Coming Up Short (Chapter 6) (Patreon)

Nerea stood upon the ruins of the eastern seaboard, surrounded by lands mushed to pulp in the shape of her flip-flops and bare toes, with her gaze pointed to the starlit expanse of the space beyond.

Never in her life had she ever felt so disoriented. In the past she’d tried her fair share of recreational drugs within the safety of friends’ homes, and yes, just this one time, she’d listened to her foolish baser instincts and stolen her friend Marcus’s unproven and non-FDA-approved pill without a real thought to the consequences. But this morning was turning into everything but a trip. If anything, the whole thing had been a tremendously confusing comedown. While under what she assumed to be the continually ramping side effects of the drug, she’d trampled Chicago into dust, expecting the high to peak there.

But it didn’t. In fact, her experience had maintained the same bizarre, unknowable equilibrium. She didn’t feel sick any longer. Her blurred vision had either healed or she’d simply grown used to the lack of clarity in this dream-world recreation of the planet she’d lived upon for twenty years, albeit at a size a pathetic fraction of her current seemingly thirty-mile stature.

“What is happening to me?” Nerea murmured. She nudged her toe into a floating island she’d created off a crushed beach and watched the entire landmass glue itself like a barnacle to the slick side of her tan digit. Wriggling it away again, she sponged her wrinkled soles down against the flat of her flip-flops, soaked with salty ocean water, and planted her hands on her hips.

Answers weren’t coming in nearly a timely enough fashion. She’d made mistakes; that much was clear. If nothing else, this experience had taught her to think twice before ingesting any miracle pills, even if described to her as the serendipitous resolution to her height problems and general social anxiety. After all, if what she was seeing right now was actually real and not the fantasy that it was, she’d have certainly solved her size problem in the same way that using a nuke on a country solved an insect problem.

Where to go, then? She tapped her chin, pondering the uncomfortable possibilities. Her toes scrunched inside her flip-flops, grinding leftover flaming cityscapes and crushed forests into a mealy paste.

None of the options for places to go were especially inviting. Odds were, Marcus wouldn’t be happy she’d stolen his creation, and her parents would be even unhappier that she’d put anything of mysterious and possibly illegal value over her lips. Still, if she was to snap out of this drug-addled reverie, she’d have to find familiar ground. She had to snap out of this. After wandering away from the general area of the university campus where she awoke, Nerea had become hopelessly lost along the wrecked coastline of America, and geography was never her best subject. With four-mile-long feet, it only took a few paces to get utterly twisted around, even with the ocean for guidance.

Home. That was the only real option, as she saw it. There would certainly be fallout, possibly litigious consequences if not a thorough grounding by her parents, but the reality now was that she had to get out of this mirage somehow. If the sight of her hometown, her neighborhood, and maybe even her childhood home couldn’t yank her back to tangible comprehension of the actual world, then nothing would.

Thus Nerea set out again, with a similar purpose as when she’d stalked Chicago purely for the purpose of using it as an insole. Her flip-flops scooped up fresh leagues of the sea and churned new tidal waves and typhoons upon the already ravaged coasts, not even remotely recovered after the girl’s first unknowing assault.

However, she took her time now, as her lack of reference points amongst the anonymous green patchwork of the countryside made it difficult to lock onto her destination with much confidence. So, she simply tramped through the ocean back the way she’d come, using the devastation like a bread crumb trail, until she reached the initial coastline she’d stepped over; this way, she could know where to re-enter the land and begin her march toward home. With a mighty step, Nerea made her presence known again via rippling seismic activity and a fresh town creamed into block-laden jelly in the rubber treads of her summer shoes.

The further she walked across the hilly terrain, the greater Nerea’s shoes became caked with the messy remains of the cities she casually pulverized on her path. By the time she re-entered her home state, well-distant from the coast, she had as much humanity and civilization crunched beneath the treads of her shoes as well as worn in the fleshy creases of her foot’s underside. Of course, she didn’t pay this phenomenon the slightest attention other than to make a mental note that her feet were beginning to itch from the sheer quantity of junk sticking to her shoes and creeping into the plush crevices of her toes.

“Oh, there’s no place like home,” Nerea sighed. She tapped her heels together, ungluing a few dangling strings of downtowns from her skin in the process. “There’s no place like home.”

The magic words didn’t work quite as well as they did in the old movie, but it was worth a try. Now on the verge of becoming lost again, Nerea hunched back into a crawl and moved across the countryside at a far more measured pace. She squinted, paying the cities she passed the same due attention she did when first even coming to realize the magnificently tiny universe her drugged brain had chosen to manifest. Several skyscrapers came down with a flick of her fingers, just to test that reality hadn’t yet returned.

Nerea crawled: reduced to an almost infantile state by confusion and the desire for normalcy again. Her knees drove through mountainsides and suburbs alike, painting her shins with grass stains and the smoking ruins of subdivisions, though she shook it off as little more than a few stray dirt smears. At long last, when the next major metropolis appeared through the clouds, the girl cocked her head. She knew those buildings and their skyline.