“Mom, I am so fucking bored.”

    “Honey, this is Toronto. Go shopping or something. These meetings are going to take a while.”

    “I’ve already gone shopping.”

    “Well, you’re in a luxury suite in the most expensive hotel in the country. Ask room service for something fun to do.”

    “Like what? There’s nothing to do.”

    “I’ll be sure to tell Miss Veronica how sad you are in her hotel. I have to get back to the other shareholders now. Have fun honey.”

    Click.

    “Euch!” Autumn says and shuts cellphone. The suite is on the 70th floor of the Kali Corp. Hotel Toronto, and commands a perfect view of the city as the sky fades from deep blue to black and the skyscrapers turn into columns of glowing and twinkling lights. The rooms are stylish and modern, in tones of silver and white and purple and black, at once cool and inviting, sleek and lavish. And boring.

    Autumn is eighteen and heir to one of the largest robotics companies in the world. Her eyes are hazel and her brunette hair is streaked with blue and teal. She's thin and has several tattoos. She’s wearing a new black sequined tunic (750$), and a new pair of black sandals embedded with a large cluster of diamonds (9,000$). The jewels glitter darkly, refracting the black leather. She walks across the carpet of the spacious living room and flops into a padded chair, tossing her feet up onto a coffee table. Her shoes crash into a chess set and send it scattering across the table and onto the carpet. She starts playing on her phone and sighs.

     Something distracts her. A small noise. She looks around for the irritation, and spots movement on the table and carpet. She realizes the hotel's chess pieces are real little people. Fancy. The black and white forms, each roughly two inches tall and naked, are returning to the upturned chessboard, several of them limping. They are of slightly varying heights and wear stylized crowns to denote their pieces. Autumn leans forward and peers down her nose at the sound she was looking for.

     A little black man with a horse crown is wailing and rocking back and forth, clutching at his leg which is bent backwards and bleeding. A little bloody shard of white bone sticks out the side. A few other pieces are trying to console him.

     "Shut up," she tells him, frowning.

     The black King and Queen pat him and hush him worriedly, but he doesn't stop.

     "God, shut up," Autumn says and raises her foot over him.

     All the pieces gasp.

     Autumn stomps down on the little knight. She barely feels him crunch into the carpet, and grinds him under her heel a bit. The other pieces jump out of the way barely in time, and cry out in shock in terror, some spattered with blood.

     Hmm, that was fun. Autumn smiles wanly as the feeling under her foot and the sight of tiny blood brings back some childhood memories. She had outgrown playing with her little toys long ago, or so she had thought. Crushing this one brings back pleasant sensations.

***

    This wasn't supposed to happen. Black King had spent his entire life (five months) training for his position. He graduated from the program and earned his crown. He knows everything there is about the game. He can stand motionless for hours on end. He knows how to serve women with total grace and obedience. But he had never been taught anything about this.

   He had dodged at the last second, but hadn't avoided getting his knight's blood splashed on him. He stares, mouth agape, at the giant sandal before him grinding the body into the carpet. Something slides down his chest. It's a length of intestine. Everyone is either stunned or emptying their stomachs. The expression on the girl's face - a wistful smile. It was so out of place, so twisted.

     King reels as the girl lifts her foot again, revealing a flattened patch of flesh and gore in a red pool in the carpet. He sees Black Queen on the other side, on her back stricken in horror. King realizes now that he has always loved his Queen. She had made every motionless moment standing on that board seem so pleasant. He feels that he knows everything about her, even though they had never spoken. Once, he had dared to look over at her. They had locked eyes for a second, and they looked away quickly, but he had smiled then, and felt her smiling as well.
     Black Queen screams as the bloody sandal lowers over her, slowly this time. She shakes her head, cries, and the giant girl smiles down at her absently. King is cold, weak, helpless. The shoe presses Queen's tiny little arms down, and then squashes her breasts. Somewhere in the back of King`s head it occurs to him that this is the last he will ever see of his one true love, who shrieks and then crunches flat into the carpet beneath the shoe. The girl twists her foot slowly, and when she lifts it King sees an unrecognizable flap of bloody meat, strings of viscera hanging from it. He realizes vaguely that he is throwing up, and that he can`t see because of tears of in his eyes.

***

     Autumn inspects her sole. She giggles softly at what she has reduced the tiny bodies to. She had liked the muffled crunch that had risen from beneath her foot, liked the blood that had oozed so quickly into a stain. She breaths a happy little sigh puts her phone down. Autumn had found her entertainment for the night. She had rediscovered herself, perhaps. How had she ever forgotten how fun killing little toys is?

     She rests her heel on the upturned chess board, keeping her sole raised. "Clean off my shoe," she orders easily. She watches them, all scattered about, glancing at each other nervously. "You serve me, don't you?" She says. "Clean off my fucking shoe." Eventually a few brave ones come forward, five in total, and tentatively reach their tiny little arms to her shoe. She giggles at them. One of them pulls off a chunk of flesh and immediately doubles over and pukes, and she giggles more. She watches them work for a while, and then picks up her phone again and starts playing her game.

     Eventually she sighs and glances down again. "Get down underneath. Get all of it," she says. They look at each other, and eventually three of them get down on their knees and slowly disappear beneath her foot. She grins and lowers her foot slowly, admiring the sparkling of her shoe. The horrified calls of the tinies drift up to her ears. She can feel them this time, with several of them under her foot at once on the hard surface of the board. Autumn presses a bit more and feels them pop. Little guts spurt across the board, bright red on the black and white surface. Love it. She shoves her foot down and they scrunch completely, her shoe sliding and leaving a wide smear on the board. Strips of stretched pink flesh signify their remains. She laughs, and at that all the remaining  pieces flee.

     Autumn claps her hands with a squeal of delight and jumps up. "Yes, run!" she says as she raises her knee up high and stomps down hard on the nearest little person, who sprays out onto the carpet. She gives him a sharp twist and lifts her other foot, stomping down on another little piece. This one blurts all its guts out behind her heel. Autumn laughs. "I was afraid you little shits were going to get boring. This is so much better!" She slams her sandals down one by one, reducing the next two to pulp. She sees a small group running closely together. Two of them smush immediately, and the third one squeaks as his bottom half gets ground into the carpet. Autumn grins as she lifts her foot again and walks across the carpet.

***

     King runs. It's all he can do. The giant girl moves about overhead, the pillars of her legs swooping by around him in his panic-stricken haze. A foot lands briefly in front of him, and he sees white Bishop stuck to the shoe by his entrails, eyes still twitching. Her muscles move, her weight shifts, and then she's gone again. King runs. There's a door in the distance. He doesn't think about where it leads, he just needs to get anywhere but here. He ignores the ground shaking beneath his feet and the distant screams that get cut off and the massive giggles that flood the air around him. In front of him there are some pawns. They turn and see him, beckon him.

     Then he sees their postures change, sees them look up and start to flee. Before he knows whats happening, a shadow passes over him briefly, and then a giant leather-clad heel lands amongst them. The other foot swings in, smashing into the rest who go flying, and then hangs lazily in the air, gore-caked sole hovering huge and insolent before him, as if waiting to decide on which of the two pawns to squish first. She points her toe and presses the tip of her sandal down onto the stomach of one man, who vomits his insides like a fountain. She drags her toe back, smearing his legs into the carpet, before pressing onto his face, crunching the remainder of his body. She grinds him carefully beneath her toe.

     The other pawn crawls away desperately on his stomach, but she rests her bloody sandal right in front of his face. Before he can change directions, her other foot rests right behind him, trapping him between the two. She puts her hands on her hips, staring down, and lifts her toes, covering his body. She lets him squirm helplessly for a bit beneath her, before ripping him in half with her feet. Intestines lay coiled and scattered between her shoes. She turns, pivoting in place, scrunching his remains before walking off.

     Suddenly King stumbles on a gory patch of carpet and falls on his face. Beneath him is a mashed remains of a man, a flattened mockery of a corpse. The rough outline of human skin is stretched and distorted, and organs splay from one side of him like pressed flowers. His flattened face is almost recognizable except for the shattered jaw and the distended skalp where his skull split open. A shattered Rook hat is embedded into it. As King looks up, he sees the girl, her gaze passing him as she scans the room. Her face brightens for a moment and she walks toward him. King screams in terror as the giant leg stretches toward him, the sole covering him. He closes his eyes.

     But nothing happens. He's still here. She had stepped over him, and was pursuing the rest of the pieces through the room. She hadn't noticed him in the bloodstain. He's been pissing himself, and as King stands the urine mixes with the other man's blood dribbling slowly down his legs. He continues for the door.

***

     Autumn stalks around the room, stepping on all the little pieces. Finally it looks like there are only two left, running side-by side. She saunters up behind them, and knocks them over with her foot. She rolls them over with her toe so that they're facing up toward her, and she gives them a moment to think about it before stepping slowly on them under each foot. She feels them crush and then grinds them slowly, already scanning the floor. It looks close to thirty-two little stains in the carpet. There are probably a few hiding under the furniture. Maybe she would find them later.

    That was fun. She notices she has a little blood splattered on her toes. Time for a bath.

     She tosses her sequined tunic on a couch and walks to the bathroom door. There's a rectangular sunken bath in the center of the floor, over two meters long. Everything is made of veined marble, brightly lit by the mirrors and fading to warm shadow in the corners. One entire wall is half-tinted windows, overlooking the night city.

     Autumn bends to unzip the heel of her sandal but she stops when she notices a trail of tiny bloody footprints. A little man had gotten all the way here without her spotting him. He's running now, and Autumn straightens herself and she steps up behind him. He turns and trips onto the hard surface. She smirks and stands over him. It's the black King, the final piece. She thinks about saying something cheesy like "checkmate", but instead, she bends and finishes unzipping her sandal. Remembering a little game she played when she was younger, she pops her heel out and picks up the little man. She watches him wriggle in her fingers, prolonging the fun. "I'm going to put you in my sandal," she says, just to see him flail more. Eventually the sight becomes boring, and she drops him onto the sole of her sandal. She seems him scrambling in panic before disappearing under her heel, and she fastens her shoe up again. He wriggles still. Fun. She presses her heel down minutely, feeling him crack and his struggles weaken.

    After a while of seeing how many snaps and pops she can squeeze from his fragile body, she looks around the room again for something else to entertain her. She shouldn't have killed all the chess pieces so quickly. Oh well, she can always order up some more. They're always coming up with new specialized units that can please in any way, straight from the labs. They aren't openly growing men, she only knows this as a privileged family member of Kali Corp. Someone in her position had access to some very private new stock. Not that she cared about that now. She was just going to obliterate them anyway.

    She notices a sign on the bathroom wall that says she can call room service to get a bath prepared. She looks at the empty bath tub. She looks at her feet. After a moment she walks over to the telephone, and enjoys the warm, wet feeling of the King as he bursts.