Two minutes later.

The door closed, and Holly got on the phone with the school. Her voice came from the next room.

“I’ll be in after lunch,” she said. “The aide knows what we’re doing. If she has any questions, have her talk to Kelly… Right… Okay… Yes, she’ll be able to explain everything to her. Thank you very much… Good-bye.”

Back through the kitchen doorway she came, her boots clacking on the tiles, her eyes preoccupied with some other matter. She sat down heavily at the table, with her chin propped up in her right hand, and looked at her husband without appearing to see him. Gradually her eyes cleared; she seemed to notice him for the first time. Stroking his back with her pinky finger a few times, very slowly, she gazed down at him affectionately. He let her do this – but wondered what she was thinking, what she was scheming behind those calm, blue eyes.

“Let me take that sock away from you, my little guy,” she said. “I’ll be gone for the morning on a business call. Think you can behave yourself while I’m out?” He heard the old teasing note in her voice, a kind of mockery – but her mind was elsewhere. He nodded.

Holly took off her boots and socks, and then stood up beside the table in her bare feet. She reached over him toward the table’s centerpiece, a fruit basket loaded up with apples, bananas, pears, and tangerines, and picked out one of the bananas, four- or five-days old, its black spots just beginning to spread out over the ripened, deep yellow husk.

A loud boom and crash landed on both sides of him, and the force of the impact thrust him three inches back over the tabletop, knocking him onto his backside. His wife had slammed her two elbows down on either side of him. High up, she was coolly peeling the banana for him, and a big smile spread across her face. When she’d finished, she made up a plate for him, diced the banana into a few dozen wafer-thin pieces, and pecked his face with a brief kiss – she had to restrain herself from giving him another long tongue-bath (but all the same, even the lightest of her kisses made him tremble). 

She carried him upstairs on the little banana plate, and set him down on her desk. She picked out another pair of boots – a sleek pair of black leather knee-highs, new and unworn – pulled them on, arranged her hair, and closed the door (blowing him another little kiss as she latched it behind her). A few minutes later, he heard her quick, hard footsteps descending the stairs, he listened as the front-door opened, as shoes scraped on the front walk, and then as the car started in their driveway. Then there was silence, complete and utter silence.



For a few moments that silence reigned in the house, and Holly’s husband, famished and exhausted, after staying awake all night (and dreaming all morning), ate as much of the banana as he could physically swallow, or force down his throat. When he was full, he sat back and considered a few things. There was enough food on that little plate to tide him over for a week – and who could say when he would eat again. Should he hide it? Could he trust her to feed him again?

And he was about to grab another little slice, when he heard a deep groan down below – under the table. The heater kicked on in the house, scratching, crackling, and purring through the radiator. He waited, and then heard it again: it was a man’s voice, murmuring something incoherently, over and over again.

Before she left, he remembered suddenly, Holly left her shoes by the chair. He ran over to the edge of the desk, and peered into the shadows under the chair. Silence again – all he could hear was the heater’s high-pitched whine and, more distantly, the sound of a car coasting down their residential street. The shadows of leaves gathered in the room, green and reddening. Everything familiar had become strange and uncanny to him, in the last day – or could it have been two days? or a week?

“Who is it?” he called out. No one spoke. “Answer me.”

From Holly’s brown leather ankle boot, resting on the chair, her sock stuffed in its mouth – its partner was tilted over onto its side, casually chucked and abandoned under the table – he heard some scuffling sounds, like a mouse behind the walls. That was enough. The radiator across the room let out a high-pitched teapot screech, and he looked around for a string or some object by which he could rappel down to the chair, and drop himself inside the shoe. He could jump inside, perhaps (he eyed the abyss between the chair and the table dubiously) – but then he had to pull himself or climb out of the shoe again.

He remembered Holly’s other sock – and turned around.  As he approached it, the odor made its way to his nostrils – it was awful. He remembered that Holly took her shoes off in the car after a week-long camping trip, and this smell was like that: just the rank, multilayered, overpowering smell her feet could have sometimes – except at a dozen times the intensity. Until he married her, he didn’t know women’s feet could smell like that. The crusty, soiled threads around the soles, where most of her weight had been applied, were all rotten and unusable. Holding his breath, he poked his head through one of the toe-holes, and peered inside. There was a warm, quiet glow in there, illuminating all the dark prints and contours of the insole, all the grime and accumulated matter of a week’s time or more. But there was something strange about her toe prints. He crept inside, still holding his breath, and then gasped: the foul air invaded his nose, mouth, and lungs, and a wave of dizziness washed over him. He almost passed out. Where her toes rested, there was the unmistakable outline – like the chalked victim circle at a crime scene – of a tiny human body. He clambered through the toe-hole as quickly as he could, and then decided on his course of action. Steeled in heart, mind, and soul against his giantess wife, he would escape – or at least determine whether escape was a possibility.

After pulling out some stray threads at the mouth of the sock, he found a rubber band elsewhere on the desk; tying them together tightly, he crossed back to the edge of the desk, and tied the sock-string to one of the knobs at the front of the desk.



Ten minutes later, he stood at the tongue of Holly’s shoe, her shoelace in hand. He called down, and waited. Seconds passed, and he called again.

“Who’s there?” a voice responded, weakly.

He thought for a moment, unsure how to reply. “Who are you?”

He heard movement behind him, around the toe-section of the shoe. He waited, and then roped one end of the shoelace through one of the aluminum eyelets, brought it around in a firm knot, and spelunked between the inner wall of the heel and her sock, landing at the top of the incline, just above the arch. He cupped his hands over his eyes, and squinted into the semi-darkness of his wife’s shoes. At least a hundred times he’d seen her wear these shoes – it was one of her favorite pairs – and once again the heady smell of her feet reached his nose, a harsher aroma than her that of her sock, and cheesier, though in its special way just as mind-numbingly powerful.

Up through the darkness, like a messenger from the dead, a man’s figure approached him, on his hands and tottering knees. Holly’s husband backed up a few steps, involuntarily, and waited. He might have expected a grizzled, withered old man to appear, naked and bearded, pale, with glazed eyes and maimed in the arms and legs. Instead, to his surprise, a young man showed himself, strikingly handsome and still well-built, though his stomach was beginning to sink in, and his ribs poked out of his chest. His hair was caked with some coarse and gummy matter, his lips were chapped, and his eyes were sunken in.

“Welcome,” he said, and smiled bleakly. There was only the shadow left of what used to be a sly, sardonic grin (perhaps, thought the husband, he used to think himself quite charming). “Welcome to my home.”

He wasn’t sure how to answer. The desperate face between Holly’s toes was still burned into his consciousness.

“I suppose I should introduce myself,” the young man said. “I’m David.”

The man holding the shoelace had a vague memory, from last June or July, of this young man’s face. “Did my wife teach you in English?” he heard himself say.

“Your wife?”

“Did a woman named… did someone named Holly – teach you English? I think I recognize you.”

David’s mouth twitched at the corners. “Yes. Who are you?”

“Her husband – did you come to the house last summer?” He rang the doorbell, and came inside for a chat one day after Holly had come inside after gardening. He himself had taken his suit and driven the car to the town pool, for a swim. By the time he returned, two hours later, she was alone.

“Yes.”

“And why are you here?”

David hesitated, and ran his hand through his grungy hair, rank with Holly’s sweat and grime. The glazed look returned to his eyes. “Four years ago, she was my teacher. I graduated college last June, and came home to speak with her, to see her again.”

Her husband held the shoelace more tightly, and stared into the thick darkness over the other man’s shoulder. He waited.

“I said I loved her. But that was all!” He coughed a few times, as though he had fabric or other matter stuck in his throat. Or perhaps he was holding in tears. “And then she brought me upstairs. I’m sorry –“

The light glimmered above. A cloud passed in the sky, outside the window.

“—I was in her bed, with her, and then I was here. Or somewhere else. She’s never said anything to me, she’s never spoken to me…” A few sobs started to rise in his throat, and Holly’s husband decided it was time for him to leave, to get out of there forever, away from her and all of this, whatever this was. Why the sudden need to escape? he questioned himself, wordlessly. Is this jealousy, or terror, or a mixture of the two – or maybe something else? All he knew was that he needed to strike back somehow. She had to know he knew everything – he wanted to hurt her with this knowledge, somehow. (Because he wanted to be her slave alone? Because he wanted to be free?)

“Come with me,” he barked, to keep that confusion of fear, love, and anger caged up inside. “We need to find a way out of here.”

But David didn’t seem too keen to escape. “Are you insane?” he blurted out. “She’ll catch you. And then she’ll kill me.”

He was busy tying the shoelace around his waist, readying himself to scale the sheer leather wall of the boot.

“She’ll kill someone if you leave,” he finally cried out. “I’ve seen it happen before –“

“What?” He was listening now.

“Because I tried to escape. She was wearing flip-flops one day in the summer, and had cut out a little hollow for me in the insole – she always does this with sandals – and for a few minutes, while she was using the treadmill at the gym, I tried to escape, but got myself caught in the zipper of her gym bag. She found me by the time she returned. When we were back in the house, she took a man out of the closet – some useless, unpurchasable worm who’s lived with her for four or five years, and stomped on him – annihilated him until nothing was left – right in front of me.” Was she capable of this?

“So we both go,” her husband said. “You have a choice, my friend.” Was there still some anger, some latent jealousy that fired him up like this? “Either stay here, and die, or come with me, and live.”

David wavered, indecisively. “You’re crazy!” the older man shouted, and began to pull himself back into the light. The young man watched him, stupidly. It was only when he’d reached the tongue of the shoe once again, and unhitched himself, that he heard the feeble voice call to him from below, this time from the heel (the boy must have clambered higher up to get a better view).

“Wait!” the voice called up. “Wait! Throw down the rope!” And he threw it down, watching its dim shadow fall against the balled-up sock, bounce off, and slip in between the gap. A few moments later, he felt a weight, and a tug, at the other end. He pulled.