There Goes the Neighborhood (Chapter 2) (Patreon)

Two thousand miles away, on the opposite coastline of the country, Albert awoke to a string of texts and calls from friends and relatives, telling him to turn on a TV. Still bleary from sleep, the college student put on the news. What he saw made him want to throw water in his face, since it seemed obvious he wasn’t awake yet and still dreaming. After he’d poured a whole bottle over his head, though, the sight didn’t vanish.

There, on the screen projecting satellite images taken from space, were his own mother and sister in their pajamas, standing at no less than one hundred miles tall, stampeding casually across the countryside, and demolishing everything in their path each time their flip-flops made berth on the terrified populace.

Dumbstruck, Albert clambered out of bed. He pressed his forehead against the TV screen, and watched in utter horror at the optical illusion he thought he was witnessing. Yet after answering the texts and calls he’d received, and flipping through every news station to find the exact same thing displayed, he saw it was no prank or digital construction. This was for real. This was happening. His family, and their house along with it, had truly grown to an unfathomable scale which, unfortunately for the citizens below, the girls were entirely unaware of.

There they were: his lovely worry-wart mother Rachel and his adventuresome younger sister Sassy, each looking a little perplexed by their environment, but still exploring the area surrounding their home, which on its own, had stretched far across the entire ocean and nestled comfortably on the seabed, without either woman noticing, due to the extremity of their growth.

Rachel delivered the most gruesome footprint, literally, as she wandered back and forth across the yard, trampling new cities and states on each trip. In one instance, she even stomped her foot repeatedly, causing earthquakes for every state remotely adjacent to the carnage. Sassy was more thoughtful, but still causing terrible collateral by ripping whole strips of land and city up from the ground and sending them flying upside-down with the convex plastic lip of her flip-flop. Even direr, as she continued on, she took to picking pieces of city out from between her soft toes and sole creases, in some cases making the situation worse by flicking those bits of debris off the ends of her powerful thumbs and sending them careening for an as-yet safe district below.

Their voices boomed like cosmic thunder, in such a deep and overpowering register that they couldn’t be heard clearly, though due to all the satellite and news footage recording them, Albert was able to roughly read their lips. It was clear mother and daughter still had no idea what was happening. Despite his sympathy for the many lives he knew his family was unknowingly ending beneath their fashionable footwear, he still feared for Rachel and Sassy, and what would happen once they discovered what was happening or, worse, once proper authorities got ahold of the situation and held them responsible for the accidental flip-flop genocide.

After sitting rapt in front of the TV for a while, Albert saw his little sister paying closer attention to the contents of her shoe, and the patchwork cities caked into her sole from the flipping. She scratched off a sample and held it up to her eye to examine, and then a look of mortal fear crossed the beautiful miles-wide countenance of the boy’s hundred-mile sister. Sassy cupped a hand over her mouth, while her mother crouched beside her to corroborate the unlikely discovery. Both parent and daughter were rendered speechless by the revelation on Sassy’s fingertip. Then the nineteen-year-old reached into the pocket of her pajama shorts and retrieved her cell phone, staring into the glossy black screen.

Albert jumped for his phone. How had he not thought of this before? Whipping out his own device, he quickly called his sister’s number. When he heard the click of the line, and watched Sassy on the satellite video bring her phone hesitantly up to her ear, Albert slumped against the wall. He was on the phone with a literal world-breaking giantess.

“S-Sassy?” he whispered into the mouthpiece.

“Al?” she answered, her voice shaking, as though about to cry.

“What did you and Mom do?”

“I d-don’t know! Nothing! We just w-woke up, and there was an explosion outside, and Mom thought it was the power plant, and…” Sassy rambled, but quickly turned into babbling, as she started to sob with fear. She pressed off the ground and returned to her full hundred-mile height. Inadvertently, in her phase of hysteria, the girl lost her balance just enough that the thong of her flip-flop slid out from between her slender toes. Once her bare heel landed heavily in the ravaged grime that remained of the urban stretch, Sassy pulled her other ped out of its plastic encasement to even out, and planted the ball of that foot firmly in the Earth. Her toes wedged into a mountain range, with several peaks fitting in between each squishy crevice, but swiftly broke the sturdy geography apart into mushy pebbles by the muscular might of her feminine digits.

“STOP!” Albert cried into the phone. “Don’t MOVE!”

“Oh!” Sassy gasped, and stopped where she’d landed, even though it her feet were poised at an awkward angle. The dust was settling peacefully around her ankles, though to everyone down at the ponytailed blonde’s feet, the destruction was still carrying on as boulders dripped down from where they’d become stuck in the pliable valleys of Sassy’s sole furrows. “S-Sorry… I didn’t mean to! Tell them I didn’t mean to!”

“Let me talk to him,” Rachel insisted. Placing a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, she took the phone and held it to her own ear. “Albert? Is that you?”

“Mom?” the boy uttered in disbelief, just the same as he’d felt talking to his equally titanic sister. He swallowed. “Yes, it’s me.”

“What’s going on, sweetie? Please, tell us something. I don’t know what happened to the neighbors. Their houses disappeared. It’s all gone, I-”

“They didn’t disappear,” Albert choked. “You… you and Sassy, just… grew.”

“What do you mean, grew?”

“I mean I’m looking at you on the TV right now!” he shouted. “And you two just stepped on the whole eastern coast. Stomped it flat. With your… shoes. Because you’re… God, you’re a hundred miles tall, at least.”

Finally, the proof congealed on her daughter’s finger aligned with her son’s dead-serious message, and Rachel couldn’t help her reaction. Sassy cupped her face in her hands, trying to dam the hyperventilating tears, but failed to do so, until the saltwater was pattering down hard as typhoon rain, surely drowning another population. Meanwhile, the phone tumbled out of Rachel’s hand, and clattered into another previously untouched state. Then, as the shock rippled through the paranoid blonde’s body, she went rigid, and fell straight back.

Albert watched his mother faint from emotional duress, prone and unconscious. Her whole luscious hundred-mile golden-tanned body smashed halfway across the Midwest United States before she came to rest. Even two thousand miles away, the boy felt the seismic vibration of his mother’s leviathan form rumbling beneath his bedroom floor.