“Your size looks better on me anyway.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I was too small to be heard arguing the point even if I tried. I was a quarter-inch tall, tops. I could be mistaken for a bit of sock lint on the floor, especially compared to the black wolf toes that now towered over me like a pantheon of judgmental gods. Even the subtle, subconscious movements he made while standing still were obvious from my tiny perspective; motions that were completely irrelevant to him were frightening to me.

He’d done plenty of walking that day, too. The smell of his toes wafted around me like a perfume—or perhaps a poison. There was no mistaking it for anything other than the smell of a mammalian hindpaw and, given my proximity, it was the only thing I could smell. Though his fur seemed to absorb most of the light in the bathroom, a few reflections off the white tiles illuminated the source of that scent: Toepads that were visibly damp with sweat. Toepads that could cover me, whole, and end me with no effort at all.

His bare foot moved forward with the devastating power of a tsunami. I closed my eyes and braced for impact (as if I had any hope of surviving such an impact) but the impact never came. Instead, things became increasingly dark, warm, humid, and smelly. I summoned the courage to open my eyes and found out the cause: I was now between his toes, stuck in the valley twilight between his digits. His weight shifted as he crouched down, but I couldn’t even see his finger until it pressed me firmly against his sweaty toe-crotch.

“Have fun down there,” he said. The twilight around me darkened. He was putting his socks on. The white socks made for a beautiful contrast against his dark body, but they now served as my prison. I was trapped alongside his sweat and scent, which now had fewer avenues of escape. That dim light turned to darkness when he put his shoes on, an act that only further amplified the sensory overload his feet inflicted on me by their mere presence.

There wasn’t a hint at all that he had a shrunken passenger in his shoe. Nobody in the outside world would know. It’d take his mercy to escape and a frightening amount of luck just to survive the afternoon. Would I receive either?