There Goes the Neighborhood (Chapter 6) (Patreon)

“Sassy, STOP!” Rachel screamed. She watched chunks of earth ripped up and scattered through the air as her daughter’s colossal bare foot impacted the ground. When Sassy lifted her ped off the muddy remains, she clenched her toes, smearing the grisly rubble up and over the hills, simultaneously ravaging other cities surrounding her footprint and painting their destruction into the fleshy crevices between her beady digits.

“Mom, you’re doing the same thing right now. Look at your feet,” Sassy pointed out. She scraped the collected cities off her own foot and onto a patch of rocky terrain as though it was a welcome mat, then dipped her toes down for another satisfying smack.

Before Rachel could reach out to physically restrain her child, she was struck by what Sassy said. Trembling, the worry-wart mother looked down, and saw her feet were indeed decorated with crunchy urban sprawl and dusted mountains, albeit not so deliberately and thickly as Sassy’s. Not to mention soaked from her trudge across the Atlantic, which turned the burning micro-city remnants into greasy mud pies. Turning around, though, she discovered a far worse sight.

Her entire trail from America, off the coast and around the house, was plainly visible. Her dense ovular prints were smeared into the land itself, and the ocean was in a state of churning unrest, as though a hurricane swirled everywhere Rachel had dunked her feet to take another step. Once she’d emerged from the ocean, she’d not only drowned the entire coastline, but continually tracked and dripped thousands of gallons of saltwater in her wake, causing new bodies of water to fill in her footprints. In effect, Rachel had created dozens of new European lakes where cities once stood, each one in the shape of her large, elegant foot.

“Oh, God… No, no, no… This isn’t happening!” It was too much horror to bear. Rachel’s first instinct was to leap away and return to the house, before she could inflict more damage. Yet to reach the door in the first place, she’d have to retrace her steps and nearly double the collateral damage, which would mean doubling the human casualties crushed like microbes beneath her unforgiving landscape-sized soles.

Rachel couldn’t help but think of them all now: hundreds of thousands more would have to be squished, if she was going to reach the house and spare the others surrounding her. Only through their sacrifice, by trampling them with the planetoid toes and cramming them into her sole-creases with each heavy step, could she end the carnage. A tear rolled down her cheek, and once the first one fell, the floodgates were open. Try as she might, Rachel could only do so much to dam her tears. They fell like hard rain, adding to the flooding caused by her shuffle through the ocean.

And yet here Sassy was, actively causing more terrible tragedy under her feet, just for the sake of feeling like a goddess. Rachel was deeply conflicted, knowing she’d only make the situation worse by trying to stop her daughter, but she had to do something. She wiped away the tears, then rushed to her offspring.

“Sassy, I said stop it, NOW. I am your mother, and you will LISTEN to me, no matter how old you are, and no matter how tall you’ve GOTTEN!” Rachel cried, and took hold of her daughter’s ankles to resist her next attempt to plop her feet down in the smoldering city-shaped muck yet again. Though she didn’t want to harm Sassy, this was necessary to prevent further bloodshed of the insectoid people down below. Rachel had to forget about the fact that she was now kneeling on the earth, thereby crushing dual swaths of land flat beneath her shins and inverted feet, though she at least did her best not to wiggle her toes too much, for fear of capturing a few European villages between each doughy valley.

“Hey… Mom, what are you doing? You’re gonna make me pull a muscle!” Sassy complained, obviously having officially stopped caring about the welfare of speck-like humanity over her own body. She tussled and wrenched, trying to pull her legs out of her mother’s grasp, but Rachel had a strong sense of balance and was surprisingly toned for a woman of her age, which allowed her to hang onto Sassy’s soft lower calves.

The image of their awkward struggle would’ve seemed humorous, if it wasn’t for the fact that it was continuing to smash civilizations down below. Rachel recalled a similar scenario from Sassy’s youth years before, when her daughter refused to put on her shoes to go to a check-up at the doctor, which resulted in the woman gently fighting to cram the precocious girl’s petite peds inside her footwear. Once again, and newly a young adult, Sassy was lavishing in the benefits of being shoeless, yet the consequences were more catastrophic than any missed appointment.

For several seconds, the mother and daughter struggled, gritting their teeth and occasionally grunting with the effort. Though Rachel was mostly successful in holding her daughter’s feet off the ground, several times Sassy managed to wrestle her heels into the earth, and once they made berth, it was a powerful impact due to her thrusting motion. The girl’s quads and glutes were fully tensed, swollen from effort, and with a final push, she mustered the strength to break out of Rachel’s grip.

Once Sassy was free, though, she simply stood back up. Rachel did the same.

They stared one another down, and Sassy’s gaze shifted between her stern parent’s countenance and their twin sets of dirty, destruction-coated island-length feet. Why couldn’t her mother understand? Why couldn’t she see the big picture? Every sci-fi book, every history text, and every moral lesson Sassy had ever learned now coalesced in her mind: the folly of mankind had given her and her mother unimaginable power and size. Thus, the world was theirs to do with as they pleased. Former rules no longer applied. Some way or another, Sassy knew she had to show her mother their new place in the sky, above the world, with the helpless pleading masses genuflected beneath their hallowed naked feet.

Starting with her image. To be a true goddess, after all, one had to look the part.

“I’m going inside, Mom,” Sassy solemnly informed her. “Sorry.”

Surprised, Rachel nodded. She wanted to punish her daughter for everything she’d just done, but she was so glad to hear she’d apparently convinced the girl to stop this rampage, she merely stepped aside. Rachel watched Sassy’s balletic strides. The ball of her foot led the charge, burrowing down into the ground, before following with the pert toes and languid soles. Though Rachel hoped her daughter would at least try to limit her footsteps to locations she’d already trod upon, there was no such luck.

If anything, Sassy went out of her way to seek fresh ground on the European coastline to pancake underfoot. By the time she reached the bay again, the girl’s soles were dirtied once again with flecks of broken forest, crushed stone, and sparkles of shattered urban stretch, all mashed like body glitter into the intimate furrows of her meaty, baby-soft undersides. Sassy splashed through the puddle of the Atlantic, reached the house, and re-entered with a dramatic slam of the screen door that blasted tornado wind across two whole continents.