For Richer, For Smaller (Chapter 22) (Patreon)

If Tony had been a betting man, based upon the way all that resumed underfoot bashing and flattening and sole-branding in the strangulating darkness below Lillian’s enormity had gradually given way at last to what felt like total apathetic nonbeing, the shrinker would’ve bet that he had finally been allowed to “fall.” This had to be it for him. He was done. Gone. After all, his shrunken body wasn’t bulletproof, let alone footproof. The little creature still suffered injuries on some level from so many weeks of unrelenting stamp assaults, and he still felt pain – oh, Christ, how he felt pain – which logically had to mean there was a limit to it all. A point where he just couldn’t bounce back. Frankly, they’d already pushed well-past the brink that he’d expected his altered resilience would still allow him to exist without splattering his insides apart like a rotten pomegranate into every crease and pore of his colossal spouse’s angelic velveteen-fleshed arches. Tony was on borrowed time, and it had just run dry.

But at the very least, he reasoned in the hazy void of his scrunched-in consciousness, he’d gone out like a man. Granted, it would’ve been better if his demise wasn’t experienced inside the ready-made coffin of a fuzzy purple slipper, squashed down to a stain of his former self beneath a sultry-contoured bare foot he used to adore so deeply. Still, though, he’d held nothing back in his last moments. Now that she’d probably have to spend the rest of her life on the run for killing a figure as important as her husband, no matter how low to the ground said figure had shrunk, Lillian would have plenty of time to pathetically ruminate on the fact that she hadn’t really won. The giantess had bludgeoned him literally to death via undersole impressions powered by the sheer heft of her monumental silhouette, yes, but nevertheless, she’d forever have to remember that Tony never gave up who he really was, and she still had nothing to her own name. He could live with that.

“Rise and shine, darling.”

Even as these words, unmistakably Lillian’s, were more loving in both vocabulary and tone than Tony had heard from the woman pretty much since he arrived home shrunken in a box, that dulcet noise nonetheless flooded him with greater contempt and dread than he’d known in all his years. He was supposed to be free of her now. What was she doing here, wherever “here” was? Tony didn’t try to open his eyes at first, mostly because he didn’t expect to still have eyelids, or an intact human body capable of such functions, but after being made to stew for a while in the malaise of knowing Lillian had somehow chased him into the goddamn afterlife, the shrinker began to notice more disappointing hints that he was still very much in the realm of the trample queen’s jurisdiction. Namely, the searing soreness of post-stomping pangs coming into sharper relief through every unbroken skin cell, muscle fiber, and bone anew, with the sensations clotted so thickly together that they didn’t so much register in the little guy’s mind as individual wounds as just one flesh-tight body suit he was wearing: the intangible fabric made entirely from compounded core-withering underfoot agony that felt like it wanted to squeeze him right down to six nanometers tall instead of inches.

“Come on, now, little one. No pretending you’re still asleep. I’ve woken up in the same bed next to you for a long time. I know what you look like when you’re awake, but still trying to go back to sleep. So trust me when I say that’s not going to happen this time. You wouldn’t get away with it. I know you too well. And besides, don’t you think you’ve slept for long enough today? It’s been, what, six hours? Seven, now, actually. I can’t imagine why you’d need more beauty rest than that, when you’ve got so little left to worry about in life. From now on, all you have to do is cushion my foot when I step down on you, wherever I go. Sounds pretty simple to me, and right up your alley. Or at least it used to be. Now, honey, I don’t want you to think I see you as naïve or stupid… even though I might see you that way, just a little bit, considering some of your recent choices… so I won’t insult your intelligence any further by repeating my very important question a third time, when you already know full-well what it is. I’ll just wait for you to come around and answer it. Again. Not for long, mind you, but I’ll wait.”

Much to what the six-incher realized was his disappointment and disbelief, after he reluctantly reopened his eyes, Tony took in the sight of his stripped-naked body laid in the middle of the bedspread: unbent, reformed, and almost entirely free of purple bruises. Practically good as new. Almost nothing was out of place, except of course for his shrimpy stature. At a glance, he might’ve just been awakening from an ordinary late-afternoon nap, if the sight alone of a cross-legged Lillian’s nearby titanic bare peds didn’t instantly infect him with pulse-racing alarm and consciousness-squashing PTSD flashes. The little guy felt a surge of some unknowable emotion welling fast toward the surface now, as his riveted gaze darted repeatedly between his own traitorously-healed shrunken anatomy and the tyrannical sky-high blonde’s gorgeously luxurious supple-slabbed feet perched so inescapably close in his personal orbit. He couldn’t quite recognize whatever this oncoming feeling was, which led Tony to assume it was some newly-unearthed superhuman degree of rabid righteous anger he was about to unleash on Lillian, the possibly-lethal consequences be damned.

Which made it all the more startling when the shrinker discovered at the same time as his leviathan wife did that this mysterious uprising sensation in him wasn’t rage. Without understanding exactly what was happening to him, and having even less power to stop it than he did to push the giantess’s violently stifling putty-wrinkled arches off his ruined body before, Tony abruptly burst into shrieking heaving schoolboy-whiny sobs. Having not shed a tear for any reason in literal decades, everything was released at once now for a thousand horrific reasons, all surrounding his life partner and those beautiful deadly-weaponized feet of hers. This was a broken dam effect, with the tears pouring over his whole face while he wheezed and blubbered from deep within, convulsively seizing on the mattress.

Meanwhile Lillian silently looked down on him with at least a shade of the shell shock he’d hoped to induce in her earlier today. Of course, that surprise on the woman’s face gave him no satisfaction now, since it wasn’t steeped in her own mortified defeat, but rather the pure unexpectedness of watching her stoic foot-loving macho-man hubby bawl like a colicky toddler. He might as well have shit himself, too, for all this display must have done to finally kill whatever invisible wisps of dignity he still had remaining. Tony attempted commanding his body to stop the teary outflow and get a goddamn grip, but this forcefulness only resulting in audibly heavier wails that made him sound even more out-of-control upset.

To her credit, if she deserved any at all, an indeed-patient Lillian didn’t comment, laugh, or show further expression beyond mild amazement while her shrunken spouse worked this backlog of distress out of his system via ugly-crying for no less than twenty straight minutes. Which felt to Tony like even more of a time-elongated lifetime than some of the especially punishing trample sessions he’d injuriously endured below his crushing self-made giantess overlord’s soles. Technically, he was feeling much less foot-clobbered hardship or overall physiology-splitting constriction right now than he had all day, and maybe far longer than that, yet the little being had never felt lower in his whole life.

What had she done to him? If there was even any of “him” left here at all?

“Get… a fucking… pen,” Tony relented upon finally battling his way through the saltwater and snot, as each syllable exited his throat like a bundle of jagged razors. “Let’s just… get this… over with.”