There were two Adelas, and there were two Hollies. I don’t mean that Adela was two people with respect to herself. In that sense she was entirely sane. I mean that, with respect to a shrunken man, Adela’s body was not just a single human body: it was a separate universe, and dizzyingly, overwhelmingly complex. If you were her slave, you adapted to her laws or you perished: she crushed you or ate you, without remorse. To be Holly’s slave had its separate challenges and, occasionally, rewards (for instance, remember two chapters ago, after Holly told me about Tuesday and City Hall).
To a man like Richard—living in a habitat like Adela’s shoe for weeks on end—it first became difficult, and then impossible, to remember that Adela was only a single person, and not a separate world unto herself. I suppose it’s partly to my credit that my self-awareness was never beaten down and fully bent to Adela’s or Holly’s whims. But then again, I was never underfoot long enough to forget that there were events, days, and months passing outside Holly’s shoe, and that Holly’s sole was only her sole—not all of her, and certainly not the world itself. Her husband was not so fortunate.
But I did my best to please them both, though I doubt that Holly cared much whether or not she broke my good judgment and senses of scale, place, and self in the process. Because that was the fate of most of Holly’s (and, of course, Adela’s) slaves: they succumbed to the illusion, to the power of the illusion, that a part of Holly’s or Adela’s body was the end-all and be-all of the universe. And once they held this belief, they never escaped or disavowed it. In fact, a man like Holly’s husband, or Adela’s Richard, actually became afraid whenever they left the insole of the shoe. That breath of fresh air alone was enough to shake their fragile worldviews. Those were utterly broken men, who were deluded enough to feel safe and content with their lives.
Meredith would suffer the same fate, if she wasn’t careful. I wanted to recall her to herself, after we returned to Holly’s room. Those passions of hers had to be controlled, or they would end up controlling her, and leading her down a path of no return.
At dinner, Holly attracted Adela’s interest by setting me on the table, next to her plate. After doling out her own portion, and handing the bowl of rice and chicken to her mother, Adela asked why I was there.
“Martin, why are you here?” Holly smiled, and seemed to ask herself.
“You put me here.”
“Yes, yes, I did. I forgot, didn’t I? Well, while you’re here, you might as well eat something.” She flicked me lightly from behind, and I fell facedown into the steaming, white rice on her plate. The scent and the taste were delicious. Holly laughed a little, and then glanced across the table at her daughter.
“Adela, did you want to use the slave tomorrow?”
Adela was alert, and looked up quickly. “Did Martin tell you that?”
“I’m asking you.”
Adela looked at me with some suspicion, and doubt, but there was also a wolfish, hungry glint in her eyes that meant—I knew this by experience—that she needed me. And that was how Adela came to have me the following day, the first Sunday in November.
After I had eaten my fill, Holly dropped me down inside her slipper beside Meredith. But before I left the table, I thought I saw—but couldn’t be sure—something very small wriggling around on Adela’s plate. The movement came in a flash, out of the corner of my eye, but that was enough to remind me of Joel, the pasta meal, and Adela’s long, satisfied belch. Yet the girl was right that many men willingly offered themselves to her, to be devoured. If that was a man on her plate—and I have good reason to think it was—perhaps he was a “willing sacrifice.” It was unusual for the girl to spice her dinner plate with shrunken men on an average day, unless that man truly wanted to be eaten. Either way, the sight was enough to make my skin creep. This was the Adela no man her size would ever see. I didn’t see it until I was four inches tall and lying under her that fresh and cold autumn day, on a park bench.
Meredith didn’t greet me when Holly took her foot outside her slipper. She seemed to be asleep, her eyes closed, her body still and straight-backed as a corpse, and her breathing measured and slow. I crawled over to her and gently nudged her in the ribs. “Meredith,” I said. She opened her eyes and looked at me. Then her expression altered, became scared.
“What happened?” she said. “Where is she?”
“Where is who?” I asked, genuinely confused. Holly’s foot odor was oppressive here. (Privately, I prayed that she would toss these old bacteria traps in the wash, at least once a year.)
But Meredith began to panic. She stood up and ran toward the mouth of the slipper. And there she saw Holly’s right foot wiggling a few yards off to the side, raised and bent straight up on the top of her toes. She was chatting with Adela, probably.
“No!” Meredith called out, and ran hard toward Holly’s foot. She tried to embrace and kiss it, and it seemed as though she were trying to bury herself in the soft flesh of Holly's foot. Holly felt her worship and jerked her ankle back, as though she’d felt some nasty insect crawling on her. When she saw it was only Meredith, she glowered down at her.
“What the hell are you doing?” Her voice rose; she bared her teeth. Meredith seemed to wake up and snap out of her stupor, or spell, or whatever it was.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Get back in my slipper.” Holly ordered. “And never bother me again while I’m eating.”
“I’m sorry,” Meredith said, slinking away. “I’m sorry, Holly.”
“I said get back,” she snarled. With a vicious, malign edge to her voice, she added, “Slave.”
When Meredith crossed back to the slipper, her eyes were welling up with tears. I wanted to comfort her and say, “That was cruel of her. She should have been kinder.” After all, Meredith had been with us for only thirty hours, and in that short time her life had been turned on its head, shattered and reassembled. She was a slave now, but the stupefying reality of her new life hadn’t had time to sink in. She was tossed back and forth between two existences. She was transitioning from one world to another, and it was hard for her to realize which world she lived in, and which was lost to her forever. On occasion even I had trouble grasping this new life of mine, and I had been Holly’s slave for one month.
“She doesn’t love me.” Meredith whimpered, lying down, and burying her face in one of Holly’s toe-prints.
“Why do you think that?” I asked, wondering why it should even matter to the woman if Holly didn’t love her—and how she could suddenly be so enamored with my teacher. This was a very dangerous sign.
“I’ve never been so humiliated in my life,” she wailed.
“She's done that with me,” I lied. I had never dared to do what Meredith just did, so Holly’s reaction was without precedent. “But keep your voice down, Meredith,” I cautioned her. “She’ll hear you.”
Holly definitely heard something, because at that moment she filled up the slip-on with her bare foot, and pushed us back and back underneath her dirty toes. I looked through a little gap in the seam, to the light outside. We were moving again. Holly was probably clearing the table and washing the dishes.
Suddenly the faucet turned off, and I heard some low moaning off to my right. It was Meredith, caught in the wide gap between Holly’s first and second toes, licking her lips, and bucking her hips up and down in ecstasy. “Meredith,” I hissed. The woman was wild. She didn’t hear me. If this was to be her fate, if she wanted to become that kind of slave, then she had begun rather too quickly. I knew from experience that Holly couldn’t care less about what kind of slaves she created: she appreciated good conversation, but demanded devotion. Meredith was, evidently, more than ready to give the second, in spades, but her special, intense kind of devotion would cost her dearly. She was on the path to utter, absolute foot slavery, and I was probably the only being alive who wanted to, or could, help her and teach moderation. She hadn’t seen the wreck Holly had made of her husband, yet—but if the sight of my own wasted flesh wasn’t enough to dampen her desire, maybe that would. I hoped.
I called her again, two minutes later, when she had calmed down. She heard me that time, and twisted her neck toward me. “You shouldn’t do that,” I said.
She gave me an ugly look, and refused to answer me for the rest of the evening. Fine, I thought. Go to hell.
But when Holly dropped me back into her leather boot, I hoped against hope that she would be kind and spare Meredith that night, and keep her in the dresser, or the closet, to recover from the day. It wasn’t to be. Meredith was unlucky, and Holly wore an old sock that night, and kept the poor woman pressed against her soles.
The last sound I heard that night was a shriek. When daylight came, one of the four men was missing from the empty bottle of milk. The day was Adela's.