I expected Chloe to flick Emma in the ribs. Instead, she called Jennifer over to the table and told her to bring in the food from the kitchen. All was still and silent again, except for the crunch and munch of Emma’s jaws. She swallowed.  

“We indulge our Emma, Meredith,” said Chloe, folding her hands together and looking across her plate at Abigail. “Just this morning she’s come back from the interior. We’ve had another victory.”

Emma cleaned her teeth with a steel toothpick, and suppressed a burp. Our eyes met, and she seemed to notice me for the first time. Enclosing the rest of her squirming food in darkness under a tiny silver, domed plate cover, she pointed me out with her gleaming toothpick.

“Who’s that?”  

“Emma, this is Meredith. Meredith, Emma.” Chloe’s hand disappeared into her pocket, and then reappeared with the sunhat Jennifer had given me on the car-ride. I stood patiently by, like a doll, as my new owner fastened it under my chin, and stroked my back up and down with her cold pinky finger. Emma lost interest, and asked Abigail something.

“Meredith,” Chloe continued, “Emma is becoming quite the little star. We’re very proud of her, aren’t we, Abigail?”

Abigail cleared her throat. “I watched her every night from the computer,” she said, mutedly.

“Abigail,” Chloe said, pausing, and turning to me with a smile, “wanted to come with us. But I told her ‘no.’ Maybe next time.”

“Go where?” I shouted up to her.

“What did she say?” Emma broke in. She’d been reclining on the couch, one boot-shod foot resting over the back, eyes closed. 

“Tell Meredith where you’ve been, Emma.”

Emma signaled to her knee-high attendant to bring the platter back to her lap. She carefully selected one of the remaining, super-small men, and gave him a diabolical grin. I recognized in her, for the first time, the armored, sheathed, sword-swinging, mouse-riding Amazon from Abigail’s computer. She slowly closed her palm around the tiny, shivering man, until only his mussed-up head could be seen, poking out from between her curled fingers and her thumb.

“Same place he’s been,” Emma answered, darkly, and then looked up at me with curious eyes. “She’s wearing my hat.”

“Yes,” Chloe said. “I’m glad you noticed. Except Meredith’s going to be my shoe-slave. On probation, but I’m sure she’ll be a good fit.”

“Who sold her?” Emma asked.

“I bought her off Pearl. She didn’t tell me about the trainer.”

“That’s strange,” Emma said, and there was a muffled scream, as though from a distant room in the house, as she tightened her fisthold on the tiny man and popped him like a raisin into her hungry mouth.

“It was Holly,” I blurted out, sick to my stomach.

Emma sat up, and stared at me in some surprise. Chloe pursed her lips tightly, and winked quickly at Abigail. I shouldn’t have spoken.

“Who?” Emma asked. “What did she say?”

“Holly,” Chloe answered. “I think she said ‘Holly’ – didn’t you, Meredith?”

“Yes.”

“There’s your answer, Emma.”

Emma bent down over her heavy boots, as though to pull them off.  But then she seemed to have second thoughts: she pushed a few strands of black hair behind her ears, and her eyes settled on me. Though only six inches tall, she was three times my height, and by the looks of her could have snapped my spine in half had she wished.

“Meredith,” Chloe whispered loudly, behind me. “Help Emma with her boots.”

“But—“ I said, and stopped. I felt my cheeks burning up. I didn’t know what to say. Slowly, like a little kid moving toward the end of the high dive, I saw myself as though from a great height, moving forward in the direction of Emma’s dirty boots, crossed at the ankles.

“Hurry up! I thought you were a foot slave,” Emma yelled to me. I hurried, and then stood in front of her. The silence behind me was deafening. “Get down and take my boots off.” I knelt down, mechanically, and fumbled over her laces, my hands shaking with shame and fear. Finally, I untied them, and waited for my next instructions, too afraid to meet the eyes of this six-inch, fifteen-foot tall woman. A few minutes passed, and somewhere behind me, she and Chloe and Abigail, unconcerned, oblivious, chatted casually. While I, submissively, knelt down with my head bowed at this wild, strange woman’s feet. There was an abrupt pause in the conversation, and I felt Emma’s eyes on me. She kicked me lightly with the left toe of her boot. I flinched.

“Take them off, you dumb skank. I’m waiting.” After a minor struggle, Emma’s left foot, about two and a half feet long, came out of the boot with an audible squeak. A ragged, discolored sock emerged, filthy and damp with sweat. I turned to the right boot. Chloe and Abigail began to talk behind me, again.

“You know,” said Emma, high above me, “I know what you’re thinking. But just a year ago I was the one in your place. Chin up, and deal with it."

The right boot slid off more easily, but as her foot emerged I heard a faint groan. Through a hole in her socks, between the first and second toes, I saw a man’s face. Small enough to fit in the palm of my own hand, his eyes opened up and met mine. He tried to say something, but I couldn’t hear him. Emma felt me hesitate, and guessed the reason.

“Throw him back in the boot,” she ordered. “He was a good fight. A first-rounder.”

I reached out, in disgust, into the little hole, and took him by his shoulders into my hand. His eyes opened again. “Help me,” he said, weakly.

“Put him back,” Emma whispered. I looked up, startled. “I don’t care what you do with him. But if you're not going to kill him,” she said, more loudly, “throw him back in the boot.”

As I held him in my hand, about to drop him back into Emma’s foul-smelling boot, his prison, I knew I couldn’t do it. I waited, and then quickly made my decision. When Emma’s bangs fell back over her eyes, and she pushed them behind her ears, I quickly stashed him away under my arm, drowning out his little pathetic voice somewhere in a pocket of my dress. (What would Chloe say, if she found him? But she wouldn’t, I told myself. She would never find him.)

“Now get down under my feet,” shouted Emma. “Just lie there, dumbass, and don’t do anything.”

So there I lay, underneath her, breathing in her socks, until she peeled them off and used my face as a footstool for her bare feet. They eclipsed my face, both in their sheer size and their overpowering, mind-numbing smell. I felt my brain shutting down, and little, calming ripples shoot up and down my spine, as I listened to my own breathing, to the muffled sounds of women’s laughter somewhere in the distance, and waited for Emma to stroke my hair and cheeks with her smelly peds, whenever I obeyed her commands, and sniffed, kissed, licked, and cleaned her tired feet.

And until she called me up again, and sent me back to Chloe, I’d forgotten that there was something I’d stolen from those feet, from Emma. But there he was, and I felt him now, waking up, wriggling in my pocket.

Chloe was sitting at the head, and Abigail on the side, across from Jennifer, who was making hand-signs to someone in the inner rooms. They were all eating now, and Chloe’s plate steamed with what looked like steak, along with soup and vegetables. She tied my hat back on, and then studied me for a second in silence, her tongue between her lips.

“Meredith, we were just talking about Holly – Abigail and I.”

I heard Abigail’s voice behind me. “Jacob was telling us about her. About Adela, I mean.”

“Jacob?” I turned around. There he was, standing unsteadily, wearing a little cut-out rag, beside Abigail’s plate.

There was silence. Jennifer spoke up: “You didn’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Jacob was Adela’s third slave. The other one. She sold him to us to keep Martin, before she flew to France.”

My mind, still lost in the fog of Emma’s feet, wasn’t functioning. Holly, Jacob, Adela, Martin, France?

“Not now,” said Chloe. “My little girl’s probably hungry.” She picked me up, and then set me down on her plate, between the steak and soup. Cleaning off her spoon with her tongue, she asked me what I wanted.

“Some soup, please,” I said. I looked back at Jacob, but he’d collapsed on Abby’s plate, in a stupor. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Chloe, her expression becoming more stern and wooden. “Just exhausted.” Just exhausted. And, I thought to myself, as the wheels in my brain began to turn again, I was just starving.

I turned my eyes back to Emma. She was stretched out, asleep, on the couch. Her knee-high platter-carrying slave was in my place, waiting there patiently for her to wake up. With a little thrill, I felt Emma’s super-tiny man squiggle under my clothes again. (She would never notice his disappearance, or if she did, I doubted she’d look for him.) After dinner, when night fell, I’d ask him questions. Who was he? Who was Emma? I wondered.

“Here’s your soup,” Chloe said, holding her spoon out to me. “Drink it slowly. It’s very hot.”

Suddenly, in the background, Jacob stood up and started shouting. “Not now, Jacob,” Abigail said, and scooped him up in her hands.

“Put him away,” Chloe suggested, “until he calms down. Explain to him that that’s not good behavior at the table.”

“I know, I know,” Abby said. “It won’t happen again.”

Chloe eyed her carefully, and then turned back to me. “I’m beginning to think this was the wrong present, Abigail.” 

There was a muffled shriek, somewhere far under the table, and Abigail wiggled back and forth in her seat a few times. “It wasn’t, really. I promise. I’ll try to do a better job.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, and then hunched her shoulders over her plate.

Emma woke up, and swung her legs over the couch to her footrest, Jennifer began to eat again, I swallowed another mouthful of delicious soup, and the dinner went on.