Featherscape Tickle Story Collection

City Boy's Ticklish Feet (FF/M)

Trevor thought he knew the meaning of 'nothing to do'. The phrase was a popular hyperbole for general boredom, often getting thrown around lazy, rainy days or long car rides with barren understanding. However, upon visiting Uncle Merle's and Aunt Girdy's farm, a more transparent meaning to the phrase began to take shape, as he truly felt that there was nothing to be done. Nothing to engage his interests, nothing to make the time go by faster, nothing to really even accomplish moment by moment. Nothing worthwhile, anyway. His aunt and uncle had made accommodations to provide board games to play, music to listen to, food to eat, and local activities to occupy the time. But Trevor grew bored of the games upon looking at them, groaned through the twangy droning of country music, had no taste for the dried fruits and vegetables provided, and wanted little to nothing to do with the local community.

There was no wifi where Trevor's parents had sent him. He checked on his phone about every five minutes. The boy being there was an effort to expose him to distant family, relatives that he had not seen in years and who never got around to visiting him in the city. The two worlds could not have been more different. An hour out in the lifeless countryside of his aunt and uncle's farm felt like a day in his time. His cousins did what they could to entertain the boy while his uncle worked the fields and his aunt tended to the chores. To Trevor, it was like being sent back in time.

"Hey, Trevor, wanna go stick fishin' tomorrow?" asked his cousin, Brett. Brett's question snapped Trevor out of a daze of staring out of the boy's bedroom window. At sixteen, both Brett and Trevor had grown into completely different people, more strangers than actual strangers. Brett was tall and built wide, both in muscle and gut. His hair was a mess and he smacked his lips when he spoke. Trevor looked over at him, truly puzzled as to whether he was serious or not.

"'Stick fishing'?" Trevor asked, as if trying to replicate speech from a language he had never heard before. "What's that?"

"You never been stick fishin'?" asked Dale, piping up from the other end of the room. Dale was the younger brother, a feisty little creature beaming with energy. He was careless and wild and always seemed to have a little bit of dirt smeared somewhere on his body. He wore ripped overalls and went everywhere barefoot. Both brothers did. In contrast, Trevor sat around wearing designer shorts, a tee shirt with the New York Giants logo on the front, and a clean pair of Nikes. His shaggy brown hair hung down against his neck and partially in front of his face.

"No," Trevor said, pushing his hair out of his face. His voice had a passive aggressive bite to it that may have been noticeable to his friends back home, but both cousins seemed to gloss right by it.

"Oh, it's so much fun, Tre," Brett said. "It's a game. You see, you go out and you find the best stick you can find. Then you make yourself a lure outta some string or twine and a hook or somethin' and you see who can catch the biggest fish in the pond."

"It's the best, Tre," Dale added. "I once caught me a sucker carp the size of my leg with a boot lace and a rusty nail!"

"Ye can't keep tellin' that story," Brett fussed. "Ye never measured it and it don't count if ye lose it before you measure it."

"But I did catch it," argued Dale. "And it was jus' as big as yours. Maybe even bigger." The bickering between the two was a consistent noise throughout the house, cut off from any surrounding ambient noise. Trevor found it almost entertaining adjacent, if also serving as a constant reminder of the lack thereof.

Trevor stared off in the bedroom. The room had a few amenities that Trevor recognized, though horrendously out of date. Both of his cousins shared a computer, an older model fatback desktop. They had a Sega Genesis hooked up to a CRT with burned screen distortion. They had a small collection of comics, various issues in the middle of different stories. Everywhere he looked, Trevor found something new to kill more of his interest. He turned back to his phone, chipping away at the evening with offline mobile games.