David wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. Did his sister say she made up a spell? That couldn’t possibly not be the worst news to have hit David’s ears today. And it had been, all things considered, the worst possible day for anyone in the history of humankind.

            “Let’s see…” Ariel drawled. “Right now, everything down there smells ten times as bad to you as it actually is. So how about… oh… with every new breath you take in now, we’ll add one more to that number. Sound fair to you?”
            “H-Huh?” David peeped. In his huffed surprise, he felt his lungs contract and expand several times in quick succession.

            “Gotta get a grip on that greedy little nose of yours, David. I know you wanna soak up that nice, stinky air some more, but you’re not gonna make it if you don’t slow down. You’re already at fifteen times the strength now.”

            His sister’s cruel, lilting voice faded out again. David tried to think as he had when he went scuba-diving years ago. Then, he’d learned to conserve air underwater and take plentiful, long gulps from the oxygen mask before pacing them. If he was going to avoid passing out from the sheer brain-curdling mania of this stench assaulting him at a multiplying rate, he’d have to outlast it.

            It wasn’t easy. Even after David got used to slowing his breath to a manageable rate, the inevitable build-up of that heinous foot odor spread like smoke in a burning house. He was too afraid to count his breaths, but he was sure by now he had to be up to at least the thirty times mark. Minutes more passed. Forty. Forty-five. It had to be over fifty now. These desperate, thirsty gasps of air against Nina’s wet, brackish foot flesh were fifty times as powerful as they would’ve been if he’d merely stuck his lips inside her sweaty shoe at normal size and sucked down a briny whiff.

            This smell was something alien now. David couldn’t conceive that anything in the known solar system could actually concoct something so vile and sharp in its pungency to his every nerve ending. Let alone that he’d be experiencing it for such a sustained period of time in secret torture, all by his younger sister’s vengeful hand.

            David, as his eyes watered in conjunction with the generous sweat of Nina’s foot being painted into his skin, attempted to cobble together a way of comparison. Some point of reference for this wunderkind of a human body odor.

            The nearest thing could use to understand Nina’s stench was an imaginary stadium consisting of thousands of women of every age and size, all pumping their legs and arms upon exercise bikes, and funneling each sweet-and-sour drop of their aggressive sweat into tubes. That liquid would be carried to a particle accelerator at the center of the stadium, where every spritz of salty, acidic sweat wrung from hair, squeezed from armpits, and leaked from their feet would be distilled. Then, that chemical weapon of compressed, atomic female sweat belonging to thousands would be poured into a bottle and aged like fine wine for decades in a sealed vault, until this instant, finally, when in all its caustic, dehumanizing glory it was poured over David’s face and down his throat.

            This was, truly, the only way David could comprehend the smell which molested his lungs now with every increasingly musky breath.

            Nina arrived at David and Ariel’s apartment. She used her spare key to enter, undoing the latches, barely allowing the metallic grind to echo in the hall. There would only be one chance here. Obviously if Ariel hadn’t brought the book with her before to visit Nina’s apartment and break the news, she’d have to leave it somewhere; was there a safer place than her own home?

            There was no sound nor sign of life as Nina tiptoed into the living room. She eyed the closed doors and the side hallway, held her breath, and darted toward Ariel’s bedroom. The door was ajar, so Nina simply pushed it open. She found an empty room, the bedsheets neatly folded; laid in the center was a large, leather-bound book containing an atlas-worth of yellowed pages.

            That had to be it.

            Nina lunged forward, not wanting to miss this chance for her poor best friend suffering down in her shoes. To her surprise, however, as her hands clawed and came down upon the broad cover of the tome, her fingers passed right through it and met the buoyant mattress. Stunned, Nina watched as the illusion of the book crumbled away.

            The closet doors swung open, and Ariel appeared from between the menagerie of hanging clothes, with that same nauseating, victorious grin on her pretty lips. She gave her fiery red hair an attitudinal flip as she hugged the real magic book to her chest.

            “Now come on, Nina!” Ariel groaned. “I gave you super easy instructions to follow. What did I say? Don’t come after me, and just keep my brother alive for a while on your stink! Was that seriously so hard?”

            “You have to undo this, Ariel! NOW!” Nina shouted, her hands balled into fists. She stared down the younger five-foot-four girl, noting her more slender frame and less toned musculature. Nina shifted her weight back against one foot in preparation to pounce; in this act, she forgot about David as he was squelched mightily into the swampy insole, spared crushing only due to the alleviated pressure between her beefy toes.

            The half-inch man roared out in the dark, wet void from the weight. In that interim, a zesty splash of foot sweat waterboarded his unfortunately open gullet.

            “Excuse you, Nina, but I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to now. Not with this book. In fact, there’s a couple new things I think I want to do now that I’ve seen you can’t follow simple directions. It’s a shame. We could’ve had a lot of fun, making my brother into our little foot-bitch together. I could’ve been a waaaay better friend to you than David, you know, with all this stuff I can do? But not anymore.”

            “Give me that book!” Nina shrieked. She leapt forward, arms outstretched to tackle Ariel to the ground. However, the redhead simply lifted a hand and snapped her fingers in combination with a silently uttered code.

            Nina crashed head-long into the instantaneously vast expanse of carpet fluff. Flailing for purchase, she turned herself over, noticing that both of her shoes had come flying off. Some distance behind her, she saw David, just as naked as ever, but appearing to be significantly larger than before. In fact, he probably stood almost as tall as her knee. For just a second, Nina wondered at how he’d regrown without the book, until she took a better look around at the towering bedposts, the infinite plain of bedroom carpet, and the skyscraper body of Ariel standing above like a ginger-haired archangel of death.

            David hadn’t regrown; Nina just shrunk.

            A scream roiled but died inside Nina’s throat. She couldn’t even muster the courage to stand up. There was nothing to do but bow low to the earth, her every molecule quaking in fear.

            Ariel stifled a musical laugh. She tapped the toe of her knee-high cowgirl boot.

            “There, Nina. That size suits you much better than your last one,” the redhead said. She set the book down on top of the dresser, so hopelessly up and out of Nina’s reach, there wasn’t even a prayer of it being stolen. Ariel clapped her hands together, shaking her head in delighted disbelief as she observed the two shrunken figures sprawled down on the floor like insects: Nina, at four inches, and David, at an even more pathetic half-inch.

            “I think we three are gonna have a lot of fun together,” Ariel commented at last, when neither of her puny subjects answered. She stepped over to the bed, careful to drop each boot on the carpet with enough force to rattle the bones of her shrunken toys, and sat down. Propping one leg up, Ariel set about prying her calves up the clothen tunnel of her boot.