There was a long silence, as Chloe popped off her blue shoes and hooked up the heels with the index and middle finger of her right hand. She bent down on one knee, and laid her left hand palm upwards, beckoning me with her finger to come closer. This one signal – her index finger with its dark blue nail polish, signaling to me across the hallway –  worked a strangely hypnotic effect on me, and my heart-rate slowed to a crawl. I looked up into her face, and as we made eye-contact, she smiled at me in a friendly way. In a dream, the distance narrowed between us, and I willingly clambered onto her warm hand, which closed around me as it rose, higher and higher, into the sky.

“Well. I have to admit, this isn’t at all how I expected we’d be introduced,” said Chloe. “You must be Meredith.”

“….Chloe…” I swallowed. “I’m h – I’m very happy to meet you,” I said, as she squeezed me tightly, a little too tightly.

“How did you come to be out here?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. While she smiled, she removed her black sunglasses, and her eyes examined me closely. I tried to look away from the sly, detective-like gaze behind the shades, experienced, impossible to fool, and even betraying a kind of cynical charm. She might not have known anything, but all the same it seemed as though she knew everything. 

“You don’t know?” Her smile, the unchanging affability of her voice began to unnerve me. “Well, maybe you can tell me later.”

“Okay,” I said, lost in her big, dark eyes, which devoured me—and almost losing the thread of the conversation. 

“I’m very hungry at the moment. You?” she asked, getting to her feet. I nodded, instinctively, though Chloe didn’t look down. She had stopped  just in front of the door, which was ajar, and seemed to be thinking about something.

Entering the room, the blue heels fell from her fingers with a loud thump against the bedside rug. Setting me down gently on one of her goosedown pillows, she hoisted the traveling canvas bag onto the bed, and began to undress and unpack. After two or three minutes of laying out her work clothes, in silence, without a word of conversation to me or the faintest sign that she was conscious of my presence, she stopped, let out a huge, lusty sigh with her whole body, and looked across the bedroom.

“What a beautiful morning it turned out to be.” Walking over to the window, she breathed in the cool, clean air, still redolent of the storm rain and wind during the night. Raindrops dripped from the trees, and the early morning sunlight poured in through the window, casting green shadows over the floor of the room.

She turned around, eyes facing down, her chin touching her collar-bone. Halfway between the window and the bed, she stopped short and let out a half-muted cry.

“Spider!” she snarled, a wave of loathing and repulsion crashing across her face. Her naked right foot lifted up high, she slammed it down heavily into the floorboards. If it was a spider, or anything else, it wasn’t any longer. Chloe squatted down, and peeled the remains of (what might have been) a fairly large spider off her heel – or the remains of something which now no longer resembled a spider or anything else, dead or alive, on the face of the earth. She flicked it outside, closed and latched the window, and dropped the sash. Shuddering to herself, and stepping gingerly, the room creaking audibly with each step, she came back to the bed.

With a quick and surprisingly agile jump onto the mattress, she landed  back-first on her laid-out clothes, her chest heaving under her white undershirt. The jolt of this giantess’s massive body landing not less than a hundred feet from where I sat – clutching for dear life to the threads and stray feather-fronds that poked out of the pillow – caused the bedsprings to scream in a kind of end-of-world death agony. Anyone who’s lived through an earthquake will understand. There's a feeling of utter helplessness, of un-avertible catastrophe, no matter how short it lasts. 

Chloe wriggled backwards, until her head rested by the foot of the bed, and then kicked her tired feet up, crossed at the ankles, on the pillow beside me.

“Oh, brother,” she said, stretching her neck and rubbing her left eye. “Such a long week.”

I waited through the long, all-too-long pause, unsure how to respond. Finally, she looked up at me, and gave me a little wink.

“So, Mer—uh – dith,” she enunciated the syllables as though reading a difficult, magic spell. “Jennifer tells me you’ve been trained as a foot slave. Do you know anything else?”

In my peripheral vision, I could see her re-crossing her ankles, heavily, and grinding her heels into the pillow.

“Ye— I mean, yes…”

“I can’t hear you,” she said, raising her head. “Did you say yes? Yes? Then jump up and down for me.”

I jumped up and down twice, slipping and skidding on the pillowy surface.

“Good,” she yawned. “Versatility is good. Not necessary, but very good.”

By jumping up and down, I’d formed a little indentation, or nest, in the pillow. I sat myself down there, slowly, so as not to slip. Meanwhile, out of the corner of my right eye, guardedly, I continued to follow Chloe’s immense, faintly pungent feet, flushed with exertion and, for the moment, totally still. At the other end of the bed, she pushed herself up onto her elbows. 

“What was your line of work, again, before we took you on?”

I answered her. She cocked her head to one side, and cupped an ear with a  hand, her eyes squinting a few dozen feet to my right. “No,” she finally said. “This isn’t working at all. Let me move up there.”

The bed creaked and shook once more as she rotated her body around, spinning it around on the axle of her hips like a two hundred foot pinwheel. In the same position (head resting on hand), she dug her left elbow into the pillow, and smiled at me, her eyes lazily, carelessly passing over me. With an involuntary motion, I backed up, feeling for a grip.

“So, you’re actually very cute – Meredith.” She showed her teeth to me, passing her tongue lightly over her lower lip, grinning. 

I was scared, but mostly because I couldn’t see the joke. “Oh. So are – thank you, Miss Winters.”

“Oh, don't be scared. I won't do anything to you. I heard you were a curator, from Jennifer.” Her warm, scented, slightly sour breath on my face, enveloping me in radiating waves, was putting me to sleep. I tried to stay sharp – but I was so, so tired.

“Yes. That was a long time ago.”

“I do some painting of my own. It’s a nice hobby. It relaxes me – you know,  just one of those things.”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” I said, the sound of her voice beginning to mesmerize me, and the warmth of her breath.

“I’m sure you do.”

“You know,” I said, my muscles unwinding underneath me. “This morning, when I escaped from your sh –”

“My what?” Her lips were parted slightly, and she was looking at me keenly now, searchingly.

“Nothing. I mean, I knew that you painted. Before.”

“And? – Well, come on. – What did you think?”

“I wasn’t able to see what you did. That’s all.”

“Do you want to?”

I nodded my head tensely but obediently, feeling like a little child.

“Then we’ll do that – after breakfast.”

There was silence for a moment, as she continued to study me, and as I did all I could to avoid meeting her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t ask you any more questions. Believe me, I didn’t sleep well last night either.”

“I’m not very tired.”

“Don’t lie,” Chloe whispered, smiling pleasantly at me. “Abigail told me everything.”

“Abigail?” I started to shake a little. “I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do,” she pursued.

I stammered, nervously. “She tried to convince me to… but I wouldn’t listen to her.”

“Yes, I know all that,” Chloe went on. “I wouldn’t have put you in that shoe, either, at least not on the first night. Between you and me, Jennifer should be down in the city, somewhere, tutoring high schoolers. So unsubtle. So where did you end up sleeping instead?”

“Well, I—,” my mind ground to a full stop, as I tried to think. Was this a trick question? What did she really know? “Abigail, I mean, she was very nice.”

“Okay.”

“And she brought me to her room, to sleep, instead, but then I couldn’t fall asleep, so I tried to find my way back here.”

“At night?”

“No,” I squeaked. “In the morning.”

“Oh, now I see. So that’s why you were in the hallway. Why didn’t you come out in the beginning? I wasn’t going to hurt you for that.”

“Well, I was afraid. So I hid.”

Chloe nodded a few times, pushing the hair behind her ears and looking across the room at the wall-clock.

“Well, Meredith, I hope we’ll make a good team, you and me. But it’s time for breakfast already. Ready?”

“I’m very hungry, Miss Winters.”

She laughed a little under her breath, and her eyes brightened. I still couldn’t see the joke. “Chloe! Not Miss Winters, please. And that's good: because I’m hungry too. But, there’s just one thing.”

“What is it?”

“Abigail made a mistake bringing you to her room, last night. She did it because she was worried about you, I’m sure – but I’m worried about you too. And I want you to be comfortable, as you transition. So I’m going to give you an option today, because you look very tired – an option that stands for one day. Don’t expect me to be lenient with you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said. I should have waited. Abigail, I should have taken the risk.

“There’s a trade-off involved here. Either we can start your new training this morning, or we can start this evening. Either you sleep now and stay awake for me this evening, or you stay awake now and sleep this evening.” She waited, and yawned again, mouth closed.

“I – Chloe – I’ll sleep this evening.” One was as good as the other (or so I thought, because I was too afraid to ask for details).

Without a word, Chloe sat up on the bed, and stretched her body crosswise over the other side, searching for something beside the bed-stand. It was a pair of slip-on house shoes she’d dug out of her traveling bag. As she set them down on the bed in front of me, and as I walked, slowly, oh so slowly, toward them, as though on my way to the scaffold, I remembered that Jennifer told me I was lucky. Chloe was kinder, more thoughtful than any mistress a slave could hope for. I looked up at her face, and tried to smile.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll feed you downstairs.” I nodded to her, in thanks, and tried to hold back a sob. I was on the verge of tears. I didn’t want her to see this – but maybe she knew all along. I scrambled across the faded logo at the heel, through the dark, deep cavern, to the end, where I curled myself up into a little ball and waited for the inevitable.

But, for about five minutes, nothing happened. Chloe was undressing and preparing herself for the day, humming a little song to herself, and stomping around the room. She’d probably worn this pair at least a thousand times – and it smelled like it. But at least I would get to sleep, later. At least there was that to look forward to.

Then, at last, came the moment. Chloe’s blue toenails paused, gripping the heel of the shoe. Then she raised it, delicately, higher and higher, into the sky. A little dizzy spell washed over me, and then I saw her face. Her lips frowned at me, and her eyes glared.

“You’re lucky I’m only punishing you, Meredith. Because, if I didn't like you or care about you, you'd be gone after a stunt like the one you pulled last night. Don’t pretend that you don’t know. I’m not an idiot. But if you try anything like that again, you’re out. I’ll sell you – and not to someone who’ll take good care of you, like I will. I hope I’m making myself understood.”

I was so terrified, I could hardly think, much less speak. But some kind of soft, wordless utterance must have escaped my lips, and reached Chloe’s ears because, like a vision of fate, of a fate that I would never fully understand, her vast foot suddenly blocked out the sun and covered me like a mountain. So this was my punishment, I thought.

Pressed somewhere underneath and between her second and third toes, I tried to put myself in Chloe’s place. And over breakfast, which fell down from the sky to the wet, awfully wet and scent-crammed insole of her shoe, and which I nevertheless greedily stuffed into my mouth (I was so famished) – I realized that I probably would have done the same. If I were in Chloe’s position, I think I would have done as Chloe did, and no better.