Holly was reading in an armchair, on the first floor, when the doorbell rang. She uncrossed her legs, set her glasses down beside the lamp, leaned over, and drew her slippers on to her feet. Before she had pulled me under her toes and sole, and made herself comfortable, I half wondered who could be at the door. This was the first house call in memory.

She knotted her bathrobe and shuffled across the room to the front door. There she paused, and in that moment of silence before the latch went, I noticed that the smell of her foot was unusually strong that evening. She should have washed it after the field trip. As I held my breath, the pressure of her foot pushed my head forward between her first and second toe. I started coughing, and then, in a long gasp, heavily inhaled the sourness inside her slipper.  I never really got accustomed to these things, these perks and quirks of staying around as Holly’s tiny slave. In this case, she was just sliding forward to open the door and, for a short moment, had put all her weight onto her right side.

“Trick or Treat!” The voices of two kids, between the ages of maybe 13 and 15, came in from the outside. Holly said something, shuffled again, and closed the door. Then she crossed the room to the armchair, undid her robe, drew off her slippers, sat down, recrossed her legs, put on her glasses, and started reading again. I stayed by the toe of her slipper, now slightly moist, and began to drowse. By the mouth of the slipper, the familiar sight of Holly’s toes, the soft, woolen material of the shoe, and the lulling sound of someone flipping from page to page of a book, put me to sleep.

Then, I was awake again. The high-pitched doorbell was shrilling over and over again, and someone was jiggling the doorknob, trying to get in. Before I could comprehend the situation, Holly’s smelly foot covered me, and she moved, more carefully this time, toward the door. My heart was pounding at my chest, and I didn’t know if I or she was sweating. But after 15 seconds or so, it became very hot and uncomfortable inside her slipper. I wanted out. Why was she waiting? What was going through her mind?

Finally the door opened. There was some shouting, back and forth, and a momentary scuffle. Then silence. The door closed, and instead of turning back to her chair, Holly climbed the stairs to her room, and knocked on Adela’s door.

She cracked the door open, said something, and Adela made some reply. Seconds later, she took off her slippers beside the bed. Shaking me out into her left hand, she raised me up to her face, and told me to get ready for dinner. 

“Ms. Holly, what happened?”
“What happened?”
“I mean, what happened just now, downstairs, by the door? I heard the bell ring.”
“Ah.” She looked at me closely. “Some kids."
“Kids?" I sounded skeptical. "But I heard voices—the bell was loud—someone was banging on the door—and then it sounded like there was a fight—and then there was nothing.”
“No. Trick-or-treaters, Martin. Just trick-or-treaters.”

I didn’t pursue it. And later that evening, when we were sitting at (or underneath) the table, eating dinner, my thoughts turned to Meredith, and the incident at the front door was pushed back to the borders of my consciousness. It was something of a mystery—those weren’t trick-or-treaters banging on the door and blaring the doorbell, and there was certainly some kind of physical contact between Holly and these people—but it was a mystery whose answer would have to wait.

Holly cracked her toes and played with me under the table while she ate and talked to Adela. A couple times, toward the end of the meal, she dropped scraps of rice and meat for me to pick up. And then dinner was over, and we went back upstairs. Holly went to bed, and I returned to her boot. The house was dark and silent for a while. Above the slow drone of the crickets, after midnight, I woke up to what I thought were voices and the sounds of some physical struggle going on not far from where I was sleeping. But soon these died down, and I fell back asleep.

It was a strange night altogether, but soon the sun and Ms. Holly, both, rose in time, and I began to hear again the usual sounds of the morning. When she had rolled me out of the boot and set me on the dresser, I happened to turn around and see myself in the mirror. I was shocked at what I saw: a white, shriveled, naked, hairless little man, with black shadows around the eyes, their raw, red, oversensitive orbs blinking like a mole into the morning light. Who was he? I was beginning to resemble—at the thought I staggered backwards—her husband.

Holly scooped me up in her hand from behind, and was about to slide me down the leg of her boot to the sole, when I turned around and hugged her thumb tightly with my body. She stopped, and looked me over for a second.
“What’s the matter?”
I cleared my throat. “Not today, please. Just not today.”
She smiled a little, flattened out her palm, and blew her hair out of my face. “I see.  Is anything wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just tired after last night.”
“Then you won’t go in the boot today, Martin.” She rubbed me a little with her finger. “But I think you chose the wrong day to be sick. I have one errand to run, and then we’re stopping at the library. No more.”
“I’m just tired.”
“You’ll have to make it up to me.”
“I know.”
“Okay.” She dropped me on the bed, and then walked over to the hamper for the pair of socks she wore the other day. After putting one on the right foot, I watched as she tilted her husband out of the other boot, and I watched as he plunged down the mouth of the second sock. Casually, she pulled up this sock, and drew on her tall leather boots. Then she turned back to me, and I immediately grew to 12 inches. There was an old but clean white knee-high sock in her dresser. She took it out, found a pair of knitting scissors, and cut out holes for my arms and head. She handed it to me, I pulled the ragged little thing on (what else could I do?), and she stood up, hands on hips, & looked down at me. 
“Try to clean the house while I’m gone,” she said. “I have a job for you tonight.”
I nodded. She left.

And so I was alone in the house with Adela and her slaves for the morning. Plus, there were the two great mysteries of what had happened at the front door the previous evening, and whose voices I heard on my teacher’s bedroom floor during the night. I decided to conduct a quick search of the room, and opened all the drawers, looked under the bed, in the closets, in the chests, and in the bathroom. I found no one. So I went on with my chores: I dusted and swept the room, ordered her clothes and shoes, made the bed, sanitized the bathroom (removing all the hair clogging the shower drain, and scrubbing the stains off the walls), and opened the windows. It was much nicer.

Then I left, passing quietly by Adela’s room—she was still sleeping—and descended the stairs. I was hungry, and wanted to see what there was to eat in the kitchen. I had to be quick, because although I wasn’t breaking any stated rules, it was against house protocol for a slave to find food for him-/herself. And there were, at that time, perhaps six or seven more slaves—besides Meredith and the doomed men living in Adela’s room—in the house. But at the time I didn’t know where they were. I was curious, and of course I wanted to find them. It wouldn’t be long.

Passing the armchair where Holly had sat, reading, about twelve hours before, I heard squeaks coming from one of the end table drawers. The reader can guess the rest. I ran to the end table and pressed my ear against the side. I opened the drawer by its brass knob, and pulled it out with all the strength an emaciated, one-foot tall man wearing rags can muster. It joggled out, and tumbled onto the ground, my back and head breaking its fall. After a moment of silence, I peered inside the box. There were two, tiny kids, a boy and a girl, dressed like puppets. Each may have been about two inches tall, because—from my perspective—they seemed about a foot tall. I didn’t know what to say, or ask, so for a moment we just sat there, staring at each other (they blinking unhappily into the slatted light from the blinds, the corners of their eyes red from crying). All at once I realized (or, as they say in movies, “it hit me”): these must be the “trick-or-treaters” who knocked on Holly’s door last night.

Then suddenly, from across the room, I heard a key twisting into a lock. The front door creaked, and opened. Daylight poured in.