Early 21st century. Springtime.

Early one afternoon, on the east coast of some country, at a small liberal arts college, in an old, venerable, and ruinous stone building, on the top story, three floors up, in an English class of about fifteen people, there was a young woman who seated herself, just after class started, at the back of the room. Directly across the circle of seats there was a young man listening carefully to the professor, and studiously scratching keywords and key phrases in his notebook. The first time she caught his eye, he looked away quickly, indifferently. Two days later, in the same class, she caught his eye again, and this time he looked away deliberately, irritably.

But the third day she met him after class, and they started talking.

He began to lend her some of his books, and she sent them back, dogeared and scribbled in the margins and splotched all over with red and black ink – she knew what she liked and disliked. She was far from squeamish, and far from reluctant in giving her views and opinions on books, films, and people. Their tastes didn’t always match – his opinions on most subjects, and in many ways, were far less orderly, regular, and final than hers – but the two stayed together. They liked each other. They got along. And soon enough they had started to live together.

There were certain irregularities in their relationship that the young man wouldn't understand until years later. The young woman’s needs – sexual needs, above all – were extraordinary. Always there was the slightest hint, at times, that he was smaller. That his efforts themselves were too small to satisfy her, were unnecessary, because her own abilities were so huge and generous she could easily perform for the two of them. 

At certain times, he shrank from her body. He would make various excuses, and then go to sleep. But then, in his nightmares, he would dream of her body growing to impossible lengths, dwarfing and engulfing his own. Sometimes his kicking or sleep-talking woke her up, and they would talk for a while, in the dark. They would make love in a normal way, and he’d remember that he loved her. And this love was strong. Always, it overcame whatever misgivings or insecurities – what else could they be? – that he felt.

Christmas Eve, one year later.

Through the screen of whiteness, one young couple could be seen trudging back to their snow-covered car. The young man dug around inside for an ice scraper, while the girl stood nearby, shuffling her boots around and rubbing her arms to keep warm.

She reached out her gloved hand, and wiped some of the snowflakes from his long eyelashes. And then she must have whispered something, because she leaned in closely, balancing herself on one boot, her cheek almost touching his own. Looking up at the dark, frozen sky and holding his winter cap with his free hand, he paused. She backed away from the car a few paces and watched him. Her lips moved, but whatever she said was muffled and then lost in the soft, unbroken sounds of the snowfall.

A few moments later, they pulled a double set of crosscountry skis out of the trunk, a pair custom-made for the two of them, and abandoned the car for another day. After only a few moments, they were little more than two shapeless black smears on a clear white canvas. After a minute, the snow had swallowed up their voices and their laughter. And after five minutes, even their tracks were wiped out.

Summer, two years later.

In a green woodland cabin, upstate, she and the young man, now married, spent a full week hiking, fishing, swimming, talking, drinking, and barbecuing fish beside a clear freshwater lake. Early in the morning, before sunrise, on the fifth night, when the water was as still as glass and as cool, they closed the screen-doors behind them and, tiptoeing down to the lake, (stark naked and smiling,) leapt into the water together with a loud splash.

Two miles away, a few deer perked up their ears, listening. All the fish scattered, and hid themselves in their holes, or their nesting grounds. The sleepy songbirds hovered for a moment, startled from their perches, and then settled down again. They dove down into the water, and the lakewater abolished all trace of them, like snow. Twenty feet away, they surfaced again, and came closer to the lakeshore, under a shady, overhanging tree.

As they lay together on the grassy bank, before dawn, the man experienced those old feelings of smallness and inadequacy for the last time. But this time, it was like his dreams. For one hour, he convinced himself that he was hallucinating – his pleasure was so intensely felt, and maybe hers also (no thanks to him), that he simply didn’t have the mental resources or stamina to understand, describe, and evaluate what was happening to him.

Her breasts were definitely larger, her tongue dominated his, and only with an extreme effort of strength and will was he able to hold on to her ass-cheeks, and stay under her. She was slipping from him, or he was slipping too deeply into her. But then it was all over, and she slept, murmuring something, sweet nothings, contentedly to herself; and as she slept, he lay gasping on the green bank beside her – shaken, annihilated, ashamed.

In an hour, everything returned to normal, and the rest of the week passed as it did, without strange incident. Ten months later, the young woman had a daughter.

Two years later.

Holly came home from her new teaching job, at school, and her husband met her at the door. He told her that he was now out of work. He was fired. His old boss had dismissed him that afternoon, on a week’s notice, and the weekly checks would stop coming after four months.

One month passed, and then two months, four months, and a year without change. Two years passed, and he was still out of work. As the days and years continued to slip by, despair began to set in. The flower garden in the backyard became overgrown. Weeds choked the marigolds and lamb’s ears, and each of the smaller plants. Vermin infested the roses and hydrangeas. Rabbits and chipmunks, robins and sparrows feasted on the lettuce and flower blossoms. The bees disappeared, and the grass in places dried up and died.

During the day, while his wife was at work, he walked from room to room, aimlessly turning on the television, purposelessly opening a book, and uselessly going to sleep. Holly changed her stance toward him. Little by little, she became ashamed of her husband. Their relationship turned from dysfunctional to hostile to unsustainable. Fights were frequent.

Then, finally, there was one day. She had come home from school to find her husband, fast asleep in her own bed, fully dressed, with her laptop near his head. Liquor was spilled on the floor, and some of her clothes were stained. In a rage, feeling angrier than she’d ever remembered, Holly shook him roughly with her hands, and lightly kicked him in the back with her shoe. He groaned, and sat up in bed, blearily trying to focus his eyes and mind on the woman in front of him. It was a pitiful sight. Then he spoke.

"Get away! Get away from me! Don't come near me!"

"Honey?"

“I’m leaving…,” he said, completely hammered, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “I’m leaving—You.”

“You’re drunk.”

“No.” His eyes were beginning to focus, and he reached over and handed her the computer. “I mean it.”

“What is this? What am I looking at?”

“What is this?” he repeated, with emphasis. “You tell me. Tiny people? Shrunken…? Murdered...and crushed? And you get off on this stuff? You tell me what's going on.”

“You’ve been snooping through my emails.”

“No.”

“I don’t have to answer that.”

“Then I’m leaving.”

“Oh, yeah? Just like that?”

“Just like…that!” he slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, anyway. You’re being unreasonable. This is unreasonable. Where would you go?”

“I don’t know! It doesn’t matter!”

“Look at yourself! You’ve got a nerve. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and look at you! Wasted. You sorry little man. Drunk as a pissant, with nowhere to go – accusing me of God only knows what. You should be ashamed.”

He pointed at the screen. “That—whatever that—is,“ he said, thrusting his finger toward it three times. “I saw everything. I saw the photos, the stories. I don’t know you.”

Holly was silent for a moment, and stared hard into the hollow of his back as he tripped on the threshold. “You don’t know me. You’re right. But I thought we could have worked this out between us, somehow. I loved you, once, in a way.”

“But…”

“Yes, but…”

“I can’t even look at your face anymore.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Goodbye, Holly.”

“Goodbye.”

As her husband stumbled wearily and soggily out of the room, feeling along the wall for a handhold, turning the corner into his own room, Holly followed him, several steps behind.

He packed his bags noisily, throwing clothes and accessories pell-mell into a few suitcases. Holly watched him silently from the door, until he was ready.

“You’ll be back later tonight,” she told him.

He shook his head, but was too groggy to muster a response. He stopped for a moment, thinking. “Why won’t you defend yourself?” he asked.

“What’s to defend?”

“The photos.”

“Were they real, you mean?”

“They were changed...doctored... Why did you make them?”

“If I understand what you’re asking me – and it’s difficult, because you’re drunk – then no, they weren’t altered in any way. Yes, this is very real. I’m being honest with you.”

"You're a liar. And you disgust me,” he sniffed, and went on working.

“I’m beginning to feel much the same way about you,” said Holly, the bile rising in her throat.

She let him finish, and waited downstairs for him at the open door. He passed her without speaking; and as he passed, she whispered in his ear, “You’ll be back by tomorrow night at the latest.”

“Not a chance,” he responded.

“Just wait.”

Early the next morning, the police brought her husband to her door. He was arrested in the next town for vagrancy, and faced a court appearance early the next month. Holly thanked them, and when they were gone, led her husband gently by the hand upstairs to his room, where he fell asleep immediately.

Two weeks later, after he paid his fine, he disappeared again. Except, this time, no one brought him back.

Holly's Dream.

She dreamed that class was almost over. Through the slatted window-light, she stared hard into the small of the boy’s back, two seats up in the row to her right. He was one of the note-takers, she felt. He’d be an easy catch, a good one, maybe a perfect one. Obedience was in his blood.

She fidgeted with her pen, excitedly, and when the bell rang slipped her flats back on and set off at a brisk pace down the hall, until she passed him. Then her textbook fell with a dull, definite thud onto the floor. Immediately, before any time was wasted, she swung around and looked directly into his face, an embarrassed grin spreading across her features, and lighting up her eyes. “Ugghhmmmphh!” she said, her eyes still trained on the boy’s. He took her cue, hurried to her side, and helped her pick them up. 

“Thank you!” she said.

“It’s nothing.”

She decided to take a random shot. “You’re really cute, you know.”

Astonishingly enough, it worked. “Yes, and so are you.”

After a week of dating, she brought him up to her room, and there he learned some incriminating information about her. She decided that he would never leave again.

The scene shifted abruptly. They were in Rome, Italy, on some study abroad trip, and she had just checked into her hotel room for the evening. Kicking off her beat-up sneakers and prying off her sporty ankle socks, she clamped her smelly toes around her little ex-boyfriend, and dropped him down onto the thick, fleecy comforter. Flecks of sock lint and sweaty matter coated his nude, exhausted body as he lay spread-out, still in a kind of hallucinatory daze, at her feet. She wiggled her toes a bit, stretching them, and a few more white and black particles descended over his body like a flurry of snow, and slush. The pungent smell, and the different sounds of the room and the Roman street, wafting in through the open window, finally woke him up.

For the last year, their afternoon routine had been set in stone: she’d take off her shoes, he’d clean her feet, file her nails and repaint them when needed, giving her a pedicure or manicure (his four-inch size made this convenient both for her and him), and then, his chores complete, they’d relax for the rest of the evening until dinner, depending on how she felt.

But this time she noticed that he wasn’t worshiping her. Like a disobedient child trying to get his way, he was puffing out his cheeks, holding the oxygen in his lungs, and seemed determined not to breathe in that charmed and odorous air. Well, he wouldn’t get his way this time. She thrust her toes out quickly, anticipating his reaction, and pinned him down under her sole. She would have to treat him like a child again, and train him every step of the way. She reached into her pockets and picked out an old candy wrapper she’d licked and scoured clean after lunch. There were still a few crumbs toward the bottom, and she picked and fingered these bits and pieces carefully, gathered them together into her palm, and presented them to him as a reward. The trick worked: it might have been roast turkey on a silver platter (instead of loose spitty crumbs on a girl’s palm), so hungry was he after a long  day. Every time he licked, she handed him a cookie crumb.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked.

“I have to punish you when you’re bad. You know that, right?”

“Yes.” He didn’t know what more to say. He licked, and she dropped a little pinch of chocolate and cookie into his open mouth. This amused her, and she made no effort to disguise what she felt. Seeing her amusement, her happy face, he felt used, violated.

“What do you want from me?”

“To give in. Just give in.”

Holly woke up from the dream, and slipped out of bed.

Early Autumn.

Times were difficult. As Holly turned the key to the guest room, unbolted the door from the outside, and opened it with a soft, resonant creak, she had serious doubts about the future of their marriage. She and her husband had hit their first serious crisis, and it still wasn’t clear what the issue would be. They had always pulled through before, she thought to herself. But this time, one member of the team had to take the initiative, and she was the one to do it. She tried to look fifteen years ahead, into the future. And then she thought of her daughter in the next room, and her husband, fast asleep in the little shoebox under the guest-room bed. In her cotton morning slippers, she moved with soft, muffled footsteps across the hardwood floor of the guest-room, and knelt down beside the box. As the sun rolled up over the horizon, the shadows in the room began to glow with a muted, golden light. A sunny, determined thought crossed her mind: She would take control, and she would make this marriage work again. Having made that resolution, she pulled off the lid, and let the early morning sunlight break into his place of confinement. 

He looked up into the light, and in the blinding glare of the light made out a huge smile which, as his eyes adjusted, spread out and grew into the face of his wife, her eyes as wide as two swimming pools, like the ones they used to fill up with garden hoses and spread out in the summertime over the lawn in the backyard. To his left he heard some rustling, and looking over saw her right hand rearranging some of the soft nylons and socks she’d stuffed into the corners of the box; apparently she had put them there for his comfort – though he hadn’t asked for this, and she hadn’t given him time to question her, assuming, that is, that his knees could once have stopped shaking and that he could remember how to ask her a question. But her immense size, and something else about her, seemed to hypnotize and silence all his thoughts, his hopes and fears, and he could only stare up, paralyzed down to his marrow, and filled with a new and strange longing, into the stunning eyes of his young wife. 

Holly pushed herself up onto her knees, and sat down on the guest bed, dangling her slippered feet over the box, and plunging her husband back into the shadows. Pulling her right foot up onto her left knee, she stripped off her slipper and peeled off the white sock she’d worn the day and night before. Then she repeated the process with the left. With a loud, heavy thud, she gingerly leapt down beside the box again, and pulled out the pair of thick woolens she’d used to pad the shoebox for warmth. After replacing these with the freshly worn socks from her feet, she bent down and gently kissed her husband on the head. He tried to resist, but her red lips closed around him and sucked him up to the wet inside of her lips, which had a faint, natural smell from the night before (she hadn’t brushed her teeth yet). Then she let him go, and nudged him into the soft, smelly pile of her cotton socks, before shutting him again in darkness. “I’ll bring you breakfast before work,” she assured him. “I’ll be back. Don’t be lonely.”

When she left him, he listened to her glide back across the room, and he listened to the wooden boards squeak, more and more distantly, until the door closed, and she was gone. “Don’t be lonely,” she'd said. And it must be a weekday: he tried to process this information, tried to force it to make sense, to fit this morning somewhere among all the other mornings of his life – and he failed. It could be Monday, or maybe Wednesday. He had a vague memory of yesterday being Saturday or Friday or Sunday. It was just too much information to take in. For the first time in the twelve hours of his captivity, he was lonely. The loneliness loomed larger than the fear or the astonishment, the suppressed anger and the shame. He listened for a while in that darkness, rank with the smell of her freshly cast-off socks, and then couldn’t bear it any longer. Furtively – as though she would catch him doing it, and resent him forever for it – he found one of her socks and, after burying his face in it for a  few seconds, found the mouth and tunneled inside.



As for Holly, after checking on her husband, she opened the door of her closet, and a familiar sound greeted her ears: the soft whimpering and groaning of dozens of captive voices, rising up from the center of that warm darkness, into all the depths and secret places of the room. Because Holly stacked and organized her shoes in this room, there was also an odor here, faint but distinguishable, of worn leather mixed with the dull, scent of dried flowers, old shower spray and women’s perfume. Above and underneath all these smells, and combined in a strangely pleasant way with the potpourri of her pressed and folded business suits and the bracing air still rising off her winter coats and spring jackets, there was the sharp and musty odor of footwear long unwashed. She looked up.

Suspended from the ceiling were old nylons and socks, and on the floor, rolled up into balls or stuffed into the corners of the room, and the gaps and spaces between shoe-boxes and winter boots, were her filthy, cast-off lingerie and undergarments. There were fainter sounds, like moans, that seemed to come from crevices in the floor somewhere, from beneath her feet. For the newcomer, and there were always newcomers, these sounds weren’t so much terrifying as haunting, uncanny in the extreme.

But this time Holly walked in and out alone. She pulled a bath-towel off the door-hanger, and started her morning routine. After brushing her teeth, she walked back to the guest-room and, after feeling round for a few seconds inside the shoe-box, found and raised her occupied sock up to her face. So he was coming round already, she thought with pleasure and pride. He was learning quickly. Soon enough they would be a functional family again.

She shuffled across to her daughter’s room, poked her head inside, and listened to her breathing. The room was dark and peaceful. Then quietly she closed the door and continued on to the bathroom. Emptying her sock into the bathtub, she turned the water on.



The sun came out. There was a loud screech in the sky, followed by three quick bomblike detonations. He opened his eyes to a cataclysm – within moments, the water had pooled around his legs, and risen up around his nose. Gasping and coughing, he leapt up.

Then, as he blinked his eyes, the storm ended, and there was silence for a few moments. Then he heard a sound, high above, his wife’s serene voice. I’ll be a few seconds, it seemed to say. Wait for me and don’t move. He heard the words, and the sentence, but somehow together everything meant nothing. The syllables made words, which made a sentence, which meant anything and nothing. Who is it, he answered, in his thoughts, as though he were trying to lip-read a conversation across the room. Who are you?

There was another earsplitting blast, about two-hundred feet behind him. As his eyes adjusted to the light, a hard metallic glint pierced his eyes like the point of a spear. Water poured in through a sort of pipeline, which resembled some sort of effluent pump at the edge of a sewer system, a huge ventilation duct suddenly overflowing with water. Steaming water gushed out of the pipe with a roar, deafeningly loud.

Then there was another shriek in the sky, as though someone's skin had been torn back, flayed. Instead of crystal white, he saw blue, sheer blue – at first.

And then high up in the blueness a face looked down at him – the face of his wife. A thrill shot up through his tiny, shivering body as a white robe fell from her bright, dazzling shoulders like a cloud blown from the sun’s face, and she stepped inside. Strangely, her immense size didn’t dawn upon his mind until he looked across, and saw her eight-yard-long right foot, with five dark blue toenails, the flesh stained and streaked with residue from the leather boot she must have worn the day before.

“I thought I’d join you,” she said. Her other foot thumped in front of him, and he started to run back, away from her and away from the running water, which now rose up around his knees. But then, suddenly terrified and beside himself with a new and very strange kind of desire, he felt her warm and overpowering fingers reach around him, and raise him up.

Holly pulled the curtain back and, with a cosmic sigh, settled herself down into the steaming, sudsy water. When she unclenched her fist, he fell in a crumpled heap near her panty-line, still faintly visible from their trip to the beach a few weeks ago. As she stroked his hair, a few times, he noticed that her nail-polish had flaked off on her pinky and middle fingers. And, as she helped him stand up, she pressed his face directly into the underside of her thumbnail, and there he caught an odor, distinctly feminine, musky and unwashed. He tensed up below, against his will. And then, with that familiar smell invading his consciousness (she must have scratched herself recently, or at some time during the night), he had a moment of clarity. In those brief seconds, as Holly set him down beside her warm, soft stomach, he realized something.

Holly, who normally kept her bedroom, her walk-in closet, and her bathroom door locked, who changed her computer’s log-in password every week, and who used a private land-line in her room for “business- and school-related matters,” who generally kept up a strict silence in all matters touching on her personal and  business life outside the home, must have known, when she left her door open, and her computer out that day, that her husband would wander into her room at some hour during the afternoon, find her computer and, either through boredom, drunkenness, or idle curiosity, learn about everything. As she placed him on her belly, and smiled at him across the bathtub, he realized that she must have planned everything to happen this way. Perhaps she wanted it to be this way. Never, in all the years to come,  could he find the merest little sparkle of remorse or surprise, anywhere on her face, anywhere in her voice. To her, all this was meant to be. It was fated, between him and her, that eventually she would enslave him, and be his mistress. Her voice echoed hollowly across the vast distance that separated them, and then reached him.

“Stand up,” he heard her say.

He stood up, obediently. He flinched, and then cowered, when he saw her left hand rising again. But, as Holly only wanted to pat his head a few times, and stroke his back, he forced himself to calm down, and nervously looked off to his side, where something seemed to glint in the morning light.

Since Holly was in college she always wore a little golden ring in her belly-button. Often, when they lay together side-by-side after going for a run, or enjoying each other’s bodies, he’d watch her fall asleep. Her eyes would close first, and then she’d roll onto her side, cupping her feet behind her, and let her left hand slide down to her middle, where the ring was. And he remembered those days when he would curl up behind her, and feel her left hand on her belly, and her cold feet pressed into his thighs. He remembered also those days when she would curl up behind him, and he’d feel the cold metallic shock of the ring pressing into his back. Uncomfortable as this feeling was, at first, as the little ring warmed up against his skin, its touch, its constant presence there,  between the flesh of their two bodies, snugly held together – her two arms around him and his one arm resting behind him, on her thigh – made him sigh with pleasure.

He thought of this as Holly dropped him just beside that very ring, which awakened a thousand wonderful memories in his mind, a thousand beautiful  associations. He wanted to touch it, be near it, and half-unconsciously he took a step toward it – and slipped. On his knees, as he looked out over her immense body, warm and living, as the waves gently washed against her sides, he could make out all the contours and blemishes, the smallest moles and pores in her skin, nothing was without flaws, not even Holly. But so familiar to him was her body, and so clear and intense his memory – of her touch, her smells, her marks – that, for a moment, looking out on her endless, breathtakingly endless, stomach and chest, he started to feel blessed. And just as this feeling of being blessed started to make its way into his consciousness, and form itself into a thought, her hand came up out of the water and stroked his head a few times, knocking him over. She could do anything to him, and do it while smiling, as she was then. His vulnerability terrified and excited him. But, as in a dream, he could focus only on one feeling at a time, so that he seemed to be knocked back and forth from one mood to another. Everything was very confusing for him – and seemed to be very clear and simple for her. He wanted to ask her, “Holly, what is happening to me?”



Just then, as though to answer his thoughts, she kicked her right leg up out of the water, and rested her foot on the edge of the tub. The morning light was coming in through the window, shimmering off her leg, and droplets fell from her calf and foot back into the water. There was a smell in the air like a dense pine forest – he looked back and saw Holly rubbing some sort of lotion over her arms and neck.  She saw him seeing her, and nodded her chin toward her foot. Did she want him to climb her leg?

“Go on,” she encouraged him, smiling.

He climbed. And as he passed her knee, he saw the little scar where she’d scraped herself playing tag football with him, five summers ago. He noticed these marks, now, as though for the first time, with a shock of warmth and affection, mixed with awe. Her body was a map of their years together, of their love. His confusion seemed to grow, and expand until it touched on everything in his experience. In that second moment of recognition, he started to love and trust this woman again. But there was also the hint of something else, beneath this welter of love, and renewed affection: it was as if, in passing these small scars full of significance and history, he were saying farewell to them, and to her. If he was to be Holly's slave (he had the discernment to see that she was treating him differently, perhaps pushing him that way, perhaps toying with him, perhaps seriously trying to enslave him), then he was passing these scars, in some way, for the last time. He wasn't that person anymore. And, more importantly, she wasn't that woman. 

And then he reached her foot, which she rested on its side, casually. On his hands and knees, so as not to slip, he began to crawl along the side of her foot, from the inner arch to the big toe. On the yellowed pad of her sole, just under the toes, he noticed, looking down (and down, and down), another scar: seven years ago, the first year he met her, they had gone down to the beach by her mother’s house, and walked one evening a few miles through the waves. A shell, he remembered, had cut her sole pretty deeply, and he’d had to staunch the bleeding with his shirt. On their way back down the shore, to the house, he remembered how ridiculous it seemed – even she could step back and laugh at herself, limping home in the half-dark, with a little rag tied around her foot, his arms around her waist. So he picked her up and carried her the rest of the way. His mind snapped back to the confusing present.

“Back to my heel,” Holly ordered him, her fingers locked in her soapy hair. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself.” He crawled the other way toward her heel. She watched him carefully, protectively.

“Now stand up,” she said. He stood up, as commanded. “And dive.” He started, and then stopped short, terrified.

“On the count of three,” she went on, clearly enjoying herself. “Don’t be afraid.” He looked at her, like a frightened animal. “1… 2… 3…” He flinched. “Go!” His tried to push his naked body off her heel, but couldn’t do it. He collapsed in a heap, and buried his head near her ankle bone. “Do it!” she said, yelling at him in the angry voice she used for her unruly students.

“I can’t,” he whimpered. Only a muffled, squeaky little moan reached her ears, and then she began to tilt her foot, very slowly, so that he’d know what was happening. He panicked, and frantically looked for a handhold somewhere on her foot. There was nothing – the flesh around her heel was smooth, and also slick and damp with her bathwater. He could do nothing at all – slipped – and fell with a soft plunk into the water, far below.



What happened between the moment he surfaced between the toes of her left foot, as she pulled his bedraggled, doll-like little body out of the water, and breakfast, passed like a blur. At one moment, he remembered standing on her chin, and watching her slowly sink beneath the water, until he lost her, and started treading. Below, she pushed her body an inch down the tub, until her mouth was directly beneath his helpless little form. Then, her lips opened wide, and she surfaced, gulping him down. She sat up in the tub, cleaning her underarms, freshening up her hair, and shaving her legs, while savoring him for few minutes, salivating copiously, tossing him with her tongue from cheek to cheek, enjoying the touch of his little fists pounding on her lips, her gums, the warm, slippery walls of her mouth. But soon enough he calmed down, and then he was silent – and then she spat him out onto her palm.

Shortly after this, she drained the water a few inches, and rolled over onto her belly. During breakfast that morning, he had a vague memory of climbing up her body, from the bottoms of her feet, splotched around her inner arches and outer heels with stains from the black leather of her boots – difficult to remove and, as he came to learn, seemingly embedded into the flesh of her sole – to her calves, her butt (the word ‘tush’ no longer remotely described those warm, titanic ass-cheeks, strange, massive, endless, soft), her long back, the spine sunken between two low ridges, like an oceanic valley, and the bare neck, from which she pulled back her long, blond hair. He stopped there, as though before some sacred forest. And he waited.

The seconds passed in a blur again. He remembered that Holly stood up to her full height, and set him down at her feet. Then she gathered her thick hair together into a ponytail, twisted it into a cute and messy knot, and then bent down and brought him, her little slave, back up to her face. Biting her lip, she looked quizzically at him, and then brought him back to her ponytail-bun, uncoiled the knot, and re-twisted it, as tightly as she could, around his body. While he was trapped there, like her hairpiece or barrette, bound to her hair, and binding it himself, she brushed her teeth, put on makeup, and shuffled back to her room in her slippers and robe.

It was then, just when Holly’s husband was beginning to feel attached to her again with a strong, silent attachment, and to become reconciled to this dream-world which was hers and could be his, just when she unbound her hair, and let him fall down a few inches onto her soft unmade bed covers (still fragrant and sweet with her body’s smell, after a long-night’s sleep), that she surprised him again. After putting on a skirt and blouse, she unlocked her walk-in closet, and returned with a worn, stained, grimy pair of old socks, once white, but now yellowed by at least a week of sweat and wear. The fibers were loose around the toes and heels, and through one of the holes near her big toe, he saw a tiny arm stretching out, plaintively, in desperation.

Holly seemed not to notice. She pulled one sock on, and picked out a pair of brown, stylish ankle boots from under the bed, popped her socked foot into one of them with an audible whoosh, and then paused. She looked at her husband, and then stuck her left foot, still bare, into its boot. Ready for breakfast, she picked up her case, a few papers, and her purse. She then scooped up the man, and stomped loudly out of the room. It was only after a few seconds that a fact penetrated his astonished brain: that she was holding her other sock in the same hand – and that he was pressed up against the fabric. Something passed through him like a bolt of lightning, and left him paralyzed. It was only a few seconds after, when she set him down on the countertop, next to her awful sock (he didn't know women's feet could smell so terrible, much less his wife's), that he realized it was terror. He loved her again, and she terrified him. That was all he could process, when there was a soft rap at the door.

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.