Holly's Dream.

She dreamed that class was almost over. Through the slatted window-light, she stared hard into the small of the boy’s back, two seats up in the row to her right. He was one of the note-takers, she felt. He’d be an easy catch, a good one, maybe a perfect one. Obedience was in his blood.

She fidgeted with her pen, excitedly, and when the bell rang slipped her flats back on and set off at a brisk pace down the hall, until she passed him. Then her textbook fell with a dull, definite thud onto the floor. Immediately, before any time was wasted, she swung around and looked directly into his face, an embarrassed grin spreading across her features, and lighting up her eyes. “Ugghhmmmphh!” she said, her eyes still trained on the boy’s. He took her cue, hurried to her side, and helped her pick them up. 

“Thank you!” she said.

“It’s nothing.”

She decided to take a random shot. “You’re really cute, you know.”

Astonishingly enough, it worked. “Yes, and so are you.”

After a week of dating, she brought him up to her room, and there he learned some incriminating information about her. She decided that he would never leave again.

The scene shifted abruptly. They were in Rome, Italy, on some study abroad trip, and she had just checked into her hotel room for the evening. Kicking off her beat-up sneakers and prying off her sporty ankle socks, she clamped her smelly toes around her little ex-boyfriend, and dropped him down onto the thick, fleecy comforter. Flecks of sock lint and sweaty matter coated his nude, exhausted body as he lay spread-out, still in a kind of hallucinatory daze, at her feet. She wiggled her toes a bit, stretching them, and a few more white and black particles descended over his body like a flurry of snow, and slush. The pungent smell, and the different sounds of the room and the Roman street, wafting in through the open window, finally woke him up.

For the last year, their afternoon routine had been set in stone: she’d take off her shoes, he’d clean her feet, file her nails and repaint them when needed, giving her a pedicure or manicure (his four-inch size made this convenient both for her and him), and then, his chores complete, they’d relax for the rest of the evening until dinner, depending on how she felt.

But this time she noticed that he wasn’t worshiping her. Like a disobedient child trying to get his way, he was puffing out his cheeks, holding the oxygen in his lungs, and seemed determined not to breathe in that charmed and odorous air. Well, he wouldn’t get his way this time. She thrust her toes out quickly, anticipating his reaction, and pinned him down under her sole. She would have to treat him like a child again, and train him every step of the way. She reached into her pockets and picked out an old candy wrapper she’d licked and scoured clean after lunch. There were still a few crumbs toward the bottom, and she picked and fingered these bits and pieces carefully, gathered them together into her palm, and presented them to him as a reward. The trick worked: it might have been roast turkey on a silver platter (instead of loose spitty crumbs on a girl’s palm), so hungry was he after a long  day. Every time he licked, she handed him a cookie crumb.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked.

“I have to punish you when you’re bad. You know that, right?”

“Yes.” He didn’t know what more to say. He licked, and she dropped a little pinch of chocolate and cookie into his open mouth. This amused her, and she made no effort to disguise what she felt. Seeing her amusement, her happy face, he felt used, violated.

“What do you want from me?”

“To give in. Just give in.”

Holly woke up from the dream, and slipped out of bed.

Early Autumn.

Times were difficult. As Holly turned the key to the guest room, unbolted the door from the outside, and opened it with a soft, resonant creak, she had serious doubts about the future of their marriage. She and her husband had hit their first serious crisis, and it still wasn’t clear what the issue would be. They had always pulled through before, she thought to herself. But this time, one member of the team had to take the initiative, and she was the one to do it. She tried to look fifteen years ahead, into the future. And then she thought of her daughter in the next room, and her husband, fast asleep in the little shoebox under the guest-room bed. In her cotton morning slippers, she moved with soft, muffled footsteps across the hardwood floor of the guest-room, and knelt down beside the box. As the sun rolled up over the horizon, the shadows in the room began to glow with a muted, golden light. A sunny, determined thought crossed her mind: She would take control, and she would make this marriage work again. Having made that resolution, she pulled off the lid, and let the early morning sunlight break into his place of confinement. 

He looked up into the light, and in the blinding glare of the light made out a huge smile which, as his eyes adjusted, spread out and grew into the face of his wife, her eyes as wide as two swimming pools, like the ones they used to fill up with garden hoses and spread out in the summertime over the lawn in the backyard. To his left he heard some rustling, and looking over saw her right hand rearranging some of the soft nylons and socks she’d stuffed into the corners of the box; apparently she had put them there for his comfort – though he hadn’t asked for this, and she hadn’t given him time to question her, assuming, that is, that his knees could once have stopped shaking and that he could remember how to ask her a question. But her immense size, and something else about her, seemed to hypnotize and silence all his thoughts, his hopes and fears, and he could only stare up, paralyzed down to his marrow, and filled with a new and strange longing, into the stunning eyes of his young wife. 

Holly pushed herself up onto her knees, and sat down on the guest bed, dangling her slippered feet over the box, and plunging her husband back into the shadows. Pulling her right foot up onto her left knee, she stripped off her slipper and peeled off the white sock she’d worn the day and night before. Then she repeated the process with the left. With a loud, heavy thud, she gingerly leapt down beside the box again, and pulled out the pair of thick woolens she’d used to pad the shoebox for warmth. After replacing these with the freshly worn socks from her feet, she bent down and gently kissed her husband on the head. He tried to resist, but her red lips closed around him and sucked him up to the wet inside of her lips, which had a faint, natural smell from the night before (she hadn’t brushed her teeth yet). Then she let him go, and nudged him into the soft, smelly pile of her cotton socks, before shutting him again in darkness. “I’ll bring you breakfast before work,” she assured him. “I’ll be back. Don’t be lonely.”

When she left him, he listened to her glide back across the room, and he listened to the wooden boards squeak, more and more distantly, until the door closed, and she was gone. “Don’t be lonely,” she'd said. And it must be a weekday: he tried to process this information, tried to force it to make sense, to fit this morning somewhere among all the other mornings of his life – and he failed. It could be Monday, or maybe Wednesday. He had a vague memory of yesterday being Saturday or Friday or Sunday. It was just too much information to take in. For the first time in the twelve hours of his captivity, he was lonely. The loneliness loomed larger than the fear or the astonishment, the suppressed anger and the shame. He listened for a while in that darkness, rank with the smell of her freshly cast-off socks, and then couldn’t bear it any longer. Furtively – as though she would catch him doing it, and resent him forever for it – he found one of her socks and, after burying his face in it for a  few seconds, found the mouth and tunneled inside.



As for Holly, after checking on her husband, she opened the door of her closet, and a familiar sound greeted her ears: the soft whimpering and groaning of dozens of captive voices, rising up from the center of that warm darkness, into all the depths and secret places of the room. Because Holly stacked and organized her shoes in this room, there was also an odor here, faint but distinguishable, of worn leather mixed with the dull, scent of dried flowers, old shower spray and women’s perfume. Above and underneath all these smells, and combined in a strangely pleasant way with the potpourri of her pressed and folded business suits and the bracing air still rising off her winter coats and spring jackets, there was the sharp and musty odor of footwear long unwashed. She looked up.

Suspended from the ceiling were old nylons and socks, and on the floor, rolled up into balls or stuffed into the corners of the room, and the gaps and spaces between shoe-boxes and winter boots, were her filthy, cast-off lingerie and undergarments. There were fainter sounds, like moans, that seemed to come from crevices in the floor somewhere, from beneath her feet. For the newcomer, and there were always newcomers, these sounds weren’t so much terrifying as haunting, uncanny in the extreme.

But this time Holly walked in and out alone. She pulled a bath-towel off the door-hanger, and started her morning routine. After brushing her teeth, she walked back to the guest-room and, after feeling round for a few seconds inside the shoe-box, found and raised her occupied sock up to her face. So he was coming round already, she thought with pleasure and pride. He was learning quickly. Soon enough they would be a functional family again.

She shuffled across to her daughter’s room, poked her head inside, and listened to her breathing. The room was dark and peaceful. Then quietly she closed the door and continued on to the bathroom. Emptying her sock into the bathtub, she turned the water on.



The sun came out. There was a loud screech in the sky, followed by three quick bomblike detonations. He opened his eyes to a cataclysm – within moments, the water had pooled around his legs, and risen up around his nose. Gasping and coughing, he leapt up.

Then, as he blinked his eyes, the storm ended, and there was silence for a few moments. Then he heard a sound, high above, his wife’s serene voice. I’ll be a few seconds, it seemed to say. Wait for me and don’t move. He heard the words, and the sentence, but somehow together everything meant nothing. The syllables made words, which made a sentence, which meant anything and nothing. Who is it, he answered, in his thoughts, as though he were trying to lip-read a conversation across the room. Who are you?

There was another earsplitting blast, about two-hundred feet behind him. As his eyes adjusted to the light, a hard metallic glint pierced his eyes like the point of a spear. Water poured in through a sort of pipeline, which resembled some sort of effluent pump at the edge of a sewer system, a huge ventilation duct suddenly overflowing with water. Steaming water gushed out of the pipe with a roar, deafeningly loud.

Then there was another shriek in the sky, as though someone's skin had been torn back, flayed. Instead of crystal white, he saw blue, sheer blue – at first.

And then high up in the blueness a face looked down at him – the face of his wife. A thrill shot up through his tiny, shivering body as a white robe fell from her bright, dazzling shoulders like a cloud blown from the sun’s face, and she stepped inside. Strangely, her immense size didn’t dawn upon his mind until he looked across, and saw her eight-yard-long right foot, with five dark blue toenails, the flesh stained and streaked with residue from the leather boot she must have worn the day before.

“I thought I’d join you,” she said. Her other foot thumped in front of him, and he started to run back, away from her and away from the running water, which now rose up around his knees. But then, suddenly terrified and beside himself with a new and very strange kind of desire, he felt her warm and overpowering fingers reach around him, and raise him up.