“More coffee?”

“Jules probably needs it more than I do. Kept me awake all night. The little busy bee.”

At the heel of Olivia’s flat, where a patch of warm sweat was slowly shrinking and evaporating into the cold, coffee-rich air of the apartment kitchen, Alan poked his head out. Directly in front of him, and dangling above his head by about forty feet, was Olivia’s yellowed right sole. Off to his right he saw a plate set out, and three figures – Neil, David, and a third man – bent over it, oblivious to the world. Behind him, above the lip of her shoe, which read 9 ½, he saw a second pair of feet stretched out straight ahead, wiggling within a set of salt-stained suede ankle-high boots and knee-high argyle socks.

It was Annabelle, of course, now returned to her normal size: only one day before she had carried those very boots in her hands, as she raced around the cafeteria, searching for her lost slave. How easy it was, in the last ten years since the Event, to pick out who had power and who didn’t, in this strange and yet very familiar new world.

“Read the paper?" Annabelle was asking. "Some woman committed the other day, for oversizing herself. Trying to. The boldness of it, though. ‘Witnesses report that Drexler’ – Abigail Drexler was her name – ‘upon being identified by prison guards, became agitated and attempted to escape. Except for a single, prehumanized three-incher branded as ‘Jacob,’ one of the earliest models in the Winters line, nothing was found in her possession. Officials of the Winters Company, known today above all for its fashionable, colorful, and realistic line of female dolls, have not returned our calls for comment.'”

“See,” said Olivia, sucking something sticky off her fingers, and smacking her lips, “it’s always in those straight-laced places you get the psychos. When will these people learn it’s all about discovery.”

“Discovery?”

The shadow of Olivia’s dangling, discolored foot fell over Alan’s tiny two-inch frame. Out of the corner of his eye, as he backed away toward the toe section of her flat, he saw David and Neil stop eating whatever they were eating, freeze, and cower. A mere split-second before her toes closed in on him, inching toward his place of safety at the extreme end of the shoe, he took a gasp of dizzying, foot-pungent air, and closed his eyes. He slipped into her toe-clasp, with a little roll, and opened his eyes in the living, warm darkness, where beads of sweat already began to gather underneath the girl’s toes.

“Yes,” Alan heard Olivia say. “Some guys like feet, for example, and others don’t. After L., I found out that all I had to do was to generate an extreme reaction.”

“You mean, make him crazy?”

“Not crazy, necessarily. Just so repulsed and confused and angry and so on, you know, that he becomes catatonic. When he reaches that level, don’t push him any further. Let him cool down, like a piece of glass after shaping it in the oven. But after you get to that stage with him, you own him.”

“I think Jules would just be terrified of me.”

“They are, at first. Really terrified, sometimes. But then you have build trust. Let them know they’re safe, as long as you’re in control, play it like that. It doesn’t even take that long. A day, two days.”

“Alan?”

Olivia laughed, and popped her heel out. When Alan tried to sit up, she pushed him down with her big toe, and then slowly stroked his body, up and down, until he became still. As she stroked him, smearing his body in another sweaty layer, she said, contemplatively, “L. was different.”

“How?”

“It was five years ago, I was sixteen, he was seventeen, and he was one of the slow-shrinkers.”

“How slow?”

“It took a month, about, before he stopped. At first I had to chase him, but as he grew smaller and smaller, he was the one who started to follow me around. One day he was waiting outside my car, it was early November, and he fell on his knees, you know, at my feet, and begged me to take him away from his home. His stepmother, I think it was. I forget her name. But she was beginning to make advances on him or something. There was a court decision pending. At that time he was just under four feet tall, and so there was almost a two-foot difference between us.”

“Wow,” Annabelle whistled over her coffee, and took a sip.

“That’s what’s real,” Olivia said, tapping her black-polished pointer finger on the tabletop. “That’s what, you know, someone like that girl Abigail is missing. They forget about the whole discovery side of it. You discovering him and who you are, he discovering you and who he really is, both happening at the same time. And in L.’s case, let’s be honest, he was born to be my slave. It’s thrilling when you finally hear that click in their mind. Nothing can ever change that. No one can.”

“When did it happen.”

“I had an inkling in class, one day, when I turned around and saw him staring at the floor, at the back of my seat. But everything changed the week after that time at the car. The next week he was shoe-level, and then one day I found him inside my sock. It was one discovery after another, from the moment he entered my life, and from the moment I entered his. He was scared.”

Annabelle was quiet. She sipped her coffee again. Alan was growing lightheaded on Olivia’s overwhelming scent, but he continued to listen, even when the sound of her voice dipped to a buzz or a low purr.

“It’s when they’re scared,” Olivia said, “that you have to isolate them. If I share Alan with you now, he’ll forget that he’s only safe with me. Think of Jules: the reason he tries to escape is because that day he was terrified you took him to the cafeteria. If you’d asked me, I would have said: put him in your panty drawer, or just leave him in your room for a few hours to do what he pleases. He’d have been too frozen stiff to leave. But bring him out in the big world, and he seizes any chance that comes to him to get away. You have to feel that moment in them, that moment when they’ve lost control of themselves, are totally paralyzed with fear, you know, because that’s the moment they’ll just surrender to you one morning.

“With L., the day I surprised him he was asleep inside my sock, those old birthday ones I wore for my sixteenth, remember? I woke him up, took off my shoe, explained to him that from then on I’d give him what he wanted, and then shoved him inside. Of course he did scream at first, for a little, when I pushed him face down on the insole, but it was a different kind of scream that time: not fear, but a kind of acceptance, as though he’d been waiting for this to happen for a long time, anticipating it eagerly, but at the same time was afraid I would actually do it to him. He thought it was his dread screaming out, I bet – but it was really desire. He wanted it, and I gave it to him. But he had to discover that he wanted it first. Call it seduction, call it manipulation, but if he didn't want it deep down it just wouldn't have happened the way it did!”

“How much did you have to drink?"

Olivia smiled. "Is it that obvious?"

"Hah, kind of. Where is he now?”

“You really want to see him?”

There was a pause, and then Annabelle said, “Yes, I think so.”

A silence followed, and then a quick breath drawn in sharply. “Right?” Olivia said.

“Oh my God, that’s amazing,” Annabelle squealed. “And Sadie knows what you’re doing with Alan?”

“She knows. She’s coming by later. I didn’t tell you. She said she was nervous because these two ladies stopped her after she left the house, that night, and they were asking about him."

“What? I didn’t hear about that.”

“Well, it’s not a problem, anyway not yet. His mother’s a big manufacturer or something, Emily something. They had a falling out, and Sadie knew her personally.”

“So that’s why?”

“I didn’t find out until this morning. Otherwise I wouldn’t have given her that box.”

“Right. Well, she’s probably safer if he’s with you.”

“Probably,” Olivia said, drily, and stood up. “Annabelle, don't wait up for me. I'll see you later."

"Going?"

"In a second. Meet you in Third."

"OK," Alan heard Annabelle say, and then her voice was gone.

Olivia walked back to her bedroom across the hallway, and pulled out a custom-designed seat from a cozy little nook on the other side of the closet wall. From here, as she pulled down her pajamas, and sat down on a round, porcelain toilet seat, she could look out on the college green, two stories below, and watch the girls and professors passing to and fro.

Her foot was sweaty, and she rubbed her toes back and forth, nervously, across Alan’s twitching, huddling form. As she pulled her foot out, and let her flat breathe for a few seconds, she remembered the Sunday after the first week L. had spent inside her boot. She remembered how he begged her, on days one, two and three, to give him air, or a drink of water, or a piece of bread, a little crumb from her toast – and how she had refused him, determined to go the distance, to break some sort of nonexistent record. After that week, he no longer called her boots or flats or slippers ‘cute’ – they’d become objects of worship for him, and he was often afraid to leave his temple. He changed her probably as much as she changed him. Sometimes it bored her to repeat the process with lesser slaves. She was afraid, as her big toe toyed idly with Alan, inside the flat, that he wouldn’t stimulate her the way she needed to be stimulated, in her work.

She told him this, long after he’d proven himself as her foot slave, after her first collection was published with acclaim, and after she'd begun her first year of graduate study. All this happened during the next year.

But now, here they were. She farted, loudly, and then evacuated inside the porcelain bowl. A door opened, and Henry appeared by her left foot. She shit a few more times, her sweaty toes squeezing Alan in between grunts, and then sighed with relief. A long stream of piss rimmed the bowl, musically, with a crystalline ping, and voices arose from somewhere behind the wall. “Enough! Enough!” someone said. And another simply said “No!” At some point, Henry had disappeared.

She wiped herself, and then flushed. An air-suction valve opened and then closed, sweeping the inside of the bowl clean, and Olivia was finished. The voices from within stopped calling, and in the silence that ensued Olivia nudged Alan below the arch of her foot, turned him on his back, and watched him until his eyes opened and met hers. Her dark eyes, shadowed at the corners by her long black hair, had a faraway look to them, as though she was thinking about someone else. But then she opened her mouth, and showed Alan her tongue. On the tip of her tongue, surrounded by bubbles and long silvery strands of saliva, there was a piece of well-chewed gum. She pulled her foot out of her shoe, bent down over Alan, and curled up her tongue. Her saliva fell over him in droplets and long slimy ropes, coating him thoroughly. Then her left hand, left arm crooked at the elbow and resting on her left thigh, reached into her mouth and took out the gum. She sucked in her spit, swallowed, and then casually held out her hand to Alan, as though offering him the gum.

He stared, miserable and fascinated, at the dripping ruin of what used to be, hours ago, a long, tasty cinnamon strip. Olivia spoke.

“It’s time to go out. But I thought that, maybe, you’d stick better in my sneaker with this piece of gum. Touch it, it’s very sticky.” Through the gross, coagulated veil of Olivia’s gum-flavored, toast-crumb-and-coffee-browned saliva, Alan reached out into blank space and touched the gum. An electric feeling swam through his body. Olivia’s thumb came down and wiped him off.

“I’ll bet you’re hungry,” Olivia said, “otherwise you wouldn’t look this shaky. That’s another reason for the gum, obviously. You’ll need sugar.”

Alan didn’t respond, and felt himself becoming more pathetic by the second. Olivia continued.

“I might as well tell you this: Sadie was going to eat you. But then she took a fright. I’ll bet you know this already.”

Alan nodded. He’d heard everything, or most of it. His lips formed a word. “Moth—my mother.”

“Right. We won’t say anything more about it, will we?” Alan shook his head, and ran his fingers through his slimy hair. Off to the side, Olivia's toes waited, and once again he saw the patch of her foot-sweat shrinking and fading from the heel of her old flat. “Good,” she said, and smacked her right palm across her thigh, and then extended her hand toward him. He thought for a moment she might choose to pick him up out of her flat, give him a moment’s relief from this horrible, overpowering, leathery odor, but instead she carried it with her, the left underneath her fourth and fifth fingers.

“Well, we have lots to do today, and time’s running out. Sneakers, you said, right?” Olivia stopped, knelt down, and abruptly overturned her right sneaker. One of her hands met him in the darkness, and roughly screwed him into the piece of coffee, toast, and cinnamon flavored gum. The fingers pushed him down to the toe-stained far end of the shoe, smelling of all the hikes and runs and tests Olivia had taken over the years, and there he waited, his immobilized, tiny two-inch body, his eyes and mouth and nose inflamed and alive with that penetrating, sweetly sickening, narcotic stink, less leathery and more cheesy than her flats. He waited, and the seconds ticked with a terrible slowness, so that he could no longer remember if he was waiting with dread or feverish anticipation. Finally her foot came, first the yellowed, callused bottom of her big toe, and then the ball of her foot, and then her high, pale arch, before everything blacked out with the heel. There was slightly more room for him in this shoe, and above him, although he made contact with the underside of her big toe, which chafed grimily now and then against his face, her second toe was suspended a few inches above his torso and legs, and he had some room to wiggle side to side.

Somehow, in some secret corner of his brain, he had been expecting this to happen all along. He realized also that for the moment he was favored above some of the others, like David and Neil for example. How long this would last he didn’t know.

 All this occurred to him in retrospect. If truth be told, for the moment he could think of nothing but food, the sugar imbedded in this girl’s saliva, which pooled against his back through her gum, and which he sucked from the side of his mouth greedily. And the complexly filthy compound that came from her feet, through her pores, and the build-up underneath her toes. Underneath Olivia’s foot, Alan had no shame. After an hour licking underneath her toes, he felt his strength beginning to revive.

Now he knew he’d be there for a long time. What he would look like in seven days, in a year, he didn’t know. It was all happening so quickly--but life is like that. Either Alan follows the current, floats along wherever Olivia’s steps are taking him, either he rediscovers himself as her foot slave, or he dies.

[Who knows, Alan says to me, if she didn’t lead me to you, Charlotte?]