I was on probation. This, after having been sentenced and punished—so I was led to believe—for giving Adela attention, and for feeling and showing mild interest in her, one night during the summer when she and I were seventeen together. I vaguely remember, these days, what we did that night. We ate somewhere and then walked somewhere else. We went home early. I hadn’t overstepped any boundaries, flouted normal protocol, or tried to cut between Adela and her mother. On a whim, we spent two or three hours together, and then separated. No offense committed, and a bland, friendly parting of ways before midnight.

But now that I knew the girl’s home-life, and how she spent her days away from school, Holly’s explanation began to make sense to me. I sat at the edge of a chessboard beside the window in Holly’s bedroom, at five o’clock that same afternoon. Holly had just stolen my first knight. I stood beside the wooden horseman, and listened to her talk. She was the judge, in afterhours—and I was nothing, the defendant long after the trial had concluded.

“For five years now, we’ve worked under very strict terms. As Adela is so far incapable of shrinking men or women I haven’t already tampered with, and since she can’t easily alter her own size, I’ve given her that task. She’s young, and in some ways still quite immature—you might have a harsher opinion of her, after what you’ve seen this afternoon. But maybe you didn’t realize, Martin, that she was cruel on my instructions.” Holly knocked over my second bishop with her queen, nabbed it up, and set it down beside me.

“I do the larger and more difficult work—finding the people, shrinking them, and breaking them down—and she the easier, final work. She finishes.”
“Why?”
“Why do I do it?”
“No, why me?”
“Ah. Now we’ve got to the central question, eh? Why you, Martin? When you come to that, you might wonder.” She knocked over my second knight with her own, and snatched it up between her long fingers. “Has anyone ever explained the game of chess to you? You’re probably the lousiest player I’ve ever seen.”
“I don’t play often. Besides, it’s difficult to see the pieces when I’m this size.”
“Then let’s make you a little more cosy. A two-foot handicap? Yes.” She looked me over, closely, almost lovingly, and I grew nineteen or twenty inches in a moment. The game went on, and for a minute Holly was silent. After taking my rook, she winked, “Well, it’s not because of your chess-playing, Martin. I’m sorry. You’re still very bad.”
I began to understand. “This isn’t about Adela.” I moved my king.
She glanced at me for a moment, and then bent back over the game. “No, Martin, it’s not.” She moved. “But if you’re not careful, it will be. Checkmate.”

I felt a new spirit of exasperation welling up out of my heart’s core:  for the first time, I keenly felt the indignity, the unfairness of this woman, a woman I had come to trust during the course of our year together in school. But alongside this anger another feeling crept into me, almost without my being aware of it: pity. Pity for Ms. Holly who, despite what she did to me and probably would do to me, seemed somehow more lonely and isolated than before. To choose the most extreme example of her cruelty: Why did she shrink her husband? Answer: To keep him with her, at a time when he had wagged his threats through the air, like a flag, and swore that he would leave.

“Martin, I picked you because you are a good kid. Not because of Adela, and not because I disliked you. You’re exactly the kind of generous, healthy-minded person who learns to adjust to a destiny you never wanted for yourself. One by one, your childhood dreams will began to fade away, and you’ll drop them by the wayside, unrealized. You’re the boy who makes compromises with his life. Well, life has led you to me, Martin! What will you do?”
“But I don't know!” 
“I know. And this is the second reason you’re here: I need you.” She reached out her hand, and seductively stroked the hair on the back of my neck with her fingernails. “I said to you this morning, and I’ll say to you a second time, Martin. Be honest with yourself: this compromise is not difficult to make. I’m a woman who will make something out of herself, and very soon. You know this, and you’ve seen it with your own eyes." She waited for me, and then urged, more strongly than before -- "You must pick your side, Martin.”
 But I didn’t know what to say. There was no time to think while self-doubt and temptation began to do their work. “What if I don’t choose?”
“Then you don’t choose: you can take your luck with Adela, or with the world. But you have your warning, Martin: five years from now, the world will not be as it is today. I’m generous with you because, in your own foolish and---quiet---way, I like you. In any case, I need someone, and if you aren’t that someone, another will be. I treat my slaves well, when they obey. There have been certain men I’ve freed.” 

Whose voice spoke, when I answered for the last time? Was it mine, or hers? I said. “Then I’ll be your slave. I choose you.”
“Good. I’m happy, for your sake, that you said it.” She shrank me to four inches again, and then lifted me across the chessboard—gnats flying in the coppery sun of late afternoon, outside the window—to her bosom. “I’m afraid that I made a little bluff—which you certainly spotted—about the choices available to you. I would not have been able to release you again into the world, knowing what you know now about me and Adela. I know what my girl has done today, and in a general way I know what you saw and heard and felt. Let there be no doubt in your mind: that would have been you, one month from now, if you had chosen otherwise. But I’m happy that you chose me. I do need you—and not just for all the dirty and menial jobs—no, I’ll need you when all of this comes to a close, in the coming months. You and a few others. We’ll see which. You don’t understand any of this, yet, but you will.”
“I don’t know what I said. I’m terrified.”
“Well, who do you think I am, then?”
"Ms. Holly," I said.
"Who do you think I am?" she repeated, in a lower voice. 
“I don’t know..." I searched for comparisons. "Lakshmi... Kali," I confessed, dreamily, "wife of Shiva.”
She laughed from the heart when she heard that. “To be honest with you, Martin, that was quite a surprise. Out of character!" She laughed again. 
"If only you gave sharp answers like that in class, I'd have taken to you much, much sooner. But I’m not mocking you! No, I don't think you fully realize what you said. Not yet. But you’re close. You’re very close.” Holly petted my head a few times, took me into her hand, and stood up. We walked over to the bed, as the last rays of daylight pierced through the window onto the floor of her room. I noticed her tall, leather riding boots sitting by the door (her husband imprisoned, as an insole, in the left boot), and looked down at her bare feet. The forebodings of the morning came back to me. 

We sat down at her bedside.
“You must be hungry,” she said.
I didn’t reply.
“We’ll get you something to eat.”
“Famished,” I said.
“I know. I have to teach you a few things, first. Not teach: but train, prod, nudge in the right direction. Come here.” Holly set me down between her legs, right before her gorgeous, imposing flower.
“Let’s see what you can do.”
I stared and stared at the sight before me. Where should I begin? 
As if she read my thoughts, “Lick, to start.”
Tentatively, I approached her, and started to lick her dark outer lips.
“No, no. Higher, Martin.”
I licked higher, and after ten minutes of licking, punctuated now and again by an order or a word from Holly, she began to warm and swell, and a thick, rich, whitish juice began to seep out of her pussy. Her fingers wrapped around me, and her legs widened, and I realized she was about to insert me. She drove me all the way in like a dagger in her hand, deep, deep between her walls, and began to moan. I was immediately soaked in her love-juice; the violent, steady contractions of her inner walls began to overcome me. I was afraid of a bone-break: of my leg, or a rib, or clavicle snapping in five different pieces -- but nothing of the kind happened. Three minutes later, she was finished, and raised me up out of her tunnel, soaked to the bone in her gooey discharge. “Not bad,” she said, “for the first time."

“Let’s give you a little bath,” she purred, and dunked me between her lips. As she sucked on me, her tongue explored my lower body, and I felt myself spring to life. (One would think that serving, more or less, as the dildo to an 80 foot tall giantess would be in the slightest way erotic. But it wasn’t, at least for the first time. That first time, I was the laborer, and her womanhood the infernal machine it was my duty to master, for life or death.) Thirty seconds hadn’t elapsed before I had finished, and she plucked me out of her mouth and dropped me, utterly spent, exhausted, and dazed, onto her bedsheets.

Fifteen minutes passed, and she washed me in the sink, with soap. While she showered, I sat on her bed, waiting, half-asleep, and hungry. Night had fallen, and through the window-screen I could hear the crickets, making their measured reckoning of the night. It was peaceful, and I thought, vaguely, of something that happened long ago, when I was a child, or when someone else was.

Holly emerged from the shower wrapped in a bathrobe and wearing an old pair of warm cotton slippers. She sat on the bed beside me, and then shook off the right slipper from her foot, and rested her ankle over her left knee, with the sole facing me. Holly had a wide sole with a high arch, like Adela, with toes that were somewhat square at the ends, from years of wearing boots and heels. There were small calluses at the pressure points, and here and there tiny knots in her muscles, that she was trying to rub and massage out with her fingers. I would soon come to know this foot very well.

From years of use, the sole of her slipper kept the darkened print of her foot. There was a faint, distinctive odor, similar but different and less intense than that of her boot, or her sneakers or flats. Though, for the next few months, I spent a few hours each evening in these slippers, it was a smell I never grew fully accustomed to (though not unpleasant).

That first night, when she shuffled out to the hallway, I heard her open a door, and ask Adela if she was hungry. “Yes, Mom." Twenty minutes later, we ate dinner.