There Goes the Neighborhood (Chapter 1) (Patreon)

Rachel was violently awakened by the sound of an explosion ripping through the morning serenity. The woman sat bolt upright in bed, her golden hair hanging over her eyes. Trembling, she batted her locks back over her shoulders and swung her legs over the side of the mattress. She slid her tanned bare feet into her pink slippers, then padded across the carpet. With a tug, she cinched her robe around her slender frame and threw open the door.

“Sassy?” she called out. She knew her daughter would usually sleep in late on a Saturday like this, but that cataclysmic boom from somewhere nearby the house had to have stirred her. “Sassy, honey? Are you all right?”

“M-Mom?” The beautiful nineteen-year-old mirror-image of her mother emerged from her room, wringing her hands. To keep her jittery fingers busy, Sassy worked on tying her sleek blonde tresses back into a ponytail. Meanwhile, she shifted her weight from leg to leg, arching the ball of her foot against the carpet and splaying her long toes softly in the fibers. “W-What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. She made her way downstairs and switched on the television, flipping through the channels in search of answers. However, every single station was frosty static. “That’s strange. Whatever happened must have knocked the cable out.”

“The internet doesn’t work, either,” Sassy reported as she clicked through her phone screen. She held the device over her head, hoping for bars, but only stamped her foot in frustration when she checked again. “I can’t get a signal!”

“Just keep trying. Maybe we should go to the basement?”

“Uh, Mom? Have you looked outside?”
 “No, why? What’s…” Rachel murmured, peeking out the kitchen window. The word stopped in her throat. A dense pea soup fog coated everything past a five-foot radius outside the glass panes. While a little morning mist wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, this was more on par with silver smoke. Almost cloudlike, as if they were staring out the window of a plane.

“That looks weird, Mom. What’s going on out there?”

“I don’t know, dear. I wonder if… no, it couldn’t be, they surely wouldn’t-”

“The power plant?”

“Y-Yes…” Rachel said. She gnawed her tongue, frightfully pondering the energy station just up the road. It seemed safe; at least, that was what they were told when she and her two children moved into this property, before her son Albert headed off to college. It’s clean energy, they said. Still, those blinking lights and rolling trucks all night long often put the forty-five-year-old mother on edge. Now that she’d heard an actual explosion from that direction, followed by the cutting of internet and cable, and the blossoming fog consuming the house, she seemed to have horrifying proof positive of the danger after all. Perhaps too late.

Rachel’s breath caught in her chest, and she pulled her daughter into an embrace. Though she didn’t want to scare Sassy, if there really was a disaster unfolding, she wanted her close by.

“Mom?”

“What?”

“Maybe we should check outside before we panic.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.” Rachel had always been the cautious type, and she tightened her arms around the teen. However, Sassy was determined, and slipped out of her mother’s grip. The girl sprinted down the hall, her firm soles thumping on the hardwood. By the time Rachel caught up to her daughter, prepared to scold her, the door was unlocked and thrown open.

Indeed, the fog extended as far as the eye could see. Rachel put aside her reservations, as she was too stunned by the bizarre visage laid before her and her daughter. Sassy, the more intrepid of her family members, shoved both feet into her well-worn black flip-flops where they lay beside the jamb. Once the plastic thongs were threaded in the plush crevice between her big and second toes on each foot, she gingerly stepped out onto the porch and descended the steps.

“Sassy! Stop this. Come back,” Rachel demanded. “There might be-”

“I bet we’d already feel if there was something bad in the air, like a chemical leak,” Sassy said. “Actually, we’d have felt it before we even came outside.”
 Paranoid as she was, Rachel had to admit that was true. Aching now with apprehension at the unknown, she watched her daughter step bravely across the front yard. Strangely, Rachel remembered the freshly mown grass as lush and verdant just the day before, without a single dead sprout. Yet now, beneath the veil of heavy fog, the ground had become like a patchwork quilt: by measures green, brown, and even speckled silver. It was ugly and alien, and Rachel couldn’t make sense of it. Gathering her strength, the woman kicked off her slippers and pressed her ample feet into her own awaiting hot-pink clogs. Once the weight of her long soles had sunken into the molded foam, she power-walked after her daughter, down the porch and into the yard.

“This is really weird,” Sassy commented.

“What happened to the grass?” Rachel complained, taking her daughter’s hand. She gathered her robe tighter around her bust, feeling a chill in the air she couldn’t explain.

“I’m not sure.” With dexterous poise, Sassy edged the front-facing curve of her black flip-flop into the nearest green square of intricately detailed earth. Once she’d shoved the plasticy slab underneath, the colorful layer popped up and flipped over. Had Sassy realized this was not a patch of grass, but rather an entire forested national park she’d just tipped over with her now-gigantic foot, she might have hesitated; however, she didn’t have this information, and so nothing stopped her from doing the same thing to the surrounding patches, in hopes of understanding what they were walking upon.

Once she’d reared her bare foot a little further back along the insole, Sassy was able to use her shoe as a utensil, flipping the pancake-sized shapes of multicolored land off the very foundations. Entire cities were lost in a flash, sent hurtling end-over-end, before crashing back to Earth from the height of Sassy’s ankles. Still she continued jamming her flimsy shoe beneath rocky patches and prying them up. The messier it became, the more the patches started to crack, until some of them, containing whole townships and counties of civilization, tumbled down the cushy, age-weathered flank of the shoe. Some of the sprawling grunge of it oozed under Sassy’s toes, only to be squashed flat once her digits reared back down for purchase against the flip-flop basin. The girl didn’t think twice about these instances, assuming it just meant she’d gotten a little dirt caught between her toes and in the fleshy creases where her soft joints bent, when in reality, by plucking up just a few areas with her flip-flop, she’d managed to lodge hundreds of thousands of broken human lives into the pinkish, oily valleys between her unwashed pedicured toes.

“Where are the neighbors?” Rachel questioned abruptly. She let go of her daughter, and wandered off across the checkerboard-resembling land, unknowingly ending countless lives as her oblong clogs were pressed into the yielding mush of the ground at step at a time. Each stride left a distinct impression of her foot, as though the yard was coated in snow, when of course Rachel’s immense weight was simply compressing the geometry of her shoe into the Earth’s crust with such force that it left a fifteen-mile-long canyon wherever she stepped. Each time she lifted her foot anew from the ground to launch it forward again, a new smattering of demolished cities and forests were caked into the thin treads of her clog. These ruins were exchanged for a new batch everywhere she went, smearing the previous step’s destruction into a whole new territory before adhering a fresh collection between the jutting lines of her foamy footwear.

Rachel was privy to none of that as she casually marched to the end of her property line, or at least the spot she thought the yard ended. Where she was used to seeing the picket fence and her neighbor’s house, though, she saw only more of the infinite fog and the same patchwork ground. If she didn’t know any better, she’d have thought the terrain looked a bit like the view from an airplane, the same thing she’d passively considered when staring out the kitchen window. However, confusion and mounting anxiety caused Rachel to overlook this connection, and with no other recourse, she slammed her shoe down on the Earth, just to kick out her frustrations.

“What is going ON?” While, for the protective mother, this gesture was nothing more than a feisty pounding of the mysteriously crusted grass, for the comparatively tiny citizens below, it was nothing short of doomsday. Jackhammer-style, that hot pink ovular blockade came down from the early morning heavens like a sunrise from hell, battering the same unlucky seventy-five square miles of space again and again. Buildings and mountain chunks alike bopped from ground then miles back up, colliding again with the giantess’s rubbery undersole, then crashing back down again.

Each time Rachel’s clog struck the same spongy spot in the Earth, her foot drove a little deeper, flattened the smoky remains of the cities and suburbs below even smoother, until there was a three-mile-deep trench on that specific place, with the smoldering destruction sculpted perfectly to the exact shape of the colossal blonde’s clog. With millions of lives and hundreds of years, no ordinary human workforce could’ve crafted such a specific model in the Earth as this, yet Rachel had done it in a matter of seconds with just her favorite pink clogs, her athletic size-ten foot, and her antsy nerves.

“Mom, come look at this,” Sassy yelled. Her gentle voice broke the silence again as she stooped down over the place in the ground where she’d just been curiously uprooting grass patches. Using a curled finger, she fished behind the thong of her flip-flop, even rubbing her fingertip into the doughy crevices between her lithe toes. “Please, Mom. Hurry!”

Her parent came running, in turn slamming those destructive feet across a new stretch of land, which was undisturbed on her first stroll across the “yard.” These sites were squelched from existence even faster than Rachel’s first hesitant expedition, when her foam soles had fallen more reluctantly, and thus peeled away from the earth with greater delicacy despite their burly might. Now, the woman jogged with such force that not only was every city obliterated under the surface area of her flip-flops, but surrounding towns for dozens of miles around the impact radius of those deadly pink shoes was blown clean off the map by gale force wind and rising dust clouds, courtesy of Rachel’s carelessly rapid pace.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Look.” When Sassy slid her finger under her foot again, and wiped away the soft glaze of sleep-sweat and remnants of coconut lotion, she noticed something peculiar about the “dirt” she’d accidentally collected into her flip-flop. Though it was tough to see against the black plastic, by scraping her fingernail along the gritty base and even scooping through the healthy wrinkles of her supple bare sole, Sassy was perturbed at what she saw: not grass, nor conventional mud or loam, but something that looked suspiciously like computer chip fragments. At least, that was the first thought in Sassy’s mind. The second thought was much more illogical, yet once the teen had it set in her mind that she wasn’t looking at dirt or even computer chips, but crumpled flecks of skyscraper-dense cities, as though viewed through a microscope, she couldn’t shake the feeling. She brought her finger up to her oceanic blue eye.

“Oh… God…”