Coming Up Short (Chapter 3) (Patreon)

The sky darkened again. Almost to a starlit twilight. Air coiled inside Nerea’s lungs to a compressed ball of wind. Slowing her breathing pace, the girl managed to adjust to the harsh living conditions of outer space, where her thirty-mile-high head now drew stray atmosphere. To her, however, this brief respiratory difficulty was just an unfortunate side effect of Marcus’s pill.

Nerea took a cautious step forward. Her flip-flop bent and flattened into the earth, right in a fresh patch of lattice-worked farmland and flea-sized downtowns. Those green-and-silver landscapes plastered like liquid into the worn-out treads of the girl’s much-loved shoe. Two more cities were swallowed into the zigzagging foam of her flip-flop, complete with hundreds of stubborn citizens too foolish or disbelieving to evacuate their homes. To Nerea, however, the sensation of squashing through dozens of communities beneath each tanned bare foot was nothing more noticeable than stepping through dry-caked mud. Gravity seemed to be on her side this morning, at least, unlike the last time she was hungover. She took a second stride forward, setting the ball of her foot down with greater confidence. This was her mistake.

Nerea’s flip-flop dragged through an entire network of lakes beneath the central black sole. With plenty of destabilizing chunks of civilization clinging to the treads, not to mention the lubricating factor of the splashed waters, the girl lost her balance. She felt the oncoming crash well ahead of the fall, and knew there was nothing she could do to prevent the descent except to brace her arms over her face and hope for only a scrape or two.

Her toes scrunched desperately at the cusp of the black shoe foam, arching in majestic, tender spires over the crisscrossed thong. The miles-long sole peeled away from mushy crater of her footwear. Nerea’s helplessly upturned bare foot kicked up into the air, inadvertently punting invented asteroids of rural homefronts straight up into space.

The world below watched with resigned terror. A new shadow of early night fell over. Nerea’s tumbling body became the temporary sky, complete with the floral clouds of her top and friendly blue hint of her beguiling short-shorts. Her pudgy toes wiggled, painting unreadable messages into the wispy, smoky air as she fell.

Nerea collided face-first with earth. Across the globe, the very system of seismology was altered in a blink. Rocky crust jutted every which way. Cities who had never seen nor heard of Nerea’s college town were obliterated merely by the residual shudder ripped straight through the molten core of the planet. Devastating earthquakes erupted for hundreds of miles around, save for the ground directly below the college student’s petite, thirty-mile body. The remaining army-assisted citizen efforts to escape the land of thousands of people were finally rendered moot beneath Nerea.

A bleary groan echoed over the hillsides and mountains beyond. Nerea made a mental note never to take any more steps in her life without either her contacts or a pair of glasses on her nose.

Angelica was right about one thing, at least. She was a bit of a klutz. A chemically-induced, legally blind klutz, granted, which put her at a distinct disadvantage, but a klutz either way. Strangely, though, she wasn’t too pained by the drop. No discernible purple bruises forming, and hardly a sting.

Who knew? Maybe Marcus had created something which worked after all, in spite of its fuzzy side effects.

That was when Nerea first took notice of the ground beneath her chin. Her fingers crept over the papery moss of the terrain. She’d previously assumed it to be the poorly maintained, half-slop backyard muck behind the frat house. Still aware of the meaninglessness of it, Nerea squinted. She brought her amber eyes to bear over the knotty ground, on a particularly curious patch of aluminum-colored granules. A bizarre study indeed. What was she even looking at?

“What?” Nerea muttered. Her voice boomed for ear-splitting miles in every direction, though she couldn’t know this. “What is that?”

At the tail-end of her outstretched body, her bouncing naked toes drove continual moon-shaped divots into the ground. Scattered, crackling city hubs burst beneath her gridded toeprints and were collected into the greasy orbit of her digits. Military battalions, sent out by the hundreds for war, waged useless combat with Nerea’s foot. Unwittingly to their host, those helicopters and tanks insane enough to wander too close in the mass grave beneath the girl’s shoe were lost to the folds of her toe flesh. They registered as little more than a passing zephyr brushing Nerea’s skin, even though she’d just accidentally won a war with the full brunt of the country’s armed forces.

“That’s funny,” Nerea mumbled. The warm typhoon of her breath bowled through the silver square of terrain. Before her exhalation so easily combed the flecks of hair-like architecture, the girl could’ve sworn she recognized the formation from somewhere. Not from an environmental science or biology textbook but, strangely, from a social studies book. Specifically a cartography project, where she was made to study atmosphere-height overlooks of various international macro-communities.

A map. This looked like a map of expansive urban sprawl, albeit one which could fit inside her hand and be compressed to the size of a pinprick with the ease of putty.

She frowned. Nerea’s gaze drifted to the horizon. Through her eyesight-impaired haze, she could make out enough of the yonder shape. The curvature of the earth, visible as it never had before, was a blaring hint inside her skull.

“N-No…” she uttered. “This is not real. There’s no way this is… actually… here. It’s not this little. And I’m… I’m not this much… above…”

Her words dissipated. Conscious only of her own analytical disbelief rather than the planet-altering consequences, Nerea dunked her finger with the force of a megaton missile into the remains of the little silver “city.” Its highest remaining “skycrapers” couldn’t even reach the same stature as the scant body hair on Nerea’s otherwise smooth-shaved corpus. Twisting her long digit in the central hub of the city-patch, the bewildered brunette focused on the resulting effects with surgical intensity.

Dark tresses once again delivered surprise nighttime, with flickers of light traveling between the hanging ropes of her hair. She witnessed unraveling business districts collecting up the side of her clammy finger with each twist. A brunette wreath imprisoned the entire metropolis, liquefying the highways which trailed off from the city. The whole area had nowhere to look but up toward the hand of the goddess and her commanding finger making its home downtown.

An ovular crater plugged into the very center of the land; buildings ripped from their paltry foundations and tumbled into the blackness. As Nerea’s finger traced a line in a deadly X across the city, boxing in its bounds by her pinky, a wider crack split open in the stone. She performed this act as easily as one might slide a fingernail into the unbroken puff of fresh baked bread. The steam of earthly heat piped from the magma-churned tunnel below. Startled, Nerea drew her finger away, then lifted her chin back toward the space-lit sun as the doomed city crumbled into the fiery pits scratched into Earth by her toying digits.

“No. I don’t believe it,” she roared. “It’s not possible, and that’s all!” The sentiment was meant to convince herself rather than her five-hundredths of a millimeter-tall subjects below. Nevertheless, those people still miraculously living within range of Nerea’s body were sent into instant comas by the sweeping sonic blast of her screamed words. Houses fifty miles from the angrily flapping lips of the giantess were blown back into mountainous oblivion, while some were inadvertently sucked back toward her gob-smacked mouth and its eternal damp destiny. Another swallow full of homes and speck-sized people rolled down that cataclysmic throat without her knowledge.

Nerea ascended to her haunches. Hands flush to her knees. One flip-flop-clad foot and one naked sole smashed unevenly into the ground. Another round of mortal earthquakes rippled over the mounds of rubble like the ringed meniscus on a babbling stream. Her discarded foam shoe still lay inverted in the cloistered soil of apocalyptic earth, where it was abandoned during the fall.

Fingertips electric with the promise of unfurling unreality, Nerea planted her hands on her hips. She felt a burgeoning sense of royalty crossing her skin. Making her new.

None of what she’d discovered at her feet could possibly be true. That much was clear. However, regardless of its existence, the fact remained that the inquisitive young college student had become the new owner of a veritable little paradise of a world ready to be made into more than her bed: her pedestal, her throne, her meal, her footrest. Whether or not it was real had no bearing.

The captured sun shone out from Nerea’s dark amber eyes like an eclipse. This was going to be fun.

So who was the short one now?