Merciful Woman
As she walks towards me across the town square the customer-mistress is clearly sizing me up – working out in her pretty head just how much she is going to humble me.
Likewise I jump to my slavish first impressions about her:
· Middle-aged? Mid to late thirties?
· Still slim and pretty
· Dark-skinned (mixed race?)
· An office worker on her way home from work? (if so, she has almost certainly changed out of her smart, court shoes and into her current, scruffy sneakers for a more comfortable commute home)
· Most definitely a no nonsense lady – happy to hurt a public footservant if he shows even the slightest modicum of disrespect towards her
· I willsubmit to her (as I do to all my customers – in fear and trembling!)
She stops in front of me for a few minutes, adopting the stance of a master about to humble her lowly slave. Her grey sneakers and socks look fantastic. After a few moments her right sneaker is confidently stretched forth onto the footblock directly in front of my kneeling nose. I can smell the leathery toe area of the shoe.
‘Clean my sneaker, slave.’
Her voice is resonant with supremely confident female authority. I am forbidden, by law, from replying verbally. I must simply, and instantly, obey her. I therefore immediately stick out my tongue – not in a gesture of insult, but of compliance, as her sneaker must be divested of its street dirt and grime and my humble, slave tongue is the only instrument I have available to me. I’m just a pathetic humble head.
I feel truly small as I lick her shoe. And rightly so. For this attractive, young(ish) woman is my infinite better, and is bigger and stronger than me, being free to stand up on her own two feet – unlike me, a down-in-the-dirt public humble head. She kindly twists her sneakered foot around from side to side to better enable my confined tongue to reach every street-soiled nook and cranny. Her short, grey sneaker-sock creases and folds in tandem with her foot movements – the sock of a goddess.
She then couches down and stares at me in the face. Now I can smell her breath. She's got halitosis. Contempt is writ large on her pretty, feminine features. This is the look of a victorious master over her vanquished slave – a slave completely in her power and at her mercy. She is contemptuous of me precisely because I must obey her and lick her dirty shoe. She calls me a 'dirty pig'. But she doesn’t hate me. She just despises me. And rightly so – for right now her feminine sneaker dirt is inside my menial mouth. Why wouldn’t she despise me?
She turns her back on me and walks away – triumphant. At least she didn’t hurt me. She is a merciful woman.
