Coming Up Short (Chapter 7) (Patreon)

Dipping her cheek down next to the city, Nerea crushed the surroundings neighborhoods under her chin. Her dark, luscious hair flooded the streets with just as much fury as the water she’d kicked up into the coasts. The infectiously glowing orb that was her eye was brought to bear before the tallest building. The shine of her pupil undoubtedly filled nearly every story, though she paid hardly a lick of attention to the flea-like specks of terrified life inside the glass tubes of the skyscrapers. She’d seen all she needed. She was home at last.

“Mom? Dad?” Nerea murmured anxiously. “Anybody around?”

Her booming voice leveled the building she’d previously peered inside, and the streets not yet reduced to rubble by her curious fingers or flowing locks were taken out by the brushing warpath of her rising flip-flops. It was time to get comfy. Each of the girl’s shoes were at last pried free of her foot. Her meaty digits released their grip on the plastic thongs, allowing the rubber islands of her shoes to crash down. Between the two discarded neon-bright ovals, the entirety of Nerea’s urban hometown was mulched.

“It’s good to be home again,” Nerea declared, as if hoping to trip her subconscious into recognizing reality again and at last removing this illusion of her thirty-mile body. It didn’t work. She stood her ground and gritted her teeth. Maybe it would be necessary to make herself more at home, so to speak.

The young woman sighed and flexed her toes, glad to be free of her shoes now that she was home, or at least as close to home as she could come without inflicting an earthquake and taking out every person she’d ever known with a single footfall. Nerea stretched. The bulbous boulders of her toes sunk greedily into the earth, gripping the planet and rooting her spiraled toe pads yet deeper into the rock. To her, after a morning of bewilderment and indecision, it was a soothing sensation: like stepping back into her bedroom at home once again after a long semester away at school and letting the silken carpet fibers seep up between her soft toes. She smiled.

It was only then that Nerea really took in her surroundings. Any lingering blurriness at the rim of her vision was washed away, and she saw the world below with pure, startling clearness. The familiar arrangement of hillocks, low as they sat below the level of her naked toes, came into view: the place she’d gone camping and sledding as a child. A suburban map suddenly became visible in the crisscrossing roads like dry veins in a cadaver, where she’d spent hours learning with her parents to drive a car. Nerea took a drunken step back, though this was her soberest moment all morning, and watched the loping volume of her slender bare foot crunch healthily into an entire neighborhood.

The arrangement of homes and cul-de-sacs containing Nerea’s childhood home, where her family still resided, all disappeared in the shadow of her falling sole. A stabbing intake of breath shot through her stomach, but not until the contours of her instep and heel had sunk thoroughly into the earth which made up the neighborhood. The houses, like splinters, scattered in a violent spray about the inverted riverbeds of her sole wrinkles.

“NO!” Nerea cried. Her anguished shout rattled half the country, as well as a few surrounding nations. Reality, at last, had caught up to her. She peeled her heel away from the ground as gently as possible, though even as she did she could see entire buildings like pebbles clinging to her skin, hovering hundreds of feet in the air as she wormed her toes out of the devastation. For someone her size, “gentle” was not truly gentle, but in fact the most violent possible outcome.

The girl staggered to the ground, her knees all but giving out. Her fingertips hooked gingerly into the patches of grass, now coated in the smoke and ash gleaned by her overturning big toe. She picked through the dusty scraps that remained of the neighborhood, but there was no denying that at thirty miles tall, she hadn’t a hope of finding an individual home and recognizing it as her own, after she’d thoroughly scrambled the real estate with a single sweep of her UFO of a foot.

“Wow,” Nerea gulped. She wasn’t capable of mustering much else, at least not while her brain continued to grapple with the heinous impossibility of her situation. Any internal flicker of sensation even close to resembling a drug-induced high had long ago faded; Nerea was left only with the afterglow of normal synapses and the fact that this, and everything she’d enacted this morning upon the hapless country, was in fact real.

Unable to take the news standing up, the girl slumped back on the earth again. She stretched her heels out across the land, blasting right through another pair of small towns with each foot; the mortal shock of what she’d already done was so great, the bodily impulse to continue wreaking havoc hardly registered. It just happened. Nerea’s athletic calves crested into fresh stretches of interstate highway while her hands braced in the mess of craters she’d already crafted with her careless footsteps.

The longer she took to process the information, the lower her body sunk back into the earth, until she’d mushed an angel-shape into the crust of the planet where her hometown and surrounding provinces once existed. All that remained was either flattened into a rocky powder, or compressed into the colorful folds which made up Nerea’s clothes and the shimmering tresses of her hair. Not to mention her feet, which were by now a couple of four-mile cornucopias representing life from across the entire eastern seaboard, as all manner of urban environments, nature reserves, and human populations had been gummed on her peds like bacteria.

“Okay. So. You’re… the biggest thing that’s ever existed,” she whispered to herself at last. As loud as her voice was now, she wondered if there was anyone still alive in the miles-wide vicinity to hear her meandering pep talk. “No big deal. You… crushed a bunch of cities and probably stepped on… a billion people already today, but… no big deal.” The words rang patently false even as she said them, yet with a wince she forced herself to speak them. It was the only thing she could do to cope.