‘No,’ snarled Derek, without any suggestion this was anything less than a threat. ‘If they don’t see me doing something I’ll get another negative report and they’ll add two more fucking weeks to my payback.’ David mumbled something under his breath but Derek persisted, ‘go and sweep a floor or something. Just get out of my face and stop making me look bad.’ As Derek lifted up the box, you lay, a dead ringer image of the moment he’d imagined, all those years ago, in the cloak room, tiny, helpless, and between his feet. Back then, he’d posed a question to which you couldn’t answer. So, what answer was he now, without knowing, missing? Between his feet, what were you, without him noticing, doing?
Flanked by the three stripes of an easily identifiable pair of trainers, you lay, sobbing to any power of any faith or force of reason that might lessen or even end the casual nightmare of squirming, marooned in this theatre of feet, any one of which might have your name and time of death preloaded into a sole, like advance notification of a live execution.
Box held at stomach height, Derek stood, planted to the spot, like a probationary Colossus of Rhodes. ‘And,’ he barked at the retreating figure of the older, David, ‘if you aren’t where we said then I’m going but you’ll still owe me, so don’t try and get out of it, again.’ He continued to stand. ‘Sad old cock sucker,’ he muttered, under his breath as he levelled the load at his waist but still didn’t move.
Curled like a defensive wood louse, with as slim a survival chance, situated in a backstage corridor, minutes before curtain, you continue to sob. ‘Please don’t do this,’ you beseeched first one foot, then the other. Dread and the attendant paralysis brought about a primitive, near-catatonic state of rapturous horror-wonder as the body above perpetually adjusted its weight, causing the sides of these ordinary trainers to bulge and ripple in order that equilibrium of the unimaginable forces and weight overhead remain calibrated.
Ordinary trainers! Of all abnormal notions of notions! Ordinary? Intolerable, unendurable! Had ever some unthinkable measure of ‘ordinary’ been set against a soul-weight, weighing down, it would look and smell like this - but simple, uncomplicated ‘ordinary’?
Quite unable to move but utterly unable to prevent the nightmare dreams whose lightest words, harrow the mortal mind, you lay, praying unspoken utterance as you awaited inevitable annihilation. Gargantuan, the cream leather creaked like a nighttime house, a gathering memory of immediate future, the sweat from Derek grew thicker and more intoxicating. Almost loving the engine of certain death as though it were the only truth or rational future, you lay on your right side, praying to a slightly rucked hem above the left shoe which revealed the slate grey of a sock, godlike in its obscured revelation. As if counting prayer beads, you squinted to see the knit of the wool, in all its grand design and subtle variation of yarn, not one single grey but infused with fibres of blues, of blacks written on slate, like bright summer skies and the darkness of an everlasting moment snuffed under the heel of a school bully grown beyond every wild fear ever entertained by any of his human prey. Stars! Start from your spheres, grubby whimpered the wood of a trampled thoroughfare, unnoticed and incidental. ‘Please don’t let it end like this,’ you quietly blubbed, worshiping one unbearable foot of a thug-God before rolling over to grovel to the other.
Rapt, you confessed shame, degradation, horror and abomination to the right foot only to be shaken to your soul’s beginning-end by a soul blasting boom of such intense intimacy that for a moment you assumed death looked so like life that you had, without knowing, crossed into the latter and lay now on an afterlife floor, as miserable, wretched and debased as whilst in the flesh. Not surprisingly, this wasn’t the case.
Rearranging his weight, Derek lifted and moved his foot an inch to the side, treading so close to your back that, had you not, the moment before rolled onto your opposite side, you would now lay pulverized beneath a left Adidas tread, gore soaking into thirsty boards as bone fragments obediently kissed the crushing mass of an impervious sole, weighing the sum of a school bully on your memory who, finally achieving a dream, didn’t know to look down upon your pathetic demise.
Wriggling with a renewed and magnified dread, you instantly recognized that despite escaping instant crush-death, the back of your pullover was now inescapably pressed beneath the edge of Derek’s heel and, try as might, no effort on your tiny part offered the remotest possibility of pulling free. The combined smell of warm leather and sweated wool burrowed into the pit of the stomach it turned with the self evident truth that your sentence had been delayed and not commuted. Alternate waves of nauseous, cold sweats and hot flushes struck in such rapid succession that losing consciousness and the inability to act at no notice was a very real likelihood. In a hopeless stew, you whimpered, casting your eyes around. The outlook was limited. Across to the further foot, gargantuan and impassive, despondent eyes feasted on a starvation of indifference. Trapped at your rear, enough v-neck rested, crushed and immovable, sufficient to detain you at any moment with a wet crunch. A sidewards turn of the head afforded an upward glance, overhead into the shadowlands of the lower hem of the bully’s jeans. Squinting into the forever-dark of the leg, the gloom gradually surrendered its twilight secrets. A sock of the same woollen grey as your previous encounter with the slough of despond breathed its own heady sweat, falling on you, almost as a light drizzle. Creaking quietly, the leather again recalled the horrible, constant movement of the creature above. The faint, hissing rustle of a whisper, inaudible to the typical ear but, cast down in abjection, open to your extended range, difficult to identify until, gazing in mute awe up at the sweat soaked sock disappearing into totality, the source became apparent. You had become so small, so insignificant, you could hear the fibres of the giant bully, the criminal and adult man towering, you could hear the fibres of Derek’s sock. And, for reasons beyond the dull comprehension under which you lay, pinned, awaiting flight or departure, you cried, almost happy this might soon be over, howling little sobs of degradation and despair.
Trying to drive out and prevent wave upon wave of terrible ideas taking root and allow, instead, alert sense whose clarity might decide whether you act in an instant and avoid a second or third, fourth crush fatality, was futile. The slow motion of Derek’s denim hem, the vicious smell of bullying feet in socks, grey as pessimism and the gentle, almost soothing lamentation of a shoe which might rise, fall and snuff you in an instant, harmonised as a lullaby, lulling you from final moment to final moment of a clear end of a pitiful life.
‘I’m moving the box,’ Derek announced to a manager as his shoe dragged across the floor before rising and crashing down with a sickening crunch. ‘I don’t know where Dave got to. Probably slacking again.’
‘Just get that box away. It’s almost time.’
‘Wanker,’ Derek mumbled under his breath, deliberately audible and certainly heard, flexing the mild fear he knew he instilled in all the theatre who didn’t want a community service thug wiping something unpleasant stuck under his trainer all down the corridor.
Spellbound in hopeless misery, you wailed in mindless terror as, without warning, the foot shifted. The first fifty-fifty toss of fate fell initially in your favour, as Derek heavily dragged his foot away instead of towards you meaning that, despite still trapped, you weren’t instantly dragged underfoot to be simultaneously, immediately crushed and shredded. However, the dragging motion of his foot hauled you with it at an alarming speed, and the attendant bunching of your pullover pulled you closer into the oblivious embrace of the three-stripe crusher.
In less than a second, you were assimilated so close to the base of Derek’s foot that the skin on your back began to feed beneath the tearing pressure, like an all consuming conveyor belt or tank tread. But then, in the last possible moment, and again without warning, you were free to scrabble, madly, necessarily and essentially, in the reverse direction when, again, the deafening boom of the falling foot came, you were barely a hair’s breadth from its edge, after retreating more than your length away from the appointed point of execution.
Amidst the crash of your own salvation came the crunch of something not so lucky. Whilst the foot fell flat and flush with the floor, something lay between, smashed in a moment into negligible depth, something once with form now nothing but constituent parts laid out as components. Neither knowing the tiny carnage averted nor the slaughter actioned, the foot turned on its heel, grinding and rearranging further the little life lost, lifting again and was gone like a car at a roadside picnic.
Not fully comprehending you were still alive, you had no time to avoid a second pair of managerial boots which thundered hurriedly within too little distance of another death, evaded. Gone before you could even throw your arms up in futile defence, you lay alone as Derek angrily stamped away, grumbling to himself at a lack of box-stow recognition, scraping something off the underside of his trainer, as he finally turned the corner.
Leaping up to run, you recoiled at the pulverised jumble of something previously about a third your size, now nothing more than a gruesome puzzle of guts, chitin and allegory whose spiral correlated with the turn of Derek’s heel. Knowing time wasted might be a life lesson you’ll never walk away from, you sprinted without a single thought for what you might possibly do next.
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
More by this author
