Under a Mistress' Spell - Episode 7. Emanuel J.

Fortunately, no one has left a comment, nor has anyone registered to be informed about new entries by e-mail.

      Isn't there something moving in the house? Is there somebody there? A burglar? I see a shadow inside the living room, he's coming straight for the terrace door - not him, but her, the domestic help, whose name I can't remember. It's lucky it's her and there's no bad guy lurking about.

      "There you are," she says, visibly relieved. "I looked everywhere for you. I thought you'd escaped." Her smile is gloating a lot. "Which would be a little difficult with your necklace. And you're dressed very strangely."

      Yeah, ha-ha. I don't know what to say. I wonder where she might have come from with her strange name, which I still don't know, her light but unmistakable accent and the black hair? Spain, perhaps, or Portugal? She has squeezed her buxom figure into jeans and a tight red top and looks at me curiously with her dark brown eyes like a cute animal in the zoo, a meerkat maybe. Her face is a bit too wide and her nose a bit too chunky to be considered really pretty. Her lips are unvarnished, her fingernails are not painted, as it is probably appropriate for domestic help.

      "Enough loafing," she says. "We have a lot of work to do."

      If she thinks so? I have to obey her, I have learned, so I get up from the floor, put the upholstery neatly on the chair and am ready to follow her wherever she goes. She leads me into the cellar and looks through the barred door into my room. "Has become pretty. Just right for a girl. Just not for a man." She doesn't seem to think much of my role, but who does? We enter the utility room and there's a pile of clothes on the tile floor.

      "Do you know anything about laundry?" she asks.

      "A little... More about ironing..."

      Her hand claps my face, a little clumsily, also half-heartedly, it hardly hurts, but it is deeply degrading. Slapped by the maid! As if she were my mistress. But she is, as apparently every woman who comes near me can rule over me quite naturally.

      The woman seems almost as frightened as I am. It does not give the impression that she does something like this often, rather it seems as if I am a guinea pig and it’s a premiere. But she struggles for determination. "You were told what to call me. haven't you?"