The dinner went on, though I’ve forgotten what happened after Emma sent me back. When it was time to leave, Chloe dropped a few breadcrumbs down my dress. “For later,” she smiled, kindly. “In case you get hungry before morning.”

In my eagerness to say goodnight and climb back up the stairs with Chloe, Abigail must have wondered about the change in me. She might have felt snubbed, obscurely, because I didn’t speak to her again the following week, not until she left with Emma and the trouble started.

Before bed that night, when Chloe raised me up to her  lips and gave me a long, wet kiss, I even returned it. Watching her thick red lips curve up in a smile sent a warm shiver up my spine, and left me with gooseflesh. She parted them, and stroked the inside of her bottom lip with her tongue, back and forth, thoughtfully.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” she said. “I have a long day planned for you, so try not to stay up too late.”

“Yes, Chloe,” I murmured, face to face with those lips, and following their motions with my eyes. She couldn’t hear me, but paused for a moment, as though listening, waiting for me to finish.

“Ready?”

“Yes, Chloe.”

She knelt down beside her bed, and lowered me gently into her house-flats, the same old and smelly pair she’d worn during and after breakfast.

“Be a good girl,” she urged me, in a hushed tone, “and maybe tomorrow night I’ll let you sleep with me.”

“Yes, Chloe,” I repeated. She dropped me toward the arm, and nudged me down toward the toe with her fingers, knocking the wind out of me. Inhaling deeply, when I came to a stop, I gagged on the foul-smelling funk rising from the insole. (I’d forgotten how pungent her sneakers were, the night before.) While I was underneath Chloe’s foot, the reek was partially obscured, in effect if not in fact, by her foot’s overwhelming pressure, heat, and hot, trickling sweat. But now that I was alone with this smell again, it seemed to penetrate my whole being and consciousness.

“Goodnight.” She blew me a kiss, and blanketed me in darkness with the other flat, which she then hitched around the top, mouth to mouth, with a shoelace. (I could walk by way of the heel of my shoe into the heel of the other, with ease and perfect freedom.) Placing both shoes on their sides, she left me there, in her closet. I listened to her socked feet, as she padded around the room, and prepared for bed.

Now my heart pounded violently. I reached into my dress-pocket, and dug around for a few seconds, my hands trembling. At first I couldn’t find him, and panicked. My breath caught in my throat. Oh no! Where is he?

But then something warm responded to my touch, and my fingers closed around a smooth, wriggling object.

Drawing him up into the heat and dankness of the empty shoe, where Chloe seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, I looked around. A tremulous spear of light gleamed in from the toe of the shoe, near the black, stained indentation of her big toe. I crept quickly over there, curled myself up in the hollow of her toe-print, and bent my face down low, beside the little rip between the polyester fabric and rubber insole. I then shuffled back a pace, and squatted up on my knees – I wanted my face hid in the darkness, when I opened my palm. No need to frighten the little man, and risk his screaming. My hair kept falling around my ears (like Emma’s, I thought), so it was better to hold him at a distance from me, an armslength away, near the light-hole. If the light was coming from Chloe’s bedside lamp, we had only a short time, perhaps a few minutes. I needed to hurry.

Little by little, I relaxed the pressure on him, and held him out on my open  palm, toward the light. When I was a little girl, I used to go back to the brook behind our house, and catch newts, salamanders and frogs. I remembered how quickly they lost the urge to escape, after only a few moments in my hand. The same frog that had bounded away from me for a quarter of an hour, seemed to lose its instinct to escape, its need to be free, after a single second in my hand. I would place him on the ground, on a damp spot near the river, and then have to prod him back toward the water with my finger, pulling on his motionless and unresponsive legs, trying to baby or cajole him back to life. He’d been too close to me too long.

My palm was warm and just a little sweaty, from holding him so tightly in the close, confined space of her shoe – but I was surprised, after seeing him for the first time in two hours, at how dead-still he was, his thin, naked form curled up in a fetal position on my hot skin, his eyelids half-raised, giving him a very stupid and vacant appearance. I prodded him lightly, with the thumb of my right hand. No response. I paused, counted to ten, and then drew up my left hand from between my knees. I ran the nail of my left pinky softly down the length of his spine – he shivered visibly, and the hair on his head stood on end. Even his little member stirred to attention a few times, before going back at ease. I smiled.

“Wake up,” I cooed. He groaned, and sat up. My face was still in the shadows.

“Where am I?” he asked. Trying to stand up, he tickled my skin with his tiny, awkward movements, and I almost dropped him. He froze, following my long arm to my shoulder, and then squinting up through the darkness at my face.

“Are you afraid of me?” I whispered, not knowing exactly what to say.

“Who are you?” he asked. When he heard my voice, he put his arms up before his face, as though in self-defense. He cowered against my thumb, and seemed unable to speak. Though he didn’t know he had nothing to fear from me, that I was harmless, it gave me a delicious, temporary pleasure to know that he thought I was dangerous. I knew he was safe, but he – terrified perhaps because of Emma, Emma, whom he associated with me, until I chose to reveal myself – didn’t know anything yet. I decided to keep this small psychological advantage for as long as I could. Maybe I’d even wait till the morning to properly introduce myself. In the meantime, though, I wanted answers from him. And his fear of me would draw those answers out of him.

He collapsed onto my palm again, on his hands and knees. He seemed to think he could just crawl away and hide. I felt sorry for him, but decided to press him. Now or never, Meredith, while he’s still yours.

“What’s your name? Quickly.”

He shaded his eyes against the spear of lamp-light, piercing through the crack in Chloe’s insole. “Actaeon,” he answered.

“Actaeon,” I repeated. “Are you sure?”

“Sure of what?” he snapped, raising his voice. He was talking back to me, testing me. I pinched his arm lightly, and then flicked him backwards.

“You answer -- I ask,” I told him. “Understood?”

“Yes,” he squeaked, after a tense pause.

“Where are you from – Actaeon?” The name didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. A Greek mythological figure, transformed into a stag by Diana, and torn apart by hounds. Perhaps he was born a slave.

“The Midwest,” he quickly replied. “Region Five, Erie Basin.”

“Why did you leave?” I chose to keep silent about Emma, and my standing in the house.

“I was beaten in the games,” Actaeon said. “By Emma. In the first round.”

“Emma?”

“Region Four, New England Basin.” He rattled it off, promptly. “There were nine others with me, all men, one from each region.”

“And this woman, Emma, beat all of you?”

“All but one, a man named Hector, who forced a draw on the last day.”

“When did this happen?”

“I don’t know. I was condemned and lost track of time.”

“Have you eaten since your defeat?” His ribs were poking out. The fight, and his sentencing, might have happened a week ago, maybe longer.

“No,” he said, and began to move forward, tentatively, to my thumb. I was feeling helpful, and offered it to him. He stood up, and then nodded over his shoulder to a blank space in the darkness where he might have guessed my face was concealed. I took my left hand from between my thighs, again, and produced a few of Chloe’s breadcrumbs from my dress. I tasted one: it was staling quickly.

“Try this,” I said, offering him one. He took it from between my thumb and forefinger, a crumb as large as a loaf to him, and tore it apart ravenously.

“Slow down,” I warned him, alarmed by the rate he was eating. “You haven’t eaten in days. Be careful you don’t vomit it back up.”

Gradually, bit by bit, I leaned my face into the yellow lamp-light, still streaming in through the crevice. The next time he turned to me, he looked up and saw my face. He dropped the rest of the bread, staggered back, eyes wide open, mouth agape.

“You— who are you? You’re a slave!” he gasped, and his face paled. Frightened by his confusion, I nodded my head, and then, pulling my feet up underneath me, I held him out toward the light, like a little girl reading a book.

“I’m no one,” I said. And then the spear of light withdrew, suddenly, and plunged us both into the dark, smelly, silent world of Chloe’s flat. In the pitch-black interior, my sense of smell sharpened, and his also. I felt him crawling around on my palm, feeling my birth and death lines, and brushing his tiny fingers over each of mine, one after another.

“Where are we?” I heard his voice ask, quietly. I closed my hand around him, and then brought him up my lips.

“Emma is owned by a woman named Chloe, who also owns me. We’re in Chloe’s shoe.”

There was silence, and then I felt his little head poke out from the space between my thumb and forefinger. “Where did you find me?”

“Emma’s boot,” I said. “You were dying.”

There was another pause, longer than the last one. “So what now?”

“I don’t know yet.” I was honest about this, at least.

“You should have let me die.”

I smiled, thinking of some old television melodrama, or action film. “Well, you’re safer with me than with Emma.”

Another pause. The shoe seemed to heat up, and my skull felt heavier and heavier by the minute. I lay down and rested my head in the hollow of one of Chloe’s toes, the second one probably.

“Why am I safer with you?” he finally asked, though more softly now. Was he falling asleep? I felt his breath on my lips, and it tickled my nose-hairs. I scratched my nose with the hand he was in, and then set him back down beside my mouth.

“Because,” I smiled. “I’ll be a better mistress to you than Emma could ever have been. It will be nice to have someone to talk to, someone to keep me sane, someone to pet and feed now and then. Don’t you want someone to take care of you – Actaeon?” I decided to change his name, maybe in the morning.

He didn’t answer me. Yawning, I went on. “Anyway,” I sighed, sleepily, “if you ever want to be tall again, or whatever you were, I figure I’m your best hope, your best shot.”

There was another long gap in the conversation, and then a snore split the silence. He was out like a baby, nestled against my thumb. I drew him in, between my breasts, and for the first time in two months, fell asleep with a smile on my face. He was mine.