Editor’s Note:

It was in 20—, one year after Holly shrank my father, two years before she shrank Martin, that the idea first occurred to me of keeping a tiny male slave. As a sophomore in high school, I used to daydream, doodle and, during classes and my free time at home, I sometimes took down little notes on this fantasy of mine. Eventually the odd and fragmentary ideas in my scattered notes began to group themselves together into a sort of narrative. In a sense, I wrote a story much like the one above, which I asked Martin to dictate to me for what Holly calls "posterity." Most of what I wanted to happen to me actually happened to me. 

One day during the summer I had left that story out on my desk, at home, and Holly had opened and read through it while looking for a blouse in my room. A few days later she approached me about the journal. To my surprise, she began to talk seriously about the thing, about my fantasies—as though they were ideas she would consider actually putting into practice. Coolly, she pointed out what she liked and what she disliked, and backed up her choices with arguments for and against. I agreed with her that it might be lucrative—but, until the September she brought Martin home, did not know or even suspect that the moneymaking came second for her, behind the sale, and perhaps the social status she'd gain after it all ended. 

The rest is history. The next week she had attracted her first clients. Richard was among them. (As a side note, I might add that I've heard from Richard’s wife, ten months after he was found in the theater and taken in by the police, that she and he are living happily together again--the necessary changes of height, marriage-role, etc., being made.) I was surprised to discover that there were men, countless men, who wanted for themselves what I wanted from them. Maybe, in the beginning, it was about my father, Mark. I wanted a world where that didn’t happen to him, but where men and women could act out their own fantasies, play their parts, and still live a good life together.  

Almost one year ago, I remember suggesting to Martin that he should consider writing a memoir. The idea didn’t seem to interest him, at the time, but I was very persistent, and after some time Holly herself (in an email) joined the chorus. I gently nagged him about it, day after day, and eventually he just sort of gave in and agreed to put this down for, as they say, future generations. And it wasn’t a moment too soon because, in the last month, Martin, at the age of only 25, has changed from what he was. He’s now decided that it’s just too hard for him to communicate to me through words. I do what I can, and I bring him out into the fresh air whenever he gets cabin fever (the intervals between those relapses are getting longer and longer, and soon, I’m afraid, he’ll refuse to leave at all). Martin will need to rest for the next two weeks, but the story can’t wait that long. Holly—who sent me and Martin a stack of other narratives dictated by her slaves, and other women’s slaves, as models to follow— has asked me to send her his account as soon as possible: so this will have to do for now. One has to learn how to be gentle with them, and  that takes years. Believe me: men can be immensely entertaining as pets, and a major pleasure to own, but every girl, every woman, has to learn how to take care of them as they deserve.

So, back to the story: what did he miss? He missed eight years of living together in relative peace. If I could put things as well as he could, I would write out our first five years together, sitting at the computer, while Martin himself squirms and wriggles around inside my fuzzy slippers. It is a delicious feeling (sometimes deliciously distracting), but just having him there may not, by itself, be enough to stimulate me to undertake, from  start to finish, some huge project like that. 

We met no one at the border crossing, and drove one hour north of the border to the nearest major city, whose lights were just beginning to blink back on in the morning sunlight. There Meredith and I rented a room, for a week, and passed the time well enough, except for the fact that she began to talk glumly about going back to the country. A week passed, and then we heard a rap at the door. I asked for the name. Ms. Jennifer Green, said the voice, for Ms. Chloe Winters. I opened the door, and she talked briefly to Meredith, who seemed eager to get out of our cramped quarters and follow this lady back south. Where is Ms. Winters? I asked. Outside, she answered, while opening a window and letting in the wintry mid-November air. Would you like her to come inside? I said no. She then asked me about Martin, and after a few seconds of silence, and a round of dodging, I admitted that he too was there (at that moment he was in one of my purple socks, hanging off a chair), but I refused to hand  him over. She mentioned the penalty, but after a personal exchange (there was the driver of the vehicle, the one slave of the remaining three that I decided to keep from home, and five thousand dollars unused) Ms. Green (incorruptible as she probably was, on her better days), left the room without him. I saw her on only several occasions, during the next 7 or 8 years, while she was with Chloe Winters. But that's all I really know. Holly is more interested in the personal narrative and memoir side of this than I am. So for anyone interested in this stuff, find her, because if you want to get Meredith's personal story, it's got to be stowed away somewhere with Holly's things.
 
As for Holly, I haven't seen her since the night it happened, and frankly I have no desire, wish, or need to see or talk with her again (this is for my own files, and not for Holly’s). If we do meet, it wouldn't be at my request; and, so far, she's given no sign that she wants to reconcile with me again. I’m sure that she’s doing fine enough, that her own people, and her husband (it hurts me still to say “Dad”) support her well enough, do what she needs, and I don’t know what she could possibly want from me or Martin. But through a letter I do know that, in that box we took from home, there were about ten people that the Departments of Health and Welfare didn’t donate to widows and orphans. And these she took into her house, freely. But all that Martin has written about her I can bear witness to, and back up. 

Martin. I haven’t fed him in two days (but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t eaten). Now I can feel him stirring and starting to wake up, under the blankets, as I write this editor’s note by the window, and reach out my legs for my shoes. Outdoors, the sky is blue and the grass is green, and I can hear two girls riding past on their bicycles this spring morning. They’re saying something in French, but I can just catch the last two words: "marvelous day." I look up at the cloudless sky, the way the sun’s coming up in the east, and my whole heart agrees with them.