I could easily end my tale here. Many slaves, before me, have come to the end long before they got this far. But I have much more to say, and not much time to say it in.
To my surprise, Holly kept minute records of the lives and memoirs of all the men and women she had enslaved. I’ve leafed through five of these books myself, books which, presumably, she had had dictated to her, typed out on the computer, saved, and printed in clean white stacks. These she bound and alphabetized in her bedroom library. From time to time, she’d select a volume from the shelf, and thumb through it, wetting her finger before every new page. For some reason I was reminded, grotesquely, of a murderess who’d saved the skulls of her victims, and ordered them row on row under the floorboards of her house: these she looked at now and again, curiosities and souvenirs in her personal museum, most private sanctum.
But Holly would allow me, when duties permitted, to read through some of these memoirs, and I soon learned who her husband was, how he spent his life, and why she decided to mold him into her living bootslave, instead of ask him for a divorce. (Soon, like him -- like all of us -- nothing will be left of me but my name, and perhaps these words.) For now, I’ll turn to the last months before the Event.
Reader – if you were Holly’s footslave or sexslave, the months would pass like days, and morning would turn to noon and night in the space of a single second. And who knows? If you’re reading this, you may still be chosen for that privilege—that honor. When I sat in her English class, five years ago today, I could not have been more blind! I am grateful that she chose me; in our individual ways, all of us are grateful that she saved us (saved us each for different reasons) from the coming destruction.
Like the rest of the men and women she had chosen during those four months, we prepared. If it was my job simply to help her relax, before, during, and after a long day, I’m not ashamed of this. There are people, such as myself—Holly explained all this to me very clearly, in the beginning, but it took me some time to fully grasp—to whom this work is given. And without more people like me, the better Society could never have been formed, completed, and perfected. Like all slaves, I am careful not to underestimate my importance, either to Holly, or to her Society. In the future, we will need more men of my caliber and ambition. So she tells me, and so I truly believe.
For those first months, I was still very frightened, bewildered, uncertain, and dubious about what Holly intended to do with me. Why I was wanted (‘wanted’ in both senses – both ‘desired’ and ‘needed’). During the night of that first day, the first of school, in the year when I was seventeen (that long, difficult day – filled with Adela’s abuses and Holly’s seductions – which has taken me so long to describe in detail), I did my best work to persuade Holly that I would and could be her obedient slave. At first, I did this in the faint and obscure hope that, over time, she would take pity and release me—little did I know, then, that I would soon be envied by all people.
But from the beginning no one could have denied that Holly was truly powerful, and that, however questionable her ethics and methods, the source of her abilities and talents and gifts was cloaked in mystery. I still don’t understand how she was able to, as she put it, “change the proportions” of living tissue, of women, men, and all plants and animals. Certainly some among us seemed to worship these powers more than we worshiped Holly herself—who, though intellectually pretty strong, and above average, was not very different from many women I've known throughout my life. Of course, she knew exactly how powerful she was, and precisely how she could use her knowledge about her powers to her benefit—and the benefit of the world, and mankind. And that was what was most important.
While, like everyone else, I came to worship her gifts, I also distinguished this love from a new affection, slow-growing and vast, I began to feel for the woman herself, my old teacher.
What was Adela’s part in all of this? By now, of course, you know what she has done, and all that I owe her, in particular. Then, I’m afraid to say, not all men and women Holly had chosen pleased her to her satisfaction. Many Adela took into her room, and many of those became, before long, a second, or a third, or a tenth Joel and Rich. Now, some of their stories are also preserved and shelved along with the others in Holly’s library: she knew what value later generations would put on these naysayers or slackers. We know the signs, and we know on what well-traveled, well-beaten paths their minds operate. In the new society, it's not the idlers but only the slaves, we know, who can be unpredictable, and who can think in new ways. Apart from this, Holly’s curiosity in history was unbounded. She kept everything. And so on and so on.
Like I was saying: if you were Holly’s footslave during those autumn hours, the months would have passed like days for you. Every morning and every night, I ate my dinner under the table, while Holly and Adela talked above. Holly would slide her warm foot out of her slipper, drop a few crumbs beside the heel, and then motion to me to come forward. Then, her foot would wait, impatiently – her fidgety toes with blood-red nailpolish wiggling as she talked and laughed, at times propping herself upward on the balls of her foot, as she reached for something across the table – until I finished my meal. Or didn’t finish it (which happened often enough)—her foot never waited for me to finish, before it began to prod me roughly back into the smelly, cavernous toe of the slipper. Always the same slipper, too.
But this I grew used to, and Holly rarely had any excuse to complain about my behavior. I never failed to fulfill my responsibilities – and as I look back on those days, I begin to feel some pride and pleasure in what I accomplished. It is my firm belief that, if Holly didn’t own me as a sexslave, underfoot, she would not have been able to achieve what she has—at least, her achievements would not have been of a like, or equal, magnitude.
My story begins again one month to the day after I first woke up in Holly’s leather riding boot, and became her slave. She had taken her class into the city for a field trip, and wore her old beaten and grungy pair of sneakers. I, of course, came with her—in the sneakers. The scent was offensive, even to someone of my intimate experience—and as a two or four inch tall man, one sees and senses things that would be imperceptible to a normal-sized fellow; and of course all visions, scents, sounds, etc., are, in one way or another, grossly magnified. After the long, sweaty, sticky, and grueling day, it was a relief to finally be out of my mistress’s sneakers, and walk around the cool floorboards of her room. I waited for Holly to remove her left sneaker, but she waited, and signaled me to come a little closer.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said. I nodded, in a weary, bedraggled kind of way. I wondered about my appearance (I knew how I smelled—as though I spent a full day in Holly’s sneakers—but not how I looked).
She pulled off her left sneaker, peeled off her sock, and then raised it a little by the toe-end over the wooden floorboards. To my astonishment, out tumbled a miniature woman, my height. Holly watched her struggle for a little--rubbing her eyes, trying to stand up on tottering knees--and smiled out of the corners of her mouth, catlike.
“Meredith!” she said.
The girl was weak and disoriented, and wheeled her eyes around the room. Though I was only twenty feet (by 3 inch man proportions) away from her, she didn’t seem to notice I was there. But she answered, in a small, nervous voice, “Yes?”
“Meredith!” Holly said again. And Meredith looked up. She froze in absolute terror when she met Holly’s eyes. But she didn’t scream. Holly turned to me.
“Martin, this is Meredith. She works—worked—as a museum curator. And I want you two to become friends.”
I turned my eyes to Meredith again. And she was looking at me.