A Mother's Fall

Chapter One: A Rainbow Haze

Arianna

I close the door behind me as quietly as I can, struggling to contain the sobs bubbling up my throat. I don't want my mum to hear, or see me in this state. God, it would make her feel so guilty...

I take off my coat, drop the keys on the nearest shelf, and make sure my phone is with me. Unfortunately, my room is the farthest down the hallway, but if I'm lucky and quiet, maybe I get to crash on the bed before -

"Ari, are you crying?"

God damn it.

I turn towards the kitchen, but can't quite meet my mother's stare. "It's nothing," I say, sniffling like a baby, which somehow undercuts my statement. But it isn't my mum's fault that I'm in this situation, and I certainly don't want her beating herself up about it.

"I'll go to my room," I say in a soft voice, but she reaches out to touch my arm.

"Honey, come on. I'll make you some tea."

And that's when the dam breaks, my resistance crumbles, and I just start bawling my eyes out.

It takes a few minutes for me to calm down and sit at the kitchen table. By then, the tea is ready, and my mother's staring at me - a soft, encouraging, nurturing look. I aimlessly circle my spoon in the mug, unsure what to say, so many words scrambling to break out of my lips that it's like they get stuck in my throat.

Eventually, it's mum that gets the situation unstuck, as always. "It's the office, isn't it?"

With a heavy sigh that contains at once resignation and relief, I nod my assent. I know the admission was unavoidable, but I still hate to see the guilt flash across mum's eyes. She thinks it's her fault I had to get this job in the first place. She still blames herself for dad leaving us.

It's his fault, of course. He chose to run away, leaving us with barely enough money to survive. But mum has trouble seeing that, which is heart-rending. Honestly, our situation would be depressing enough, without her also flagellating herself over it.

And Christmas is round the corner, too... I swear the tsunami of decorations and songs is driving me crazy. It's like the whole world wants to remind me I'm supposed to be happy, while my life is an unfixable mess of pain and misery. Makes me feel abnormal for being sad.

"Don't worry mum," I say at last, wiping tears from my eyes. "Things will get better soon, and then I can go back to uni and never see that office again. I just need to hold tight a while longer."

"True," my mum says with a nod. "But still, that doesn't mean we should suffer any indignity in the meantime just because it'll be over eventually. Tell me, what was it this time?"

"It's my boss, Anita," I say, and now that protecting mum is no longer a consideration, the words just pour out of me. "She's horrible. She humiliates me at every opportunity."

"Honey, what does she do?"

"For a start, I almost never type, even though that was ostensibly what I was hired to do. She says I'm the most junior person in the office, and as such I need to earn my keep and show deference to my elders."

Mum rolls her eyes. "Pretty sure that's mobbing."

"Yeah. She has me serve coffee to every employee in the office..."

My mum's eyes grow wider at that. She draws in breath, my words clearly giving her pause. "What?"

God, I'm so embarassed by the weakness I'm displaying. I feel like such a wimp for letting this business woman walk all over me...

"Every task judged too menial or lowly for them is dished out to me. I wash everyone's mugs in the resting area, collect the trash from their offices, do the filings... I'm their errand girl. Anita says so herself. And with the corporate Christmas party coming up, she says they can save some on the catering because the office already has its own waitress..."

As I continue with my horrid tales of office abuse, my mother's expression goes from shocked, to disapproving, to increasingly angry.

"The reason I was... am crying today," I say, clearing my throat, "is that I got her coffee wrong this morning. I was distracted, I wanted to tell her that the male employees keep leering at me, I was hoping she'd do something about it..."

"Oh damn," my mum says, nodding for me to go on.

"Anita didn't even let me finish," I say, and I feel tears swelling back in my eyes at the recollection. "She sipped the coffee and immediately started shouting at me, said so many horrible things... that I'm a gutter rat who belongs in the streets, and that's where I would end up if she fired me because she knows we have no money... that if I was truly incapable of remembering coffee orders, then she would consider demoting me to office shoe-shiner... that I'm the stupidest girl she's ever met and not worth cleaning the dirt under her sole."

My mum's face is growing paler by the second, while mine is growing redder. I wish the ground would open to swallow me up.

"Then she added that..." I gulp. "That I should let the men ogle me and take it in silence. That incompetent noobs like me are only good for eye candy anyway."

"This is unacceptable," mum says at last. "Illegal, too. I don't care how desperate our situation is, Ari, I won't stand for it. I think it's time for me to go have a talk with this Anita boss lady."

My eyes widen in welcome surprise. "Mum... you'd do that for me? Really?"

"You're my daughter. What else would I do?" Then her smile fades a little. "The only reason you're in this position is to help put food on our table. This is even more my responsibility than usual."

Worry stings me at the thought of mum barging into the office to have a shouting match with Anita. Our lives are difficult enough as it is, and I don't even want to consider what kind of abyss we would be facing if I got fired. But I can't quite bring myself to stop her. The truth is, every day at this office has been hell. If mum can make it stop, then I'm sure we'll figure out the rest together.

And we'll be okay.

We always are.

I rise from the chair and rush to hug my mum, thanking her under my breath. I love her with all my heart.

***

Aurora

The place looks rather unremarkable.

I've never visited my daughter's workplace before, and if you'd shown me a photo, I would have failed to recognise it as such. It looks exactly the same as so many other workspaces across the country. Desks, files, long faces, crappy coffee.

A soul-sucking, soul-crushing environment where people waste eight hours of their day, day in, day out. A place for worthless tasks that benefit nobody except shareholders, with poor workflow and even poorer human relations. The feeble attempt at putting up some Christmas decorations only makes it look even more pathetic.

A drab, uninteresting place, but also a mundane one. It's weird to think such an ordinary-looking place can be where Ari has been subjected to bullying and mobbing for the better part of three months now.

But then again that is the nature of life, isn't it? Horror strikes in the most harmless-looking of places. This isn't a movie or a story, after all.

At last I am snapped out of my reverie as Anita's personal secretary - a mousy looking girl, short and slender - signals for me to enter the boss's office. This isn't off to a good start... I'm sure she deliberately kept me waiting as a power play.

On the other hand, observing the secretary corroborates Ari's tales about how this office works. It's clear that Anita is a terror. The poor girl keeps her eyes downcast and her voice low as she gestures for me to go through the door behind her.

Well, I am not so easily intimidated. Anita possibly makes it a habit of chewing up wisps of girls fresh out of college, but she'll find a tougher customer in me.

I enter the office with my most confident strut - not the walk you would expect from a struggling single mother whose own daughter had to go find a job so we could keep affording the rent. Showing weakness here would be a mistake.

The office has considerably nicer furniture than the rest of the floor, with mahogany decor, shelves full to bursting with books, and a heavy-set coffee table. It's all a little incongruous. Even weirder is the diminutive Christmas tree sitting on Anita's desk. It's one of those pre-made, pre-decorated plastic things, no more than forty centimetres tall: just plug it in and enjoy the parody of a festive atmosphere.

Behind the desk sits Anita, wearing a neutral expression that belies the token attempt at decorating the office. But I have to admit, she's not exactly what I expected.

She's older than me, and on the chubby side, definitely more than I am. But there is a weird grace to her as well, in the way she carries her high-powered suit like it's a uniform.

Embarassingly for me, she actually looks younger than me - by virtue of money and grooming, no doubt.

"You must be the girl's mother," Anita says, without looking up from the desk. "What do you want?"

My nostrils flare in irritation. I feel silly for letting a first impression like that put me on the back foot. Anita isn't an almighty CEO or something, she's a glorified pencil-pusher stuck in middle management hell for the rest of her life. At her age, that makes her a corporate underachiever, not a bossy charger. And maybe most importantly, her arrogance and demeanor are disgusting.

"I'm Arianna's mother, yes," I say, stressing my daughter's name. She's a better person than you'll ever be, I think to myself, but I refrain from saying it out loud. "And I have concerns about what's been happening in this office."

Anita still refuses to look at me, but her face contorts in a pensive frown. "If she can't take the heat, she should get out of the kitchen."

I am genuinely at a loss for words. This brazen, bullish attitude is leaving me stunned. I realise I've been wordlessly opening and closing my mouth for a while, like a fish. Being lectured by Anita about sink-or-swim is throwing me back to an unhappy place in my life, to when I was bullied by brasher girls in school and I could offer no riposte except for meekness.

"No retort? Interesting." Anita scribbles down something. "Clearly you agree."

"I certainly do not! I -" damn, why is this conversation spiralling out of my control like this? "I want you to start treating my daughter like a human being."

"Do you like my Christmas tree?"

What? I blink at the complete non-sequitur, shaking my head in sheer disbelief. Is this woman insane?

"Look at it while I think about what you said."

I almost want to make a point of ignoring the tree altogether, but unfortunately, I find my eyes subconsciously lured to it. It's like when someone tells you not to think about a polar bear, of course it's the first thing you do.

It's curious that she never seems to look at her bloody tree herself. Her head's been down this entire time.

I hadn't noticed this before, but the tree is spinning, oh so gently, on a rotating base. The lights glimmer like tiny diamond specks, and with such pretty colors... how hadn't I noticed the bright colors as soon as I came in?

"You're absolutely right: Arianna is a human being," Anita says, and I can't turn to look at her, as the lights swirl and dance around me. Her voice reverberates from everywhere at once, almost...

Almost like it's being carried by the spinning light.

"And we humans are a hierarchical species," Anita continues, her voice echoing and bouncing from every surface in the room. Washing over me in warm, pulsing waves. "It's part of our biology. Our social structures are predicated on power imbalance. We build governments on the very concept, our workplaces are structured upon it, hell, we even end up fetishising it."

Her pen stops scribbling, and even as she keeps her head down - and I keep my eyes focused on the tree - I can almost hear the grin on her face as she resumes talking.

"You certainly do fetishise it."

She says it with such force, with such conviction, that of course it must be true. A surge of arousal snakes its way through me, and I feel my underwear growing wetter. A part of me is dying inside from the embarassment. Another... well, another is quite thrilled.

"Power imbalance is part of what makes us human. It has always been this way. Long before we learned to master fire, we had learned an equally important skill: how to master one another."

"Master..." I say, drool escaping my lips. On some level, I feel like staring at the explosion of colors is... reducing me. Like there is less and less of me left, the maturity and certainty of adulthood slowly being corroded away, until all that's left is the snivelling little girl that feared and served her bullies at uni.

The only part of adulthood that remains attached for me to access is my litany of failures, my shambolic marriage, my disastrous finances... my confidence drains away from me, and in my heart of hearts I know I'll never get it back.

"When I unplug the tree," Anita says, "you will keep seeing the lights, inside your mind."

She says it with utter confidence. So of course, it must be true.

It is only after unplugging the tree that Anita finally looks up to meet my gaze, and newfound understanding dawns in my captive mind, bringing with it a tidal wave of horror.

"Arianna is simply being put in her place. I'm breaking her in a little. I thought that was sufficient, but clearly it wasn't. I will need to resort to more... forceful methods," she says, glancing languidly at the cursed tree.

At the mention of my daughter, my resistance flares up. I think of my sweet girl, who quit uni and put her life on hold just so she could help me fix my mistakes. Anger swells inside me, from my chest and up my throat, but it's almost like the way into my head is blocked... blocked by the molasses caused by the pretty lights.

A neon fog, descending over me. A rainbow haze.

"You'll get me a Christmas gift, now," Anita says, and I'm all too aware of her crossed legs underneath the desk, the way her heeled foot is bobbing up and down, almost... expectantly. "A nicely wrapped one, with a cute bow on top. Waiting for me... under the Christmas tree."

Anita's words resonate like a speaker in an amphitheater, but only my subconscious is listening. My conscious mind is trapped, diminished, shrunk down, a parody of a full human mind.

Too weak to just sit in the chair, I slide down to my knees, before this older woman, and it feels right. It feels part of what makes me a human. That I can partake in power imbalance.

That I can be mastered.

***

Arianna

I trust mum.

I repeat it to myself like a mantra, as I ready myself to enter the lion's den, the boss's office. Mum must have fixed this. I'm going to walk in, and either be fired, or get Anita's apologies. Either way, it'll be over.

If I say this enough, surely it will quell my anxiety. I trust mum. She's fixed this. I trust mum.

I need to stop being a silly girl, and just get on with this. Literally nothing could go wrong. So I brace myself, put my hand on the door handle, and enter the office.

And right from the off, I know something's wrong.

Anita's sitting at the desk, not even looking up at me - figures. But what immediately raises the hair at the back of my neck is I can't see my mum.

I look around the office - spacious beyond belief, while we grunts have to slave away in cubicles - but I spot no trace of her.

"Uhm, is my mum here?" I ask, not even bothering with empty courtesies - we both know why I'm here after all, and as for Anita, she's being her usual rude self, after all.

Yet I see her lips stretch into a feral smile as she looks down at the stack of papers on her desk.

"Oh yes, she is."

Before I can react, something slams against my back like a ton of bricks. With horror, I realise someone was hiding behind the open door, and that someone's tackling me to the ground! What the hell is happening? Is Anita crazy??

I do my best to roll on my back and face my opponent, as our hands lock in struggle - but I'm on the ground, so gravity is against me. And then, fear and shock lurch inside me as I recognise my assailant's face.

"Mum?!?!"

Paralysed by shock, I don't react until it's too late. Mum has rolled me face-down, and her hands are expertly tying my wrists together with some kind of ribbon. I struggle and squirm, but realise with embarassment that she's much stronger than I am. My ankles soon follow, and just like that, I'm hog-tied before Anita's desk.

"Mum!" I scream, my words now being my only weapon left. "Why are you doing this? What's hapmmmppphh!!!"

My mum runs another ribbon through my mouth, like a set of makeshift reins. She places her shoe against my neck and pushes down, while simultaneously pulling on the ribbon through my mouth. This pins me in place and stretches me at the same time. It's painful. Humiliating.

Horrifying.

"Be quiet, you little slut."

It's mum's voice, and still I can barely believe or process that she's saying this to me. Tears swell in my eyes. Anita is openly guffawing at this point.

"See how she's physically and mentally weaker than you?" Anita tells my mum. "Just like you're weaker than me. I was right. Say it."

"Yes ma'am, of course you were right. And here's your Christmas gift, as you asked. Wrapped in ribbons and bows, under the Christmas tree."

I scream through the gag, as much in fear as I do in frustration. This has to be a nightmare. Someone please wake me up!

"Ari, sweetie," mum tells me. "The issue was never how you were treated at the office. It's how you were treated at home."

"Mmmmppphhh?!?!?!"

"I never disciplined you enough. You needed to know your place. Now, you will serve me at home just like you serve the office here. Same conditions, same treatment."

Tears start flowing freely from my eyes and into my cheeks at this point. What has this bastard of a power-mad manager done to my mum?!?!

"And here, at the office, we'll both serve Anita," she continues. "And there will be no complaints from you this time."

"You should be proud," Anita says. "You both make for excellent slave material."

"Ari, I need you to do something for me," mum says, in a sweet, soothing voice that is completely at odds with her brutal hold on my reins, or her shoe pressing against the back of my neck. "Look up. Look at the tree."

I almost want to defiantly close my eyes, then. But I stare at the light, just for a second... and find I cannot quite look away.

And as the light enraptures me, Anita begins to speak. Passively, I listen, and let her words worm their way into my mind.

***

Arianna

Gently, Anita guides me under the desk, and soon enough, her shoeless feet find their way to my face, where they nestle in triumph.

They're meaty, coated in sweat, tough with calluses. Each foot is large enough to completely cover my petite face, and that somehow feels appropriate... a visual representation of the extent of her victory over me.

Soon enough, my mum joins by my side, laying under Anita's desk in turn. Our faces are footstools for each of Anita's enormous feet, and in a way it's like we're sisters in slavery... except not really. I know I must respect my elders, those standing above me in the pride. I know I'm lesser, even to her.

But at least, we both serve. As is only right.

We stay like this for a long time, while she - presumably - works. Anita doesn't talk, at first - rather, she flexes her toes over my chin and nose, plastering my face in her sweat, silencing me by pressing the ball of her foot against my submissive lips. The smell is atrocious... and it serves me right, for challenging this clear alpha. Me, a lesser woman! How could I?

Eventually, she does speak.

"Arianna." At the mention of my name, my lips stretch more enthusiastically into a series of humble, demure kisses against the ball of her foot. "You'll be taking a 50% pay cut."