For the past hour, ever since waking in Liam’s dorm, Ethan had been trying to convince himself that everything he was experiencing originated from some vivid nightmare.
Ethan stood atop a platform of cork taller than his shrunken body as he pressed down on the nail of his boyfriend’s big toe. The slab of cork provided the wide surface of Liam’s sandals. Otherwise, the college student wore only a T-shirt and a
Liam’s voice jarred the silence with ominous, thunderous words. “You’d think he’d at least respond to my texts!”
The loud, scary words proved difficult to comprehend for the college student’s shrunken boyfriend, at that moment attempting desperately to use his inch-tall body to provoke a reaction, a simply acknowledgement, from Liam.
“I’m here! On your sandal!” Ethan yelled at a toe many times larger than himself. “Please! Hear me!”
In an instant, the stable platform of the sandal tilted wildly, sending Ethan careening between Liam’s big toe and its adjacent neighbor.
“Oh fuck!” Ethan screamed as he managed to slide between the colossal toes. “I’m going to get squished if I stay here! Even his toes are massive!”
Unfortunately for Ethan, Liam kept moving. “I’ve got to hold on,” Ethan decided upon a choice mostly foist upon him by necessity.
As Liam’s footsteps continued to shake the tiny man and work him deeper into the space between the toes, Ethan smelled an extremely unpleasant odor. “Oh my god! Is that his feet? They smell so horrible!” He coughed and felt like he might choke from the rank smell, which also began to make his eyes water.
As Ethan extended his arms and tried to wedge himself securely between the toes, he tried to make sense of the fact that he had shrunk to insect size. What, if anything, had he done out of his usual routine?
“All I did was talk with that guy at the coffee house for the entire evening,” the tiny man recalled. He remembered now how the encounter had caused him to be late for dinner with Liam.
In fact, the last thing he remembered was arriving at Liam’s dorm. He had been ready to knock on the door when he had been seized by a wave of dizziness and passed out.
He had awoken no longer a man but a bug. How could this even possible? People don’t shrink except in the movies.
Another steps almost propelled the tiny man from the dubious security offered by the crevice between Liam’s toes. “I’m smaller than his damn toes,” Ethan cried.
Despite the constant motion, his eyes focused on the vinyl strip that divided Liam’s big toes from the others and supported the rest of his sandal. “I have to grab hold and pull myself on top of his foot,” he said in a shaky voice. “I hope Liam notices me when he stops walking.”
Before he made a lunge for the vinyl strap, one of his hands slipped on the sweaty wall of flesh. “Yuck! Even his toes are sweaty!”
The prodigious amount of sweat could make his attempt to scale the vinyl strap a challenge. The surface of the strap glistened from a damp layer of Liam’s foot sweat.
“Here goes nothing!” Ethan screamed and plunged forward toward the strip of vinyl.