There Goes the Neighborhood (Chapter 5) (Patreon)

Rachel hung up the phone and placed it in the pocket of her fluffy robe. She tugged the sweeping flaps tight again around her waist, which accidentally cast another blazing gale across the battered cities surrounding her clogs, though the woman seemed not to notice. Her focus was narrowed off the coastline, around the side of the house. Though Rachel wasn’t a geography wiz, she knew enough to get started.

Taking a deep breath, she lurched forward to walk, then halted again. It would be impossible to spare everyone in the places where she stepped, but perhaps she could lessen the burden by removing her shoes. That would give some of those poor helpless people the chance to be swallowed up relatively unharmed inside her deep arch, instead of guaranteed a uniform trampling by the hard tread of her clog. Collateral was inevitable, and required, in order to stop Sassy from turning the entire Earth into her sandbox playground.

Slowly, Rachel withdrew her feet one by one from their flip-flops. She unflossed the thong from between her dexterous toes and, wringing her digits with anticipatory anxiety at the inevitable crushing to come, she planted each of her nude bare feet upon the ground.

Instantaneously, once-whole cities were mulched and reshaped to the subtle geometry of her mature yet shapely ped’s underside, whether they fell under a squishy flesh wrinkle or the unforgiving globe of the ball of her foot. Prickly metallic skylines tickled Rachel’s sole crevices. Uncomfortable goose bumps shot up her body from heel to scalp, akin to the disgusting feeling of tramping through underwater seaweed. Of course, the sensation was tenfold worse, because she knew that it wasn’t harmless aquatic plant life beneath her pinkish bare soles, but rather wide spans of undeserving life soon to be crunched to organic lint in the furrows of her instep.

Suddenly, Rachel spotted something else: a trail of footprints, conspicuously fourteen miles long each, give or take, leading away off the coast. All the woman had to do was literally trace her daughter’s path. Gingerly, but grateful for her yoga training improving her balance, Rachel set off from America toward Europe, and took special care to make no new imprints in the ground, only laying each bare foot inside where Sassy’s soles had previously crunched the Earth.

Unfortunately, the plan was flawed in that Rachel was taller than her daughter, and therefore possessed longer and roomier feet. This meant the colossal mother’s toes spilled over the ovular blast zone of each impact hole, try as she might to step lightly as a ballerina.

Across the ocean, Rachel traveled, leaning on the wall of the house for support, until she arrived at the back porch. Squinting through the fog, she could now make out the definite shape of her daughter, just as her son had described: crouching innocently on the ground, with her legs spread wide and her feet settled into the earth, while her hands were kept in constant busy motion, plucking and scraping up new interesting sights at the expense of Europe’s infrastructure. In a matter of minutes on her hands and knees with her fingers in the dirt, Sassy had set the continent back a whole age.

“SASSY, what do you think you’re doing?” Rachel scowled. It almost felt silly to speak to her nineteen-year-old daughter this way, as though she was a disobedient schoolchild again wearing wet galoshes through the house. Indeed, Sassy had always been an adventurous and free-spirited type of girl, but until the two had grown to one hundred miles tall, Rachel never dreamed that attitude would translate to her daughter’s winsome disregard for the safety of microscopic humanity.

“I’m… just checking it out, Mom. Sorry…” Sassy guiltily said, and hung her head. However, she didn’t put down the lump of urban crunch she’d unearthed, and even started patting it between her twin palms as though it was a ball of cookie dough. Each time she tossed it between her curved fingers, a few hundred more buildings were sent flying off the miniature planetoid and into the stratosphere.

“Those are people down there. REAL people, dear. You’re destroying their cities! Don’t you see?” Rachel crowed. She stepped closer to her daughter, but her footsteps weren’t lining up as cleanly with Sassy’s prints now, and the prodigious mother’s feet were gradually cresting out of the craters, until Rachel was simply squashing new stretches of Europe on her own. “Maybe you’re just in shock. You haven’t processed what’s happened yet. But believe me, honey, you’ve got to stop what you’re doing, and-”

“I know what I’m doing, Mom. I… understand these are little people down here. In my hands, and under my shoes…” Sassy interrupted, though her tone was measured and contemplative. “I just… had to get a look at them for myself. I’m sorry.”

At last she set down the doughball of flaming mush and wiped her hands, but she didn’t stand up. If anything, the situation was worsened when she shuffled around to meet her mother’s gaze, which ensured that her feet were dragged on a wide fanning arc across Europe. Her toes scrunched, damming up the piling debris, until she faced Rachel again. Sassy’s youthful soles caked their way through civilization. When she was finished, most of the western quadrant of the continent was in a state of grisly disarray, with much of the universal carnage smeared like garden soil grime across Sassy’s smooth legs and bare sun-kissed feet.

“Sorry won’t undo all of this damage, young lady!” Rachel yelled. She was in full disciplinarian mode now, but she didn’t care; something had to be done about Sassy’s behavior. With her fists on her hips, Rachel stomped the final two paces toward her child, inadvertently pounding another few dozen square miles of spotless European metropolis into a fine paste.

The plush undersides of Rachel’s feet now resembled an ecosystem unto themselves, with thousands of trees, office buildings, cottages, and whole city blocks tattooed into her skin via sheer bracing impact. However, her rage and maternal instinct was in such full force, she was completely unaware of anything else.

“Mom… if you didn’t notice, our house kind of already did a bunch of “damage” on its own!” Sassy pointed out. Petulant an argument though it was, Rachel couldn’t argue with it. “And I think you’re right about that power plant! They must have done something to make us grow, and cause all of this. So it’s not our fault, it’s theirs! And plus, how often will you get a chance like this in your life, to look at the world from this high up, feeling this big and powerful and… you know, godlike! I know those are little people, in their own little world, but I still can’t help it. I’ve got to know what it’s like. I HAVE to do this!”

With that, Sassy stood upright again, looked down at the land, and stomped her magnificently deific bare foot down so hard that it sent seismic shockwaves to every bordering country. The burning loam of Europe squished up like mud between her marshmallow toes.