
Her answer came quickly, as Cassie entered the room.
“Congratulations, Emma! With that little man in your shoe, you’re now a full-fledged Delta Zeta!”
Now Emma was the one who was confused. Her face turned bright red, and she could feel sweat starting to drip down her forehead.
“Well, about that… I mean, he’s just a little bug. Are you really going to tell someone about…”
Cassie ignored the stammering and threw a handful of shrunken people onto the floor. Emma was speechless as she counted six people - three women and three men
“No, no, we’re the ones who shrunk them. The final part of your initiation depends on how you react to your shrunken boyfriend. All of us kill and enslave these little shrimps, usually just for fun. We need to be sure we can trust our girls and that they’re okay with this, so what better way than making them squash their significant other?”
That devilish smile returned to Emma’s face. Her eyes turned to the shrunken people on the floor.
“So you mean… We can bugify men whenever we want?”
“Of course! It’s as simple as us putting an app on your phone. There is, however, one small caveat. Each girl does need to kill a shrunken man before they can join. We can set the bugs to different durability levels, and it seems like yours accidentally got set to 10.”
Emma’s foot was raised before Cassie could even finish her sentence.
“Well, I spy six more that I can kill right there!”, she beamed.
Cassie was pleased with the enthusiasm, but grabbed Emma’s leg before she could land a killing blow.
“You might want to look at them first. You’ll learn that it’s a lot more fun when you know who they are.”
Emma took a closer look and recognized three of the other Delta Zeta pledges, quickly deducing that the three men must be their boyfriends.
Cassie spoke up, “You might have guessed it, but this is what happens to the girls who refuse to stomp out their little lover. You only need to kill one of the six, since I know they were your friends.”
The six small voices fought to be heard, begging and pleading for the sisters to let them go. Emma’s voice was enough to drown all of them out.
“Okay little lovebirds, since you wanted to stick together so badly, it looks like two of you will end up sticking to the bottom of my shoe.”
She sat on the floor, legs outstretched with her soles facing the group of shrunken pledges and their boyfriends.
“I think we’re going to play a little game to decide which one of you gets turned to mush. You’ll all get into pairs with your significant other and start licking the soles of my Nikes. Whoever has the cleanest shoe at the end, gets to live. Go!”
Amanda and Patrick hurriedly rushed to the left shoe. They started licking away bits of dirt and grime, pieces of gravel, and mud that Emma had picked up on her runs. The shoe was undoubtedly dirty, but they felt bad for the team that had to deal with the right shoe. The opposite foot was objectively filthier than the left. A wad of green chewing gum graced the heel, and clumps of mud were caked into the tread of the shoe. There were dark grass stains mixed among the rest of the filth. The smell was equally repulsive on both sides.
Amy and Ben tentatively approached the right side, visibly fearful of the task at hand. Amy started lapping away at some of the cleaner parts, while ben tried to lick up the bigger clumps of dirt and mud.
Neither Cassie nor Emma could stifle their laughs as the former pledges so obediently lapped away at the shoes. They knew that all three of the girls in front of them previously had bright futures and career aspirations. That was a basic necessity to even be considered for Delta Zeta. The three were to be a future lawyer, nurse, and engineer. Each of them had held leadership positions in their extracurricular activities. They had lived fulfilled love lives with boyfriends that they just couldn’t come to squash. To see those “people” on the floor, licking Emma’s shoes, got both sisters drunk with power.
Tori and Patrick exchanged worried looks as they hesitantly moved towards the left shoe. Both shoes already had teams, and the left was, after all, far easier to clean. Before they could even get one lick, Emma scooped them up in one hand.
“Now, now. I have two feet and I see two teams.”
Emma could barely hear Tori’s voice as she shouted out, “We were pledges together! You heard her Emma, you only need to kill one! Please, we’ve gone through this entire semester together. I can’t-“
Emma’s booming voice overtook Tori’s with a single word. She grabbed Patrick with her other hand and extended it towards Cassie.
“Snack?”
“Mmmm…”, Cassie licked her lips and wasted no time plunging Patrick into her mouth. An audible crunching was heard throughout the room each time Cassie chewed. “Crunchy, but not very filling.”
Emma shot an annoyed look at Tori as a shrill shrieking filled the room. “NOOOO! YOU ATE MY BOYFRIEND! YOU’RE A MONSTER! YOU-”
The wind rushed through Tori’s hair as she was lifted to Emma’s face. “Guess you should’ve eaten him when you had the chance.” Emma’s head tilted back, as Tori dangled above the open mouth. Emma’s tongue came out and ran the length of Tori’s body, while Tori’s screams became incoherent. “That’s really getting annoying. I’m going to have to shut you up now. Try to make sure you struggle on the way down, I want to feel you fighting in my belly.” Emma released her grip, and Tori plunged down her throat whole and alive. A light, girlish burp escaped Emma’s mouth as she looked down to see how the slaves at her feet were coming along.
Amy was flailing around, stuck in the chewing gum on the shoe while Ben was frantically trying to dig her out. Her entire torso was somehow covered in the green sticky substance with just her legs and head sticking out. Emma laughed at the pathetic display before checking Amanda and Patrick’s progress and noticing that the left shoe was surprisingly clean. “It seems pretty clear to me who our winners are. I mean, how did you even get tangled up in there Amy? Even if you had won, one step and you’d be dead. Pathetic.”
Both giantesses ignored Ben as he took off in a full sprint. Emma simply plucked the gum, Amy and all, from the bottom of her shoe.
“I normally don’t like leftovers, but what the hell”, Emma threw the piece of gum into her mouth and began to chew. Her face soured as she tasted the dirt and grime stuck to the piece of gum. “You’re definitely paying for this,” she thought to herself as she carefully gnawed on the gum.
The same shrill shrieks escaped Amy as did Tori, but Emma decided she was going to make these ones last. Amy was sure she was dead as bright white molars clamped down on her body, but her life was prolonged as they only clenched hard enough to leave deep cuts on the body. Her screams grew louder as Emma’s tongue manipulated the piece of gum and ran across Amy’s feet. Amy didn’t realize what was happening until the first bite. One full chomp, and her left toes were suddenly gone. Emma was going to eat her piece by piece.
“Well, it still has some flavor to it.” Emma said as the blood gushed out from Amy’s foot. She knocked the gum around in her mouth, contorting Amy’s body in ways that nearly made it snap.
“Wonder if I can blow a bubble”
After minutes that seemed like hours, the next bite came and Amy’s right toes were gone. Emma sucked on the gum and rolled it across her tongue. “I’m eating this off of my shoe, so you know I’ve gotta make the torture worth it”. Minutes turned to an hour as Emma worked her way up Amy’s body, biting off tiny piece by tiny piece.
Ben’s hopes were high as he started to near the door. If he could just make his escape away from these psycho sisters, SOMEONE in this sorority house had to be sane enough to help him. He knew that his girlfriend was still alive and being tortured right behind him, and he felt a dash of shame for leaving her. He glanced back one last time as he closed in on the exit, and ran headfirst into Emma’s Nike.
“Going somewhere?”
He fell to the ground, too exhausted to muster a response. Emma flipped his tiny body on its back and pulled his gum-covered, half-decapitated girlfriend from her mouth. As he saw the gum beginning to descend towards him, he relaxed his muscles and gave up hope of escape. He thought he saw a smile from his girlfriend - tortured, but still alive, as Emma stuck the gum on top of him, reuniting the two.
“Get your goodbye kisses in now, lovebirds.”
The blue Nike that they had been forced to lick descended onto the piece of gum, and a bright burst of crimson soaked the floor.
Amanda and Patrick watched on in horror as Emma returned to where they were standing. “Well, I guess you two are the lucky winners.” She reached down and pulled first the bloody shoe off, followed by the clean sneaker. She peeled her pink socks off and tossed them to the side, David still inside.
Amanda fell to her knees and began praising Emma. Even after the horrors she had just witnesses, she thought it best to remain on Emma’s good side to ensure she was returned to normal size. On her knees, bowing and showering Emma with praise for saving her, she didn’t notice the giant bare foot hovering above her. Patrick simply looked up, hopelessly, at the inevitable. Emma’s toes wiggled in the air as she fought back a giggle. “Ohhhh, Amanda!”
*Splat*
Emma’s size 8 slammed down, killing only Patrick. Emma placed her toes on top of Amanda, sliding her back and forth in her boyfriend’s remains until finally standing on tiptoes, squashing the last of the bug-pledges.
The click of an iPhone’s video recorder was heard as Emma turned around to see Cassie finishing a recording of the fun. Cassie’s smile was even bigger than Emma’s. “I’m so glad we let you join.”
Emma unraveled the pink sock containing David and dumped him onto the floor, directly in-between her bloody soles and the blood-stained Nikes, and David heard the one word he now dreaded even more than “Smoosh”.
“Lick”