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The sight of Mr. Duncan’s student’s landscape of a foot becoming the new horizon on the curvature of the earth itself felt, somehow, horrifyingly natural in this instant. Like an inevitability. The history teacher had long suspected something was approaching which might pull a final curtain on mankind. He just never assumed it would originate from a point so near to home, from a caring young woman he’d taught so many times before in his classroom with her bright eyes and raised hand.

            But his expectations were irrelevant. That this could be the same Andrea, now looming high enough that she’d be visible from the moon, was merely a footnote in the completion of mounting probability. The conclusion of humanity was here, and apparently, he was the only one with his eyes open wide enough to notice.

            The man raised his arms above his head, cleared his throat, and proclaimed.

            “Look! Look at her!” Mr. Duncan cried out at the top of his lungs, feeling his voice mostly lost to the blaring of car horns and screaming populace. “Don’t you see what’s happening? This is the end. She is the end! We’re standing around in wonder, as though we want to be near, as though we aren’t afraid of what she means for us. We’re watching the coming of the apocalypse, my friends. The end of life as we know it, the end of life on the planet, and the end of anything that… isn’t her.”

            Mr. Duncan continued to babble, earning a few listeners here and there, most of them too dazed and shell-shocked by the cataclysm of Andrea’s bronze, vortex-printed toes to process his words. They were lost in the fog.

            “Attention, everyone,” Andrea said, casting her gaze for miles around, such that every city in earshot could appreciate her magnificent form. She cleared her throat for emphasis and commenced a speech which transcended borders. “I know it must all be a lot to take in, seeing someone so big and strong as me above all of you, wiping out your cities with one step. But try to think about it from my point of view, hard as that might be. This is all new for me, too. And I think it’s going to be good. Not good for you, obviously, but for me and… my world. Since this is my world now, and you’re all… my people. My itty, bitty, dust-spot people, who go where I want, sometimes die when I want them to, and most importantly, live for me. Me: Andrea, your new goddess. Got it, little ones?”

            She didn’t wait for an answer, nor would she have been able to hear any of the various throngs of humanity squealing in either adoration or revolt. Their agreement with her new order as Earth’s queen wasn’t necessary; Andrea just liked the idea of them knowing what was going to happen to them, and why. She supposed she made a good goddess, in that respect. With every passing second, it became easier to think of herself as their deity.

            Andrea ascended back to her full height. It was difficult to make out individual details of her toy Earth now, but she knew she’d manage by feeling out whatever she needed with her toes.

            She adjusted her stance, dragging her remaining flip-flop across a lake and another mountain range. The barely-noticeable puddle of water splashed a mile high and drowned an adjacent town; the tumbling crags of rock which didn’t become lodged in the hot-pink sky of Andrea’s shoe were left to rain down as megaton hail upon the unfortunate cities below. The young woman’s toes, paled by the effort, released their grip on the thong of the limp footwear. Her shoe became a fluttering pink meteor as it flopped to rest, sinking down over thirty square miles of farmland and suburb and dragging the crying population and their useless defenses down into the crater below the discarded footwear.

            That foot, now just as free as its twin, stamped down hard into the saturated ground with the same force generated during Andrea’s “fight” with the army. At her new seventy-mile stature, such a collision of heel to Earth actually caused the planet to shake. Amused at her own unknown strength, Andrea coquettishly cupped her fingers to her lips as she pondered the towns on the opposite side of the planet which were no-doubt affected by that single clomping declaration of her bare-foot leadership over humanity.

            The girl let her foot hover now over a new stretch of land not yet touched by her destructive skin and the earth-breaking muscle behind it. Shadow danced across miles in a flash between the grand canyon-crevices of her toes. Bored of this mounting anticipation for the poor, sobbing civilians in the streets below with no hope of escaping the coming force, Andrea set her heel down. She took her time with this city, laying her foot down mile-by-mile, from the back to the front.

            “Ready or not…” Andrea snickered, giving her dark ponytail a flighty toss. “…here I come!”

            Her marshmallowy sole, so silky and luxurious in its texture, folded down from an arched flex to a wrinkle-bunching bulwark. The makeshift carpet of the cityscapes crunched quietly into the creases of her peachy skin, shaping the destruction into a mold of her body, as though she’d set her foot into pure, fresh-fallen snow. An orb-like divet sunk into the earth below her heel as she pivoted her weight, twisting and scrunching multiple ecosystems at once into her foot.

            At last her toes met their mark. Each one gaped and closed, ensnaring dozens of buildings and office parks into the fleshy folds between every olive digit. It was likely she held close to a thousand human lives, if only briefly, thrashing and wailing for help in the dark grip between her toes before the steel structures were pulverized as easily as melting ice amidst her hot skin.

            Her other foot lifted, snidely pausing as the first had, and crushed the remainder of her home city’s downtown between writhing toes. She snatched up what remained between her big and second toes, letting the papery architecture be preserved for just a few more fleeting instants between her buttery digits before destruction.

            “I guess this is one way to get a massage, if you just can’t find someone tall enough to give you one,” Andrea shrugged, laughing to herself. She only hoped some of the puny inhabitants below were picking up on her joking jabs at their expense. The point of her rule would only be driven home if they could all hear the sheer elation she took in their mass-scale undoing. If they could know, once and for all, that she was not here to nurture them, but to make their contemptible, fingernail-sized accomplishments into a middling source of fleeting comfort to her worship-deserving body.

            Between Andrea’s toes, in the cluster of buildings and street so cleanly plucked from the very earth, was a city block clogged by crunched buildings and piled cars. Within one of those cars near the top of the heap, overturned but nonetheless intact, was Mr. Duncan: concussed, bleary, but awake. He clambered upside-down to the broken window of his vehicle and watched the light fading fast between the mile-high cliff sides of his beautiful student’s velvety toes beyond. It was truly like watching the opening and closing of the earth itself, in this valley of shadow.

            When, in fact, it was simply the dexterous grip of a happy-go-lucky student and her meticulously pedicured naked foot longer than the entire city which had been her home for nearly two decades. Already Mr. Duncan could tell she was clenching her toes, as the buildings melded together by atomic pressure and literally shattered via the strength of the seventy-mile goddess.

            With the sealing away of that light, Mr. Duncan could trace a humbling relationship between his theories on the end of the world and this bombshell brunette’s playful foot. The man tried to call out the last lines of his sermon on the end of times, but found he was out of words, and out of listeners, as the young woman smashed the last remnants of her town amidst her toes and allowed the stony crumbs of it to spill out down the mountainside of her upturned sole, glinting in the sun.

            “God, am I ever glad I didn’t skip science class today, huh?” Andrea murmured triumphantly to herself. She was truly unable now to imagine how different and pointless an existence she might have led, and the Earth itself in turn might have led, had she not unwittingly volunteered to be the new goddess of her universe. It was a sad thought, and one she quickly set aside in favor of giggling wonderment about the location of the next-largest city on Earth, so she and her holy feet could bestow a visit.

            It was only fair to spread the joy, after all.

 

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