“Mayday! Mayday!”

The sirens blared as an automated voice droned, collision warning! Over and over.

The take off had gone smoothly from the crowded Andropolis airport. The calm breeze had offered little turbulence as the double-decker plane ascended toward 30,000 feet.

A bizarre darkness had filled the sky, then everything seemed to return to normal, but the radar had gone haywire as it pinged solid, huge masses in front of them where there appeared to be only blue sky.

“The hell?” Captain Perez had said.

“Uh, yeah. Do we divert our course?” the copilot then asked.

Then, the blue sky opened, as if elevator doors. What they had seen next made no sense!

A huge, black mass, had to be more than a mile wide entered their view. It was shiny, and sheer, and rose straight up, much farther than they could see…and down to the ground farther too.

Then a shockwave of air, and an explosive rumble greeted them.

This was no instrument error! “Mayday! Mayday!” But the captain didn’t know what to tell the tower.

He pulled back on the yoke to try to get out of the collision path with the huge mass, but maneuvering one of the largest planes known to man was not a nimble feat. The momentum of the plane still carried it toward the object that more-than-filled their windows. As they turned, the object filled the passengers’ windows too. It was still miles away, as it garnered quizzical looks from the passengers. Then they heard another boom, and another shockwave!

The plane banked and the people in the right of the plane could see up, up, and more up into the sky, and what now looked like a leg to them. The leg disappeared in a skirt so far in the distance it shifted toward the blue color of atmospheric distortion.

The commuters on the left got a view of the ground, or what should be the ground. Instead they saw a black leather shoe that reached far past where their plane was in the air. They could only imagine the fate of that which was under the pump.

They didn’t see, but her other leg moved forward, the shockwave buffeting the plane once again, almost leveling it in the air. The next thing the passengers saw was the slick black stocking of the leg, filling their view on the right side…more…and more…and more.

The individual strands of the stocking, sheer and minute as they were, seemed hundreds of feet thick as they filled the windows.

Diane barely felt the explosion her shin caused. But, as she visited this place more and more, she became more attuned to…the little things. And the tiny bit of warmth made her smile.

Bryn Dale’s citizens worked in Andropolis, played in Andropolis…but it was nowhere near good enough for them to live in. They called Bryn Dale a bedroom community. It was one of the most opulent suburbs in the country. It was about an hour’s commute to Andropolis proper, but far enough from the hurly burly that they didn’t smell the smog, or have to deal with the crowds.

Strict neighborhood associations made sure a structure was imposed to the city. No “McMansions”—the real kind only. Perfectly manicured lawns. Christmas lights that didn’t blink—but you had to have some Christmas lights, regardless of your faith or lack thereof. And, dear lord, you better have the right kind of mailbox.

All told, Bryn Dale was several square miles of Shangri-La, with property values in the millions per lot.

Many of the homeowners were in Andropolis, working, or being trust fund kids enjoying the music festival. But, many thousands were working from home, or enjoying their status as idle-rich. An army of a few hundred proles also attended to the well-off residents’ yards and homes to make sure they were in top notch…and just a bit better than the neighbors’.

The sky went black for a second. Almost none of the residents or workers noticed. How could that directly concern them anyway?

About a dozen miles in the distance, against all probability…the sky split on the side.

The air whooshed as the pressure changed. The did not notice Diane, or at least they didn’t notice she was a towering, Amazonian goddess. Nor did they comprehend what happened when her leg, around 20 miles high, swung forward.

They did notice when her stiletto heel impacted the ground and took out an opulent shopping center.

One moment, entitled, upper crust shoppers milled about. Then…they didn’t. Their lives ended in a split second. They barely had time to notice the roof caving in on them before the thin heel drove the whole mall and surrounding area into the bedrock of the earth.

The people in the immediate vicinity were flung to their feet, and blasted into the air by a hurricane-force wind. Many of them died in mid air, many splattered into other buildings.

The surrounding buildings shook on their foundation. Many of them collapsed.

The onlookers out of the immediate blast area stared in awe. A sleek, monolith that seemed miles tall descended from heaven and now stood where the totem to commerce known as the mall once was.

A few miles away, in the city of Bryn dale, confusion slowly moved the complacent citizens. They all felt the tremors, but they were far enough away from the impact and their houses-well built enough not to suffer any real damage. Most of them ran out of the house, and looked in the distance at the stiletto heel rising up into the sky. They followed it up. Most did not comprehend what they saw. Then, as they saw the sole blot out their entire sky, many of the women, guys with foot fetishes, and transvestites knew all too well what they saw. It was the sole of a shoe. It was not the very slight scuffing—hundreds of feet deep to them, or the SUV size clumps of dust. The words “Le Petit Mort” in genuine gold leaf were stamped on the sole. They knew that for a their sky, their heaven, had been replaced by one of the most expensive designer shoe brands money could buy.

Their world quickly got darker. The letters got bigger. Tiny, ornate golden letters, now hundreds of feet tall, and embossed dozens of feet deep got bigger, and bigger.

Whether they knew they were going to be sacrificed under a goddess’s sole or not, the entire populace screamed.

Crush!

The entire suburb—gone.

Millions in property lost, thousands of lives. A billow of dust, more than kicked up in any bomb in human history, any volcano rushed toward the surrounding area. The debris tore people apart, flung cars in the road hundreds of feet. The merciless shoe did not stop at the ground. It compressed the rresidue of the human fleas and their homes down to the bedrock once again.

People a few miles away, snapped their head around at the impact of the stiletto, but were mesmerized as her sole descended. There towering past the clouds, her shoe filled their horizon. They felt the air displace too, but it had settled tremendously compared to those in the immediate blast zone. They could see their world reflected in the shiny leather. They could see the shoe bend in the toe section as she relished the feeling of being in the tiny world. And their attention, fully on the deity, now saw her other foot come in the door in slow motion, and knew their world was hers now.

Diane, for her part, did not know if she stepped on completely empty area, or the city of Bryn Dale. She did relish the tiny crunch, and following softness as her shoe settled. Her eyes were on the bigger prize of Andropolis, a few steps away.

Countless tiny citizens vanished under Diane’s brief travel to the “large” city of Andropolis. Her cruel pumps erased several small communities, and moss-like forests in one step.

Now that she had the tiny world’s attention, it was quite clear that they did not, in fact, have hers.

People a few miles from her feet could barely see past her knees as she sauntered around languidly. But people over 50 miles or so away, incidentally 50 miles tall was what some pundits were estimating her height to be, could see all of her.

She was gorgeous. She was sexy. And she had an aloof, oblivious look on her face. And therein, surly lay the answer. She didn’t even know the ant-sized people were down at her feet. Ants, in point of fact, would be humongous monsters to them actually on her scale. The reason she trod on them and killed them by the…it had to be close to a million by now, the reason her sexy, deadly pump claimed their lives and destroyed their property so callously, so indifferently, is that this towering goddess didn’t know they were down there!

After, all, when was the last time you noticed crushing an ant beneath your feet?

They posited, then, that they must get her attention. And, unlike ants, they could do it! They had the technology to pull it off!

Those fortunate enough to survive her foot falls, or the resulting tremors, and wind displacement that issued forth with each step got to work to try to communicate with them. They had hope. They would cope with this nightmare version of the new normal that manifested in the form of this oblivious, sexy goddess.

The logical, reasonable people of this world, however, in no way outnumber the easily frightened, the irrational, the superstitious. A glance at who tends to get elected to office, or how many churches line the streets will attest to that.

In their world, the sky was falling in as close to any literal way possible they could have ever dreamed. In a flash, belief structures were upturned. The very real, very powerful goddess they witnessed first hand usurped vague notions of invisible people who lived in the sky and lorded over them in the afterlife. They did not have the nonsensical metaphor of a burning bush or the like. They had a woman, immense beyond anything they had ever seen besides the planet they clung to desperately, walking around their city. She was their new religion. They worshipped her. The true goddess.

Like most modern, living religions, her appearance, her being, and her actions were wildly interpreted. Many people decided in quick order to worship only parts of her. Her feet were a popular choice as that’s the only part of her that they had truly contacted.

Many, broke her feet down into more discrete parts still. Her stiletto heel was a towering column of rapturous divinity. Her sole was an apocalypse-bringing judge, jury and executioner. Some favored her left foot over her right.

Many saw her as a goddess of fertility, as destructive as she had been, and took advantage of the short skirt to fetishize her panties, and what lie beneath, in both the sense of a religious proxy for a higher being, and in the sense of a sexual preference. She was undeniable woman. A pinup fantasy that both spoke to male lust and female power. The universal symbol for her femininity was her womanhood.

Every body part of hers was a sense of worship for many people who could not possibly comprehend the full being of Her, and like many fetishists who developed a fixation at a young age, they often focused on the first part of Her they saw.

Where some religious zealots who abandoned their previous ways and the logical scientists both put stock in her equally was her eyes. Her lake-sized, blue violet eyes had mysticism to them, and hope in the salivation of their tiny lives lay with her eyes. They needed Her to know that they were down at her feet, under her feet, ready to communicate with Her, worship her, whatever She wanted as long as She noticed them.

As her feet approached the city, her sensual walk seemed slow and sultry…but yet her feet were moving mind-numbingly fast. How could something that big move that fast?

They all paused working, worshipping, going mad, whatever they were doing, to witness her as she approached the city of Andropolis. Whereas the lives she claimed in the burbs totaled an absurd amount, if she took one step on the skyscrapers that were not nearly as tall as her heel, hell not even as tall as the pointed toe of her pump, all hope would be lost!

And it was with resounding cheers they noticed she paused in front of their city and looked down on them from on high.

Her stance was almost as wide as the city even though her skirt constricted her movements and made her feet relatively close together. Her expression changed as she looked down at them. Her aloof, superior expression held, then several square miles of her perfect face transformed into a grin.

The attention of the tiny citizens was ripped away from her face to her foot once again.

TAP.

Most of the in the heart of the city couldn’t see her feet because of the skyscrapers blocking the view. That changed as she lifted her foot slightly, about a mile and a half high, and let it drop. Not a slam, not even a step, a tap. Her tap sent ripples through the city and shook foundations again. The proud, well-designed edifices stood their ground against the colossus. They rippled but did not break. The gem-like, shiny structures distorted and shook, creaked and groaned, but stood thrusting into the sky, the tallest things until a few minutes ago the tiny citizens had ever experienced.

Her smile expanded and teeth that seemed almost as big as, or possibly bigger than, any of their buildings showed.