Nastya couldn't remember when her strange fascination first appeared. It seemed that it had always been with her, as long as she could remember. Since her early childhood, she would freeze inside when the villain in an old movie sank in quicksand, but it was not fear, no. Nastya could never describe that feeling, but it flared up in her stomach and chest whenever she saw quicksand or swamps, whether it was moments from movies or YouTube videos. Even the earth that had melted after heavy rains and turned into soft mud seemed to tempt her, and she wanted to take off her shoes and walk barefoot on this viscous mixture of water and earth, enjoying the way it slipped between her toes, the way it slurped and sucked at her feet... And every time Nastya was terribly annoyed, she walked by, suppressing these strange desires. But there was nothing to be done, doing such things in the city was not the best idea for obvious reasons. So Nastya sighed sadly and went on her way, satisfying herself only with her imagination.
She was looking forward to a trip to the countryside, and the closer the date of her vacation came, the more often various fantasies about deep mud pits, ditches with loosened clay, or the sticky bottom silt of dried-up lakes popped into her head. Nastya literally felt the wet pressure on her ankles and calves, the soft pleasant suction on the soles of her feet, felt the soft but strong grip of the mud that pulled her feet back with each attempt to pull them out. The fantasies became more vivid and intrusive.
Yes, it is impossible to say exactly when the girl had this strange fascination, but there was one incident that was clearly imprinted in her memory, and it definitely helped to reveal this strange desire to get stuck in the mud. It was ten years ago, Nastya was on summer vacation in the same village. It was the middle of July, it was hot as hell, and the girl was walking with her friend on the outskirts of the village. They liked to walk together in deserted places where the probability of meeting someone was almost zero. So they walked barefoot, holding their shoes in their hands, until by chance they came across a shallow ditch with gray mud and small puddles of water at the bottom. Nastya didn't remember the excuse for going down there, but she clearly remembered that as soon as her bare feet touched the cool surface of the mud, she sank down to her knees. A dozen seconds of struggling and trying to get out, and the girl was stuck up to the middle of her thighs. She was stuck very firmly, no matter how fast she was sinking and how soft the gray mass seemed. She tried to get out, she struggled as hard as she could, but even with the help of her friend, she could not get out right away. At some point, they even began to think that they would have to call someone for help, because the sticky clay sucked Nastya's feet so tightly that it was impossible to pull them out by brute force. Only when her friend carefully climbed down, distributing her weight and crawling on her knees so that she would not sink in, did they both dig their hands into the loosened earth and slowly, inch by inch, pull Nastya's legs out of the sticky trap, soaking themselves from head to toe in the mud. The process was so exhausting that the girls lay silently on the edge of the pit for several minutes, catching their breath.
Afterwards they laughed and joked about it, but for Nastya it remained more than just a funny memory. Again and again, her thoughts returned to that pit. Again and again she relived the moment when she first touched the wet ground with her toes and then finally shifted her body weight from her hands, resting on the edges of the pit, to her feet, which immediately began to sink slowly into the mud, and she could only spread her arms awkwardly, trying to keep her balance, and could only watch as her knees disappeared into the sticky gray soil. But the most vivid memory of all was the feeling of suction on her legs and under her feet. Every time she tried to pull her foot out, she felt the mud like a giant mouth sucking her bare soles back in...
And now the long-awaited moment had arrived. Nastya walked confidently along the path, paying no attention to the prickly stones and twigs under her bare feet, not yet used to such surfaces. The girl didn't even notice them, her head was only filled with thoughts of the place she was going to, and the closer she got, the faster her heart beat, and at some point her knees even started to tremble, so she had to slow down. But that didn't help her to calm down. Her mind was full of worries - what if the ditch had been filled in? What if it had dried up? Most of all, Nastya feared that she would not find what she had come all this way for. Once, somewhere in the back of her mind, there was a faint fear that she might get so stuck that she wouldn't be able to get out on her own, and this time there would be no one around to help her. But Nastya became even more excited when she imagined how helplessly she would wriggle in the thick, heavy mud, and she immediately brushed away the slight feeling of danger. She's going to this mud pit just to get stuck. How will she get out? She'll think of something, it doesn't matter now.