You had spent an entire day navigating the stale terrain of the dirty gym floor, you had survived jumping onto some kid’s stomping shoe only to be deposited into a revolting cesspool of sweaty gym socks and shoes. It seemed that no matter how hard you tried to survive this nightmare, some other challenge threw you back at square one. Both options seemed like suicide so you sat atop the shoe and thought about what you were going to do. Now with an outside view, the shoe belonged to the same girl from before, only surrounded by other similarly colored shoes across the floor. The potent smell radiating from their interiors was no more tolerable than what you had dealt with inside the shoe below you.

Half an hour had passed since your grim realization and since then you had only gotten smaller. You were fated to die amidst the smelly footwear, but you still had a say over how exactly you’d go out. You could have chosen to jump off the top of the shoe and land with a splat on the tiles below, but instead, for some unknown reason, you decided to fling yourself back into the dark abyss from which you came.


Your ritualistic suicide was as poorly planned as it was smelly. The soggy insole of the shoe provides just enough cushioning to prevent your death on impact. Instead, every bone below your waist shatters as soon as you hit the bottom. Your face pummels into the bog-like sole and everything goes black.

When you awake, the pain you feel is unbearable, like you’ve been doused in gas and set ablaze. Your legs are a mangled red mess and sting more and more as the puddles of salty foot sweat seep into your open wounds. Your frail body curls into a ball at the heel of the insole longing for death. Like an ostrich, you shove your head between fibers of fabric and try to drown yourself in the sea of sweat beneath. Your lungs burn but still, your body refuses to shut down, jolting your soaking head back out just in time to see the shadow of Emily’s foot loom overhead. Her sock drops down onto the shoe, sealing you in darkness. The last thing your brain can process is the crushing weight of the girl’s heel inside the hellish environment of her shoe…