Adela has asked me to write a few words about the second time I was under her feet—the first time I realized, with total clarity, that she had won her first victory. Well, her will is my command. I don’t want to spare or overlook the details of anything that might, eventually, prove to be important. 

The darkness, and the overpowering smell. All of Adela’s slaves have mentioned those two things. Some nothing else. (What more—really—can you say when you’ve become the insole to a girl’s shoe?)

That late afternoon, the cold and fresh autumn was everywhere—everywhere but inside Adela’s shoe. The strong, pungent, yet somehow girlish, stench arising from the entrance to her sneaker turned aside everything and everyone, except those willing slaves whose bodies she had formed into her insoles. Under her soft heel, again and again, Adela effortlessly crushed out their spirits and minds. In the right shoe, it was my turn to lie down as calmly as possible beneath those same long, very happy toes—and I stayed there for the next several minutes--minutes like hours.

Barren, ever-changing minutes, rubbed out and re-written like chalk powder. I coughed on a piece of Adela’s sock-lint, and simultaneously inhaled the thick, multi-layered, cheesy scent between her toes. Was there something I could tell her, was there anything I could do—anything at all—to prove to her that, though some men perhaps wanted to be slaves, I wasn’t one of them? That there was still some shred, some fragment of my mind left that refused to accept Adela’s ownership of me? I could think of nothing, and went on breathing, breathing, and breathing. Oxygen was short, and it wasn’t long before I started to feel slightly delirious.

I said I enjoyed being a slave. Now, for the first time, I wondered and feared that I really meant what I said. It had escaped my mouth so simply: Yes, of course I enjoy it. And because of that simple statement—which, I now realized, was slowly becoming true—Adela had convinced me to become her personal slave. Under her foot, I was beginning to change into that slave, the slave Adela wanted me to become, her willing, lovesick slave. The lover that she rolled in and out between her toes, during the day, living in her flats, her sneakers, and her strap-on heels. The pet under her feet who calmed her nerves during tests, and massaged her after a long run, or before sleep. Was that my dream future? Was that all I would be?

Maybe Adela wanted me to be that, or maybe she wanted both, or maybe she was only playing with me and wasn’t aware of her own tremendous power to change my life for better or worse. Even I wasn’t aware of it, until I was engulfed in her socks, surrounded on all sides by sweaty, unwashed—Adela. There was no other word for the scent, texture, and taste of her toes but her name. Adela.

Under the spell of Adela’s soft toes—as unyielding as she was herself—for the first time I began to feel very pathetic.  As she moved, maybe walking or driving a vehicle, she pressed the delicate imprint of her large toe down against my chest, and as this pressure was gradually released, I rolled back and forth on my side in the valley between the ball of her foot and her toes, where most of the grit and slime accumulated. (She did not know how merciless she was.) 

She squeezed me with her toes, and distantly, boomingly, her musical, satiny voice came down with a question, mixed with the powerful scent of her feet, and the soggy insole that her toes pressed into with loud smooching and smacking sounds every time she raised them—ever so slightly. “Can you kiss them for me, Martin?” Her disembodied voice carried down to me as though heard from a television in the next room, its volume jacked up all the way, though the sound yet vague and half-heard. 

Could I? Her footsweat welled up continuously from her warm skin and, following the spiral pattern underneath her big toe, dripped down and splashed over my face, into my eyes and mouth, and over my naked body. No, I couldn’t. Holly never made me do this. I tried to pull myself forward, out of my confinement in the grimy place between her first and second toe. 

We were still in the car, and maybe at a stoplight. “C’mon, Martin. It’s me.” I failed to pull out. Her weight kept me down, and sucked me back underneath her foot. Casually, rocking her shoe from side to side, she nuzzled my face back into its slot. Then she pressed forward—perhaps into the gas pedal.

I stopped asking myself if Adela was a person worthy to be worshiped or even loved. Suddenly I realized that I had loved her, and had never stopped loving her. Lightheaded, bruised, and drenched in whatever secretions dripped from her feet and mingled with the matter in her sock, I started to passionately kiss and lick between her toes. It no longer tasted awful to me: or if it still tasted awful, it tasted like her. Adela.  

And then it happened. The pressure was released. Adela removed her shoe, and tore off her sock. Dizzily, I looked down and saw wet leaves and deep green grass under a cloudy sky. My mind started to clear again in the fresh air and I hugged and clung to her second toe in terror.

She smiled and lowered her bare foot toward the lawn. “Martin, you can let go.”
“What?” I looked up at her and down at the grass.
“Let go of me.”
I let go, and fell down and rolled over onto the dewy carpet of the grass. Adela pulled her skirts behind her, and sat down on her purse, with her bare feet before her in the grass, left leg curled back and right extended, with the sole facing me. I tried to get my bearings, spun around, and saw the school the distance. Adela had only driven to the park across the street! We weren’t anywhere near the house.

The scent of the leaves mixed with that of her foot. She was smiling at me and glancing up at the sky every now and again, and there was a certain anxiousness in her looks. Her toes wiggled a bit, and her fingers fussed a little with the wet blades of grass, restlessly. 
“Martin,” she turned to me. “I really like you…”
This is where the phrase was supposed to be repeated, but this time from me to her. But she didn’t wait to hear me say it. Her fingers fiddled a bit with the buttons on her blouse, and she yanked the elastic scrunchie out of her hair. Before I even knew what was happening, or could protest, I was full size (or almost full size—she still seemed huge—I couldn’t tell) and Adela had straddled over me, and was warming herself up. God it was quick.

Soon enough she was ready, and carefully touched down, encircling me. She was the captain of this boat, but where was she moving me, where was she sailing me off to? I would soon know.

She swiveled, and the outstretched soles of her feet, damp with dew, sought out my face.
“No!”
They found it. And as Adela grinded me, I inhaled deeper and deeper. (I was wrong. She knew exactly how merciless she was.)
“Let me hear you breathe,” she said. “C’mon, Martin.”
“Oh,” I said, completely muffled. Escape was impossible.
She was beginning to pant. “Don’t back out on me.”
“Wait.”
“I don’t care,” she said, with a hint of bitterness I hadn’t heard in her voice since the first day, one month ago. “You don’t like to do anything. This is what I want.” She stopped to breathe. “If we didn’t do what I wanted, we wouldn’t do anything at all.”
I was inhaling, gasping for air, trying to fight my way through her toes to the sky. “It can’t happen,” I thought. “It’s going to happen.” And then it happened.

My face was covered with tiny particles of leaves and grass that had stuck to her feet. She had rubbed off the autumn onto my face, along with the sweat from her soles. This was how she wanted it, and she got it from me for the first time. She pulled herself out and then sat on my chest for a while, looking around. A few flies buzzed around my face, and she considerately swatted them away. Her skirts tickled my sides, and my initial, confused feelings about what had just happened began to fade away. Something began to feel okay.

“That felt right,” she told me.
“It did?” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Completely.” She smiled, and I pulled my legs up. She leant back on them, and made herself comfortable.
“You know,” Adela said. “I’m ready for everything, now. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think so,” I said. “Adela.”
“Yeah.”
“I really like you.”
She gave a tight-lipped grin, like the girl after the guy muffed up his lines during a performance. And then she sort of purred, like a wolf being stroked by a blind child. Maybe I said the right thing, or the only thing.
“It’s only,” I decided to qualify it. “It’s only your feet. It was so strong, I thought you’d walked or driven all the way home.”
“Hm. That bad?” she said. “You were in my shoe for ten minutes.”
“I don’t want to be your foot slave,” I said. “I have to be honest—Adela—I’m afraid.”
She was unpersuaded. “You were Holly’s foot slave for the last month. Don’t tell me you’re not used to it.”
But I wasn’t used to it. There was a difference between being under Holly’s foot, and under Adela’s. At least for me. I couldn’t understand it. I almost lost my head in ten minutes, whereas with Holly—whose feet were often just as filthy, in her leather boots—I could last a school-day.
“Look, Martin. I know you don’t like it now, but that’s not my problem. That’s yours.”
Was it? I couldn’t respond to that point, and as I thought she shifted around antsily on my chest.
“Let’s go back,” she said, and stood up.
“Home?”
“Yes. Holly is getting worried,” she said. And then added, with an insinuating undertone, “And you’ll want to see how Meredith is doing, of course.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” And that was it.

Adela shrank me again, and dried her feet off with her shirt, wiping off the tiny leaves and the lawn debris. As I watched her, an eighty foot tall giantess, perform this simple, humble act, my heart began to grow warm again. In that moment she was a goddess to me, but I couldn’t tell her that, because she wouldn’t believe I meant it. Did I mean it, really?

She plucked me up between her blue nails, walked back under the trees and over the field to the car, and deposited me back in the shoe. But this time her bare foot followed, and brought in the autumn with it. How would I explain these new feelings—or these old feelings, recently exposed like an old wound—to Holly? It was neither the time nor the place to think about that. I decided to kiss and lick. And then Adela started the car.