Sunlight. The asphalt was dark with last night’s drizzle, and the smell of rain rose up from the turf near the field across from my house, where high school girls were just beginning soccer practice. A whistle shrilled a few times, and as we walked into the city down the long, loud, tree-lined street, we heard the coach calling out drills and yelling at the girls by name.

Alan wanted to avoid the crowds. Everywhere we walked we attracted the curious eyes of women and girls, wives and daughters, sports’ teams in the activity fields outside the school, and drifting groups of teenagers, jamming the sidewalks or standing in front of windows full of blouses, skirts, and sandals made-to-wear (plastic models of men displayed in the usual positions, heel-to-toe, lengthwise across the toes, or curled up under the arch), some chatting with the cashiers in the bookshops, and others  lounging about inside the diners and shops, slurping up sodas and lattes or scarfing down sandwiches. We stepped inside one of the coffee houses and found ourselves a table toward the back.

He was nervous. “Everyone’s watching us, Charlotte. Let’s go back.”

I looked at the table across from us, where two sleepy twenty-somethings in t-shirts, slacks and loafers sipped their coffees and munched their bagels. One of them might or might not have flashed a smile in Alan’s general direction. When I turned around to look at him, he nodded back at me, uneasily.

He leaned across the table, and whispered in my ear. “Naked. I feel naked here.”

I caught his hand in mine, and squeezed. “Nothing will happen to you. I promise.”

He folded the edge of his napkin a few times. “I’m here, Alan. It’s okay.” He returned the pressure, weakly. Our eyes met, and he gave a forced smile. We ordered.

Minutes later, as we were drinking our coffees in silence, I felt a sharp tug at the hem of my jeans, just above my left heel. I flinched by instinct, as though at a rat, and jerked my foot up to the wooden seat. Alan, without even looking, followed my example, but then quickly corrected himself and lowered his legs back down to the floor. “Charlotte, it’s okay.”

There was a sudden commotion from the table across from us, and I immediately felt ashamed. “Damn it! Where can he be?” one of the girls cried, close to tears, crawling around under the table, peering beneath the chairs and over the stained, dusty, crumb-covered floor tiles, her two moccasins balled up in her fists. I only half-wondered if this were a kind of act, or if she had really lost him, if men could escape from their owners so easily.

Why did they escape? As I looked down at the man, hiding in the shadow of my shoe’s inner arch – a man who looked so eager to escape and was just given such a rare and promising opportunity to run away, even before he was fully “broken in” (the term was used especially for human insoles, of which this slave seemed to be one). Unmodified – unspecialized, too – by the looks of him. A cheap, newly bought item. Probably imported. I reached down and took him up in my fist. I knew that Alan was staring at me, but sooner or later he had to accept the way things were. He had to know that much of what I did, much of my job, dealt with search and recovery. He had to just accept that.

The man was lost and I handed him back to his grateful owner, who, ignoring all his prayers and pleading, promptly stuffed him into the toe of her moccasin and cut off his weak cries with five very warm-looking, red-polished toes. I looked over Alan’s face, and wondered if my smile was as thin as his. We left soon after.

So we threaded our way back through the pale girls with uncut, dirty or streaky hair and tight pants, some carrying books and others phones, some guitars, some basketballs, and others nothing at all. Some of the girls we passed seemed to give Alan looks, some frightened or tense, nervous, surprised, curious, wolfish. There was a poetry reading across the street. I asked Alan if he wanted to go. A cloud passed over his face, and his eyes glazed over.

“Alan?”

“What?”

“The reading – do you want to go?”

He shook his head, stopped again, his body very still, and then pulled me forward by the hand, abruptly. “Home! We’re going home.”

I felt guilty. “I’m sorry, Alan. I –“

“Now. We have to start. Immediately.”

“Okay, okay. But wait a sec. You’re hurting me.” I had to jog, almost, to keep up with him. “That was a stupid idea, the poetry reading. I always knew…”

But he was about five feet ahead of me, and had turned the corner toward my apartment. I heard the door slam as I unlatched the gate, and when I opened the front door he was standing in front of the fireplace, scrutinizing an old photo of me and my husband. Years ago.

I was chuffing from the jog, my forehead and wrists just beginning to perspire. I felt out of shape, worn down all of a sudden. “Oh, that was years ago.” I came nearer to him, as though to examine the photo myself. “My husband.”

“Where were you?” he asked. I passed my eyes over the back of his neck, his shoulders, and then toward the curtain’s green sunlit shadow on the chair.

“Camping,” was all I said. I wanted to apologize, I thought. I’m sorry, but I should have apologized… I was going to apologize. Somehow I couldn’t form the words in my mind. Call up the casualness necessary to speak what I felt, say that I knew what he felt, and that our feelings were the same. I know what you’re going through, I wanted to say. But he wouldn’t believe me. I wouldn’t believe my own words – but I wanted to. I wanted to believe them more than anything. Wasn’t that something? Isn’t that enough?

I cleared my throat. “Say, fifteen minutes?” I asked. Alan turned around and smiled. “I have to shower.”

“That’s fine. I’ll wait for you,” he said.

Five minutes later, I heard him calling my name from the upstairs hallway. I didn’t answer, and counted the seconds as the shower water sprayed against my back and shoulders.

“Charlie!” He was nearer now, at the bathroom entrance. He knocked loudly against the door-frame.

“Alan? Alan, is everyth—“ But before I could finish my sentence, the shower curtain slipped back quickly, its metal rings jangling, and he’d pressed his naked body up against mine. Then I felt him dropping to his knees, his arms encircling my thighs, and then my ankles. I pulled him up by the arms, quickly, and rubbed my finger underneath his chin until he raised his eyes.

“Charlie…” I brought his head down to my breasts, hard, fingers interlocked in his hair. His heart beat rapidly against mine.

“What is it? What?” I whispered. The warm water still ran, quietly, over my shoulders. He gripped my arms like a drowning man.

“I just want everything to be normal again.”

“It is normal. This is normal.”

He looked up, and his back stiffened as he tried to right himself up again. His eyes, bewildered, met mine. “Yes, you’re right. You’re right. I’m sorry, I—“ He made a feeble attempt to pull away from me.

“No, it’s okay. Really.” I felt there was something forced, willed in this sudden weakness of his. As if he were half-uncertain I would play along. I felt the same sort of fear rising up in me, fear that he would run away suddenly, that he would walk out the door before I’d even finished dressing to come back downstairs. As if this were the point we had to cross together, before we could continue, go on wherever we had to go. I wanted him to know that I wanted him to be happy, would do anything for that to happen. And I wanted him not to be afraid that his happiness would mean my own unhappiness. That we could be happy together.

“But this isn’t normal,” he said. “Not anymore. Not for me. I need to – I need – “

When we came downstairs, fifteen minutes later, both of us were ready to begin.

When Alan finally opened his eyes, red with pressure and damp with foot-sweat and tears, it wasn’t Sadie who greeted him with a painful flick of the knuckle and a smile – it was Olivia. Scattered around the cold, uncarpeted room were the chewed ends of pencils, the stumps of erasers, worn-out pens, books, open and closed and torn and scribbled upon, and papers, papers everywhere, in piles and stray sheets, unwritten and written upon, unruled and loose leaf, printed and in manuscript. Shoes and socks, underwear and dresses, jeans and t-shirts took up the rest of the space. In the corners were giant dust-balls and a few hidden cords, probably connected to a computer somewhere. 

But directly in front of him were Olivia’s feet, bare, with black toenail polish, sweaty, and gigantic. She wiggled her toes a few times, and then cupped them together sideways along the blades of her feet. A dark, heady, sweetish smell wafted across the floor to Alan’s nostrils. He stepped back, instinctively, and rubbed his eyes.

“Welcome back to the living!” Olivia chirped, from high above. She sat down on the floor with a resounding thump, and circled her legs around the little man, until her feet met behind him. In front of him, he stared, fearfully, at the floral print of her skirt, only partially covering her pussy. She seemed unconcerned.

Alan, still rubbing his eyes, and breathing deeply, close (he feared) to hyperventilation, somehow couldn’t remember her name. But she reminded him.

“Olivia. I thought Sadie might have told you about me!” She paused, and then said, “I might as well tell you outright. When she took you out after fifteen minutes, she was worried because you’d passed out. So she came to me. She asked me what was the matter. I – I’m sorry, were you going to say something, sl—Alan?”

Alan looked as though he might have been about to say something. But Olivia went on.

“No, if you're wondering. That's not a good thing. She asked me what the matter was. I told her. And so here you are, until tomorrow or until further notice.”

“Fu-further notice?”

“Indefinitely. Let’s say indefinitely, or until Sadie wants you back. Or until you want you want to go back, but usually it’s the other way around.” She smirked.

Alan stood up, shakily, and looked with bleary eyes around the cold, quiet room. Rain beat gently against the closed windows. Outside it was dark and a single streetlight illuminated the opposite side of the room. Distantly, he heard other sounds, coming from the closet. A soft mouselike shuffling, a crackling of papers.

“I write, Alan. Poetry. I put together poetry nights here on campus. College poet laureate. Unofficially! I don’t think highly of myself.” Olivia tucked her feet in closer to him, by a few inches, slowly. He had nowhere to run but toward her. She went on talking. “Do you know that this one guy used to smell rotten apples, to get himself in a creative mood? Another drank coffee – by the fucking gallon. Do you know what I do?”

Alan turned around sharply toward her feet, and then looked up in fear and despair at her smiling face.

“Guess. I like it when you guess.”

“Guess?…”

“Well, let’s say I change people. I’ll put it like this: I teach you how to be a foot slave, and in return you get to live under my foot.” She smiled broadly. “Questions?”

“What? What is this? I’m a tutor, I’m…Sadie…Sadie’s…”

Olivia clamped her soles against his tiny sides before he could yell out another word in protest. A thick, leathery incense rose up from where his head was encased between her toes, and he breathed it in deeply, in a wild panic. His head swam, and he felt his eyes rolling back in his head.

“Just breathe, slave. Breathe in deeply.” She sucked in air through her nostrils, and exhaled slowly.

“Slave?” But he imitated her, automatically. Slave?

“For the next twenty-four hours, you belong to me, slave. Understand?”

Alan breathed in deeply against the foul space between her toes, and opened his mouth to let out air. When he swallowed again, he felt  a spoonful of her sweaty, filmy grime slipping down his throat. He gagged slightly, but didn’t throw up.

“Now, it helps me concentrate when my slaves are helpful. The better you are, the better I can write, and the sooner you’ll get out of here. Keep breathing. Okay? Nod if you understand.”

There was a pause in the air, and he felt her toes relax their pressure for a moment. His mind was clouded. He couldn’t remember… couldn’t remember anything. He nodded.

“Good, then.” She pulled her feet away from him, and he crumpled to the floor, in a panting heap. Painfully, still in a daze, he watched as the ground flew away from him at liftoff speed, and felt the blood rush to his head in a wild whirl. Olivia’s calm, warm voice reached him from a vast distance, over mountains and plains, over endless continents. It was another time, a different place. He thought back, vaguely, to the morning, to the year before, ten years, twenty…

“Now we can begin.”