A Tale of Little Cities (Chapter 7) (Patreon)

Then just as suddenly as it arrived the first time, the gigantic female foot resumed its heyday of mushing and pulverizing the poor German citizenry into dust. It fell with a vengeance, crashing through the streets anew, and blasting some of the previously surviving buildings down into a flat paste. Yet more homes disappeared into the collected leather-scented gunk of the girl’s sole wrinkles. Adding insult to injury, her sweat-glazed skin kept painting fresh layers into the streets and clean-wiped urban clusters. While not gathering enough liquid to cause a flash flood, multiple droplets of sweat had beaded around the town center, engulfing entire government buildings in the bittersweet, starchy globe of perspiration.

The stroll continued. Step after step, Berlin was swirled into a messy shade of its former self. That giant foot was relentless in its all-encompassing assault. Occasionally the weight of it would favor one portion, bulging with muscle under the doughy skin, either rolling toward the instep or the toes. Inevitably, though, the mass would redistribute itself in a wave of rolling, tanned shadow. Like a spiraling storm cell, most of the remaining citizens got to watch helplessly as the girl’s sole arched then flattened itself back out to fill in the imprisoning sandal island and cover them under its damp padding. Flimsy attempts by the remaining military, even with the most explosive complements from their missiles and tanks, didn’t do a single thing to slow the march of the girl’s ped. If anything, she ground her sole a little harder on the landing, twisting and turning, as if scratching an irritating itch. The drop distance increased, the impact became harder, and Berlin looked like it had just been shelled.

So grievous was the wounding of the capital that none noticed nor would have cared when the walking paused, with the pudgy weight of the foot of course still affixed over the powerless ruined city. More of the low-octave sky-speech continued and managed to creep in between the giant toes, around which the only source of light was allowed into the sandal-clad hell.

When the walking resumed, however, it caught the awareness of the last remainders of civilization. Then their attentions were ensnared with purpose when the foot stopped in place and commenced shooting skyward. She was jumping; that was the only explanation. Again and again, with the zeal of a weekend warrior at the discotheque, the foot bounded from the sandal’s insole and into the air. Berlin was mulched like never before. Sonic blasts rattled the graveyard. Buildings already felled were then ground to powder by the sheer moon-cracking strength of the rebounding foot.

The leaping of the giantess created new problems not yet conceived of by the victims until now. Uprooted buildings and entire downtown sections tumbled into the danger zone beneath the toes. They squished like mud clumps into the soft valleys between those digits, while others were squished merely on bouncing collision under the broad, spiraled pad of the toes. Even the happy pinky toe was more lethal than any machines of war ever conceived by man or woman down in the lingering puddle of a city currently enduring this biblical plague of the girl’s foot. The dance party didn’t pass for more than five seconds. Unfortunately, such a length equated to a near-eternity for the survivors.

Berlin was spread like fruit jam across all corners and curves of the girl’s foot, if they weren’t outright pounded into the very fabric of the leather sandal insole. They weren’t merely destroyed. They’d become a mosaic, scoured in a similar manner to lotion over the giantess’s smooth, creamy skin. So far from recognition now, it was doubtful Berlin would even be recognized as the capital of a major European nation again, even with magnifying glasses and a miracle. There was nothing left to be seen.

More walking and more growled sonic distress followed, sure as the sun would set in the west. When at last the foot and partnered sandal came to rest back in its original position, bathed in pink light upon the multicolored shrub carpet, a strange calm overtook Berlin. At least for a few tricky instants, when it seemed the violence was over and peace could soothe the abused city. Gravity was made irrelevant as the powerful leg hoisted the city back up into the air, not to take a step, but to be cradled in a nation-long young woman’s hand outstretched to receive it.

The final act of destruction proceeded, as though an actual god had tipped the Earth on its end to deposit the crumbs of humanity into a waste bin. Berlin rode vertically into the sky, tipped upward and only loosely held in place by the sandwiched force of the cracked leather sandal and the plush, sweat-sticky planet of a foot. She was having her shoe removed by the visiting goddess. The pressure decreased by millions of tons at a time, until the city was separated from its destroyer. More pink light, now revealed to originate from a star-sized lamp shade, washed over the city ruins and the girl’s foot alike.

For the first time, the city had a clean gaze at the youthful, glistening tan foot with its cheerfully bucking toes and fidgeting sole wrinkles, all of which had wrought their end. It was unlikely there were any tiny people watching at this point, though. Anyone with the lottery odds to have survived these minutes of undoing was either unconscious or poised with their face to the earth within a steel-reinforced bomb shelter.

The second girl’s fingers, as wide as river-traversing bridges, gripped the shoe on its straps. Her digits hovered over the ruined urban crunch, and lowered the entire unassuming mass toward the darkness below. The mouth of a bag large enough to hold a modest country closed around the sandal and Berlin, swallowing them up. A zipper sounded above like the chime of post-storm rain, and then there was only blackness as the city of Berlin was sealed into the mystery woman’s purse.