There Goes the Neighborhood (Chapter 11) (Patreon)

Albert sunk to the floor in the wake of his sister’s world-spanning speech declaring her intention to rule humanity after making a grisly warning out of the nation’s capital. Trembling, he switched off the TV and his computer, since the satellite images of Rachel and Sassy’s four-hundred-mile shadows framed against the sky were on the verge of making the young man pass out from shock. Unfortunately, though, even by trying to blot out the images, he could still hear his sister’s voice howling in the wind. Her laughter rattled the walls of his dorm room, despite the fact that she was standing on the opposite side of the country.

Knowing he couldn’t hide from the horrible truth any longer, Albert ventured outside of his room finally, expecting to find an angry mob ready to attack him because his family was beginning a global takeover after their exploding house and destructive sixty-mile-long feet had crushed hundreds of thousands of lives into ash smeared across their soles. However, the halls were empty, and once Albert made his way outside, he understood why. The streets were crowded with citizens, not a one of them moving, except to look straight up at the cloudy horizon. Despite all the distance between them, the sheer enormity of Rachel and Sassy’s figures meant that Albert could actually see the shapes of his mother and sister remarkably plainly, almost as though they were standing just down the street at normal size, only with cities and mountain ranges planted between them, reminding him how truly godlike his mom and sibling had become.

His jaw dropped, watching as Sassy held her fist in the air, then raised her leg skyward as though preparing for a peaceful yoga-style lunge, only to instead bring her spike-backed shoe careening back to Earth so swiftly and relentlessly that Albert could’ve sworn he felt the shockwave quaking the campus a split-second before his sister’s enormous foot even impacted the ground again. If any part of him disbelieved the insane news footage, he now had literally seen his bubbly teen-queen sister stomp repeatedly on a once-thriving metropolis, surely turning it to smoking pulp with only one meteoric drop from her gritty high-heeled sole, but just for good measure, she’d trampled it a second time, even twisting her foot now as though extinguishing a cigarette butt, only it was all of Washington D.C. under her weight.

After all, Rachel and Sassy were only about one-seventh the length of the nation from coast-to-coast now: a distance they could probably walk across in a dozen short steps. Albert could hardly wrap his mind around that: to think even though his mother and sister were standing about three thousand miles away, a few steps, like crossing an average-sized room, would bring them suddenly to him. Though ironically, he’d be unable to see them, since destruction-smeared soles the scale of whole provinces would darken the sky before smashing him and all his classmates into pancakes, specks of ashy lint indistinguishable from the sparkles decorating Sassy’s stiletto.

His sister was still busily making an example of Washington. Earthquakes of varying severity ripped across the country with each pivot from her shoe, even making the pebbles bounce around Albert. He struggled to keep from falling, as did everyone around him, but they did so anyway, too terrified of looking away and missing a moment of the prophetic giantesses’ rise to power. The silken folds of her thigh-bearing prom dress billowed each time Sassy took another step atop the city, sending out mighty cyclone winds that, coupled with the residual shivering from her astronomic feet, made the atmosphere of Albert’s university campus seem like the end of a calm before the storm. And certainly just one of these women alone was more destructive than any known natural disasters combined, yet there were two of them, which made Sassy’s announcement that everyone would have to fall in line or die under her shoe seem more of an apocalyptic statement.

The breeze picked up again when Albert saw his mother pacing and wincing, distraught, before throwing herself into another embrace around Sassy, if only to make one last attempt to prevent more genocide beneath the girl’s sleek and stylish footwear, which had so easily eliminated foes and strangers alike, turning them instantly to dust, more efficiently than any atomic bomb could have. Again the Earth shook while the colossal mother and daughter tussled.

“NO!” Rachel’s voice boomed with just as much deific authority as her child’s, despite the struggle to hold Sassy back from crushing anything else. “This… can’t happen. Listen to me, everyone down there! We… can… fix this! It doesn’t have to be this way. I know we can come to an arrangement. Please, no one else has to get hurt. Just… help us! Do whatever you have to, return us to normal, and I swear I won’t let this happen again. Sassy, STOP!”