A Tale of Little Cities (Chapter 12) (Patreon)

Laura rolled her eyes. For Tara, it seemed the world was a spa.

“Hey, I was right! This is really nice. You should get your shoes off, girl, so you can feel it, too. After all the crazy shit that happened today, I bet you’d like to relax a little, wouldn’t you?” Tara encouraged. She commenced spreading the grainy remains, still cupped in her palms, onto the top of her foot, effectively burying it in as much of the shorn-up earth as she could, as though sliding her foot through hot sand on the beach. “Like I said, it’s still a little coarse, so you can work out the kinks, but it’s still super-soft, so you don’t get scuffs. Try it!”

“Tara, earlier you… I mean, we… both crushed a couple of tiny cities into the dirt. I really don’t think we should do anything until we can figure out what happened, and get ahold of my dad, to see if he has an idea yet about how to fix all the-”

“Hey!” Tara interrupted, her eyes bulging big as dinner plates. She held a puny rectangular flake of silver between the pads of her thumb and index finger, squinched down to a pressurized point. The object had to be less than a quarter of an inch across, like a speck of congealed dust, but its shape was distinct. Tara brought the flake to an inch away from her face, and closed one eye for concentration. “This… this is…”

“What?” Laura uttered, crowding by her friend’s shoulder for a look.

“Isn’t this… the Sky Eye Tower from the financial district?”

“What, are you crazy? The Sky Eye Tower is the tallest thing in our state, I don’t think it… oh…”

“Maybe you were right after all,” Tara said, setting the miniature building down gently on the ground, as though that would make up for the fact that she’d just violently ripped up handfuls of urban sprawl and painted the destruction around her bare foot.

“Oh God, oh God…”

“I thought your dad was only transporting cities!” Tara protested. She gazed in wild-eyed wonder at the anonymous landscape around them, all comprised of the same intricately micro-stalagmites, like silver blades of fresh-cut grass. The only signs marking the uniform terrain were the craters of footprints belonging to herself and Laura. “This place is a lot wider than what was on the floor in his office!”

“I… don’t think this place shrunk,” Laura said quietly. She swallowed hard. “I think we-”

“Oh, no way. Are you saying that you and I… holy shit. It didn’t get small, we got…”

“…bigger.” Shivering again with the terrifying magnitude of what she only now was realizing had happened, the blonde stood up. Gracefully as she could, the girl kept one sneaker rooted to the earth, while she lifted the opposite leg off the ground and crossed it over her knee, hoping to minimize any further destruction she caused. Unfortunately, she could only think of the massive square mileage trapped under the mighty rubber slab of her Adidas shoe: how many countless buildings, streets, and lives were pulverized now into a fine powder?

“Wow…” Tara murmured, obviously not nearly as traumatized by the news as Laura. She stayed right on her haunches, and even lowered into a crawling position, with both hands flush to the ground. The girl traced her fingers through the cities like cake frosting, mesmerized by the ease with which she could remold the countryside with just a brush of her thumb. “This is crazy! Gosh, think of all the little people down there that we can’t even see. I wonder if they know who we are?”

***

Down below, in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of onlooking victims, the mood was much less exploratory and cheerful. It was a peculiar day, with the abrupt disappearance of several major capitals around the world, leaving many to ponder whether terrorists were waiting to strike and wipe their cities off the map next. What followed wasn’t an act of war, which might have ultimately been preferable to reality, but instead the arrival of two young women. Their bodies stretched so high above the clouds, no one could positively identify what was assaulting the landscape for several agonizing minutes. All they knew for sure was that cities instantly laid in smote ruin, thanks to a cadre of unidentified objects colliding with earth. No one could’ve realized it was Tara’s toes at the time, though on the list of expected destroyers of humanity, the ditzy brunette teen’s soft bare feet was not high up.

A peach-hued planetoid carved with immaculate detail and greased with oil had settled down over the entirety of downtown and surrounding areas. Those shown mercy by the brunt of the falling mass instead found themselves marooned in the gridded valleys in between the spiraled loops which patterned the surface, suffused with darkness and an inexplicable odor of flowery soap tainted by balmy pore fluid. Of course, the notion of sweaty human body odors clouding the airspace in the midst of disaster was utterly preposterous to the terrified citizens; this had to be some kind of alien invasion, or at least a meteor strike. Not a person.

That theory was debunked, though, when Tara next lifted her foot, and her pinky toe, which had singularly wiped out the district with one plop of its lithe, doughy weight, rose again into the sky. The horrors of the toe’s initial blast radius were then shared once the dark-haired sky goddess lifted her leg, not only revealing the mirage of her body to the scant survivors inside her squished footprint, but transporting the island nation of her bare foot to another unfortunate location. Just as quickly as it came, the foot soared across miles of distance and came crashing down again, burying unknowable thousands into a mass grave beneath those happily scrunching toes.