The rain had stopped. Morning was only a few hours away. I was heartsore and lost almost all hope after my midnight rendezvous with Abigail. Ten long and slow minutes of inhaling the foul yet womanly smell of Chloe’s socks confirmed my resolve to break free from my shoe prison before the night was up. Once free, I would find my way back to Abby’s room, wherever it was. Even if it took hours, even if it took days, I'd find her again and apologize; gradually, I'd work my way back into her good graces. She would accept my apology. She just had to forgive me. 

Here’s how I did it. At the big toe of the sock, I noticed that the threads were considerably more frayed and brittle than elsewhere. At some places, the fabric almost crumbled between my fingers. It was here that I’d first seen the flash of the thunderbolt, outside. So I applied all my energy to that one part of the sock, biting, clawing, ripping, and tearing through the fabric until, after what felt like an hour, I’d managed to gouge out a space wide enough for one of my legs to fit through. Now that I could see an exit, the end was in view, and the work went more quickly and easily. My heart beat more rapidly now, not so much because of the sheer exertion I was undergoing – although it would be an understatement in the extreme to call it warm, inside what smelled like a woman’s old workout sock, and I was sweating bullets – but because of the expectation, the joyful anticipation of my escape. Soon enough, in less than ten minutes, I had cleared a hole wide enough for my midsection to pass through. I was now sitting, or rather feeling my way, crawling and groping around, on the insole of the giantess’s shoe.

There were now two choices available. I could either climb my way between the scrunched-up sock and the inner wall up to the mouth of her sneaker, or I could try my luck with the smallish opening that I knew, (because of the lightning during the storm,) must be located somewhere near the deep hollow where she rested her big toe. 

Both presented difficulties. In the first case, even if I were able to force a path through the sock to the mouth of the sneaker, there would be no easy and simple way for me to scale the six-inch high, sheer canvas wall at the heel of the shoe.  And in the second, there was no telling how long it would take me to burrow and tunnel through the toe (assuming that all effort wasn’t totally futile).

Those of you who know only half of my history, or know of me through hearsay, might be surprised by my actions here. Is this singleminded woman the same pitiful specimen who gave up so easily and so completely, so willingly, to those other women? Yes and yes. You don’t know a person well until you’ve seen them yourself, around all kinds of different people.

To be honest, there is one memory that still rankles. (I’ll never be able to forget that horrible night she forced me and him – together – inside her slipper.) It wasn’t my heart but my eyes that burned, that night, in Chloe’s shoe. My throat also – I must have vomited because of the heat and smell at least three times while making my escape.

And the longer I worked and worked at my getaway, the more my heart pounded with anticipation. At last, just as the room began to pale, and the first bird began to sing, and the light outside the shoe took on a soft yellowish tinge, I was free.

I touched ground on a rug beside the bed, about two-thirds the length of a football field, or just over 200 feet long. The aluminum frame of the mattress gleamed in the sun about two stories high above me. Under the bed, dust bunnies, dust mice, and dust kittens danced around in the breeze that blew through the window-screen. The dawn chorus grew in volume and power, until all the birds were awake and calling to one another, outside, from tree to tree. For the first time in my life, I felt as free as they did.

I ran headlong, almost head-over-heels, tripping at certain points in my excitement, toward the door of the room, which was cracked open about ten feet. Totally exhausted, in body and mind, I sat in the corner at the room's edge by the door, and looked back with a feeling of relief over the wide, wooden plain I had just crossed. I took time, while catching my breath, to straighten my now ragged little clothes, and groom my hair, combing out the knots with my fingers. As I turned my eyes back to the bed and Chloe’s tennis shoes, I could make out long, yellow and brownish hairs, sunlit over the surface of the floor, along with tiny bundles of dust, grit, and dead insects, blown and tossed about in the morning breeze over the floor. It was close to 7 o’clock, I guessed.

Far in the back of the room, the glint of metal held my eye. Withdrawn into a well-lit corner, by the window, was a painter’s easel. A palette hung on a shiny nail off one side of the easel-frame. In a shady and cosy little part of the room, across from the painter’s corner, a stack of finished and unfinished sketches, studies, and finished paintings were lined up in a row behind a few paintbrushes and blank canvases. Chloe painted! What other explanation was there?

At any other time, in any normal situation, my curiosity would have put a wrench in the best of my plans, and all my devices would have been overthrown. I resisted the sudden, irrational urge to cross the room and inspect some of her finished paintings and drawings. There was no time left to waste – I had to leave the room before Jennifer, or someone who wasn’t Jennifer, arrived.

After one last keen look behind me, I poked my head through the door-space, and peered out into the hallway. All was clear, and all was quiet– except for the loud beating of my heart, and the sound of my pulse beating fast and hard around my temples. I took my first tentative step outside the door, and ran my hand over the wood-grains in the wall. Not even a spider scuttled over the hall-carpet. The house itself, like a living thing, seemed to be asleep.

The hallway was narrow (about a hundred feet across) and branched out in two directions, to the right and left of the door. To the left, about nine hundred feet away, there was a large, gleaming bay window, with a cushioned seat for two people removed into a little alcove. To my right, about five hundred feet away, there was another window, a small casement about ninety feet  above the ground, its glass brushed red and yellow by the leaves of a tall tree outside. I yawned, anxiously. If I could only remember the whereabouts of Abigail’s room, I thought.

After a moment’s indecision, I turned right.

Through a field littered with pebbles the size of car tires, thick brown hairs the length of jump-ropes, tangled threads, rubber shoe-stains, bits of leaves, and one very dead and very large old spider, I reached the window. My heart sank as I turned the corner, and instead of a room or a doorway, found only a door-less hallway, at the far end of which was a staircase, leading up. A dead end.

More anxious and uncertain now, I turned back down the way I’d come, and kept going forward, across the field of debris, past Chloe’s door, onward to the other end of the corridor by the bay window. Making a right turn at the ninety-degree crossing here, I gazed down the full and dreadful length of another hallway, at the end of which was another staircase, this time leading down. At this point I had no other choice. There was no other way open to me. Maybe if I could find the staircase leading to the foyer where Jennifer and I first came in, yesterday, I’d be able to navigate my way through the house to Abigail’s room. So this was the way I chose to go.  

I broke into a run – and was brought to a screeching, sudden halt by the distant, shattering sound of thunder. I waited, and five seconds later I heard it again. It was the loud boom of a door shutting, or of someone shutting a door – a car door. Someone was in the driveway.

Soon enough, the entranceway creaked open, and the unfamiliar voice of one woman came to my ears, a woman talking slowly and sonorously, at a regular tempo. But there wasn’t a second voice – or if there was, it was inaudible. To whom was she speaking? My limbs were paralyzed, and my heart skipped a beat, as I thought of the possibilities.

I was shaken out of my paralysis by another door that slammed shut somewhere behind and above me. Who could that be? I darted to the shadows under the window seat, my back pressed hard against the wall, my chest heaving and panting with fear. Footsteps pounded by the casement window at the other end of the corridor, and a shadow lengthened, stretched, and contracted again to a few hundred feet, until she herself came into view. It was Abigail! I wanted to cry out and run to her, but then she started to sprint toward me. It was no use trying to make myself known: she was oblivious to everything at shoe-level. Each of her footfalls boomed like a cannon shot, and the earth shook and seemed to protest after each of her steps, seemed to beg her to have pity, not to injure it, not to trample it into annihilation.

So I kept to my two-inch self, for the moment, in the shadows. And as she ran past me at about three hundred miles an hour in her blue flats, twenty-five feet long, I hugged the wall, and half-prayed to whatever new goddess might have power in this world that she’d take pity on me and fuse whatever was left of this pitiful little body of mine with the wooden panels behind me, or melt me down into the floor boards below me. I was never so terrified for my own life, not even with Holly – and not even with Adela. I put my hands over my closed eyes, and soon enough it was over.  Abby had disappeared down the stairs.

Now there was only one way to go. As fast as my burnt-out legs would carry me, I hurried back toward the other end of the corridor.  The seconds  collected into minutes impossibly long– like the stalagmite eons old on the floor of a cavern, the physical representation of the billions upon uncountable billions of water-drops. It seemed to me, as I ran, that I’d accumulated enough water-dripping seconds to fill the whole floor of a cave system. Fear makes me think of these things. I had only one object in view – to get to Abby’s room before all was lost. 

All was lost. I was just past Chloe’s door, when I heard the sharp click of a woman’s shoe behind me. Anyone coming around the corner just then would certainly see me. I was utterly exposed. The pulse in my temple was beating so quickly now, I thought I would die then and there. Then she turned the corner, a giantess two hundred feet above my head. A woman came into view. She was a very good-looking woman, in early middle age, with chestnut hair tied back in a blue ribbon, wearing black sunglasses, and toting a traveling canvas bag in her right hand. Her left hand held a set of keys, which jingled as she walked. She had on a close-fitting blue suit, and wore dark blue pumps with a low heel of about six or seven feet. Slowly, and as stealthily as possible, I backed up against the wall. 

She rested her hand on the door, and stood there in silence for several seconds. And for a brief, passing moment, I thought she might go through. I thought I might be safe. But she turned around, and looked right at me. I couldn’t see her eyes through her sunglasses, but I knew I was discovered. She smiled, and I came forward.