Chapter 11

    Damien looks up through teary eyes, squinting as the sun starts to sink below the distant mountains.

    Jacqueline pulls the trigger. There's a tearing, shifting noise as matter and mass begins to rearrange. He watches in horror as the entire building shrinks, the house he spent so much of his life in, dwindling away from sight.

    "No... no..." he whispers.

    "Yep," Jacqueline says. "Don't worry, it’s still there. Shall we take a look?"

    Suddenly the air is squeezed from Damien's chest as Jacqueline's massive finger and thumb pinch him up. His eyes bulge from his head as the ground shoots away from beneath him in a second. He would have gasped if he could, but then his vision is filled with Jacqueline's giant, piercing blue eyes. He can see every detail of her skin, every eyelash and every swirl and canyon of her iris. She overwhelms him completely.

    "You're actually quite cute all shrunken down like that, little one," Jacqueline says as she strolls down the road and then across the bare earth where the house had once stood. It stands only a few inches tall now, just a miniature dollhouse in a barren patch of dirt. "Finally, I can just crush the whole thing under my shoe and be done with it," she says, lifting one high heel over the tiny house. In the low evening sun, her shadow stretches before her.

    "No no stop!" Damien wheezes from the tight grip of her fingers. "My dad, he's still in there!"

    "Oh yes, that's right isn't it?” Jacqueline says, pausing. She puts her foot back on the ground. “I suppose I can let you fetch him out... If you beg a bit more." Jacqueline turns her hand and opens her fingers, letting Damien fall into her palm.

    It takes him a second to gain his breath before he presses his lips to her palm. "Please let me save him Jacqueline, please... I beg you..."

    "Are you sure you want me to do that? It may be hard to take care of him now, you know. I could just squash him and save you the trouble?" Jacqueline says.

    "No! Please let me save him," Damien cries.

    Jacqueline shrugs. "Thirty seconds," she says. Then she lowers her palm to the ground and dumps him in his own front lawn. "Count it off Marlee, would you?"

    Damien gasps as he hits the ground, but then he scrambles to his feet. He’s in front of his old house again, and with it back to scale, for a second it’s almost like everything is normal. Except that it’s in the middle of barren landscape. Pepsi jumps around him, barking.

    "Thirty," Marlee says, staring at her wristwatch. "Twenty-nine."

    Damien sprints to his front door. It’s still ajar from earlier and he barrels through it, almost losing his balance as he scrambles through the living room.

    "Twenty-seven," the voice booms through the house.

    He clatters up the stairs, turns at the top, down the hall and then bursts into his father's room.

    "Damien!" his father cries, face red in alarm. "What’s going on? What's happening?"

    "Dad!" Damien shouts, rushing to his side. "We have to go, we have to get out of here!"

    "Twenty-one."

    "What? But-

    Suddenly the ceiling bends and creaks under a huge weight, dust falling. Damien reaches for his father. "Oh god- D-dad, we have to get you out of here or we'll die, its Jacqueline, she’s, fuck we don't have time-”

    "Sixteen."

    "What? I can't, Damien, I can't move like this, you-”

    Damien grabs his father under the shoulders and tries to lift and drag him at the same time toward the door. There's a splintering crack as the rafters break and then all the windows shatter at the same time. The house groans loudly and shifts, the room tilting crazily. Damien falls and they both spill onto the floor in a tangled heap on top of the sheets.

    "Damien!" his father yells in pain.

    "Ten."

    Damien tries to lift his father again. Instead the man bats his arms away and looks him in the face. His eyes are bulging and bloodshot in his flushed face.

    "Damien, I- y-you should just go."

    "Seven."

   “But-”

    "Better go now, son."

    "Six."

    A section of roof falls to the floor with crash, covering them in debris and dust. In the gaping hole where the ceiling was, the black sole of Jacqueline's massive high heel shoe rests on the house directly above them.

    “Five.”

    They can hear her chuckling, even from here. Damien tries to not to look up as he frantically shoves the sheets and rubble off him and gets to his knees.

    “Four.”

    "O...okay." Damien’s face is pale and taut as he makes his way to the door. He pauses and looks back.

    "Three."

    His father nods back to him from on the floor, looking more broken but yet more alive than he has in months.

    "Two."

    Damien hurtles down the stairs as the building crumbles around him. He tries not to look at the ruins of it now, tries to ignore the memories that flood into his mind as he rushes through the house he grew up in. He doesn't want to remember it like this later. If there is a later.

    “One.”

    As soon as he sprints through front door, a massive booming crash signals the destruction of his home. A gust of wind pushes him face-first onto the ground, and wood splinters fly all around him. He looks back just in time to see the entire structure collapse and flatten beneath Jacqueline’s enormous, god-like pump. The building that was his home is now just a crater of boards and insulation and rubble. A dust plume rises and Damien looks way, way up and sees Jacqueline grinning in the sky.

    She shifts her weight, leaning forward slightly, and lifts her heel. Her shapely calf moves side to side as she begins to grind her foot into the ruins, her stockings sparkling slightly in the last sliver of evening sun. The remains of the house crunch and shatter under her. "Mmm,” she hums. "That was good.” She squints as she looks down, touching her headset. “I can hear you crying little one, so I know you made it out. Ah, there you are.” She bends down to look at him closely, keeping her feet planted. “Oh, no father? That’s a shame. Oh well, you tried. At least he died in his own home. I guess you won't get that same luxury though. Oh well.”

    Curled up on the ground, Damien buries his face in his hands and continues to cry.

    “Will you miss him?” Jacqueline says. “Do you want to have a funeral of some sort? I wonder if we can find him." She tilts her pump back on the heel and looks underneath. "Oh, what's this? Is that him stuck to my shoe?" She laughs and turns her raised sole to face Damien. “How convenient.”

    "No, no please..." He says between sobs. He tries to hide his face in his hands, but through his fingers he sees the white sheets that his father was tangled in hanging from her sole like curtains, soaked and dripping with blood. Jacqueline reaches down and pinches a clean corner of the sheet, tugging on it daintily as if it was a scrap of tissue. Damien watches as it peels away and a clump of intestines and other organs slide out, along with a mostly intact arm that tumbles into the debris. Left on her shoe is a squashed bloody t-shirt, almost unrecognizable with the patches of flesh pressed into the surface. A chunky, pink splatter marks where his head had burst and smeared. The rest of him lies in a wet heap among the broken boards and wreckage. Damien begins dry heaving again.

    Jacqueline looks at the little cloth, smirks, and folds the clean part over and uses it to carefully wipe off her sole until its almost dry. Then she rolls the bloody cloth into a ball between her finger and thumb and drops it.

    Damien gasps for breath, unable to vomit any more, quivering and crying.

    "No funeral then I suppose," Jacqueline says, sighing contentedly as she stands up. "There's just you left now, isn't there? I’ve had everything else related to you crushed. All gone."

    Damien emits a low moan. It slowly turns into a tortured growl, rising in pitch until he's screaming. Its a shrill and ugly sound.

    Jacqueline taps her foot. She listens to his little wails in her headset and crosses her arms. "I guess there's nothing left but to step on you now, is there?"