“MOM!” screamed Alex at the top of his lungs, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus… MOM! MOM, PLEASE!” The fifteen-year-old boy stood on the hardwood floor of the kitchen, which had become a seemingly infinite cavern of mountainous marble countertops and sky-high cabinets, peeking around the corner of the kitchen table corner leg. The leg itself had become like a great temple pillar, painted jet black and carved with an intricate, twisting design spiraling upward toward the cedar tabletop. “MOM, FOR GOD’S SAKE! DOWN HERE!”
High up, so much above that Alex had to strain his neck to see her face, was Michelle, his mother, seated calmly at the kitchen table. Her silky black locks were swooped over her shoulders stylishly, framing her youthful, carefully salon-tanned skin, and particularly her piercingly emerald eyes, which to Alex were essentially as large as he was now. Her toned arms rested on the tabletop, a deep olive skirt fitting her slightly curvy but nonetheless fit figure. To Alex, it was like staring up at an Egyptian monument of a goddess, resting, yet so powerful and omniscient that she could wipe out all structures and forms of life around her like bugs in the dust if she so chose. Perhaps without even realizing what she was doing due to her simply tremendous, larger-than-life strength and potential for destruction.
Unfortunately enough for Alex, this particular analogy was pretty much on the mark for the situation.
Blinking a few times, Alex’s gaze returned absentmindedly to ground level, where his eyes met with his mother’s gargantuan feet. Even being at ground level, the fifteen-year-old’s height was easily dwarfed by Michelle’s lower appendages, as they were still clad in her comparatively modest two-inch black velvet pumps. To Alex, of course, this meant his mother’s heel rested comfortably in a shoe hovering at a height four times that of his own. It simply boggled the boy’s mind, and as he took a moment to try to drink in the situation, he nearly became sick.
Alex hadn’t the slightest idea of why this had happened. He had been scurrying around the kitchen, setting the final touches on a surprise for his mother’s forty-second birthday before she arrived home from work: a chocolate cake with coconut cream frosting. Her favorite. In fact, he had just set it down on the table and stepped into the restroom for a break when the strangest of sensations overtook him, and in a matter of instants, he found a feeling of cold shooting over his skin as if he had been dunked headfirst into ice water, and when he blinked next, he was naked on the tile floor, standing atop a pile of his clothes, which seemed like a veritable dune of colored fabric to him by that point. He’d barely had time to begin comprehending the fact that he registered at roughly the height of an average human thumbnail when the door had opened and his mother had entered. Alex just had enough time to dash under the bathroom door crack, duck behind the leg of the table for safety, and simply gawk at his mother in all of her titanic glory, now towering impossibly over him, her head rising into the heavens of the kitchen, her green skirt swinging in the breeze of the room like a billowing curtain winding around and around her powerful body. Each clack of her heels against the hardwood sent vibrations through the floor and into Alex’s already weakened legs, and instantly caused great fear to swell in his heart. Solving the mystery of his condition was the least of his worries at this moment. For Alex, the greatest current concern was being squished beneath the hard sole of those velvet pumps.
A matter of minutes later, with his mother seated to go over some paperwork, Alex’s mind was racing wildly. His voice was such an insignificant squeak that, with some mindless sitcom acting as background noise on the living room TV, his mother couldn’t hear him; worse, his vocal cords already going hoarse as it was from repeated attempts to call out to her. Alex stared ahead as Michelle’s right foot began tapping for a moment against the wood floor before rocking side to side. Confused for a moment, Alex realized what was happening just as his mother slipped her bare heel out the back of the pump, followed by the rest of her foot.
Michelle arched her shapely foot in midair over the floor, wiggling her toes to air them out from a long day at the office. Alex blinked in disbelief as he stared up at the massive force of nature hovering above that just happened to be his mother’s foot. He simply couldn’t believe it. It just didn’t seem real. Sure, it had everything he would have expected, and then some with his closer vantage point. Soft flesh. Wrinkles in the pale sole. Moist looking pink toes from being cooped up in the pump all day. A dry, peeling heel. A rotund ball of her foot. The sudden salty, musty aroma of body odor leaking out of the massive shoe. A smog of sweat clouding the breathing space. All relatively normal. And yet, compared to Alex, the boy looked at the foot and knew it must be capable of stomping an eighteen-wheeler into a useless pile of crunched metal and wheels like a smashed tin can.
Alex coughed as the acrid scent of his mother’s tired, filthy foot clogged his breathing cavity. Under normal circumstances, he doubted he would have noticed such a thing, and even if he did, it wouldn’t have been much of an issue. However, at his size, and essentially existing under the dispersion zone of the horrid stench, each intake of breath felt to Alex like he was inhaling sweat vapor from between his mother’s meaty toes.
“Think, Alex, think… think…” he whispered to himself. “Gotta be smart, gotta…” he began before widening his eyes in sudden, mind-boggling terror. Michelle, having finished flexing her foot, had clamped the back of the heel between her big and second toes and tossed it forward under the table to get it out of the way.
The massive, velvety footwear was barreling toward Alex across the floor, rolling over like a sports car involved in some insane Hollywood stunt. Except this was no movie. This was real, and Alex barely had time to take a breath before the pump was bulldozing into him. Clenching his eyes shut and his muscles up, Alex felt himself swept like a dust bunny into the opening of his mother’s shoe as it came easily to rest on its side.
Reclining on the damp, squishy interior of the pump, soaked thoroughly with Michelle’s tangy perspiration, Alex breathed a sigh of relief that he was unharmed, then rose to his feet. As he stepped carefully out of the pump, brushing slick residue of his mother’s foot sweat off of his arms and back, he swallowed hard. At this rate, what kinds of odds did he stand to being rescued?