A Tale of Little Cities (Chapter 5) (Patreon)

The news of Paris’s disappearance flashed through most every television, phone screen, and bulletin across Berlin. Unrest permeated the cloudless morning, throughout the streets, office buildings, and private homes. As a precaution, major figureheads were already transferred to bunkers underground, in case a more drastic citizen response hit the streets, as it already had in several European capitals who, in the throes of paranoia, presumed their fair cities to be the next target after France’s capital was scooped cleanly off the map. Security officials didn’t buy into this notion, since there was still no definitive answer of what had happened to Paris, or if there even was an attack at all.

Still, eventualities were prepared for. The military went on standby. Citizens were asked to return to their homes, while the police hit the streets and temporarily closed up the borders. No one going in or out until someone in France could scrape together a hint of what had happened to Paris. Surely it wouldn’t take long to get a lead; cities couldn’t simply vanish into the ether. They could explode, certainly, but there had been no sign of a nuclear assault gleaned from any of the teams now studiously examining the Paris crater. The only scrap of a clue was a very weak laser energy signature hovering somewhere above the cityscape, but this was unlikely to reveal anything. Besides, a little laser concentration couldn’t possibly be responsible for the quiet theft of one of the most famous cities on planet Earth.

The earthquake shuddered beneath Berlin with uniform strength. There was no ripple along the ground to creep down the streets and rattle the glass. Every citizen felt the seismic rift instantly. Most were terrified, flinging themselves under tables. Though the rumble of the supposed earthquake was nothing that could bring down buildings or cause much more than a few sprained ankles city-wide, the atmosphere was too tense to read the tremor as anything but a follow-up attack: the mysterious magical disappearing terrorists, now come for Berlin.

Most people were indoors when the shift took place, and thus weren’t privy to the dramatic alterations afflicting the skybox directly surrounding the three-hundred-forty-four square mile metropolis. The police certainly saw it, though, and most had to stop where they stood and gawk with jaws hanging wide at what they saw. Some dropped to their knees, either from mere shock, or the onset of confused prayer.

There was no urban sprawl to be seen past the borders; only a level plain of crack-speckled rock, and beyond that, multicolored shrubs which formed into a jungle as far as the eye could see and much too long to measure. None paused to consider the remarkable similarity of these terrains to a leather sandal and a bedroom carpet, of course, or at least not yet. The very idea would’ve been too ridiculous to fathom.

Pink light, too sparkle-tinted and bubblegum-hued to be a sunset, stretched across the far-flung landscape. This light did not extend into the city, however. Directly over the city of Berlin itself, there was only the fuzzy darkness of a mysteriously overcast cloud, which appeared to reach for dozens of miles beyond the outskirts of the German capital, give or take the distortion of distance. Meteorologists were baffled; the day was meant to be clear. There shouldn’t even be the ghost of cirrus, let alone storm clouds.

Most perplexing of all, though, was that the supposed forecast on high wasn’t black or gray, nor indeed even textured like any recognizable cloud. Rather than fluffy, smoky puffs, it appeared to consist of deeply tanned landscape furrowed with an endless array of creases and dotted by cellular hexagons. Not unlike a duned beach environment, it was puzzling, both for its inverted position hanging over the city, as well as the strangely soft composition of the skyline discovered upon telescopic examination. There was nothing granular or rocky about that floating mass that suggested any known ecosystem. In fact, though this information did nothing solve the conundrum at hand, most agreed the cloud looked plush and malleable enough to resemble human skin.

But of course such a thing was impossible. Or at least it should’ve been.

A roiling slam like a thunderclap sounded in the distance. For the second time in several minutes, the citizens were thrown into a rapid panic. The earthquake hadn’t spelled their doom as many assumed, but that sound just now seemed a great deal like the onset of a major assault. Maybe an atom splitting in the heart of a metropolitan area. This, now, had to be the end.

Yet it wasn’t. Instead, several more quivers bubbled up from below the city. A rhythm established at a measured pace, not unlike a casual strolling pace. Could they be aftershocks? Something was happening out in the great pink yonder. Most couldn’t make out the vision clearly, and fewer still could believe what they were seeing. Nevertheless, the visage on the horizon was clear.

It was a door. A simple, white-painted door, hinged open to allow for the entrance of a pair of celestial-scaled bare legs like Olympic pillars and the accordingly enormous nude feet guiding their journey forward. The first thunderclap, it seemed, lined up with the opening of the door, and the subsequent gentler but nonetheless seismic nudges beneath Berlin’s crust was owed to the set of naked feet and their earth-moving steps.

Hundreds of miles away, yet still so massive as to appear less than two meters from the noses of any startled citizens watching, those feet drew nearer. Ten titanic toes bent against the jungle shrubs below them, wrinkling and flashing through every color of the flesh spectrum from pink to pale and back again. Then, launching off the mile-wide bulbs of those toes and rolling its godlike weight onto the ball of the foot, the great machines of those peds lurched forward. That mysterious pink light flashed off the rising soles and filled in the wrinkles of the peachy sole like moonlit rivers.