On 9/12/20** at about 1030 hrs., comp. arrived at 1632 G.M.C. Blvd. E.to perform window-washing work. Upon arrival comp. walked onto third floor landing and observed the victim through the window panes. The victim was lying on the floor, with water splashed over his body, and an open bottle of prescription pain medication near his hand. Comp. called 911, and a dual response of BFD and BPD was dispatched. First on arrival, MacBride, finding the front door locked, made entry by breaking one of the window panes. She observed that the victim’s door was blocked by a chair, which prevented access. She stayed beside the victim, and attempted to put her fingers in his mouth to retrieve the pills, until responders arrived and he was stabilized by BFD #99 in the ambulance. During an interview with the victim, the victim was asked if he had taken the full prescription bottle, at which time the victim answered “Yes.” On further interview of the victim, the victim was asked if he was attempting to harm himself, at which time the victim answered “Yes.” The victim was treated by B— medical staff for a drug overdose, and was released into the care of MacBride, according to his and her wishes.


After filling out the police form, I drove Alan to my house on the edge of town. We sat down together and had a drink and a smoke. Then I dug out the tape recorder from my closet, and set it down on the table in front of him.

“Chicken?” I offered. “I left the dark meat for you.”

“No,” he waved it off. “I’m ready.”

“Are you sure, Alan?” I walked back to my chair, across from him, and sat down.

He nodded, and pressed the red button. The cassette tapes started to whir (it was an old machine, from the early 1980s). “It started like this,” he said, talking into the tape recorder, and lighting another cigarette. “She was 19 and I was 21. She was just entering her second year of university, and I was just leaving school, for good.” He coughed a few times, and then took a sip from his drink. “It was eight years ago, and she begged – and I mean really begged – me to sign those forms. There I was, her friend since high school, it’s not like we were strangers or anything, you know…” He stopped and looked over at me.

“What is it?”

“Being silent about this was killing me. I don’t know how long you’re willing to listen, Charlotte. It’s a long story, you know.”

“Take as long as you need. We can stop when you want.”

“I’m sorry.” For a moment there was silence between us. Then he suddenly dragged his chair close to mine, so he could face me better. He downed his glass in one go, paused, and launched afresh.

(Note. What follows is my narration of the facts and the records, taken faithfully from the transcription, and approved by Alan.)

Alan was the son of one of the Society’s leaders, and so had been permitted, by special order, to remain at his pre-reduced size throughout his college years. At the age of 22, like all adult males, his immunity expired, he was released out of the custody of his parent-guardian, and was free to find work as he could.

Though he’d received the highest marks in Engineering and the New Humanities, he was unable to find stable, full-time employment at any of the firms. His troubles weren’t perhaps due to any exclusionary policies against males, but because most employers would have found it difficult and perhaps impossible to retain a talented male worker over the long-term. His rights were unprotected, and at any time, if not in the safekeeping or under the guardianship of a female caretaker, he could disappear from work one day and never be located again. Such sad stories had occurred and recurred, or had been rumored to (which came out the same), in hundreds of cases among males who had in various ways managed to maintain their pre-reduced status into their twenties or later. Now and then one came across a male in his thirties or forties, or perhaps older, but barring certain cultural figures, pop singers, and henchmen, these were rare, most of them solitaries, vagabonds who lived on the outskirts of the cities, or in forests, roaming the country and scrounging or scrabbling for their daily meals.

So when Alan heard, the fall after he graduated, that Sadie, his close friend at college, had offered to pay for his services as her private teacher, in the school’s new tutoring program, he responded with interest.

“Where do you need help? What subjects?” he asked her, over the phone.

“All of them. Is that okay, Alan?”

“So you’re my only student? How much do they pay?”

“I should be. Room and board’s covered. So is food. Basically all living expenses, from what I’ve heard.” She told him the pay. It was a teacher’s wage, mid-range and fair.

“Do I interview with them?”

“Nope. I took care of that, Alan,” Sadie said, and then coughed away from the receiver. He could almost hear her smiling over the phone. “I’ve gotta go. When can you come over and check out the room? My week’s free.”

“Tomorrow’s good. Say, 5 in the afternoon? How’s that?”

“Works for me. Bye, Alan.”

“Goodbye.”

“See ya.”

So the next day, late afternoon, he took the bus downstate to his old university, and met Sadie at the stop. Before the bus even came to the curb, he picked her out in the crowd, her long, black hair, curled at the ends naturally, her old blue autumn jacket, that she wore year-round, and the white skirt underneath it, which she wore with white socks and black and white saddle shoes (early 1990s fashion was coming back). She grinned when she saw him – it was one of her infectious grins that lit up her eyes, her whole face and body. He eagerly returned it.

They walked a few blocks until they came to the four-person flat where she was rooming that semester. She swiped her card, walked down the hallway, and unlocked the door with her key. Two of the other girls were out for dinner, but one of her flatmates, Marina, was in. Sadie and Alan waved to her, briefly, as they passed her room.

He caught a glimpse of that girl, out of the side of his eye, stretched out lazily on her bed, back-first, playing with something she had pinned against the wall with her feet.

“Does she have a pet?” Alan asked, when they turned the corner to Sadie’s room.

“She’s doing veterinary science.” Sadie flipped on the light.

As she crossed her room and pulled back the blinds, Alan walked over to the bed and sat down. It was a single, apparently. There was a bookshelf, two closets (one for coats and formal wear, and the other for shoes), a dresser, desk, chair, and all the other accessories one finds in a typical furnished college room. The bedspread was a dark green, the pillows black, the computer stickered with bands whose names Alan only half-recognized, the wall-space cluttered with posters, notes, and calendars – and the floor covered with old shirts, pants, skirts, and discarded socks, white and colored.

“Want any music?” Sadie offered, tapping once or twice at her keyboard with her middle finger, idly.

“Whatever you like.” She put on some rock ballad from the early 90s, and then sat down by her computer, clicking the mouse and typing, more rapidly now.

“So…” Alan said, and looked around the room, with some distaste. He felt bored, terribly bored, all of a sudden.

“Yes?”

“Where am I staying?”

“What do you mean?” Sadie stopped what she was doing, and turned to him.

“What apartment? Where?”

“Here… you’re staying here,” Sadie said, and then saw his confusion. “What – you didn’t know?”

“No, I thought that – over the phone, I mean, you said room and board was covered. So I thought—”

“Oh, Alan, I’m so sorry,” Sadie frowned, and swiveled around back to her computer screen. “I should have explained. It’s covered because I offered to keep you here. I thought you knew.”

Alan’s face paled, and his heart sank, as his eyes passed from object to object around the room. “How can I fucking well stay here, Sadie?” he blurted out, exasperated.  “Did you even think this through? I’ll be here for a year.”

Sadie was quiet, and then closed her computer. She raised her eyebrows, as one does who wants to dismiss someone for being importunate. A new disdainful pride took possession of her, and worked its way into her expression. She pushed herself up onto her desk, and turned to him.

“You can stay here for the year, Alan, or you can go back to wherever you came from. I need to tell you this: they are going to shrink you, of course, and I’m going to be your owner, for as long as I want. The deal was three years. But, but, listen to me, unlike most slaves, you’ll be paid for your work, and you’ll have something to live on if I ever decide to give you up. Tell me: what other choice do you have? I want you to be safe… We’re friends, right? You liked me, too, otherwise you wouldn’t have come all this way. You must like me.”

Alan listened to her, open-mouthed, and then bent down to gather up his things. “Where’s the nearest hotel?” he asked.

“Alan…”

“Where’s the nearest hotel?” he demanded, yelling at her now.

“Alan, this wasn’t my choice. This is what they do to all of their tutors. It’s policy, you know… to keep people safe…”

“Tell me!”

She told him, and then followed him out. “I’ll be here tomorrow morning,” she called to him, as he stormed out of the flat, his face burning red. “For the whole morning,” she added, more softly, and then turned back inside.

On the bus-ride to his hotel, he saw a young couple two rows up from him, across the aisle, cooing to each other dovelike. The girl was in her mid-twenties, with frizzy chestnut hair, a scarf, white blouse, and jeans with moccasins. And the man she held in her left palm, and poked, tickled, whispered to, was presumably her boyfriend. She had dressed him in her own way, and it seemed she’d made and sewn the clothes herself.

[Alan, muttering, and scowling at the tape recorder: Knitting seems to grow in popularity among these girls, seems to become a ‘creative outlet,’ the very second it ceases to be necessary.]

He watched the girl with disgust, at first, and then interest, and then with some jealousy, and finally, to his surprise, with real longing. Maybe he had been too curt and cruel with Sadie. Maybe she was just really trying to help him get by. He had no un-malicious reason to think otherwise. And suddenly dozens of memories from the year before, all happy and full of interest, filled him with nostalgia. There and then he decided to meet her again the next morning, and talk terms. No more than three years, he would say, until she graduated and was settled. And after that she’d have him restored to his natural size.

[Alan: It was a ludicrous plan, when I think about it now, Charlotte. But something had poisoned me, I was nostalgic, frustrated, sex-hungry, and maybe there was loneliness there, too. I didn’t want to be alone, you know, and I would have been…would have been alone. She picked me, after all. I felt as though I could trust her, that we could trust each other, you know. I talked myself into believing this nonsense. I wanted to believe it.]

He phoned her early the next day, and they met up for coffee and breakfast. After they left the bistro, where after some begging and pleading she finally brought him around, Alan and Sadie wandered for a while through the leafy town and the old campus, the morning air nipped with the frost of early fall. He noticed, as they walked, how few male students there seemed to be that year. The number had perceptibly dropped since the last semester. He broached the topic, as they entered one of the World Language halls for warmth.

“Sadie,” he said, approaching one of the ancient and cackly radiators in the entrance corridor. “Looks like the number of male students has changed. Fewer this year, seems.”

“Yeah.” Sadie joined him beside the radiator, and rubbed her hands a few times, her pinkish mittens flopping about her wrists. “The admission rate has – it’s just plunged. Can you believe how cold it is?”

He agreed it was very cold. “So, should I just follow you to the admissions hall?”

She eyed him keenly, and pulled her scrunchie out. She tossed out her hair and rearranged it, slowly, tying it back in a knot and securing it again. “We can do it now, sure. But don’t you want to say goodbye to anyone? Your mother, maybe?”

“She doesn’t need to know,” he said quickly. “All I’m worried about are my things, my books and computer, my music and games, clothes – everything.”

“Oh,” Sadie said. “That’s easy. There’s a form for all that. I’ll show you when we get there. Just send for what you want, when you want it, and they’ll have it here pronto, safe and sound.”

Alan walked down the hallway, and let out a deep sigh. Sadie looked up at him suddenly. “You know, if you don’t want to do this, you can still back out.”

He met her eyes, briefly, but then looked down, half-ashamed of himself, unable to believe that his future had led him here, to this. “I took French here last semester. Strange how long ago that seems. You want to walk down a bit?”

“I’ll be here tomorrow for class. You can come with me then, if you want.”

He flinched, thinking of something. “No, it’s too late to change.”

“It’s not too late. Like I said, you can back out any time.” But she knew he wouldn’t.

“Yeah, it is...”

“Well, for me, anyway, it’s still early,” Sadie said, cupping her hands together and blowing into them. “But if you’re ready, let’s do this. Right now.” She gave him a sympathetic, ingratiating smile. Alan returned it, weakly.

“I’m ready.”

Three hours later, just after lunchtime, Sadie strolled out of the male admissions office alone, carrying a thick manila envelope in her hand. After a few steps, she began to skip and spin around in her black and white saddle shoes, a light breeze catching the hem of her dress. She could be seen running to the nearest stop to catch the bus, which had just arrived, right on schedule. 

My cell-phone rang from the kitchen. I excused myself, squeezing Alan’s shoulder as I walked past him.

“I won’t be long. Do you want anything?”

“No,” he said, and tapped out another cigarette from the pack.

It was the Director of the Public Safety Commission. She asked how Alan was holding up, inquired about his breathing, his behavior, and his contacts, and then informed me that the bureau was interested in meeting with both of us in two days, at 5 in the afternoon.

“We’ve already notified your superintendent,” she added.

“I’ll be there. Is that all?”

“That’s all. Hang tight, Deputy,” she said. “We’re very proud of what you’ve done, all of us.”

Before I could speak, and thank her, the connection broke off on the other end. My cell-phone screen blinked a few times, and my background reappeared. It was a five-year-old photo of me and my former husband.

“Who was it?” Alan asked, hearing  the phone click on the countertop. I poured myself a cup of coffee, and walked back to the other room.

“The Director of Public Safety,” I said. He looked up from the table, curious.

“What did she want?”

“I’m not sure.” I took a sip. “She wants us to come in on Sunday,” I said. “Said she wants to talk with you.”

Setting down my coffee mug on one of the side-tables, I sat down and began to unlace my sneakers. The silence in the room suddenly became very tense and pregnant, and I looked up at Alan. He was staring at my shoes with a pallid face, and blank, wide-open eyes. My hands froze.

“Alan, what is it?” I asked. He blinked – the mist in his eyes gradually cleared.

“Nothing,” he said, looking up. Our eyes connected, and he gave me a weak, forced smile.

“Alan,” I said, kicking off my right shoe, and then pulling off my left heel-first with my toes, “I know this has been hard on you. And I totally understand if you don’t want to do this tonight.”

“No.” The blood rose to his cheeks, and he shook his head slowly. After the second time I caught him glancing down at my socks, I pulled my feet up behind me, on the chair, and knocked out another cigarette from the box with the flat of my hand. As I lit it up, and blew out a long, sweet-smelling tobacco cloud, I smiled at him, and nodded my head. He exhaled, regained his composure, rubbed his hands up and down on his thighs, breathed in deeply, and pressed the red button.

What did that girl do to him?

~~~

He heard two people whispering in the distance, and then the sounds of a window opening, and a light switching on. A sharp pain stabbed his forehead, and shot between his temples. The first time he opened his eyes, he saw nothing but red, a beating, panting, throbbing, bloody red that spread, took over all the colors of the world. He panicked, thinking maybe he’d been blinded.

Then he blinked again, and the redness began to bleed away. Bit by bit, his surroundings came into focus. Off to his left, he sensed movement. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, and turned his head. What he saw gave him another headrush.

Five immense and dirty toes, painted with black toenail polish, and gripping the edge of an enormous bed, beat regular time to a song he couldn’t hear. The other foot joined them shortly, heel-first on the headboard. It was a girl’s foot. And then came the humming, and singing along. It was Sadie’s voice.

A frigid breeze entered through the window-screen behind him, and caused him to shudder violently. He hugged himself, and felt his clothes – a suit and a tie, though made out of some silky, doll-like organza fabric, coarse and unknit, instead of cashmere or cotton. It reminded him of doll clothes. He shivered against the cold again.

Sadie, the giantess, must have felt it too, because the two feet disappeared, and a colossal shadow approached him from across the room.

“Alan!” she sang his name like the lyrics to a song, probably the song she was just listening to. “How long have you been awaaake! Alan…” She grinned, walking over to the window and shutting it.

“Brrrr! Right?”

“Sadie?”

“Yes?” Sadie leapt over to the desk, which creaked at the impact, and pushed her rear up right beside him, mere inches away. He squeaked and jumped back. She didn’t notice, and settled in, moving a few items around.

“They said you’d have a headache for a few hours, Alan. Your body’s got to toughen up.” She paused, and smiled that familiar smile, the one that seemed to begin at the eyes and spread like a bolt of lightning across her whole body. It was a gift.  

Terrified as he was, and shivering with cold in the new doll’s outfit he was wearing— he now saw it was a miniature businessman’s suit, complete with suitcase and tie – Alan smiled back. “I can hardly think,” he said. “How tall am I?”

“Two and a half inches,” Sadie announced, proudly –  as though she’d done the work herself.

“Two and a half inches,” Alan repeated after her, as though hypnotized, with a blank look on his face.

“Oh,” Sadie said, breaking the silence. “I’ve got your little books over here. Political Science and French tomorrow.” She zipped open a little black coin purse, and dumped a tiny set of volumes over the desk. He caught Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and Hobbes’ Leviathan, alongside an elementary French textbook.

“And these are mine,” she announced. With a fatal thud, she let fall a heavy pile of her own books just beside him. He read the same titles along their thick spines.

“I have to go with you tomorrow?” Alan stood up, shading his eyes against the light.

She paused again, and he caught a little black flicker behind her eyes, vanishing as quickly as it appeared. “Yeah!” she said, playfully. Too playfully, maybe. “Anyway, rules say you have to attend classes and take notes too, otherwise you’re fired.” She pouted. “And I’d miss you if you stayed here, Alan.”

“What do we do now? Till then, I mean.” He changed the subject.

“Well, we’ve been out all afternoon. Hungry?”

We have? he thought. Where have we been? His insides growled and grumbled, before his brain even processed the word ‘hungry.’ A smile played almost constantly over her face. She stood up, aglow, and looked down on him. From below, the shadows playing across her face gave it a sinister contrast. Alan got to his feet and returned her look, and let out a nervous chuckle.

“Very.”

“I’m going to the deli. Wanna come with?”

“No,” he said. “If it’s okay with you, I mean, I’d rather stay here. Get my bearings. Do you have any aspirin?”

She frowned darkly, it seemed to him (it could have been the light), and studied his tiny face. Then her face cleared again, and she said, “Yeah. Let me get that for you.” It was somewhere in her closet, in a little zip-locked plastic bag, along with vitamins, loose bandages, and cough syrup. She brought the kit over to the desk, and poured everything out in front of him.

“How’s that?” She broke off a few particles from one of the tablets, ground them between her fingers, and sprinkled them down in front of him.

“Perfect,” Alan said. “Thanks.” His heart was still beating very quickly, and he tried to control himself. Any moment, he thought, her hand could come down. Sadie…she could do it.

“No problem.” Sadie crossed the room to her bed, picked up two worn socks at random from the floor, pulled them on, and slipped into her old black and white saddle shoes.

“Sadie,” he said, watching her pull on her blue coat, which she’d tossed over the desk chair. She stopped, and turned to him with an attentive face. “Where am I sleeping tonight?”

She seemed not to have heard him the first time. Her look was elsewhere, absent, preoccupied. He repeated the question, and this time she answered, stretching her arms through the coat-holes. “With me, Alan.”

“I’m sleeping with you?”

“Well, no!” He didn’t see the joke until she started laughing – he was so nervous. “If,” and she grinned, faintly, while rummaging through a desk drawer for her wallet, “and only if you’re good.”

“Well, what if I’m not?” He asked this automatically.

But she’d already turned her back on him with a quick about-face, and ran across the room to the door. Once she was outside, she peeked in for a moment, smiling, and then left it ajar.

“See ya.”

“Bye,” he said. But she’d left without waiting for an answer.

He hadn’t been leafing through her French textbook for more than five minutes when he heard a timid, two-fingered whistle far below, on the carpet. He froze and waited, one, two, three seconds. Hearing it again, he crept to the edge of the desk, and peered down into the darkness, interrupted in places by the yellow and orange shadows cast by Sadie’s desk-lamp.

“Hey!” It was a full-lunged cry. “Hey up there!” Alan traced the voice to a dark patch underneath the chair. He fixed his eyes on that dark patch until it began to move and change, and gradually take shape under the light. It was a man, perhaps in his mid-twenties, dark-haired and with a weeklong growth of stubble around his chin.

Alan watched him in silence, as five seconds ticked by.

“Hide!” the other man yelled up.

“What?”

“She can’t find you here!” He disappeared, running into the shadows under the desk. “Hide!”

Alan heard a key rattling in a keyhole, from outside in the hallway. A door’s hinges creaked, and something scraped against a hard surface. Shoes squeaked over the polished floor, stopped, and then came forward again, closer. The door to the neighboring room opened, and then closed. Through the wall, he listened to the movement, bags flung against the bed and books unpacked, shoes chucked to the side, and music turned on. Then there was a pause, a silence.

He backed up against the lamp, and flipped the switch off by jumping on it with his full weight. In the darkness, he hid behind one of Sadie’s books and waited. He didn’t wait long.

He heard stirring behind the wall again, and the door opened with a loud bang. Bare feet padded in the hallway, and someone’s hands pushed back the door to Sadie’s room, which she’d left ajar. The overhead light flared on, and Alan peeked his head behind the books. He recognized the girl from next door, Marina. She was kneeling down with her face against the carpet, scanning the ground for movement, for something or someone. In her right hand she held a pair of yellow canvas shoes.

Back behind the tall pile of textbooks, Alan’s heart banged against his ribs. He breathed in deeply, and let it out slowly. The shuffling noises on the carpet were nearing him more closely now, and then they stopped. There was a girlish laugh, as the wooden chair was dragged aside.

“There you are!” Underneath the desk, in one of the corners near the window, a man shrieked, terrified. Alan, trembling himself, decided to come out and demand to know what was happening. When the girl, holding her chestnut colored hair behind her head with one hand, reemerged from underneath the desk, he called out, loudly.

“What’s going on?” Everything in the room, and everyone, came to a standstill.

Marina got to her knees slowly, and locked eyes with Alan, her huge, black, sparkling eyes against his very tiny bluish ones. He didn’t see the man. But he noticed the old, yellow pair of flats in her left hand, their worn-out soles facing him. A tiny hole was beginning to appear in the heel of the right shoe. She sniffed, and tapped the desk with her finger.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were there. Have we been introduced?” She had a faint Russian accent, and a flintiness to her voice. She smoked, Alan thought.

“I’m Alan,” he said. “Sadie’s new tutor.”

“Marina, Alan.” She sat down in Sadie’s chair, straightened her skirt out, placed her shoes in her lap, delicately, and her elbows on the desk. She cradled her chin in her hands, as she talked.

“There was a man here. He hid under the table.”

“Charlie. He’s my tutor. So that's what.”

Alan gulped. “Why was he hiding, if he’s your tutor?”

“Well, Alan, what did he tell you?” Marina answered with a question. There was a singsong, mocking quality to her voice now.

“He told me to hide.”

“He did?”

“Why would he say that?” Alan asked. “Where is he?”

Marina grimaced and then smiled to herself. She stood up. “I don’t know, Alan. But it was nice to meet you. We’ll have to talk again some other time.” She walked over to the door, and waved goodbye with her yellow shoes.

“Sorry! Wrong hand!” she laughed, and slipped on her flats while standing. As he watched Marina put those yellow shoes on her bare feet, and close the door after her, Alan remembered the day before when he and Sadie had passed her room. He had heard stories and rumors of men, and women too, enslaved since adolescence, and bought by some girl or woman while still young, living out their lives in her service, and forced to subsist, day in day out, in her footwear, socks, or nylons. Some starved, and were replaced. He remembered that some were sold as toys, dehumanized [Alan: or re-humanized, as they call it], worked to the bone, and then re-sold as an ornament, or as a choice delicacy in grande cuisine.

All he knew, for the time being, was that he wanted to stay as far as possible from Marina and her shoes.

When Sadie came back from the deli, with food, he told her everything. She frowned at him, while stripping her clothes and getting ready for bed.

“How did he get in here?” she asked.

“The door – it was ajar,” Alan said. She threw her shirt and pants into a corner of the room, and shook her head.

“I’ll have to talk with Marina about this tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know what to think.”

Alan waited. His stomach rumbled twice. “Did you get me anything?”

“I saved you a piece of my sandwich. Want it now?”

“Please.” She dug around in the deli bag for a second, and came up with a few sheets of crumpled wax paper. Unrolling it, she found a few stray pieces of lettuce and the corner of a roast beef sandwich.

“Bon appétit,” she said. “How are you doing with the French?”

“Didn’t get a chance.”

Sadie jumped on the bed and rolled over onto her belly. She winked at him, and made a wry face. “That’s one strike,” she said. “A half for not studying, and a half for trying to escape.”

Alan froze for a second, munching on the crumbs of her sandwich, and then laughed. “What?”

“I said if you’re good you can sleep with me. That’s one strike!”

“Really!”

“Yeah!” She smiled, and Alan returned it. But something, he couldn’t say exactly what, made him feel queasy. Half-uncertain.

As he finished eating, he watched Sadie brush her teeth, get into her pajamas, and set her alarm clock. From her dresser, she pulled out a clean, bright blue sock, and laid it out on the bed, beside her pillow.

“You could get lost in there,” she said. “Alan, if this doesn’t work out, you’re going on the floor.”

“What?” He waited for her to pick him up, and bring him over to the bed. Things were moving quickly, too quickly – almost as if she’d done this before.

“If I roll on you, I mean. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Oh, right. Maybe I should sleep on the floor, then.” I’m going to sleep in a blue sock, Alan thought. What could be worse?

“No, we’ll try it,” she said. “For one night.”

“Okay,” Alan said, noncommittally. “Whatever’s best.”

~~~

He broke off here, and asked me to bring him another drink. “Is it getting late?”

I looked at the clock quickly. It was just after midnight. “Do you want to stop?”

“Soon. I want you to hear what happened the next day. It rained, all day long. And then everything started to unravel."

For hours Alan lay inside Sadie’s sock, tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep or find a comfortable position. Thoughts and memories filed continually into his consciousness, until he gave up and admitted defeat, decided to go for a walk that night, and think.

But Sadie had foreseen this. As he crept toward the mouth of the sock, in the blue darkness, he found she’d tied it in a triple knot. He was trapped.

Crawling back to the toe, he lay down again and curled himself up into a little ball, gathering the blue fabric and winding it around his tiny body. For the first time in at least ten years, as memories flooded back again, and the present weighed down on him more and more heavily – he began to sob. And then he fell asleep.

The beeping of her alarm clock woke him up. Bathed in warm, sticky sweat, he reached out his hands sleepily for phantom bedsheets, and swept his fingers across a warm, moist surface that responded to his touch. It was difficult to breathe, and the air was suffused with a sour-sweet smell like unwashed hair on a dirty pillow, mixed with the stale flowery scent of old shampoo. He opened his eyes in the darkness, and stood up. All he knew, stumbling over the soft surface hands-forward, was that he wasn’t in the sock. He was outside, somehow.

And then he touched something warm, and slightly damp. Stroking it, running his palms and fingers over the small, sensitive hairs and ridges, he felt it respond again (and something in himself, this time, responded to that response).

“Alan…” He heard a yawn, muffled. He felt her skin shiver, as she stretched her arms and legs.

She laughed: “Not between my ribs, Alan.” In a single movement, she threw back her covers and swept him up in her hand. Pulling her knees against her chest, and smiling with a sleepy grin at the little man in her palm, she arched her back and turned on the lamp behind her.

Rubbing her eyes, slowly, she blinked against the light. “Ready to get to work, Mr. Alan? Want me to pick out a tie for you?”

The corners of his mouth rose, faintly, and he was about to say something, but then stopped. Sadie watched him more intently, how he opened his eyes and lips, how he turned his head around, how he moved his arms and midsection. Everything seemed to fascinate her.

“I hope you’re feeling better this morning, Alan. Were you crying last night?”

She sounded concerned, and Alan pushed himself up onto her palm. Sadie twitched, and let out an abrupt snort. “I’m ticklish! Sorry!”

“OK,” Alan said, after a moment’s silence. “So you moved me?”

“Yeah.” Now she looked concerned, and brought her free hand up underneath him, as a precaution. “I had you in my hand, at one point. You must have moved.”

Alan wanted to be angry with her for putting his life in danger – she might have rolled over him in her sleep – but instead he felt gratitude for that small act of thoughtfulness.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Not necessary.” Carefully, Sadie set him down on her pillow. “That was just for last night, Alan. Tonight, we’re going to try something different.” She took a quick breath, as though she were about to explain – Alan looked at her inquisitively – but she had second thoughts, and closed her mouth again.

“Now,” she said, pushing herself out of bed, stepping into her slippers, and pulling on her white cotton bathrobe, “I’m going to take a shower. And then we’re going to get breakfast together.”

Halfway toward the door, she stopped and hopped over to her desk. “Oh! I almost forgot. Here’s your clean clothes, and your briefcase, and your notebooks.” She picked them up and dropped them beside him on the pillow.

“But,” Alan raised his hand, overwhelmed. “Thanks, Sadie -- but -- I need a shower, too.”

She winked. “No you don’t!”

Alan stared. “Why not?”

“No time. But, if you want," she offered, turning half around, "I mean I could clean you up in the sink."

Alan pictured Sadie’s wet and soapy hands caressing his body, up and down, under a steel faucet pouring out steaming hot water, and shook his head. How could she clean him, at his size, without leaving him feeling physically violated – raped? He stiffened slightly, imagining it.

“No -- no, thanks,” he said.

“Aw,” she said, and he felt a warm blast of her sour morning breath blowing over his bare face and chest. A few beads of saliva settled over him, like water-spray. “That’s what Marina –” She stopped, and looked confused. “Well, we’ll figure it out later, I promise.” With a shifty smile, she crossed the fingers of her right hand, and ran out of the room. Seconds later, he heard the shower curtain pulled back, the pipes squeak on, and the water spew out.

While the shower ran, he clambered up Sadie’s pillow, over the long, black stray hairs and faint greasy patches left there from the night or the week before, and tried to find a vantage point from where he could look out over the room. Outside the window, he could see, there was a kind of leaden glow, a cloudiness in the air. It could be gray and dry or drizzly outside – he didn’t know which until the water in the shower flow was cut off. He heard Sadie’s wet feet slap over the tiles, and the scratching sound of the bath-towel, as she dried off her naked body. Quickly, he dressed himself in the clothes she’d laid out, and slid down her pillow to the dark green comforter, with a soft, plushy plop.

She walked in, screwing the corners of the towel into her ears, cleaning them out. Paying Alan not the slightest attention, she lobbed the towel onto the bed, and bent down over her dresser; pulling on her panties, snapping on her bra, and rummaging through her drawers for the day’s socks, skirt, and blouse, she got dressed.

He, meanwhile, wasn’t sure whether to feel pleased or offended by her indifference – he watched for a while, but then instinctively turned his eyes away toward  the window, to the stitching in the pillow, and the music posters on the wall. Twice he flipped through the French textbook, as she was sitting down at the end of the bed, as though to jog his memory. But he couldn’t read it – and after thumbing a few pages, tucked it away in the matching doll-briefcase that seemed to have come with his outfit. Ten minutes later, Sadie was ready. After brushing her teeth and blow-drying her hair, she took a seat at her desk, and put on her old shoes.

“Alan,” Sadie said, contemplatively, gazing out the window at the gray morning. “I want to tell you something, ahead of time.”

From the bed, he looked up, and stared at the small of her back as she brought back her long dark hair and secured it with a clip.

“Today’s going to be… difficult. For you, I mean.” She stood up and walked over to the bed. A crease formed between her eyes: she was thinking hard about what to say to him.

“This afternoon,” she said, “after lunch, there’s an initiation. A ceremony, for me.” She sat down beside him. The bedsprings groaned under her weight.

“Initiation for what?” Alan already dreaded the answer.

“Psi Phi,” Sadie answered. “The Pi chapter.”

“A sorority.”

“Yeah.”

“Why difficult?” Alan asked. Despite what she’d said about its being difficult for him, he tried to sound as though he were comforting her.

She didn’t answer immediately. “Do you maybe wanna talk about this over breakfast? It’s getting late.”

He glanced at the digital clock over her bed, and nodded. She picked him up and, briefly hesitating, stuffed him away with his briefcase and books, in her jacket pocket. They began to move.

Sadie had forgotten, or perhaps she simply didn’t care, that inside the same pocket there was an old used tissue, half of a peanut, a piece of scrap-paper, a rubber band, two dimes, and a chewed piece of gum wrapped up in a crumpled wad of gum-paper. He heard her open the door to Marina’s room, a few inches – but her roommate either wasn’t in, or was still asleep. She unlocked the door to the flat, and strolled out into the morning. She opened up her umbrella – so it was drizzling – and as she walked he rolled around in her pocket, jolted about and colliding with all of the other scraps of garbage and loose objects, until she arrived at the dining hall for breakfast.

After about a quarter of an hour, light broke through her zipper, and her hand reached in, searchingly, pushing aside the gum wrapper, tearing through the tissue, flicking the half-peanut into a corner, until she found him, and seized him, knocking him hard just north of the solar plexus. Out he came into the light. He looked out at the new surroundings.

Sadie was alone at the table, eating her cereal and sipping from a glass of orange juice. Around the lunchroom, he saw other girls eating breakfast, some with tiny men at their tables, and others alone. It was crowded and loud; the room hummed and echoed with conversation.

“Hungry?” Sadie asked, slurping her juice and shoveling a spoonful of milky cereal into her mouth. Alan walked over to her bowl, and looked up into her face. She smiled down at him [Alan: She looked different, like a goddess this time – I couldn’t decide whether to admire her or to be afraid – this was new and I wasn’t used to it] and dipped her spoon back into the milky cereal bowl, resurfacing with some Cheerios. She picked them out, one by one, laying them out in front of him, like tiny oysters.

“How’s that?” she asked. Again he looked up at her shyly – grateful.

But their conversation was cut short by the laughter of  three girls at the next table. A shrunken man, Alan’s size, was seen running around on the floor, either looking for or running away from someone – his mistress. Wherever he was going, he seemed lost.

“Whitney!” squealed one of them, “he’s by your feet. Get him!”

Whitney, a blonde with a ponytail, wearing a tea-shirt and soccer shorts, slid her feet out of her flip-flops and arched her leg over the tiny man. From Sadie's table, Alan watched as the man jumped around and peered up, fascinated, face to face with the giant, crushing sole of her foot. Eying him under the table, Whitney pressed her toes over the man, pinning him against the cafeteria floor, and slowly, carefully, dragged him headfirst over to her sandal.

“Got him!” She celebrated by pumping one of her fists in the air.

“Whitney, hide him! Hurry!” whispered the third girl. Sadie and Alan followed her eyes, and they saw together another girl exiting the bathroom, her face strained and somewhat haggard, her hair in disarray, and a pair of ankle-high boots in her hands.

“Where?”

“Drop him in your rain-boots…”

Whitney quickly reached down and snatched the man from the floor. Then she wheeled around behind her chair and plunked him into one of her rubber boots, wet from the early morning drizzle. She’d removed them at the table, after coming indoors.

Before turning back to her meal, and burying her face behind her hands, Whitney met Sadie’s eyes. Alan noticed – with a sickening shock – that they exchanged a smile. Who smirked first, he didn’t know. It passed by in a flash, and then both became instantly very grave and absorbed in their meal – but he caught that look, and never forgot it.

The other girl, frazzled, ran from table to table, and questioned everyone. Getting no definitive information, and advised by the cafeteria manager to log a report with the campus security, she finally ran out into the rain, and disappeared down the walkway, and around the corner.

As the buzz of conversation resumed again, Sadie and Alan returned to their meal.

“What was that about?” he asked, when she offered him another spoonful of her cereal.

She gave him a tight-lipped grin. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll never be like that.”

“Who was she?”

“That,” Sadie whispered, bending her head down to the table, blowing her syrupy breath softly into Alan’s ear, and rustling his hair, “was Annabelle.” She licked her lips, and smacked them as she opened her mouth again. “She lives with us.”

Sadie’s warm breath whistling in his ear sent a tingle up his spine, and made him feel very drowsy and content. But he forced himself to turn his head and make eye contact with her. She was looking at him with her luminous eyes, wide open and intelligent. She wanted him to see and be amused by the comedy and budding drama here: as though she were incapable of understanding, or perhaps sympathizing with his fear – even after he saw what happened to the other man. If something like that could happen, in full view of dozens of other people, then what else is permissible?

~~~

I held up my palm, and mouthed the word Stop. Alan pressed the red button again, and the machine whirred to a crawl, the high-pitched tone descending to a low bass.

“Yeah,” Alan said.

“Sorry: I just want to confirm this with you: the male kidnapped was a dependent of this girl – Annabelle.”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re saying that Sadie, your caretaker at the time, witnessed the kidnapping and failed to report it?”

Alan hesitated. “There were others present, Charlotte.”

“But how many would you say – give me a round estimate, Alan –  directly observed this girl – Whitney, you said – abduct this male?”

“That I can’t say.”

I took a sip from my coffee, and flicked the ashes off the end of my smoldering cigarette. “Go on.”

Alan stole another glance at my sneakers, and gulped. “We had French class that day, you know. Whitney and Annabelle were both there.”

I inhaled deeply, and the fiery end of my tab crackled in the semi-darkness. “Don’t you want to record this?” I asked.

He shook his head, as though to clear it, and tore his eyes away from my shoes. “There’s nothing to say – except that we took one class that day, before the ceremony. After that, she – Sadie, I mean…”

“Talk about the class,” I cut in, to focus his mind. “Who was there?”

He thought for a second, and then said, “Whitney was there, and so was Annabelle, and, I don’t know. Maybe ten, fifteen other girls.”

“Did you see any men?”

“No,” he answered. “Except for one in the back, with a girl. Another tutor, like me, taking notes and listening. Shrunken. Annabelle looked miserable – had her head in her arms all class long. So I assumed nothing had changed.”

I nodded, to encourage him. “Well, where did you go after class?”

“There was a brick townhouse, just off campus.” Alan sighed, and then hovered his finger, like a mouse pointer, over the red button. “I should record this,” he said.

And he pressed the button.

~~~

The rain was pouring when Sadie collapsed her umbrella and rang the brass doorbell. Seconds passed, and Alan, clenched and half-suffocated in her damp left hand, heard the door open and a woman’s voice, gentle and pleasant, welcome them inside.

“I’m Olivia,” the voice said. He caught dark hair, a young face, Italian maybe, and casual clothing, shorts, a t-shirt, and indoor flats.

“Sadie.”

“Nice to meet you. Follow me.”

Sadie followed her through the first door on the right, entering on a spacious living room with three couches and three chairs. Alan noticed that Whitney and Annabelle were there, along with twelve other girls he didn’t know, besides one or two he seemed to recognize from breakfast that morning.

[I asked if Marina was present. “No,” Alan said. And then added mysteriously: “Not yet.”]

“Do you have him with you?” Olivia asked, as she guided Sadie into the room.

“Yes.”

Hooking her by the arm, Olivia escorted her into the neighboring kitchen. On the island in the center of the kitchen, there was a plastic tub, covered. Holes were punched into the blue lid.

“Put him in here for now.”

Sadie hesitated, but only for a moment. Then she gave Alan a quick smooch and lowered him down carefully to the bottom of the tub.

“See ya later, Alan. Don’t worry!” It was the same voice she’d used with him on the phone, earlier that week. He must have looked back at her with dismay in his eyes, in fear and disbelief.

When the lid closed above him with a cold snap, he looked across the blue shadows at two other men at the opposite end of the plastic tub, one in each corner. Neither of them was Annabelle’s man, he noticed, and neither seemed inclined to talk. One raised his eyes at Alan, frowned, and buried his face in his arms. The other, disheveled and reeking, unmistakably, like a girl’s locker room, stared with absent eyes at a point somewhere to the left of where Alan was standing, and never gave a sign, not by the raising of an eyebrow, or by moving a single finger, that he was conscious of the other two men’s presence. They sat there for a few minutes, until the lid shook again, and a hand reached in for the silent man. He cowered against the wall, and gasped, as though he were choking. The black nail-polished fingers seized him – and he flew upwards, without a word of explanation from him or the giant woman. And the lid snapped shut again.

The young man opposite Alan was trembling. Their eyes met.

“What’s happening?” Alan murmured.

“Initiation Day,” the other man stammered out, after a moment’s pause.

He heard a chorus of laughter from the other room. One girl, not Sadie or Olivia, shouted something, and then the laughter died down again. A low hum of conversation replaced it. Footsteps approached again.

“For them?”

“Yes, but—” The lid tore open, and another hand, this one with unpolished nails and long fingers, reached in and snatched the other man up before he could finish his thought. He heard a girl’s voice high up, hushing him – he was trying to scream, protest, beg, say something, but she’d pressed her finger up against his mouth. “It’s OK,” Alan heard her say. Before the lid closed again, he’d placed the voice. He recognized the blonde girl from the morning. Yes: it was Whitney.

Another roar of laughter rose from the next room. Again he waited, and again the footsteps came back. The blue lid was lifted once again, and the hand that came down  -- for him, this time – was Sadie’s.

“Sadie!” Alan pleaded with her, gripping her thumb tightly with his arm. “What’s happening? Tell me!”

But she just smiled, and held him close against her breasts. Her old black and white saddle shoes squeaked over the kitchen tiles. “Just roll with it, Alan. It’s going to be OK.”

“What? What is?” She didn’t answer him, and now it was too late. Olivia introduced her, when she walked into the room.

“This is Sadie,” she said. All the other girls, legs crossed or sprawled out on the couches, waved and smiled.

“And this is Alan, her new – tutor. Right?”

“That’s right,” Sadie said.

There was a hush over the room, and then Olivia continued. “Sadie: are you willing to accept the responsibilities of a Soror of the Psi Phi sorority, Pi chapter? If so, repeat after me: ‘I am.’”

“I am,” she repeated.

“Do you solemnly promise obedience to the laws governing this organization? If so repeat after me, ‘I do.’”

“I do,” she repeated.

“Alan,” Olivia addressed him now. “Are you willing to be submissive and in every way subjugate yourself to the highest authority, your new caretaker, Sadie?”

Alan was bewildered, and started to tremble. “Wha—”

“He is,” Sadie answered.

“What proof have you?” Olivia asked.

Sadie took off her saddle shoe, and removed her wet sock. “Alan,” she said, “this is just for today. Don’t worry.”

Alan, stiff with fear and unable to respond, stared into Sadie’s huge, dazzling eyes, at her black hair, curled at the ends, and at the zipper of her blue jacket. Then she dropped him down, and he tumbled down, to the toe of her sock. In the dark, twilit glow, breathing for the first time the complex, cheesy smell of Sadie’s feet mixed with the musty odor of the rain, and soaked cotton cloth, he heard a crescendo of laughter outside. Then, though he couldn’t believe it – it was impossible for him to accept – Sadie, his old friend, the one girl in the world he thought he could trust, squeezed her foot back into the sock, and pinned Alan underneath the soft, damp arch of her sole.

When she re-inserted her foot, she’d disturbed a few flakes of lint and dark matter from the toe of her sock, and as she pushed Alan’s tiny body forward underneath her warm, antsy toes, he swallowed and gagged on some of those flakes, and a sweaty, watery mix of foot-grime trickled down into his mouth. Sadie’s toes, as she tried to find a comfy position for them, pulled Alan facefirst underneath them, and his face was besmeared with a foul, strange and greasy mixture of stale toejam and old, damp fabric. He pushed back against her toes, helplessly – and then, as he heard her heel pop into her shoe, sealing him in, he tried to yell, to say something, but couldn’t. She was tying her shoelaces, double-knotting them quickly, as she always did. Part of him felt betrayed – but the other part…

~~~

“No.” Alan broke off. “Tomorrow,” he said, waving his hand. “I can’t talk anymore.”

I was sympathetic. “Alan, it’s OK. I really had no idea.”

He turned off the machine, and stood up. I didn’t know whether or not he wanted a hug – so I stood up too. Instead, he asked where the guest room was.

“Second door on the right, as you turn the corner.”

He thanked me – his face scarlet, his eyes evading mine – and said goodnight. I would have to wait until the morning. I picked up my shoes and put away the machine.

I could wait.

The smell of pancakes and bacon woke me just after sunrise the next morning. I slid into my robe and slippers, as softly as I could, and stole out onto the second floor landing. Listening there for a  few moments, I heard steam rising, the clatter of utensils and plates, and the sound of a spatula scraping and flipping something in a pan. The fire hissed at intervals, so someone was at the stove.

“Alan?” I called down. “That you?”

“Morning Charlotte!” he called back.

I hurried down the steps, and turned the corner into the kitchen. Alan had two of the burners going, one for blueberry pancakes and the other for bacon, popping and sizzling, bubbling up from below in long, crispy, greasy strips.  

“Bacon’s ready,” he said, cheerily.

“Great.” I had a sudden, impulsive urge to give him a peck on his cheek. I gave in and kissed him.

“Want any?” He was beaming.

“Yeah. Thanks so much.” I paused, wondering about his transformation between the night before and the morning. What was going on?

He dropped two long, deep-fried, steaming strips of crispy perfection onto my plate, and then nodded toward the pancakes. “They’ve still got a minute.”

I smiled, and made myself comfortable on one of the stools at the kitchen island, pulling up the hem of my robe underneath me. I pulled my hair back, tied it, and then poured myself a glass of cold orange juice. Alan had set up all of my cereal boxes in a long row on the countertop, beside a bowl of fruit, powdered sugar, maple syrup, and milk.

“How’d you sleep?” I asked him.

He looked up quickly from the stove and smiled at me. “Best I had in years,” he said, and turned his eyes toward one of the sunny, partly-open windows above the sink. Birdsong poured in.

“Charlotte, let me tell you something: it was like a weight was lifted off my chest last night, after I started talking. It was like – I could breathe again.”

I nodded, munching on my pig fat.

He continued: “And I wanted to thank you somehow – I was restless, and had to get up and just do something.”

“Thank you,” I said, sincerely.

“How’d you sleep?” he asked, turning around and flipping a few pancakes.

“Not well, sorry to say.” I had one bad dream after another, and Alan and Sadie were in each one. I wasn’t about to share them.

“Oh -- ” He paused mid-speech, and I guessed the reason for his silence.

“Nothing to do with what you said, last night,” I lied. “Just bad dreams.”

“Sorry to hear it, Charlie.”

He hadn’t called me by that name since high school. It thrilled me to hear it, to know he remembered. “I’m not used to bacon like this,” I told him. “It’s amazing.” He turned around, in mock disbelief. “I’m not kidding!” I said, with a smile. “I should keep you here to cook for me every morning.”

“I used to cook it all the time, when I was young,” he said, turning toward the table with a full platter of pancakes. “Mom – my Mom taught me.”

After Alan had taken his seat on the other side of the island, and speared a few blueberry pancakes for himself and me, I set my fork down and looked across at him.

“Alan,” I said, with a serious face.

“Charlotte.” He responded with a grin, eying me sharply above his plate. Sleep or no sleep, he was a different person this morning. Or seemed to be.

“May I ask you one question – one quick question – about last night?”

He winced, and then regained his composure. He met my eyes, and smiled again – it was half-forced, though (so he did have something on his mind). “Of course. What is it?”

“I’m sorry, Alan – this was bothering me all night, and I couldn’t sleep at all. Just before you stopped talking, last night, you said that – anyhow I thought you said that – part of you felt betrayed by Sadie – but that there was another part of you that felt differently? Right?”

I waited, as he reached for the orange juice, and took a long, cold gulp – probably to buy himself time. Sighing, and glancing away from the window, where the sun was just beginning to peek in over the horizon, his eyes met mine again, and he answered.

“I was confused. Early on, I was scared – terrified, actually.”

I didn’t know where I was going with this, yet. “But later, you changed...”

“Sure, if you want to put it that way.” He was curt. I was treading on thin ice – or his ego was still fragile, delicate, even five years after the torture. I wondered, vaguely, if he had ever gone back to her, sought her out, after their separation – I wondered if he still cared for her.

But I had one more turn that round – before he could refuse to answer me –  and pressed him with one more question, the one I needed an answer to (I needed the answer for me, and not so much for the Bureau).

“When did it change, roughly?”

At first Alan was diffident. “It changed gradually, Charlotte. I remember being afraid, and then feeling angry, and then depressed. And then, honestly, after that I just wanted to survive. I don’t know, maybe a month later, I got used to it, to her, to being with her all the time.

“I began to notice things differently – smells were different, charged somehow with her mood, her thoughts, the time of the day. She kept me in the dark most of the time, and there were long periods – especially in the winter, when she wore boots, or during exam week in the spring – long, very long periods where I didn’t get out more than three times a month. I started to see and hear everything in a different way, not with my eyes, you know...I forgot some things. I still forget…well…”

“Oh,” I said, and slit open a pancake with my fork.

“I mean you don’t know what it’s like, Charlotte, every second of your life being tied up with another person’s well-being. To know that you’re part of all her successes and failures, that you’re a cause of them, or can be a comfort, at least in a small way.”

His eyes suddenly lit up, and he went on, rhapsodically: “Sometimes just to be in a pocket of the clothes that covered her –  or maybe the lotion or ointment that she wore – or the water that she used for her bath – or strung up against her hairpiece, tied up in her hair, as she worked at her desk, like a pen behind her ear –  or the insole to a shoe, so that you’re at least pressed against her foot – or enclosed in her panties, in the good weeks during the month, against her…  – to be anything, as long as it made her happy. I know what that’s like, now.”

I almost snapped my fork in half, listening to this tripe, this disgusting, rambling... “Alan, Sadie was a horrible person – and she is a horrible person.”

He woke up for a moment, and agreed with me, flashing a quick look my way. “Horrible, yeah. It’s different though, looking back. The pain of being with her doesn’t seem as bad as not…well…you know what I mean?”

“You’d change your mind in a hurry if it ever happened again.”

“Yeah,” he said, absently. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Charlotte.” He took a bite of his pancake, and then added, “That’s why I always liked you in high school. I could trust you.”

“What?” This sentimentality, after his twisted confession, was beginning to make me gag.

“All the other girls kept slaves – only you – ”

He stopped because I shook my head and waved my fork side-to-side. “No. You’re wrong, Alan.”

“Really?”

“Well, partly.” I swallowed. I decided to strike back, now, and see if I could turn the conversation back my way. “My girlfriends bought me one of the ready-trained slaves, for my sixteenth. Everyone on the basketball team had one – not on the court, but in the locker-room. For the junior varsity, they used to keep them there on one of the upper shelves, next to the cupcakes and cookies, after a win. But all the varsity girls had their own personal males – anyway they all did by junior year. Except for me. I was the last one.”

I looked over the table to gauge Alan’s reaction. He was listening closely now – no longer eating.

“This was when they were engineering, tooling slaves from the get-go, adolescence onward, and orienting them, predisposing them genetically toward specific lifelong tasks. I guess I was used to non-specialized slaves, or maybe I remembered what my mother told me – about my father, I mean. What they were like.”

“Together?”

“Pre-reduced, before she convinced him to shrink. This was maybe a few months after I was born – costs were going up, she’d said. Things like that. I never believed any of it then – maybe I believe a little more of it now. But I never knew him at his pre-reduced size.”

“I haven’t seen your family in years.” Alan took a sip of orange juice. “He’s still living?”

“Living, yeah. He doesn’t talk much anymore, but yeah, he’s still alive. What was I talking about?”

“Specialization.”

“Right. So this was when they were beginning to design slaves for that kind of work: in-shoe slaves, accessories to sports shoes, or heels, or mules, moccasins, the works. And of course there were the adult options. These were slaves that wouldn’t only live, they’d thrive in a girl’s shoe, slaves who’d really be unable to live anywhere else, as strange as that sounds. They were designed not to live anywhere else but underneath a girl’s foot, not to be anything else but her insole. Alan?”

Alan coughed, and frowned uneasily. “I’m listening.”

“You know all this. You’ve seen more than I have probably. I don’t have to tell you. But I couldn’t keep one for more than a week. After practice every day, there he would be, in my flats, waiting oh so patiently for me to change shoes. There was a little slot in the insole they’d carved out, and he would be there for hours, massaging and scrubbing away, moving from heel to toe as I was driving, or taking the bus home from practice or work. And I admit, for that week, my feet felt incredible: I never had muscle pains, sores, cramps. Though I sweated much more – but only because I was nervous, knowing that someone was in there, a grown man fulfilling his life’s purpose underneath my foot, ingesting my sweat, my toenail crud, cleaning whatever he could, surviving in my shoe. And knowing that, after a while, made me physically nauseous. After the second day, I dreaded putting my shoes on in the morning or after practice. And I mean this was a visceral dread, one you felt in the pit of your stomach, one that made you super depressed and anxious even to avoid. There was no way out of it.

“So I wondered at first if he really liked my shoes and my feet, if he was really happy, even though I knew he was trained to be happy – so I tried to take him out once or twice, talk to him, you know, because maybe he wanted conversation, or a better place to sleep.” I sighed. “Because I didn’t want him to like it. But he did! And his obedience, his fawning, his ridiculous enthusiasm revolted me. Whenever I took him out, and put him on the floor, he would shudder, have these convulsions nonstop, rolling around on the carpet in these terrible spasms, like his skin was burning or something. So I’d throw him into my ratty old basketball shoes again, to calm him down. It disgusted me – he did, I mean. Or maybe they did, the people who’d genetically design a man for one thing like that, and make him happy into the bargain. I promised myself never to buy a man like that for my own daughter – never to get used to those slaves. They weren’t people.”

“Re-humanized, is what Sadie called them,” Alan said.

“Re-humanized?” I stopped and looked at my plate. “That’s comic. As for that slave, I just couldn’t do it. So I returned it.”

“Was that the only time?”

“Well,” I thought back. “For my seventeenth, another friend got me one of those dildos. Which squicked me even more than the foot-slave. The whole idea of using him night after night, without any bond between us – if he were a friend or a former boyfriend, I’d probably have kept him, but something really unsettled me, Alan. I gave it up and never told anyone.”

Alan took a bite of his pancake. His hand was shaking. “Thanks, Charlotte.”

I felt bad immediately. I stood up and crossed to the other side of the table, behind him. “I’m sorry, again. I should have watched what I was saying.”

“No, no…I’m happy you told me. It makes things clearer for me.”

“Clearer?”

“Well, not clearer, exactly, but – I know what you mean.”

I wanted to keep talking, to lighten the mood. “Maybe there’s something in there that made me want to be a police officer.”

“Maybe. You’re a good person, Charlie. I’ve always felt that.”

I went back to my plate, and started gathering my dishes. I think I knew how Alan felt, partly, when he talked about that weight being off his chest. “Alan.”

He walked over, picking up with trembling hands his own plate, and carrying it to the sink. “Let me help you with that.”

“Hey, let’s go for a walk after breakfast, you and I.”

“It'll have to be quick,” he said, suddenly very serious. “I want to get back to the tape. Have evidence down before tomorrow.”

“Right, right. Also – ”

“Let me finish that for you,” he offered. I moved away from the sink, and walked out of the kitchen toward the stairs. With one foot on the staircase, I looked back at him again, and felt so much pity for him. I didn’t know what to say. “Alan.”

“Charlie.”

“Things might have been different. I wish I had asked you out, back then. But it was your mother—“

He turned around and gaped at me. “My mother?”

I pressed on. “But I think if I ever had a man, Alan, I’d want that man to be you. And that was the real reason I couldn’t do it.”

And with that last word, leaving him staring, I leapt up the stairs three at a time. He could take it however he wanted. It was the truth.

Sunlight. The asphalt was dark with last night’s drizzle, and the smell of rain rose up from the turf near the field across from my house, where high school girls were just beginning soccer practice. A whistle shrilled a few times, and as we walked into the city down the long, loud, tree-lined street, we heard the coach calling out drills and yelling at the girls by name.

Alan wanted to avoid the crowds. Everywhere we walked we attracted the curious eyes of women and girls, wives and daughters, sports’ teams in the activity fields outside the school, and drifting groups of teenagers, jamming the sidewalks or standing in front of windows full of blouses, skirts, and sandals made-to-wear (plastic models of men displayed in the usual positions, heel-to-toe, lengthwise across the toes, or curled up under the arch), some chatting with the cashiers in the bookshops, and others  lounging about inside the diners and shops, slurping up sodas and lattes or scarfing down sandwiches. We stepped inside one of the coffee houses and found ourselves a table toward the back.

He was nervous. “Everyone’s watching us, Charlotte. Let’s go back.”

I looked at the table across from us, where two sleepy twenty-somethings in t-shirts, slacks and loafers sipped their coffees and munched their bagels. One of them might or might not have flashed a smile in Alan’s general direction. When I turned around to look at him, he nodded back at me, uneasily.

He leaned across the table, and whispered in my ear. “Naked. I feel naked here.”

I caught his hand in mine, and squeezed. “Nothing will happen to you. I promise.”

He folded the edge of his napkin a few times. “I’m here, Alan. It’s okay.” He returned the pressure, weakly. Our eyes met, and he gave a forced smile. We ordered.

Minutes later, as we were drinking our coffees in silence, I felt a sharp tug at the hem of my jeans, just above my left heel. I flinched by instinct, as though at a rat, and jerked my foot up to the wooden seat. Alan, without even looking, followed my example, but then quickly corrected himself and lowered his legs back down to the floor. “Charlotte, it’s okay.”

There was a sudden commotion from the table across from us, and I immediately felt ashamed. “Damn it! Where can he be?” one of the girls cried, close to tears, crawling around under the table, peering beneath the chairs and over the stained, dusty, crumb-covered floor tiles, her two moccasins balled up in her fists. I only half-wondered if this were a kind of act, or if she had really lost him, if men could escape from their owners so easily.

Why did they escape? As I looked down at the man, hiding in the shadow of my shoe’s inner arch – a man who looked so eager to escape and was just given such a rare and promising opportunity to run away, even before he was fully “broken in” (the term was used especially for human insoles, of which this slave seemed to be one). Unmodified – unspecialized, too – by the looks of him. A cheap, newly bought item. Probably imported. I reached down and took him up in my fist. I knew that Alan was staring at me, but sooner or later he had to accept the way things were. He had to know that much of what I did, much of my job, dealt with search and recovery. He had to just accept that.

The man was lost and I handed him back to his grateful owner, who, ignoring all his prayers and pleading, promptly stuffed him into the toe of her moccasin and cut off his weak cries with five very warm-looking, red-polished toes. I looked over Alan’s face, and wondered if my smile was as thin as his. We left soon after.

So we threaded our way back through the pale girls with uncut, dirty or streaky hair and tight pants, some carrying books and others phones, some guitars, some basketballs, and others nothing at all. Some of the girls we passed seemed to give Alan looks, some frightened or tense, nervous, surprised, curious, wolfish. There was a poetry reading across the street. I asked Alan if he wanted to go. A cloud passed over his face, and his eyes glazed over.

“Alan?”

“What?”

“The reading – do you want to go?”

He shook his head, stopped again, his body very still, and then pulled me forward by the hand, abruptly. “Home! We’re going home.”

I felt guilty. “I’m sorry, Alan. I –“

“Now. We have to start. Immediately.”

“Okay, okay. But wait a sec. You’re hurting me.” I had to jog, almost, to keep up with him. “That was a stupid idea, the poetry reading. I always knew…”

But he was about five feet ahead of me, and had turned the corner toward my apartment. I heard the door slam as I unlatched the gate, and when I opened the front door he was standing in front of the fireplace, scrutinizing an old photo of me and my husband. Years ago.

I was chuffing from the jog, my forehead and wrists just beginning to perspire. I felt out of shape, worn down all of a sudden. “Oh, that was years ago.” I came nearer to him, as though to examine the photo myself. “My husband.”

“Where were you?” he asked. I passed my eyes over the back of his neck, his shoulders, and then toward the curtain’s green sunlit shadow on the chair.

“Camping,” was all I said. I wanted to apologize, I thought. I’m sorry, but I should have apologized… I was going to apologize. Somehow I couldn’t form the words in my mind. Call up the casualness necessary to speak what I felt, say that I knew what he felt, and that our feelings were the same. I know what you’re going through, I wanted to say. But he wouldn’t believe me. I wouldn’t believe my own words – but I wanted to. I wanted to believe them more than anything. Wasn’t that something? Isn’t that enough?

I cleared my throat. “Say, fifteen minutes?” I asked. Alan turned around and smiled. “I have to shower.”

“That’s fine. I’ll wait for you,” he said.

Five minutes later, I heard him calling my name from the upstairs hallway. I didn’t answer, and counted the seconds as the shower water sprayed against my back and shoulders.

“Charlie!” He was nearer now, at the bathroom entrance. He knocked loudly against the door-frame.

“Alan? Alan, is everyth—“ But before I could finish my sentence, the shower curtain slipped back quickly, its metal rings jangling, and he’d pressed his naked body up against mine. Then I felt him dropping to his knees, his arms encircling my thighs, and then my ankles. I pulled him up by the arms, quickly, and rubbed my finger underneath his chin until he raised his eyes.

“Charlie…” I brought his head down to my breasts, hard, fingers interlocked in his hair. His heart beat rapidly against mine.

“What is it? What?” I whispered. The warm water still ran, quietly, over my shoulders. He gripped my arms like a drowning man.

“I just want everything to be normal again.”

“It is normal. This is normal.”

He looked up, and his back stiffened as he tried to right himself up again. His eyes, bewildered, met mine. “Yes, you’re right. You’re right. I’m sorry, I—“ He made a feeble attempt to pull away from me.

“No, it’s okay. Really.” I felt there was something forced, willed in this sudden weakness of his. As if he were half-uncertain I would play along. I felt the same sort of fear rising up in me, fear that he would run away suddenly, that he would walk out the door before I’d even finished dressing to come back downstairs. As if this were the point we had to cross together, before we could continue, go on wherever we had to go. I wanted him to know that I wanted him to be happy, would do anything for that to happen. And I wanted him not to be afraid that his happiness would mean my own unhappiness. That we could be happy together.

“But this isn’t normal,” he said. “Not anymore. Not for me. I need to – I need – “

When we came downstairs, fifteen minutes later, both of us were ready to begin.

When Alan finally opened his eyes, red with pressure and damp with foot-sweat and tears, it wasn’t Sadie who greeted him with a painful flick of the knuckle and a smile – it was Olivia. Scattered around the cold, uncarpeted room were the chewed ends of pencils, the stumps of erasers, worn-out pens, books, open and closed and torn and scribbled upon, and papers, papers everywhere, in piles and stray sheets, unwritten and written upon, unruled and loose leaf, printed and in manuscript. Shoes and socks, underwear and dresses, jeans and t-shirts took up the rest of the space. In the corners were giant dust-balls and a few hidden cords, probably connected to a computer somewhere. 

But directly in front of him were Olivia’s feet, bare, with black toenail polish, sweaty, and gigantic. She wiggled her toes a few times, and then cupped them together sideways along the blades of her feet. A dark, heady, sweetish smell wafted across the floor to Alan’s nostrils. He stepped back, instinctively, and rubbed his eyes.

“Welcome back to the living!” Olivia chirped, from high above. She sat down on the floor with a resounding thump, and circled her legs around the little man, until her feet met behind him. In front of him, he stared, fearfully, at the floral print of her skirt, only partially covering her pussy. She seemed unconcerned.

Alan, still rubbing his eyes, and breathing deeply, close (he feared) to hyperventilation, somehow couldn’t remember her name. But she reminded him.

“Olivia. I thought Sadie might have told you about me!” She paused, and then said, “I might as well tell you outright. When she took you out after fifteen minutes, she was worried because you’d passed out. So she came to me. She asked me what was the matter. I – I’m sorry, were you going to say something, sl—Alan?”

Alan looked as though he might have been about to say something. But Olivia went on.

“No, if you're wondering. That's not a good thing. She asked me what the matter was. I told her. And so here you are, until tomorrow or until further notice.”

“Fu-further notice?”

“Indefinitely. Let’s say indefinitely, or until Sadie wants you back. Or until you want you want to go back, but usually it’s the other way around.” She smirked.

Alan stood up, shakily, and looked with bleary eyes around the cold, quiet room. Rain beat gently against the closed windows. Outside it was dark and a single streetlight illuminated the opposite side of the room. Distantly, he heard other sounds, coming from the closet. A soft mouselike shuffling, a crackling of papers.

“I write, Alan. Poetry. I put together poetry nights here on campus. College poet laureate. Unofficially! I don’t think highly of myself.” Olivia tucked her feet in closer to him, by a few inches, slowly. He had nowhere to run but toward her. She went on talking. “Do you know that this one guy used to smell rotten apples, to get himself in a creative mood? Another drank coffee – by the fucking gallon. Do you know what I do?”

Alan turned around sharply toward her feet, and then looked up in fear and despair at her smiling face.

“Guess. I like it when you guess.”

“Guess?…”

“Well, let’s say I change people. I’ll put it like this: I teach you how to be a foot slave, and in return you get to live under my foot.” She smiled broadly. “Questions?”

“What? What is this? I’m a tutor, I’m…Sadie…Sadie’s…”

Olivia clamped her soles against his tiny sides before he could yell out another word in protest. A thick, leathery incense rose up from where his head was encased between her toes, and he breathed it in deeply, in a wild panic. His head swam, and he felt his eyes rolling back in his head.

“Just breathe, slave. Breathe in deeply.” She sucked in air through her nostrils, and exhaled slowly.

“Slave?” But he imitated her, automatically. Slave?

“For the next twenty-four hours, you belong to me, slave. Understand?”

Alan breathed in deeply against the foul space between her toes, and opened his mouth to let out air. When he swallowed again, he felt  a spoonful of her sweaty, filmy grime slipping down his throat. He gagged slightly, but didn’t throw up.

“Now, it helps me concentrate when my slaves are helpful. The better you are, the better I can write, and the sooner you’ll get out of here. Keep breathing. Okay? Nod if you understand.”

There was a pause in the air, and he felt her toes relax their pressure for a moment. His mind was clouded. He couldn’t remember… couldn’t remember anything. He nodded.

“Good, then.” She pulled her feet away from him, and he crumpled to the floor, in a panting heap. Painfully, still in a daze, he watched as the ground flew away from him at liftoff speed, and felt the blood rush to his head in a wild whirl. Olivia’s calm, warm voice reached him from a vast distance, over mountains and plains, over endless continents. It was another time, a different place. He thought back, vaguely, to the morning, to the year before, ten years, twenty…

“Now we can begin.” 

He woke to the sound of ocean waves lapping against a sandy, tropical beach. The hush between each wave seemed to last a minute, and then ten minutes, and then, as he felt himself falling back into a deep, wakeless sleep, the long silence spread upwards of an hour.

A blue light pierced his eyelids, and somewhere far away there was a woman’s shadow, parting the curtains of his room. “Wake up, Alan. Wake up!”

He rubbed his eyes a few times, clearing them of what felt like an unusual amount of sleep. Crud, scum, grit seemed to coat not only the insides of his eyes, but his hair, his throat, the membranes of his lungs, the walls of his arteries. He tasted the sides and roof of his mouth: it tasted like filth. He breathed in through his nose, deeply, and then choked and gagged on the smell: feet, mixed with minty antiperspirant and old coconut-scented body wash.

A few memories, here and there, trickled back. He squinted behind himself, and slipped on the warm, pillowy surface. “Alan! Oh good, you’re awake. Come on out for breakfast. Everybody’s waiting.”

He stumbled forward through the bluish darkness, toward a yellowish glow at what seemed the end of a tunnel, until the mesmeric sound of the ocean, and that smell, as strong and musty as a girl’s locker room, began to sink into the background. “Let me help you up. Come on over to the table. I’m Annabelle. Over here. Up we go!”

Two huge hands met him at the entrance, gripped him by his underarms, and heaved him up out of his dark prison into the bluish, glowing light. Somewhere far behind him, a door slammed shut, wood on wood. Groping about with his hands, he felt a chair just in front of him, and then the edge of a thick plastic table. Once his eyes adjusted, he made out a young woman, in her early twenties or late teens, seated at the head of the table. Around him five other men, all undressed – like himself – except for a strip of white cloth around the waist and pelvis, were already seated in their chairs and waiting, two of them smiling, and the other three not. Annabelle – to his surprise – he recognized. But this primly dressed girl, with curly brown hair and dark blue eyes, with a brown blouse and belted brown skirt, with brown loafers and stockings, was at least twice his own height. Perhaps even three times. He couldn’t be sure.

“Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m pretty excited about this,” she started. “Some of you, like Jules here, I’ve known for a long time.” Jules, a look of utter terror zigzagging across his sad,  scarred face, before turning into a sickly grimace, flinched as though someone had cocked a pistol at his head, and then subsided again into his usual indifference.  “Others, like Alan over there,” she winked, “I’ve met only briefly.” She folded her hands, and then sighed, looking around, as though waiting for the other four men to volunteer themselves, hearts and minds, to her as new acquaintances.

“Alan,” she said. “Why don’t you start? And then we can go around the table. Each man stating his name, his owner, and why he’s here. So for example: Alan, you would say ‘Alan. I’m Sadie’s. I’m here to learn how to be a foot slave.’”

“I’m sorry, but – wh- what…”

“Speak up, Alan!”

“I—I—don’t…”

“Jules? Jules!” Annabelle flicked her eye at the other man, who woke up out of his trance, eyes wide open like a startled rabbit’s. “Why don’t you start?”

He jerked his lips open, and ran a dry tongue over dry lips. “Julesannabelle’sslave—ffootslave.”

“Try again.” Her eyes glinted. “Jules ran away from me today. He didn’t say that. And that’s why I’m here!”

“Ss…” Jules couldn’t form the words.

“Again!” She stood up, and her tight shoes clicked, fierce and sharp, against the hardwood floor, as she circled the table to Jules.

“Jules…Annabelle’s…” She was closer, and his muscles tightened, helplessly. “To…to…”

“To learn…” She was beside him, her finger stroking his matted hair, gently.

“To learn how to…”

“To learn how to be a good…”

“…a good…good…”

“Foot slave! Damn!” He flinched. “Say it! Say it now!” She was yelling at him, teasingly.

“…how to be a good foot slave.” His head collapsed against his hands on the table, and she gently ran her red fingernails over his tiny cheek.

“Okay! Who’s next? Let’s hurry it up so we can start our tour.”

One after another, one man excepted, each repeated the miserable formula, until it was Alan’s turn. To avoid conflict (all his life he had been averse to confrontations, perhaps too much so), he said what was expected of him. “I’m Alan. I’m Sadie’s. I’m here to learn how to be a good foot slave.”

“Now, I’m sure you’re all wondering where you are.” There was silence, and one man, Steve by name, one who was smiling when Alan entered and had never once stopped smiling since, began to fall into hysterics, laughing uncontrollably. Without a moment’s hesitation, Annabelle stood up and strode toward him. She gripped him by the collar, and held him up, dangling wildly, half his bodylength from the ground. She was really three, maybe four times Alan’s size. (But what size was that? he wondered.) Everywhere stared, as though entranced, at the sight before them.

“Now I’m going to show you something,” Annabelle announced, her teeth clenched together, her bottom lip curled in a scowl. On the far side of the high-ceilinged room, there was a door (the only door in the room – and thus the door through which Alan and all the others came in and out). Beside this door was a tiny black button. Toward this one door Annabelle walked, Steve slung over her right shoulder like a sack of potatoes, no longer laughing or smiling, but protesting, swearing, praying, begging, screaming. She pressed the button with one long black forefinger, and after a moment’s pause a buzzer sounded and the door clicked open. The other men heard her sharp, deliberate footsteps in the next room, clear against the hardwood, and listened as they receded. Distantly, another door opened, and closed. There was total silence, except for the low hum of the single blue lightbulb overhead.

A man who identified himself as “Neil, Hélène’s” nudged Alan with his elbow, and whispered. “You know where he’s going?”

“No.” He looked toward the door with a sort of dread. Suddenly, the clack-clacking of Annabelle’s shoes returned, and the inner door slammed shut again.

“Short of it is he’s doomed,” Neil said confidentially. “Olivia keeps about five or six – no one’s counted – women. Ex-convicts, cold, insane most of them. Those who do good work, now and then, get a slave.” Annabelle’s footsteps were close. She was almost at the outer door. Neil hurried. “Short of it is he’s not coming out, even if she says he is. He’s off the radar. He’s…he’s…”

Annabelle had returned. She closed the door behind her. Clasping her hands together, and smiling, she apologized, and asked everyone to please stand up. The tour was starting. They pushed their chairs in, somewhat shakily, and filed out the door past the young giantess, into the thick darkness, which smelled heavily of feet. Somewhere behind them, Annabelle flipped on a light switch, and the room lit up, from a height of about a half-thousand feet in the sky. As their eyes adjusted again, the five men looked out, some with surprise, and some – like Henry, the only one who hadn't yet named his owner-caretaker, and therefore the one Alan found himself watching most often – with time-hardened boredom, on the floor of a girl’s closet. All around them, or thrown haphazardly over the floor, were all her socks, her school and work flats, her stockings and slippers. Up on the rack were old sneakers and boots, heels and mules. At the far back was a row of six particularly battered, smelly ballet flats. Beside each was a small black bag, tied at the mouth with string.

“For the two days, at least,” Annabelle announced, “because some of you will be here a little bit longer – a day for Jules for orientation,  or actually one week if we’re counting in-shoe time with me, and we are, a month for David, and six months for Neal – this is going to be your home. “ Neil, an older man in his late 40s, bearded, thin and stoic, made no response, but Alan shuddered at the news, and rubbed his eyes again.

“I’ll bet you’re wondering what’s in the black bags. Well, tonight, each of your caretakers has left some personal item of hers, plus a photo. Olivia knows how much your owner cares about you, and thinks about you, so she’s personally seeing to it that each of you will be able to take some little remembrance with you during training. She wants to make this as comfortable as possible, transitionally speaking.”

Neil and David nodded, as though they understood exactly what she was talking about. “Neil, I know Mrs. Boucher misses you, and only wants the best for you. I talked with her yesterday during French.” Alan turned his head toward Neil, who had begun to tear up.  “And David, I know that Jessica thinks the world of you.” David, a chubby young man of about 19, began to sob in this throat. “She really does. She told me that personally.”

“Alan,” Annabelle said, walking back toward the other end of the single file line, her hands clasped behind her back like a drill sergeant. “I don’t know why you’re here, to be honest. I think you’d be,” and as she spoke, she reached out her hand and gripped his head like a softball, gently rocking it back and forth, and rubbing her thumb up and down his forehead, “I think you’d be very good. And Henry,” she continued, letting Alan go with a suggestive wink, “knowing Marina, you must be the best slave alive.” After Annabelle had passed to her little Jules, now convulsed with fear, shaking and shivering all over, Alan turned quickly to Henry, who just as quickly returned his look. Sadie. Marina. Had they talked? Henry read his look. The answer was yes. But why? What was happening? What?

Speech over, Annabelle switched off the light again, and they began to march, she behind and Neil in front, toward the entrance of the closet. Somewhere below them, behind and under the wall, a man wailed out.

“Stop here,” Annabelle said, and they were still. “It’s locked now, but behind that wall, in a metal box, Olivia keeps some of the other trainees.” She paused. “Be glad – be thankful – you’re not them.”

“Who—?“ Henry started.

“No questions, please,” she interrupted. “Who they are isn’t important. It’s what they are, dontcha think?” The five men heard her rap on the closet wall, three times, and the wailing stopped. “Ask them who they are,” she told Henry. He hesitated. “Go on,” she said, “I insist.”

Henry asked, and there was silence. Then, all at once, ten or twenty male voices, it was impossible to count them all, called out for help. “Save me!” one said. Another laughed. Another cried. Another yelled out, “I’m hungry!” Another said, “What time is it?” But no one answered his question.

Henry looked at Annabelle, and she looked back, a bit disgusted. “Toilet slaves, mostly. And most of them have only been inside the Zone – Olivia calls it ‘the Zone’ – for a few hours. She does it to test them. Some girls want that kind of slave – but maybe one out of a hundred is a real natural. The others just go crazy suicidal, or whatever. Or they get poisoned, because owners can be stupid sadistic and eat beef, or chicken, or their own slaves, or some other meat, and then feed them that kind of waste. Vegetarians only need apply, is what Olivia says. And she’s been doing this for years now, and so far no deaths. By poison.”

Alan decided to ask a question, “So, so she doesn’t eat them?”

“Olivia? God no. She only fattens them up. Maybe she’ll show you later. What do you think, Olivia?”

The closet door had cracked open, and through the darkness Alan made out a ring of lamp-light spreading across a well-worn rug on the floor. The immense shadow of a girl, barefoot, t-shirted and in saggy pajama bottoms, stood just in front of them, framed against the light. She wiggled her toes a few times, as though in anticipation.

“Where’s the other one?” she asked. Olivia. Alan gulped in fear, his dream coming back to him. Somehow, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her toes. Their smell, their power, their casual strength, as if he were submitting not to her will, but to her. It took nothing out of her to make him a slave: she being who she was, that was enough. This realization terrified him. And at the same time, he felt a budding longing to obey her, to submit to that casual power, which seem to come out of her without her even being aware of it. The smell, the way she had dominated him so easily just with the smell…

He looked sideways at the other men, and all but Jules seemed to share his feeling. Though Neil’s knees were trembling.

“He had to be dealt with,” Annabelle answered. “Do you want me to take Jules?”

“Sounds okay. You going out?”

“Soon.”

“Okay then. Head out the back. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Annabelle hoisted up Jules in a single motion, and ran out the closet door, past Olivia. No questions were asked. They waited, and soon Olivia bent down on one knee, and cupped her chin in her hand. By Alan’s reckoning, each of the four remaining men was about 2 inches tall, more or less. He felt his knees knocking, and didn’t dare to look at the others.

“Alan,” Olivia purred, finally. “I think I’ll start with you. The rest of you can go to bed. It’s late. You know the way, right?”

Henry turned around, and the other two men followed him closely. Alan almost heard one of them sigh in relief as he passed by. When they were gone, Olivia reached out in the darkness with one hand (her long dark, faintly greasy hair falling over and enveloping Alan’s tiny body), rummaged around for a few seconds, and pulled out a well-beloved moccasin for the left foot and an even more treasured sneaker for the right. She picked him up, abruptly, stood on her feet, and dangled him by the shoulders between the mouths of both shoes.

“Which one?” she asked, flinging her hair back over her shoulders and smiling.

Alan looked down, past Olivia’s sweaty fingers, past the two shoes she was holding up by her pinkies, all the way down to the floorboards, and froze.

“I know. Why don’t you inhale each one. Then tell me which you prefer.” She lowered him to the moccasin, first, and its crusty, vinegary, girlish odor knocked him back to life, like smelling salts. Then she carried him over to the sneaker, out of which a cheesier, raunchier, sweatier smell seemed to rise. He saw her wearing the first around school and home, and the second out the streets, running in the mornings before dawn, or at track meets, years ago in high school, on hikes, on long excursions with friends or family.

“The sneaker,” Alan said. “Please.”

“That’s a good choice,” Olivia grazed his head with her wet lips, and nuzzled his hair with her nose. She breathed in deeply, in and out. “Hear me breathing?” she whispered in his ear. He shivered with pleasure, against his will. “That’s how I want you breathing, every night, every morning, every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Do you understand me?”

Alan nodded. He…he understood. Did he? “Yes.”

She sat down at the top of her bed, carefully. The springs creaked a few times, and then there was silence again, silence except for Olivia’s breathing, and Alan’s. “But tonight, because of the cold, and also because I want to sleep well, I’m going to put on socks.”

Alan looked up her, scared, curious, confused, hypnotized somehow by her words. He looked at her lips, her long nose, her dark eyes, her long dark hair, and for a moment thought she was the most perfect person he had ever set eyes on. She brought him close to her ear, and whispered again. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where will you be?”

“Inside,” he said.

“That’s right,” he saw her cheek crease, and knew she was happy with him. Or was she? Or was it amusement.

She scrounged about underneath the bed with her toes, until she came up with a  pair of yellowed, old, disgusting socks, with birthday cakes printed all over the heels and ankles in faded pink and blue shades. “Sadie told me you need help with history,” Olivia said, as she pulled on the first sock over her left foot. Alan noticed her toenail polish was chipped in places, and there was a thick callus under her second toe.

“History…” Alan, fascinated by Olivia’s voice, by the shape of her ear, and the way she put on her sock, heard himself mutter the word. Who was speaking?

“The revised history. Underneath every great woman is a greater man, they say. Have you heard that? Do you know about Catherine the Great?” Alan didn’t respond. “I’ll have to tell you about her sometime. Maybe tomorrow.”

She brought him down to toe-level, face-to-face with the mouth of her other sock. He noticed, even in the dim light of her lamp, and just before full force of her foot-smell hit him bodily like a wall of bricks, that she was still talking to him. He tumbled down to the soiled toe of her sock, and gripped the unwashed fabric, the tendrils, for dear life as he swayed from side to side, like a fly in a web. Soon enough the spider came, Olivia’s five toes, the pad of her sweaty foot, and her tough heel.

Just before she clamped down on him, and forced him underneath, deep, face-down into the dark crevice between her toes and the soft, sensitive mound of her foot, she spoke to him again. “Tonight it’s going to be all about the smell,” she said. “Tomorrow, we’ll start on the details.”

Her rank toes, warm and soft, scrunched around his body, and every time he gasped for air, he found that Olivia had been there before him. Judging by the smell, she must not have washed her feet in a week – perhaps longer, much longer. At a certain point one could no longer judge these things. In the back of his mind, as his breathing became more and more regular, and he became gradually more aware that her socked feet, bunched up against each other cozily in the darkness, were, despite the thin layer of sweat that was beginning to spread over them, over the lining of the socks, and over his own body, which he curled up into the gap underneath the ball of her foot, searching for room and comfort, that she and they were now asleep, he felt his mind was overcome by some force greater than his own (Olivia, Olivia, Olivia… crossed his mind, and the big toe of her left foot scratched an itch on her right sole, before withdrawing again). This felt permanent. Eternal. He couldn't escape this power. Her. He breathed, and reached out his arms, in a daze, into the foul darkness. And it was then he realized why she used the ocean recording. The waves. She curled her tired toes around his form, playing with him in her sleep, and then buried him alive. He inhaled deeply, gagged once more, and blacked out. 

“When you say you ‘blacked out,’” I interrupted, “what do you mean? Suffocation?”

Alan blinked a few times, shook his head slowly from side to side.

“I’m gonna be honest with you, Alan. This type of black-market abduction and training – well, let’s call it as it is: brainwashing – isn’t uncommon at all. I mean,” I added, following his wandering eyes, as they circled the room, settled on the mantelpiece, indecisively, and then rested on me. “I mean, you aren’t alone. I know how that sounds, but you really aren’t. As for the rest, if it isn’t too difficult to dig into the details, the day-by-day, I want to ask you a few questions. If you’re ready. Only if you’re ready. Alan?”

He was staring fixedly at my loafers. A light glinted in his eye, and he looked up. “I’m ready.”

“Was Henry a plant?”

He flinched. “No. There was some mystery at first, that first night I mean, but afterward it became clear he was there…there on loan.”

“Loan?”

“Or exchange, maybe. Anyway he never went back to Marina. Olivia was one of his former students, I think. I could be wrong.”

“I’m surprised…”

He cut in quickly. “Well, if Marina – or Olivia (and if Olivia hasn’t killed him or sold him by now, he’s probably still with her) – had asked him, he probably would have done it. He would have done anything for any price. I mean, and Charlotte sorry if I’m rambling, because I have to think back now, but Henry seemed immune to all their brainwashing techniques, and at the same time he was completely loyal…”

“He would have betrayed you, then, to get what he wanted…”

“He betrayed other men. Probably former owners, too. Girls who, he felt (and you’d be surprised how many slaves said this) weren’t good enough for him. So yes, probably. But our lines never got crossed. What happened was that he actually asked Marina to be Olivia’s slave, and there was some kind of tradeoff. I never looked into it.”

“I see.”

“Hope I’m being clear enough.”

“You are.” Though I felt somewhat less at ease in my mind. Everyone hides some things in some stories, loose details, a few words here and there, but Alan was still hiding something important. Despite how little I knew about them, I felt it wouldn’t have been out of the question for Sadie or Marina to play a game like that on Alan, on any new slave. It wasn’t criminal, but it was sadistic, and in keeping with the brainwashing techniques he’d already touched on (for example, the ocean waves circulating like blood through a body, the scent training, the other psychological and physical abuse). “Go on.”

“On? Where was I?”

I was sitting on one foot, and felt the jeans stretch tightly over my thighs. The other loafer, now loose, flapped up and down as I wiggled my toes inside it. “Suffocation.”

I noticed he was watching my shoe again. Thinking of Olivia? Or was I teasing him now? I pulled the second foot underneath me, and waited. “I didn’t suffocate, you know…”

“Well, wherever you want to start again. The next morning, a week later.” He didn’t respond at once, only pushed his hands underneath his thighs, as though they were cold. I didn’t want to hurry him, but I was growing impatient, both with the story he’d already told me and the story he still had to tell. “Tell me more about Olivia, then. Give me a day in the life.”

“I was with her a long time,” Alan said. “Before Sadie came back.”

“What do you remember?”

He shook his head, and met my eyes again. “It’s like, I don’t know, I was drunk, you know. Bits and pieces. Annabelle said that she, Olivia I mean, never ate her slaves, but I saw things… She didn’t, but you remember that room where Steve went? Well. Use your imagination.”

I used it. “Alan, my God.”

He sighed. “It gets worse. I said I was with Olivia a long time. I don’t even know how long it was. Six months, a year, I don’t know. I didn’t get…I didn’t get out much. Anyway it was much longer than a day, so....”

“She lied?”

“Of course!” he blurted out, almost defensively. He was getting more anxious by the second. It was time to stop asking questions. “Everyone did. I knew it the next day, when I saw…well…”

He flipped the recorder back on. I listened.

“Why not in the morning?” 

“Don’t you think it’s just a bit, I dunno, alcoholicish…?”

Olivia snorted, scratched an itch on the ball of her right foot, and then, resting it across her thigh, wiggled it back and forth at the ankle.“Alcoholicish? That’s not how you pronounce it. It’s really alcoholicious, Sadie, stress on the fourth syllable. And yeah, it is.”

Alan felt his world rocking up and down, and then heard laughter high above him. He groggily opened his eyes. His head pounded and throbbed with pain, as though he’d just woken up after a nightlong binge. Rubbing his eyelids with his fists, he found they were crusted over with some sort of moist substance. Suddenly, without warning, something warm, damp and living seized him from behind with overwhelming force and flung him face-forward and smothered his fear in a wet, smelly, rippling wall of flesh.

Olivia was wiggling her toes and laughing. She smiled and looked down, casually, at the sole of her right foot. She felt Alan tossing and struggling under her toes. “Aw, I think he just woke up.”

“Woke up? Who woke up?”

“Alan. Sadie, I’m gonna have to let you go.” Alan heard her voice now, and her name. Was that confusion in her voice?

“Can I see him?”

“You know,” Olivia said, as she stretched her legs under the desk, reaching for her indoor flats, “he was so good last night. Like a little chick under…under a mother hen, huddling for warmth. He was so…happy.”

“Liv, what are you talking about? We went over this like ten times.”

“What else could he be?” she hunched forward over the edge of the desk, and crossed her legs, left over right. Alan, wide awake and wriggling against  Olivia’s toes a moment ago, now found himself slowly drifting off to sleep again, as she applied more and more pressure to his body, and buried him, little by little, second by second, in the dark zone between her toes and the insole of her ballet flats. “The only reason you got a box full is because at the moment I needed someone new. That’s the only reason. Used for me isn’t used for the next girl, like Marina, for one. If you want to come over some time, I can show you what I mean, my ex-boyfriend from high school, for instance. He can still speak at least, and I wouldn’t trade him to anyone, except for a high price, a really fucking steep price. He still knows what he’s doing.”

“Olivia, calm down. I was just asking.”

“What if I told Alan you traded him for a box of delicacies or something. Told him what you like to do with them sometimes, like, I don’t know, tie one to the roof of your mouth while you eat, and leave him there for days. I know the sort of stuff you do.”

“Tell him, I don’t care.”

“He probably heard you. Anyway…” Both were silent for a moment, and in the silence Olivia slipped out of her flats, and crossed her legs again. Alan, who did hear everything – Olivia’s darker, deeper voice seemed to travel across her body, down her legs, and through her toes into Alan’s tiny body – pulled his face, with a wet, suction-like sound, from the underside of her fourth toe, and felt himself falling, head over heels, down toward the upper part of the sock, pressed loosely against the outer blade of her foot.

“Maybe I should come over.”

“Why not today?”
 
Sadie didn’t answer. “How long do they usually last, for you I mean?”

“Interested now? Usually a week – when I was just getting started, I mean. In L’s case – I still call him L, he seems to appreciate it – wow, going on four years now.”

“Congratulations,” Sadie said, a bit sarcastically. “How d’ya do it?”

Olivia smiled, and shook her head. She took another sip of her wine, and swallowed. “As far as foot slaves go, the grosser it is, the better they look, and the longer they live.”

“What?”

“Counterintuitive, right?” She burped softly, and then exhaled. “I found out with L that the longer I went without washing my foot, the less he complained, the longer he lasted, both by the day and month. I mean, he wore down eventually, I used him every day, and now he’s only good for cleaning and small tasks. But the savings are enormous.”

“I don’t understand. I have to go soon, Olivia. Maybe you can tell me later.”

“Come by after.” The screen fizzed out, and Olivia pushed her chair away from the desk.

She peeled off her old birthday cake sock, balled it up with Alan still inside, and stuffed her flat with it. Her footsteps receded and stopped. She shuffled about for a few seconds, perhaps poking around through something, and then traipsed back, lazily, across the floor, her bare feet making a sucking, slapping sound over the hardwood floor. The chair scraped again, and his body tensed, waiting for the girl’s fingers to close around him, or reach inside the warm, smelly sock and bring him out into the cold, clean air. Instead, her fingers gripped the toe of the sock, and simply shook him out onto the heel of the flat, darkly begrimed.

He didn’t know what to say: for almost two days, now, not once had he been asked, “Would you prefer…” or “What would you like instead…” Already it felt absurd for him to say something, to protest to Olivia: “I would prefer you dump me out of your sock more gently.” He submitted to these minor indignities, convincing himself that he was focused, really intent on stopping the larger one, which was the plain fact that Olivia wanted to make him something he was not. She was down on her hands and knees, under the desk, and gently cleaning his face with a spittle-covered pinky finger.

“Little Alan. If I dress you up, I could call you Lana, or maybe Nala…” She smiled. “No, little slave Alan, that sounds nice.”

She frowned, concerned. “How did you sleep last night? I slept wonderfully.”

He forced himself to look away from her eyes, and felt trapped. His headache was fading away, and then something emerged out of the fog, in between throbs. “Who is L?”

Olivia didn’t hear him, or pretended not to. She stood him up, raising his arms with her index finger and thumb, stretching them out to the side. “You have to a lose a few pounds, little slave Alan, but we’ll talk about that later.”

“Who is L?” He said it more loudly now. Protesting was futile, but he wanted to at least let her know that he was listening. That he knew something. That he wasn’t totally stupefied by….by the last two days of his life. He was becoming everything he’d dreaded, and felt himself frozen in disbelief, unable to accept that this dread had now become a very real, very immediate danger. Even escape would be an admission that he was a slave, a prisoner. And that one, that all-important fact still hadn’t penetrated his skull.

“You want to meet him?” she smiled, as though surprised and pleased by his interest. “You will, don’t worry. But I have to write an essay now, little Alan, and want you to pay attention to these five girls.”

Alan was just about to open his mouth again, and stupidly ask the same question, but Olivia had backed up from underneath the shadow of the desk, and was now pointing to one of its four wooden legs, where five girls, each almost double Alan’s own size, were standing in a row, waiting for some order. All of them were stripped down to their underwear, though one wore a flowing blue skirt, and seemed a bit busy adjusting one of her bra straps, and pulling up her panties.

The chair scraped again, and this time Olivia was sitting in it. Her bare feet lay before them, and the five women suddenly stood at attention, as though waiting for a signal. In that long, tense silence, broken only by Olivia’s finger on the computer mouse far above them, and the occasional snort and hair rearrangement, the girl with the blue dress turned around to Alan and smiled. She pulled up her dress, and revealed what was there. Steve, his mouth frozen and twisted in a perpetual moan, had been wedged up her hairy pussy like a tampon, only his head extended out into the sudden, cool breeze. He gulped, and said something, very scratchily. It could have been “Help me,” or “Hell,” or maybe even “Go to hell” – or maybe, as the girl said, it was simply “Hello.”

“He’s saying hello,” she whispered.

But there was no time to respond. Olivia had wiggled her black-painted toes, the blue dress had fallen back across the girl's pussy like a veil, and the girls started their work on their owner’s left foot. Out of nowhere appeared a nail file, a pair of scissors, polish, lotion, and other assorted foot-care accessories.

“While they’re working, Alan, I want you to study my other foot,” she said, silkily, a bit mechanically (because she’d already started typing her essay) from high above. “Study the top. I want you to slowly graze your fingers around my footprint, as though you were tracing it with a marker. Study the back, by the heel, and then move around to the arch, and finally to the toes. When I’m finished, I want you tell me about it. Describe it to me as best you can, in detail.”

Alan couldn’t move. He stared at the girls, and listened to his heart pound. He wasn’t who she thought he was. Didn’t she know how smart…what a waste…

“I’m sorry if you’re bored, but when I’m finished, we’ll have breakfast together. We’ll talk. Maybe we’ll meet L.” She stretched her toes out, as though searching for him, and then cracked them loudly. “Where are you?” She peered down underneath the desk, and looked around her right foot until their eyes met, or hers met his and his looked away. “Start at my heel, I said. What’s wrong with you?” She turned back to her computer, and when Alan walked around to her heel, and grazed it with his fingers, he felt her skin tremble in response. An heady odor surrounded him, like old overworn leather, something like cedar wood, and something very much like the sickening, cloying smell that overwhelmed him last night, and lingered over his hair and skin. Already his own pores smelled more like Olivia than him.

“I don’t want to overwhelm you all at once,” he heard her say. “I know there’s a transitional period, there’s a steep learning curve, and I know everyone has their limits, and I’ll try to respect yours.” She bent down and cupped her mouth in a whisper. “Some advice: stay as far away as you can from those five girls.”

What was she talking about? Was there an ironic smile on her face as she said these things, or was she being sincere? But, Alan muttered to himself, stupidly. But this is only temporary, only a day. It’s just a game, she said. Though he no longer knew who was meant by “she,” whether it was Olivia or Sadie or someone else. He was hungry, though, and the smell was affecting him again, so that he could no longer think clearly enough to disobey her. He needed a reason to say no. And somehow that reason was escaping him. He’d come this far, after all, and he’d been tricked by Sadie twice now. He was desperate to trust someone, at least, and Olivia, so far, hadn’t lied to him.

He began to circle her foot, studying it as she asked. For now, yes, he'd do as she suggested. He'd stay as far away as possible from those other five girls.

“You know what I liked about you, Alan??” She was muttering to herself, as she typed out her essay. Alan was touching her arch now, half-amazed by the way her flesh responded immediately to his fingers. “Your innocence. The moment I saw you, last night, I had to get you for myself. Don’t be afraid of me,” she said. Alan listened, and despite a sudden urge to run away, to hide among those loose piles of clothes, to find a hole in the wall, any hole, and scurry through it like a mouse or a spider, he decided it wasn’t the right time. Maybe later, when she let him alone for a few minutes, he’d have his chance. She must let him alone some time.

“I won’t kill you. Remember the thing I told you about the rotten apples? How one thing or another gets me in that creative mood? This is the one thing for me. I need you, so I don’t want to hurt you. Keep going.”

After a few minutes, Alan faced her toes again, and was waiting, indecisively, for another word. It came.

She stopped typing. "I want you to climb inside my flat -- the one right behind you -- and wait for me to put my shoe on. I’m almost finished now.”

Alan looked behind him, away from Olivia’s gigantic, shapely foot, and inched his way toward the flat. As he stood at the tip, facing the toe of the shoe, Olivia suddenly stamped her left foot and dismissed the girls. “That’s enough! I’m finished. Find your way back.” The girls scattered, dropping their implements and cotton wads here and there, and Olivia extended her feet toward the shoes, twirling them around with her toes at the heel, and pulling them on to her feet. She slipped the left shoe on, sloppily, and then prepared to put on the right. Her toes inside, and her heel propped up, she instructed Alan to push himself up into the shoe, and crawl underneath her arch, until he reached her toes.

Alan hesitated, again. He had to explain something, that he wasn’t supposed to be a foot slave, that he hadn’t marketed himself, that his mother... But it was too late, and Olivia had already scooped him up and dropped him inside. The heat and smell of the night before engulfed him. She put him in the spot most comfortable for her, and then started walking. The printer whirred, the laptop cover closed, and Alan, huddled in a tiny ball with his head underneath Olivia’s overpowering pinky toe, waited for what was coming to him.

The toes squeezed him warmly, and he gasped in pain. But what confused him was how quickly that pain became pleasure, how quickly his flesh responded to hers, even underneath her toes. It occurred to him, briefly, in a flash, that she wasn’t torturing him, controlling him – she was seducing him. And seducing him in the strangest way: by overwhelming him with the repulsive, sickening, sweaty odor and backbreaking weight of her feet. He wasn’t able to form this thought into words: it just occurred to him, suddenly. And he became aware, just as suddenly, as the weight lifted from his torso, as he was forced by the released pressure to inhale deeply and gratefully the corrupted, heavy odor permanently embedded into the skin at the base of her toes, and just as Olivia had seated herself somewhere, probably at the breakfast table –  that his lips were pressed against her pinky toe. He tore them away, and spat, mechanically, into the warm darkness. He closed his eyes and gasped for breath, almost in a panic.

When he opened them again, her foot was gone, and he was alone in the shoe. He stood up, and groped toward the light. Far above, he heard voices talking, laughing, and no one was mentioning his name. 

“More coffee?”

“Jules probably needs it more than I do. Kept me awake all night. The little busy bee.”

At the heel of Olivia’s flat, where a patch of warm sweat was slowly shrinking and evaporating into the cold, coffee-rich air of the apartment kitchen, Alan poked his head out. Directly in front of him, and dangling above his head by about forty feet, was Olivia’s yellowed right sole. Off to his right he saw a plate set out, and three figures – Neil, David, and a third man – bent over it, oblivious to the world. Behind him, above the lip of her shoe, which read 9 ½, he saw a second pair of feet stretched out straight ahead, wiggling within a set of salt-stained suede ankle-high boots and knee-high argyle socks.

It was Annabelle, of course, now returned to her normal size: only one day before she had carried those very boots in her hands, as she raced around the cafeteria, searching for her lost slave. How easy it was, in the last ten years since the Event, to pick out who had power and who didn’t, in this strange and yet very familiar new world.

“Read the paper?" Annabelle was asking. "Some woman committed the other day, for oversizing herself. Trying to. The boldness of it, though. ‘Witnesses report that Drexler’ – Abigail Drexler was her name – ‘upon being identified by prison guards, became agitated and attempted to escape. Except for a single, prehumanized three-incher branded as ‘Jacob,’ one of the earliest models in the Winters line, nothing was found in her possession. Officials of the Winters Company, known today above all for its fashionable, colorful, and realistic line of female dolls, have not returned our calls for comment.'”

“See,” said Olivia, sucking something sticky off her fingers, and smacking her lips, “it’s always in those straight-laced places you get the psychos. When will these people learn it’s all about discovery.”

“Discovery?”

The shadow of Olivia’s dangling, discolored foot fell over Alan’s tiny two-inch frame. Out of the corner of his eye, as he backed away toward the toe section of her flat, he saw David and Neil stop eating whatever they were eating, freeze, and cower. A mere split-second before her toes closed in on him, inching toward his place of safety at the extreme end of the shoe, he took a gasp of dizzying, foot-pungent air, and closed his eyes. He slipped into her toe-clasp, with a little roll, and opened his eyes in the living, warm darkness, where beads of sweat already began to gather underneath the girl’s toes.

“Yes,” Alan heard Olivia say. “Some guys like feet, for example, and others don’t. After L., I found out that all I had to do was to generate an extreme reaction.”

“You mean, make him crazy?”

“Not crazy, necessarily. Just so repulsed and confused and angry and so on, you know, that he becomes catatonic. When he reaches that level, don’t push him any further. Let him cool down, like a piece of glass after shaping it in the oven. But after you get to that stage with him, you own him.”

“I think Jules would just be terrified of me.”

“They are, at first. Really terrified, sometimes. But then you have build trust. Let them know they’re safe, as long as you’re in control, play it like that. It doesn’t even take that long. A day, two days.”

“Alan?”

Olivia laughed, and popped her heel out. When Alan tried to sit up, she pushed him down with her big toe, and then slowly stroked his body, up and down, until he became still. As she stroked him, smearing his body in another sweaty layer, she said, contemplatively, “L. was different.”

“How?”

“It was five years ago, I was sixteen, he was seventeen, and he was one of the slow-shrinkers.”

“How slow?”

“It took a month, about, before he stopped. At first I had to chase him, but as he grew smaller and smaller, he was the one who started to follow me around. One day he was waiting outside my car, it was early November, and he fell on his knees, you know, at my feet, and begged me to take him away from his home. His stepmother, I think it was. I forget her name. But she was beginning to make advances on him or something. There was a court decision pending. At that time he was just under four feet tall, and so there was almost a two-foot difference between us.”

“Wow,” Annabelle whistled over her coffee, and took a sip.

“That’s what’s real,” Olivia said, tapping her black-polished pointer finger on the tabletop. “That’s what, you know, someone like that girl Abigail is missing. They forget about the whole discovery side of it. You discovering him and who you are, he discovering you and who he really is, both happening at the same time. And in L.’s case, let’s be honest, he was born to be my slave. It’s thrilling when you finally hear that click in their mind. Nothing can ever change that. No one can.”

“When did it happen.”

“I had an inkling in class, one day, when I turned around and saw him staring at the floor, at the back of my seat. But everything changed the week after that time at the car. The next week he was shoe-level, and then one day I found him inside my sock. It was one discovery after another, from the moment he entered my life, and from the moment I entered his. He was scared.”

Annabelle was quiet. She sipped her coffee again. Alan was growing lightheaded on Olivia’s overwhelming scent, but he continued to listen, even when the sound of her voice dipped to a buzz or a low purr.

“It’s when they’re scared,” Olivia said, “that you have to isolate them. If I share Alan with you now, he’ll forget that he’s only safe with me. Think of Jules: the reason he tries to escape is because that day he was terrified you took him to the cafeteria. If you’d asked me, I would have said: put him in your panty drawer, or just leave him in your room for a few hours to do what he pleases. He’d have been too frozen stiff to leave. But bring him out in the big world, and he seizes any chance that comes to him to get away. You have to feel that moment in them, that moment when they’ve lost control of themselves, are totally paralyzed with fear, you know, because that’s the moment they’ll just surrender to you one morning.

“With L., the day I surprised him he was asleep inside my sock, those old birthday ones I wore for my sixteenth, remember? I woke him up, took off my shoe, explained to him that from then on I’d give him what he wanted, and then shoved him inside. Of course he did scream at first, for a little, when I pushed him face down on the insole, but it was a different kind of scream that time: not fear, but a kind of acceptance, as though he’d been waiting for this to happen for a long time, anticipating it eagerly, but at the same time was afraid I would actually do it to him. He thought it was his dread screaming out, I bet – but it was really desire. He wanted it, and I gave it to him. But he had to discover that he wanted it first. Call it seduction, call it manipulation, but if he didn't want it deep down it just wouldn't have happened the way it did!”

“How much did you have to drink?"

Olivia smiled. "Is it that obvious?"

"Hah, kind of. Where is he now?”

“You really want to see him?”

There was a pause, and then Annabelle said, “Yes, I think so.”

A silence followed, and then a quick breath drawn in sharply. “Right?” Olivia said.

“Oh my God, that’s amazing,” Annabelle squealed. “And Sadie knows what you’re doing with Alan?”

“She knows. She’s coming by later. I didn’t tell you. She said she was nervous because these two ladies stopped her after she left the house, that night, and they were asking about him."

“What? I didn’t hear about that.”

“Well, it’s not a problem, anyway not yet. His mother’s a big manufacturer or something, Emily something. They had a falling out, and Sadie knew her personally.”

“So that’s why?”

“I didn’t find out until this morning. Otherwise I wouldn’t have given her that box.”

“Right. Well, she’s probably safer if he’s with you.”

“Probably,” Olivia said, drily, and stood up. “Annabelle, don't wait up for me. I'll see you later."

"Going?"

"In a second. Meet you in Third."

"OK," Alan heard Annabelle say, and then her voice was gone.

Olivia walked back to her bedroom across the hallway, and pulled out a custom-designed seat from a cozy little nook on the other side of the closet wall. From here, as she pulled down her pajamas, and sat down on a round, porcelain toilet seat, she could look out on the college green, two stories below, and watch the girls and professors passing to and fro.

Her foot was sweaty, and she rubbed her toes back and forth, nervously, across Alan’s twitching, huddling form. As she pulled her foot out, and let her flat breathe for a few seconds, she remembered the Sunday after the first week L. had spent inside her boot. She remembered how he begged her, on days one, two and three, to give him air, or a drink of water, or a piece of bread, a little crumb from her toast – and how she had refused him, determined to go the distance, to break some sort of nonexistent record. After that week, he no longer called her boots or flats or slippers ‘cute’ – they’d become objects of worship for him, and he was often afraid to leave his temple. He changed her probably as much as she changed him. Sometimes it bored her to repeat the process with lesser slaves. She was afraid, as her big toe toyed idly with Alan, inside the flat, that he wouldn’t stimulate her the way she needed to be stimulated, in her work.

She told him this, long after he’d proven himself as her foot slave, after her first collection was published with acclaim, and after she'd begun her first year of graduate study. All this happened during the next year.

But now, here they were. She farted, loudly, and then evacuated inside the porcelain bowl. A door opened, and Henry appeared by her left foot. She shit a few more times, her sweaty toes squeezing Alan in between grunts, and then sighed with relief. A long stream of piss rimmed the bowl, musically, with a crystalline ping, and voices arose from somewhere behind the wall. “Enough! Enough!” someone said. And another simply said “No!” At some point, Henry had disappeared.

She wiped herself, and then flushed. An air-suction valve opened and then closed, sweeping the inside of the bowl clean, and Olivia was finished. The voices from within stopped calling, and in the silence that ensued Olivia nudged Alan below the arch of her foot, turned him on his back, and watched him until his eyes opened and met hers. Her dark eyes, shadowed at the corners by her long black hair, had a faraway look to them, as though she was thinking about someone else. But then she opened her mouth, and showed Alan her tongue. On the tip of her tongue, surrounded by bubbles and long silvery strands of saliva, there was a piece of well-chewed gum. She pulled her foot out of her shoe, bent down over Alan, and curled up her tongue. Her saliva fell over him in droplets and long slimy ropes, coating him thoroughly. Then her left hand, left arm crooked at the elbow and resting on her left thigh, reached into her mouth and took out the gum. She sucked in her spit, swallowed, and then casually held out her hand to Alan, as though offering him the gum.

He stared, miserable and fascinated, at the dripping ruin of what used to be, hours ago, a long, tasty cinnamon strip. Olivia spoke.

“It’s time to go out. But I thought that, maybe, you’d stick better in my sneaker with this piece of gum. Touch it, it’s very sticky.” Through the gross, coagulated veil of Olivia’s gum-flavored, toast-crumb-and-coffee-browned saliva, Alan reached out into blank space and touched the gum. An electric feeling swam through his body. Olivia’s thumb came down and wiped him off.

“I’ll bet you’re hungry,” Olivia said, “otherwise you wouldn’t look this shaky. That’s another reason for the gum, obviously. You’ll need sugar.”

Alan didn’t respond, and felt himself becoming more pathetic by the second. Olivia continued.

“I might as well tell you this: Sadie was going to eat you. But then she took a fright. I’ll bet you know this already.”

Alan nodded. He’d heard everything, or most of it. His lips formed a word. “Moth—my mother.”

“Right. We won’t say anything more about it, will we?” Alan shook his head, and ran his fingers through his slimy hair. Off to the side, Olivia's toes waited, and once again he saw the patch of her foot-sweat shrinking and fading from the heel of her old flat. “Good,” she said, and smacked her right palm across her thigh, and then extended her hand toward him. He thought for a moment she might choose to pick him up out of her flat, give him a moment’s relief from this horrible, overpowering, leathery odor, but instead she carried it with her, the left underneath her fourth and fifth fingers.

“Well, we have lots to do today, and time’s running out. Sneakers, you said, right?” Olivia stopped, knelt down, and abruptly overturned her right sneaker. One of her hands met him in the darkness, and roughly screwed him into the piece of coffee, toast, and cinnamon flavored gum. The fingers pushed him down to the toe-stained far end of the shoe, smelling of all the hikes and runs and tests Olivia had taken over the years, and there he waited, his immobilized, tiny two-inch body, his eyes and mouth and nose inflamed and alive with that penetrating, sweetly sickening, narcotic stink, less leathery and more cheesy than her flats. He waited, and the seconds ticked with a terrible slowness, so that he could no longer remember if he was waiting with dread or feverish anticipation. Finally her foot came, first the yellowed, callused bottom of her big toe, and then the ball of her foot, and then her high, pale arch, before everything blacked out with the heel. There was slightly more room for him in this shoe, and above him, although he made contact with the underside of her big toe, which chafed grimily now and then against his face, her second toe was suspended a few inches above his torso and legs, and he had some room to wiggle side to side.

Somehow, in some secret corner of his brain, he had been expecting this to happen all along. He realized also that for the moment he was favored above some of the others, like David and Neil for example. How long this would last he didn’t know.

 All this occurred to him in retrospect. If truth be told, for the moment he could think of nothing but food, the sugar imbedded in this girl’s saliva, which pooled against his back through her gum, and which he sucked from the side of his mouth greedily. And the complexly filthy compound that came from her feet, through her pores, and the build-up underneath her toes. Underneath Olivia’s foot, Alan had no shame. After an hour licking underneath her toes, he felt his strength beginning to revive.

Now he knew he’d be there for a long time. What he would look like in seven days, in a year, he didn’t know. It was all happening so quickly--but life is like that. Either Alan follows the current, floats along wherever Olivia’s steps are taking him, either he rediscovers himself as her foot slave, or he dies.

[Who knows, Alan says to me, if she didn’t lead me to you, Charlotte?]