– A Horny Short –

Most people with interesting fetishes can recount the first experience that cemented their proclivity. But much like a first kiss, these defining moments are not often synonymous with the most remarkable ones. Derrick was no different. His life promised to be filled with boys and rubber boots…and better, boys with rubber boots. And while that path may have started at the fence post, it was not his inaugural orgasm in the north pasture that he revisited in countless fantasies throughout the coming years.  This one occurred a few months later. 

It had been a summer of experimentation, of finding every excuse imaginable to don the Hunters and trek to a secluded place in order to recreate the events that had transpired the first time.  And as can be expected, Derrick discovered there was a multitude of ways to respond to the arousal that inevitably came from sliding the rubber boots onto his feet.  He mounted hay bales in the loft.  He discovered the vibrations of the seat on the tractor when his dad left it idling in the yard.  And, of course, he eventually learned that his hand could do the trick—which was just a hop, skip, and a jump from the epiphany that he didn’t even need to wear, but merely had to think about the Hunters…or his unsuspecting classmate. 

It was a muggy afternoon when Derrick plunged his feet into the beloved boots.  His parents had since become accustomed to seeing him romp across the farm and surrounding properties with them on that summer.  They seemed to think nothing of it, though once his mother had questioned the choice of attire on a particularly brutal day.  Not only where they black, knee-high rubber boots—is there any footwear that breathes less?—but Derrick preferred to wear them with jeans.  Perhaps it was that having his own, scrawny legs visible shattered the illusion that the boots weren’t actually his, but Simon’s.  

The sky was a milky white and the sun cast a hot, diffused light across the backyard as he clomped down the back steps. While his mother called after him with her predictable, perfunctory mandate for a prompt return for dinner, today she added a new warning: stay clear from the quarry.  Years later, Derrick wondered why she had bothered to say it. He had never wandered as far as the clay quarry before—it was nearly two miles from the house.  Yet once issued, the unexpected edict had the quite the opposite of its intended effect.  While it had never before occurred to Derrick to make such an arduous journey through the heat—and in rubber boots no less—the idea was instantly appealing.  

He had once seen a newspaper article about a cow that had become ensnared in a tar pit.  He had pored over the grainy black-and-white photograph of rescue workers in slickers and boots up to their knees in dark, sticky mire.  The idea of sinking his own boots in slimy clay was perhaps the most exciting idea yet. Half walking, half running, he stole across the edges of the neighbor’s fields, now tall with corn, to the carved out valley where he knew the local brick company sometimes excavated for deep red soil. 

His feet were sweating in their unforgiving rubber sheaths by the time he reached the site. It was fairly unremarkable, the clay quarry. Certainly nothing so dramatic as a stone quarry, where the ground suddenly plunged through layers of Earth to a mysterious blue lake at its bottom.  Because the rich red soil—so perfect for baking into masonry—was just below a thin crust of topsoil, the brick company scarcely needed to scratch the surface of the meadow to collect the resource. The resultant landscape resembled more of a plowed up construction site—perhaps for a new shopping plaza—rather than a quarry.  Chunky treads of earth movers criss-crossed ground that sloped toward a brown pool of stagnant water.  

An abandoned dozer sat parked in the tall grass nearby.  It was just Derrick, the droning cicadas, and horseflies darting over the surface of the fetid pond.  No one else was in sight. He trudged toward the center of the operation, plodding over the uneven terrain and observing with satisfaction the Hunters turn rusty with dust.  Indeed, the now familiar strain against his jeans was already in full vigor by the time Derrick had reached the place where the crumbly ground grew darker with moisture. 

He pressed a tentative boot into the clay and shuddered in delighted fascination as it gave with a surprising sponginess under his tread.  The air, hot and sweet with the scent of sun-baked grass, suddenly curled around him with the almost metallic tang of the copper soil as his foot disturbed the edge of the quarry. He lifted it and surveyed with satisfaction the perfect likeness of his sole—a cleanly stamped “Hunter” in reverse pushed into the Earth just above the v-shaped grooves of his boot heel.  He strode in further with both feet, savoring not just the sensation of the ground yielding under his boots, but the sticky slickness with which his boots shot forward with each step, as if the quarry were drawing him into its center.  The prints of the treads behind him became increasing drawn out in exaggerated, shining lengths. 

Derrick hadn’t expected the clay to be so slippery, nor so greedy.  The resistance with which he raised his Hunters from the quarry seemed to become more insistent the further he went, as though suggesting his very boots were ransom for trespassing. He knew this should concern him, but it only emboldened the throbbing that egged him on. By now, he was ankle deep in the mud, each lift of his foot resulting in a glorious squelching release and an progressively slathered boot shaft. 

A scintilla of logic told Derrick to stop shy of the water’s edge.  Though the brightly glistening pond beckoned innocently, clear enough to reveal the sodden ground just below its surface, he knew his strength would be no match for the quarry if he ventured in where the clay mixed with liquid.  He satisfied himself by playing in the sublime, soggy silt just beside it, though, sinking his beloved Hunters to new depths as it compacted further and further under his weight.  A great clod of ooze fell from the side of the furrow he had created, collapsing onto his boot.  The pressure of the ground seizing his foot was as thrilling as it was shocking. Derrick hadn’t realized how heavy mud could be.  Was this perhaps the reason for his mother’s stern warning?  The disobedience felt wickedly delicious as he grasped the top of his boot with both hands and wrenched his Hunter free.  

Clay was now smeared halfway up his boot shafts, and his hair was plastered to his forehead, soaked with the strenuous activity of battling the quarry’s powerful suction.  The sun was now no longer overheard but dipping toward the west, and the shadow of the quiet land mover was slowly reaching across the parched grass toward the patch of raw mire where he stood, panting. 

How long had he been here?

Derrick knew it would be foolish to ignore not just one, but both of his mother’s directives.  But there is also no contest between good sense and titillation when it comes to a boy in the throes of pubescence.  So as the cicadas wound down in the subtle cooling of early evening and his mom was dropping a handful of spaghetti noodles into a roiling pot of hot water, Derrick resolved to see his Hunters thoroughly christened in a coating of oily, russet mud all the way up to their rims.  He sunk them into a fresh expanse of gumbo at the water’s edge and began work his feet in circle, both widening and deepening the hole as he churned.  The blissful ache bloomed between his legs as the ground swallowed the bottom two thirds of his boots. 

He was just wondering if Simon Glass had ever been here with his beautiful olive boots when his heel struck too close to the pond.  Like a patient predator, the quarry now saw its chance and pushed a finger of yellow water into the disturbed clay.  Derrick felt more than he saw the change in the consistency of the mire as it quickly went from grainy to soupy.  It clamped the shafts of the boots to his calves in seconds and slowly began to ascend them. 

Derrick was caught between awe and panic at his predicament. He strained the top of his foot against the inside of one boot, then the other.  They were utterly glued.  In less than a minute, he had been swallowed by the pond as though it was a giant boot-consuming amoeba, and only the top two inches or so of the Hunters were now all that separated them from being completely lost.

“Well you’ve gotten yourself into a spot, haven’t you?” came a voice from the direction of the dozer.  

Derrick, heart hammering in his neck, twisted around to see a man approaching through the brown reeds.  He shaded his eyes against the lowering sun.  The man was his father’s age, perhaps. He wore  a t-shirt, battered khaki pants with many pockets, a backpack, and an amused expression on his unshaven face. In a few long strides, he fizzled through the withered grass and stopped with the dusty rubber toe caps of his beat up Converse hanging over the place where the ground turned treacherous and Derrick’s footsteps began. Derrick would have flushed with shame for being discovered had he not already been glowing from sun and exhaustion. The man put his hands on his hips and whistled low. 

“That is some mud!” he marveled.  “Bet it was a lot of fun in there…until it wasn’t, huh?” He winked. 

Derrick felt tears stinging his eyes and mixing with the sweat already slick on his face. “I—I don’t know,” he stammered, horrified at how babyish he suddenly felt.

Still smiling, the man crouched, bringing his face level with Derrick’s. “Hey now,” he said lightly, as though coaxing a kitten from a tree. “No worries.” He spread his palms out. “It’s just a little bit of dirt mixed with a little bit of water. Nothing we can’t handle, right?” 

Derrick nodded ruefully, his weary legs beginning to quiver in his stubbornly fixed boots. He watched with curiosity as the man removed his backpack and opened it.  “Lucky for you,” he continued brightly, “I came prepared for some fun, too!” From the bag he produced the tallest pair of rubber boots Derrick had ever seen. They were a shiny brown and accented with cream yellow bands at the outsole and rim. 

“You have boots, too?” Derrick was incredulous, his doleful circumstances temporarily forgotten. 

The man beamed as he sat on the hard, knobby ground of petrified tire treads and began to tug at his shoelaces. “Sure do! Just about always have a pair with me.” He methodically removed his sneakers and set them side by side before pointing his toes inside the boots. Derrick stood mesmerized by the way they seemed to inflate as his feet slid into them, and he knew that man was enjoying the cool sensation that comes with donning a pair of recently vacant boots.  “Something tells me—” he continued as he stood up and brushed off his pants, “—that you probably have your boots with you a lot, too.”  

Derrick nodded as the man unhesitatingly began to squelch into the soft clay.  He waded toward Derrick until he was standing in the newly formed arm of lake with him, though the coppery sheen of muck scarcely went halfway up the man’s boot shafts, that’s how much bigger he was.  Though tempered by timidity, the electricity of Derrick’s previous excitement tingled at the sight. 

 “Hunters!” the man exclaimed, observing the nearly submerged badges on Derrick’s boots.  “Those are some good boots you’ve got there, kiddo.”  He leaned in conspiratorially. “They’re pretty fun to fool around in, aren’t they?”  

Again Derrick nodded, both feeling intensely sheepish, yet also feeling somewhat wonderstruck at having this full-grown man empathize with him, not to mention standing before him in the most beautiful rubber boots he had ever seen. 

The man bent down and grasped the rim of one of Derrick’s boots, giving it a tug. Derrick felt the man’s thumbs through his jeans.  The boot, however, remained fixed. The man chuckled and straightened, putting his hands on his hips. “Well, buddy, seems we are going to have to get you out of here in a two-step plan.”

“What does that mean?” he heard himself ask, his voice small. 

“You first, then your boots.” he stated matter-of-factly, bending down until Derrick could see the back of his tanned neck.  “Grab on.”  Derrick obediently wrapped his arms around him.  The pleasant smell of an unfamiliar deodorant enveloped him.  When the man spoke again, his voice vibrated through Derrick’s chest and arms. “Now when I lift you, don’t try to bring your boots up with you, or I’ll just fall over and we’ll both be in trouble. Just let your feet slide out. Got it?”  

When Derrick had answered in the affirmative, the man stood, his shoulders taking his weight and raising him from the surface of the quarry. Derrick felt his feet, damp and warm, leave the boot shafts behind as the man slowly backed away from the water.  Though he swayed with each belabored step as the silt grasped at each of his boots in a succession of loud slurps, the man never faltered.  He bore Derrick to dry ground, where he squatted so that Derrick’s socks came to rest on crumbly shards of summer-dried earth. 

His rescuer smiled at him as Derrick stared back at him, at the great folds of creamy clay that were still glued to his tall brown rubber boots.  He fumbled for something to say.  The guy was a complete stranger, yet he seemed to understand Derrick so well—never scolding or even questioning why he had ended up in the quagmire.  

“Well,” the man clapped Derrick on the shoulder.  “I’d say we were pretty successful with phase one of our mission! Now, if you don’t mind waiting here for me, I’ll complete the second part and retrieve those amazing boots of yours, huh?” He gave a good natured laugh and turned back to the clay mess.  The man was just sinking back up to his ankles before Derrick called after him. 

“But what if you get stuck?” A nearby grasshopper suddenly stopped trilling as though also waiting for an answer.  

The man paused and turned back to him with a crooked grin.  “Not to worry, kid. I’ve had some practice with this sort of thing.” He gave Derrick a slow, knowing nod before continuing in his sloppy trek to the Hunters, two small bands of black protruding amidst the brown rippling water.  Derrick tracked the movement of the pale yellow rims that encircled the man’s legs as he used the toe of his boot to pry them from their resting place.  He shook the largest clods of mud loose, sending a spray across the pond, then headed back toward Derrick with his beloved pair of boots pinched together in one hand. 

“I return these to their adventurous owner,” he announced dramatically as he placed them on the ground before Derrick. 

For once, Derrick knew exactly what to say.  “Thank you, mister!” He unhesitatingly plunged his feet back inside and considered where he might quickly rinse them off before he returned to the house. When he looked up, he found the man was watching him with the same amused face he had worn when he first arrived. 

“Seems you’re going to be fine. I guess the responsible thing would be for me to tell you not to get yourself into this kind of trouble again.”  

Derrick stiffened, the blood rushing to his cheeks. He prepared himself for the inevitable scolding.

Instead, for a second time, the man winked. “But I guess we both know that’s not going to happen, will it?”  Derrick breathed with relief, and smirked in agreement. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Derrick.”  

The man clapped him on the shoulder again.  “Glad I came by to meet you, Derrick. I’m Anthony.  You take care.  Alright?”  Derrick nodded vigorously. “Okay, then. You better get.”

Derrick started homeward, watching the reddish film slowly wipe from the tops of his boots as they skimmed through the stiffened blades of grass.  When he reached the edge of the corn field, he turned, expecting to see Anthony watching the progress of his departure. Instead, Anthony was heading in the opposite direction, making his way back through the boot print-pocked grime…as though heading for the center of the pond.  

Derrick furrowed his brow.  Why would he be going there? Wouldn’t the clay be the deepest, and impossibly thick?

The thrill that had been stifled by the panic and embarrassment of his rescue suddenly reignited.  The welcome throb returned. 

Yes. Yes it would be. 

He smiled.  Simon Glass, it seemed, had been usurped.  He turned, pushing his way into the waving leaves of cornstalks and hurried home.