“I’m 17 and starting 11th grade. I’ve had some girlfriends and I can’t decide whether I’m a jock, nerd, geek, or dweeb. I think the second, though I’ve played some sports. I’m somewhat unpopular…”
My English teacher raised her hand, and for an instant I was afraid she would swat me. But she opened her mouth, instead, with eyes smiling, “Don’t start your story like that. Here’s my tip for you: All children and young boys begin stories like that—I’m popular, I’m unpopular, or I’m neither, & I’m a jock or a nerd or I’m neither—and imagine they’re telling the reader something valuable. It’s not valuable to me, and it tells me nothing, because none of those categories exists in any important sense for me, or for anyone I respect. Go on, and start from the beginning, wherever you think that is. But don’t tell me what status you think you had among a group of idiot teenagers. (Why does every child seem to begin a story this way?) But I have half an hour. Go on.”
I felt her warm, slightly acrid morning breath pass over me as she talked. I stopped for a moment, and then thought of her husband, or that being she had enslaved several years before. Every day, during class, that man must have been in her shoes, slowly dying, being crushed to pieces, and we, the students, for nine long months, never perceived, at any moment, that anything in her behavior was unusual or amiss. Will, one day, I become like that? Would she torture me, and break me, and do to me what she did to her own husband? Before I could start again, I needed to know this. My knee-joints buckled, and I sank on my knees into the fragrant, cushiony surface at the edge of her pillow, and begged for my life.
When I opened my eyes again, it was through tears that I saw Ms. Holly. But something was different: she was my height or--by my reckoning--only several inches taller than I. She was relaxed and reclined as before, cozily, propping her upper body with her hands and crossing her legs at the ankles.
“Perhaps you’d be more comfortable talking to me at this size,” she said, amiably. “Go on, I said.” She winked at me and, with her finger, pointed toward the pillow, and bid me to sit down and continue. “But don’t come near me. That’s a warning.”
I cleared my eyes of tears, stood up, and went on. “I wasn’t born in this area of the state,” I said. “I moved here when I was 13, four years ago. Before then I attended a private, Catholic school, where the children were required to wear uniforms, go to daily services in the school chapel, pray before and after classes, right, you know.”
“What does your father do?”
“He was a mechanic.”
“Your mother?”
“A secretary in the local real estate office. We were middle-class, or lower middle-class, I suppose.”
“Do you have any siblings?”
“An older sister, but she died two years before I was born, a few hours after birth.”
“Well, keep going. How did you like high school here?”
“High school? I don’t know. Does anyone like school?”
“Some. Didn’t you like my class?”
“Your class? Yes, I think I did. I thought you liked me. I read everything…”
“You were okay, Martin. Not great, but good enough. Sure, you got an A, but that’s not everything.” She uncrossed her ankles, and curled in her legs ‘Indian style.’ “I give the scholars—the great students—and the others—the ‘good enough’ students—A’s. But I wouldn’t have recommended you for a good university or college. I’ll be honest with you. Not because I don’t like you: I loved having you in my class, and you were an ‘A’ student. But I’ll be frank with you: grades may mean something to you, but they mean nothing to me. If you were a teacher, you would know soon enough that there are degrees of excellence independent of grades. I might recommend a ‘B’ student to his or her school of choice over an ‘A’ student if they demonstrate, in my view, extraordinary potential or imaginative ability beyond the range of the ‘A’ student. You didn’t strike me as one who possessed that potential.” She paused for breath.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“You’ll see. Close your eyes.” My eyes were immediately closed, it seemed, by a power that was not my own.
“Open them.” I opened them, and again my teacher was the size of a small mountain, spread out along the whole of the bed, with her head resting against the pillow. She pushed herself up on her elbows, lazily, and then plucked me up between her fingers.
Her words didn’t have time to penetrate far within me before I imagined, or remembered dimly (as of an event that happened long before my birth and read in a book, or heard from the lips of some long-dead ancestor), that one night in this suburban town the shadow of a hundred-foot tall woman suddenly appeared and disappeared in a backyard. The moon was blotted out for ten seconds, during which only the silhouette of a giant woman was visible—and then this vanished forever, and the moon returned. I had seen, a month later, when passing Adela’s backyard, between two trees, a fifteen-foot long depression in the grass of the lawn, in the shape of a giant footprint. There are clouds that look like elephants and eagles, and this too didn’t trouble me much at the time, if it ever happened. But I thought of it then, when looking at the beautiful, impossibly huge face of Ms. Holly, of my English teacher.
“Martin,” she cooed. “Why you? Why a good kid? Isn’t that what you want to know? Why do bad things happen to good people? Well, why is this a bad thing? Look at yourself!” But instead I looked up at her. “I can enlarge and reduce the proportions of any living organism, including myself. This is a talent, and it’s taken me years of honing and practice. Adela has inherited the gift, to a degree. But she does not have, and probably never will have, the self-command and mastery I’ve attained. Only I will be able to restore you to your former size—although I don’t believe there will ever any good reason for me to do this.
“I could give you to Adela, but she owns five men presently, and has owned countless others. She has never treated her pets well (though, because she had spoken well of you to me in the past, and hinted once or twice to me that she was keen on getting you as a mini-pet or some slave, I think she would handle you more gently than others). But I think I want to keep you for myself, Martin—at least for a little while.
“For one, I do need a cushion for my right sole, and it’s been months since I’ve walked right (the last one I hired for that rôle was something of a disappointment, and scrunched rather too quickly for my taste). Two, I need someone to clean this place during the day, while I’m gone, and my husband (as you saw) is entirely useless these days. For those household tasks I can enlarge you to about 12 inches, which should be sufficient—for the harder, monthly chores, maybe twenty-four inches would be more comfortable.
“Martin, you would have wasted your life in an office or a school. You might have been a minor government functionary, or a C-grade engineer. We have thousands of those, and any man can take a life like that; any man can replace you. But with me, you might be able to make something really useful of yourself. You have a chance to make yourself truly irreplaceable, Martin. I’m a busy woman, and need all the help I can find, these days.” She looked away, smiling, and with the shy air of one about to broach a delicate topic. “There are advantages to being my pet, also,” and she lowered me down to her unclad pussy, and pushed me gently forward into its folds.
“No!” I cried out. But the scent was intoxicating and overpowering, and she held me there, pressed against her lips, for what seemed like a full minute. Then she lifted me back to her face. “Adela, I think, is still somewhat too young for such games, or doesn’t understand the point of them. I know what she does with her pets, in any case, and I know she doesn’t…do...this…” I was in heaven, briefly.
“But it’s time to get ready for work, Martin. Today is your first day, so I’ll be easy on you. I do want you to get used to the kind of work you’ll be doing for, most likely, the rest of your life, so you’ll have to grow accustomed to me, get used to the way I am, think, work, smell, look, feel, etc. It’s 7 AM now. I’ll leave you in my purse until noon, and then give you some food, and we’ll have a short chat. Find out how it’s working. Then, during the afternoon, I may give you some minor tasks, to help me find out what you’re good at, where your aptitudes are, and where we need to work a little harder.”
I listened to all of this, and remembered all of it, but my rational mind still failed to rationalize it, and for the time I just accepted that all of this was “the case,” and that everything before it was no longer the case. It would be a long time, weeks even, before any of this began to make sense to me, as it does today. I was slipped into one of her well-worn, fragrant nylon stockings—the same one which imprisoned me in her leather riding boot which, I remember, she always wore to school (sometimes, during the spring, she brought in flats, heels, or flip-flops, and during field trips she wore a battered pair of old sneakers, but during the fall and the winter it seemed she wore the boots almost every day). She then dropped me in the purse, and I breathed in the leathery, cheesy scent of the fabric, lint, and small flakes of skin fallen from her foot, for the rest of the morning. I was hungry, and all I thought about was my raging, all-consuming hunger and thirst. But it had to wait. I waited and waited for noon.