The Footslave-Oubliette
Author’s note: I am indebted to regular reader Derek for the inspiration behind this story.
There are a whole host of tiny, secret foot-prisons, known as ‘footslave-oubliettes’, scattered throughout the Gynarchy, in which individual footslave-prisoners are confined and forgotten about (colloquially they are sometimes referred to as ‘forget-me-rots’!)
They are, fundamentally, ground-level grilles below which the slave is confined on his back, face upwards, so that all he can see are the soles of his female betters’ shoes, sneakers and boots through the mesh. Indeed, the slave is oftentimes reliant on those female shoe, sneaker and bootsoles for his sustenance, since the mud dropping off them onto his face is a necessary supplement to the meagre rations of dirty slave-food his ‘minders’ very occasionally drop through the grille. Many footslave-oubliette prisoners are so permanently hungry, they will even actively tongue the dirt from the dirty sole-treads of their female masters who are unwittingly standing, or sitting, above them.
Footslave-oubliettes tend to be located in public places – such as bus-stops; beneath park benches; at the lobby entrances to public buildings; in the middle of sidewalks etc. But, for the most part, the female public are blissfully unaware that a male footslave is confined within them, since they just look like normal drains, and the occupant’s face is hidden in the darkness beneath the grille. Even if the female members of the public were made aware of the footslave’s presence – for example, if they could suddenly feel his tongue tickling their bootsole-treads beneath them in order to extract their underside bootmud – they wouldn’t care; for the ladies of the Gynarchy are well used to having their footwear cleaned by anonymous, maleslave mouth!
Public slave no. 57834 is about to be inserted for life into one such footslave-oubliette. It’s not that he has done anything wrong – it’s just that he is owned by the Female Municipal Authorities, and a prestigious new female university is soon to be opening on the outskirts of Barbaria, the capital city of the Gynarchy. Thus the female designers have incorporated a number of footslave-oubliettes throughout the new campus. Slave no. 57834’s oubliette is to be located beneath a bench on the university campus bus-stop, so the majority of his female ‘customers’ will be seated, rather than standing, above him, with their dirty boot and shoe soles resting on the metal grille directly above his upturned face.
His female installer – a decidedly glamorous, Indian migrant-worker girl who is employed by the female construction company tasked with building the new university – is very much enjoying her work as she mockingly inserts the slave into his permanent, underground prison! She smiles mischievously down at him baring her pretty, white teeth, and verbally reminds the prisoner-slave that he is going to be stuck in this footslave-oubliette for the rest of his natural life; and beyond:
‘Ha! Ha! Just think, slave – all you will ever be seeing from now on, through the mesh of the grille that I will soon be welding over your ugly, slave face, is the underside of this dirty bus-stop bench, or the bottoms of ladies’ muddy shoe and boot soles, isn’t it? Ha! Ha! And this is being the last time that anyone will ever be speaking to you! You will soon be being completely forgotten about in your dirty, underground hole, and it will eventually be becoming your burial ground! Ha! Ha! Even your minder-mistresses who will be feeding you at night-time, will merely be pouring their dirty slops down through the grille, without talking to you, isn’t it? Everyone else will be thinking that they are just chucking stuff down the drain! Ha! Ha! You are being nothing but a dirty, university campus, underground forget-me-rot!’
He had been surgically muted, like all footslave-oubliettes; so he could not answer her back!
Having mercilessly mocked him, the pretty, Indian construction-worker girl with her beaming brown face, and wearing her bright luminous, high-visibility vest, then contemptuously spat on him, before deftly closing the grille over his upturned face; putting some safety goggles over her beautiful, but cruel, brown eyes; and then soldering the grille permanently shut with a hot blow-torch.
She next took the liberty of sitting herself down on the cold, metal bench above him, in order to be the first to impose her hobnail-bootsoles over his confined face. She even kindly scraped the thick, muddy treads of her black leather, laced-up, construction-site workboots over the thin, metal bars of the grille so that at least some of the detritus from her heavy bootsoles fell onto his face and into his mouth.
Footslave-oubliette no. 57834 thus gets his first taste of supplementary, female bootmud; it will be an acquired taste, but one which he will come to relish in time, actively seeking it out with his tongue as he is driven by hunger!
There were still two whole days to go before the university actually opened its doors to the female-student public, and so, for the first 48 hours of his lifelong confinement, footslave-oubliette no. 57874 (or whatever his number was – already I’m forgetting!) spent most of his time just staring up at the green underside of the metal bus-stop bench beneath which he was now so ignominiously confined. His boredom was only punctuated by a solitary visit from his campus ‘minder’ – a twenty-something, slim and pretty, plain-white-sneakered and blue-bejeaned Filipina girl – who, just as the Indian construction-worker girl had described, taciturnly and unconcernedly dropped slops down through the bars of his grille in order to supposedly feed him.
To be honest, already he was missing the taste of the Indian construction-worker girl’s hobnail-boot mud, for at least it had tasted strong and bitter; the slave-slops supplied by the Filipina girl consisted of a bland and tasteless mush, and would never be enough to keep his hunger-pangs at bay; yet she, unkindly, refused to scrape her muddy sneaker-bottoms over his forlorn face-grille!
It was therefore with a good deal of relief that he greeted the dirty soles of the first female students to enter the campus – all freshers, of course, as this was a brand new university with no existing students; and all of them fresh-faced and entirely innocent of his existence beneath the university-campus, bus-stop bench on which they were seated!
Being fresh-faced, and often impecunious, students, the footslave-oubliette soon got to see a wide variety of cheap, casual footwear above his face. He even, quite quickly, began to recognise the soles, socks (beneath jean-hems), and legskin-tones of his ‘regular’ student-mistresses – those who routinely got the bus into town.
Thus he both endured and enjoyed all of the following resting repeatedly above his secretive, grilled face:
· Ballet flats – hoards of ballet-flats! Mostly with smooth and malleable, beige brown soles – whatever the colour of the soft leather uppers. He liked licking the smooth undersides of young women’s ballet-flats as the dirt and detritus came off very easily onto his tongue through the narrow bars of the grille. But he had to lick softly, lest he tickle and disturb the unsuspecting bus-stop girl above him. He also came to like the way the young women’s ballet-flats afforded him a furtive view up their, often creased and manky-looking, student-girl socks; and even, sometimes, up their smooth, bare ankleskin above the socks, beneath their ubiquitous, student-girl, scruffy denim jean-hems! Yes – ballet-flats he very much liked!
· Sneakers – again in their hundreds and thousands; some low-top (and thus sock-revealing); some high-top (and thus ankle-hiding); some laced-up; some Velcro-fastened; some plain, some stripy; some canvassy, some leathery. All invariably scruffy and unkempt – with mud, twigs, dead leaves, cigarette residue and chewing gum stuck to the different-patterned treads in the sneaker soles; a veritable feast of young-womanly shoe-detritus! The university-campus, footslave-oubliette came to particularly like zigzag-patterned sneakersoles, as he found his tongue could really get deep into the grooves and sweep out any detritus with one long lick (providing the female wearer of the superior sneakers sat relatively still at the bus-stop – and, of course, providing the bus didn’t come too soon!)
· Brogues – worn by some of the ‘smarter’ female students; those who didn’t go out much, and who were usually catching the bus to the library in the centre of town where they could swot up some more, rather than to the bars and nightclubs like the majority of the female-student populace! (They didn’t have to study hard, after all; they were guaranteed to pass their final exams, being free and female. This is a Gynarchy, after all!) One bespectacled, ginger-haired, brogue-wearing, swotty girl particularly caught his low-lying eye, mainly because she always insisted on wearing incongruously pink and white frilly anklesocks with her brown, laced-up Oxford brogues! She was clearly a first-class nerd – and therefore fully deserving of his footslavish respect. And so he always made a point of lickshining her brown leather shoesoles – even if they were already relatively clean – not to selfishly fill his stomach with the meagre morsels of mud she may have been walking in, but purely out of underground, footslavish respect for her white-frilly-topped, pink cotton anklesocks beneath her brown corduroy, trouser hems!
· Moccasins – invariably damp and musty-smelling either as a result of feminine footsweat (during the spring and summer months), or rain (during the autumn and winter months). Although they were soft shoes, like the ubiquitous ballet-flats, the moccasins tended to have sturdier, leather soles, often with ridges, and so he was more at liberty to lick at them with abandonment, and without the danger of disturbing the mistress through inadvertently tickling her sensitive, unsuspecting foot-nerves through her dirty moccasin-soles! This despite the fact that moccasin girls, he noticed, tended to go sockless inside their soft, slipper-like shoes!
· Ankleboots – all the rage amongst fashion-conscious student girls the world over, of course; and the Gynarchy of Barbaria is no exception! He came to admire and appreciate the sheer variety of ankleboot-styles that were unwittingly inflicted upon his face – some lace-up; some zip-up; some with chunky, dirt-entrapping heels; some with spiked heels; some with low or flat heels; mostly black, but occasionally brown, red, pink, or even blue! He liked the way girls’ ankleboots tended to only reveal a tiny slither of matching, elasticated socktop above the upper bootrims, for that helped to retain the mystery of the girl’s socks; were they plain black, or navy-blue, or pink – as the socktops suggested? Or did the uppers of the ankleboots hide some exciting sock logos or cartoon patterns on the sides of the socks? The beauty of it was that he would never know – and he came to appreciate a bit of sock-intrigue in his otherwise miserable and monotonous life!
· Calf and kneeboots (including ugg-style boots)– these, of course, gave him no chance of catching a furtive up-glimpse of sock above his face; unless the young woman had elected to wear long, calf-length or knee-length socks to go with her boots. Just occasionally he was treated to the sight of such long, thick, bootsock towering above him over skinny-tight jeans or leggings above the upper bootrims, and he felt suitably in awe and humbled. For the sight of powerful, female sock towering above his face reminded him that he was lower than a girl’s sock, and that the sock was more important than him, since it helped to keep the young woman’s feet and legs warm inside her boots, and to garnish up all her warm and clammy, active student-girl footsweat inside her boot! He sometimes wished the young women would temporarily kick off their boots, and rest their sweaty-socked feet on his grille; but they never did – this was a very public place, after all, and no self-respecting, young woman wishes to impose her vinegary sock-stink on other free persons waiting at a communal bus stop, however hot and tired her feet may be inside her boots!
He also got to recognise the various types of footmistresses above him; nick-namely:
· The ‘jigglers’ – those whose shoes or boots were continuously, subconsciously, jiggling up and down as they waited impatiently for their bus, or texted their boyfriends on their phones (he actually quite liked ‘jigglers’ as they gave his tongue a rest – he had no need to lickshine their boot or shoe soles as the dirt and detritus they had previously walked in tended to fall off the bottoms of their soles thanks to the vibrations caused by their subliminal jiggling!)
· The ‘no-nonsense flatterers’ – those young women who preferred to sit with both their feet resting demurely, side by side, flat down on the grille above his face. Whilst tis style of seating tended to block out the light from his face, he was compensated by the opportunity to really study the student-girl’s shoe or boot soles, and examine the pattern in her treads (bespectacled brogues was, perhaps unsurprisingly, one such ‘no-nonsense flatterer’)
· The ‘tuckers’ – those whose natural seating position involves tucking their feet around one another at the ankles, providing a nice cross-section of creased sock for him to look at (‘tuckers’ can be ‘jigglers’ also!)
· The ‘confident crossed-leggers’ – young women who invariably sat with their right leg dominantly crossed over their left, meaning that the hovering-in-the-air, right boot or shoesole was well out of reach of his tongue; but, if he was lucky, the left shoe or bootsole would be resting directly on the grille above his face, meaning that, in some ways, he had the best of both worlds – for he could normally see the young woman’s socktop on her hovering right ankle (unless she was wearing kneeboots, of course), whilst simultaneously tasting the leathery sole of her left shoe or boot, knowing that she was almost certainly wearing an identically-coloured and textured sock inside that left shoe, sneaker or boot.
· The ‘danglers’ – mainly ballet-flat wearers, who subconsciously pop their socked-heels out the backs of their ballet-flats whilst demurely seated at the bus-stop playing electronic games on their smartphones. Needless to say, the footslave-oubliette loved a ‘dangler’, especially if the exposed heel area of sock was worn and bobbled, for then he got to observe the thinly-veiled heelflesh of his female better through her thinning sock-material, and of course, through the veiled mesh of the grille covering his face. If the young woman’s own face was thinly veiled, i.e. if she was a Muslim student-girl, so much the better! For then it was a case of veils upon veils upon veils – and it somehow made the superior, young woman’s bare heelskin all the more unattainable and exotic!
When it came to hosiery, he didn’t just see socks, of course; especially in the wintertime, he had the inestimable privilege of staring up at young women’s thick-woolly-tighted legs (often garishly coloured!); and on the weekends, in the evenings, he would not infrequently get to lick the rough soles of shiny, patent leather pumps on the likes of party-going, dark nylon stockings or nightclubbing, black fishnet tights!
But socks, sneakers, ballet-flats, moccasins, brogues, ankleboots and the street filth and dirt attached to them were his secretive, daily bread and butter. He was a human drain – a hidden receptacle for the day-to-day filth that falls off the bottoms of bright young women’s shoes. Soon even the authorities, and the Filipina girl who was supposed to feed him, forgot all about him, and he was compelled to survive on a diet of nothing but external, feminine footwear-filth; which is fair enough – given that he had been ungrateful for his little sods and slops!
But he still managed to survive for years, serving successive generations of young women on the university campus. And when he eventually died of old age, and the authorities noticed a strange smell coming from inside the ‘drain’ beneath the bus-stop, they simply concreted it over.
Then he really was forgotten about for all eternity!
