“Uh, I’m sorry? You said, ‘crush them’?”

“Look, Mom, I need them to be crushed for this to work. Those… ants.”

Meanwhile, the students on the ground, meandering around and near the box had suddenly perked up as the booming voice of the giantess that nearly stepped on the group during her first lap around the room said something that most certainly did not inspire confidence.

“Hol’ up, hol’ up, what?! What’d she say?” yelled Ryan, who beseeched Ms. Wraith with fear in his eyes. “Did she just say ‘crush us’?” 

Iasmin interjected, “No, wait, what? Huh? Why would she say that? Ms. Wraith, why would she say that?!”

Ms. Wraith had no clue as Sharon had one foot atop the other in an act of benign confusion. She was transfixed by those feet, not out of any affinity or fondness for women’s feet, but just out of fear and consternation once again of the power they wielded. She thought of Micah, and began to ponder, just what exactly was that boy trying to do?

The nylon’d feet of Sharon Kingsley stood still perhaps a foot away from the group, and by extension the device. They were small, yes, but they should still be visible from the size of someone like Sharon. Whether they would be identified as humans was a different matter entirely. Sharon inquired further in confusion, and Micah, still struggling to justify precisely why he wanted this done, began to stammer, thus making his miniscule voice even more difficult to hear for the titaness: “Ah, uh, well, the thing it, it, like, the machine, it won’t, like, work if there are any living things nearby. S-small living things. Like, ah, bugs. So, you’ll have to crush them.”

“But aren’t you a small living thing?”

Micah stammered once again, “Shoot, well, ah, yeah, but I’m close enough to you that you should be able to shield me from any ill effects.”

“Ah…” said Ms. Kingsley, still fairly unsure of the whole ordeal. “Well, I still don’t know… didn’t you say the rest of your class was shrunken? We would need to make sure they’re safe.”

“Oh, don’t worry about them, they shrunk in a different room. They should be fine.”

 Ms. Kingsley rubbed her chin and put her empty hand on her hip. Then, with expert precision and care, she raised the hand within which Micah stood up to her shoulder, depositing him upon her blazer.

“Okay… hold on tight, honey. Grab my hair if you need to.”

And she raised her right foot.

As panic and fear spread through the ranks of the children, Ms. Wraith could recognize the acquiescing expression in the eyes of the god-like woman who stood above them. She could see them as human. She had to be able to identify these people as human, couldn’t she? She just had to!

But the lifting of one foot in the group’s direction was not the most inspiring act of confidence. As a matter of fact, this foot raising up, eclipsing the small group of students was enough to cease any conversation or speculation. Ms. Wraith knew not whether Sharon herself was aware, but every one of them could see there, plastered on the soul of the shin sock, was a splotch of red. Guts, blood, and skin, smeared and distorted to the point of simply being meat, unidentifiable. It was most likely an accident, but they still knew that they were face to face with one who had managed to take a life and was now intending to do so again.

Ms. Wraith took executive command.

“EVERYONE, RUN!”

And then they ran out, in all different directions.

Ms. Wraith saw the group, many of whom were her own students, all split up, some of them trying to stay with their cliques. The largest such group of cheerleaders had managed to link up through nonverbal communication and were now dashing their way across the linoleum floor. Unfortunately for them, Sharon was quite the efficient giantess, and she chose to target first the most populous group of “ants”. Her foot came down, and Ms. Wraith’s heart leapt into her throat as she saw her own pupils, those she had been trusted to train and nurture and cultivate, hold their hands up in fear as the apocalyptically huge ceiling of flesh and fabric descended upon them, reducing the group to nothing but dead cells and bits of bone and blood. Once Sharon raised her foot from the sight of her first kill(s), a thin strand of the viscera connected to the flesh before snapping. It was no longer possible to even differentiate between the four girls any longer; they had become one in their demise. On the bright side, it was easier to differentiate between their remains and the remains of the poor victim that had already peppered Sharon’s sole.

“Oh, oh!” Ms. Wraith could only croak, holding her hand to her mouth and collapsing herself as she witnessed the grisly sight. But Sharon had no intention of allowing these targets a period of rest; the longer she waited, the longer they would have to get away!

She targeted another nearby student, Ryan. The kid’s general silence in class was able to mask the fact that he was indeed quite the runner, and he had managed to cover a significant amount of distance compared to his peers. In most situations, his speed would be to his advantage. In this one, however, sufficiently distancing himself from the group had marked him as a target, and he needed to be removed from the equation before he could escape. And so, Sharon readied the aim of her foot once again, unloading and allowing the full weight of so many hundreds of thousands of tons of pure mature woman descend upon the miniscule young man. He splattered audibly, a horrifying noise which was itself preceded by a horrifying scream.

As this occurred, one of the runners, Mark, who was not quite as fast as Ryan but still pretty quick had been heading in a similar direction to the young Ryan. Upon seeing his companion get crushed, however, he decided to shift his course. Mark huffed, exerting himself with as much effort as he could muster, but was spotted anyway. Not wishing to lift her foot up from the ground for such a close target, Sharon instead slid her foot on the tile in Mark’s direction. This action created an audible squelching sound as the blood and guts created a sensation of squishy friction with the floor. Upon reaching Mark, still running his heart out, Sharon raised her big toe, dropping the lone, fat digit upon the young teen.

If being crushed by her foot proper was akin to having a building dropped upon you, then being crushed by the toe was a bit like having a two-car garage fall on top of you. In this case, however, the toe did not vaporize him instantly, instead breaking most of his bones and restricting his movement, while also giving Mark an up-close and personal interview with the scent of the feet of a woman who had been hard at work all day. The bulbous appendage, wreathed in the black nylon like a shroud, had landed on Mark, sending him to the ground face-up and covering him mostly completely, though the elastic, rubbery nature of the woman’s skin meant that he was not completely in a vacuum. As a matter of fact, he was close enough to the edge of the toe that Ms. Wraith could even see his hair peeking out.

This did not last, of course. With just a little bit of effort, the screaming, crying, muffled Mark’s body began to give, and after only a moment his body collapsed in on itself, and blood shot from beneath the toe like a high-pressure water balloon.

Not content to let only her right foot have all the fun, Sharon raised her left foot, easily dispatching of several stragglers who had attempted to take refuge beneath the nearby desk. With only one swipe of her foot, the group of students were splattered against Sharon’s heel. 

Iasmin, one of the last students alive, saw this. She had attempted early on to run in the opposite direction of Sharon’s movement, at first attempting a similar plan to the students of taking refuge beneath the desk. However, in the execution of this plan, she had an even better idea: she would sidle up directly against the leg of one of these desks. It was a much harder-to-spot location than simply being out on the open against the linoleum floor. 

So, she split up, lagged behind, and quickly darted to the nearest desk leg, putting her back directly against it.

The maneuver took a lot out of her, and as Iasmin leaned forward to catch her breath, she felt the familiar boom reverberate through the floor accompanied by screams. Iasmin felt a yelp well up as she just barely saw from the corner of her eye the big black foot descend on the group, crushing them by the heel, and rolling them outward from underneath the desk, their fleshy masses losing any and all material as they traveled until the group simply consisted of a streak on the linoleum floor.

Bile welled up in Iasmin’s mouth as she prepared to gag, feeling nothing but horror at the likelihood that it could have been her.

This would prove to be one minor mistake (minor as, ultimately, it would not have made much of a difference), as before she could regain her balance and stand up again, her doubled-over form found itself face-to-face with Sharon’s prowling toe. It mashed the young lady against the metal bar of the desk leg, folding her like a taco-shell as her spine caved in on itself, before splattering her against the cylinder. Sharon removed her toe from the desk leg’s base as she slid her foot away, once again having nothing to identify the formerly promising young woman with, with the exception of a pastel-colored strip of Iasmin’s old hijab that had been pasted by her guts and organ bits to the face of Sharon’s toe.

Up above, Micah watched the massacre with a similar, detached disgust, hoping that his own calculations had been correct. The young student cared about few things, admittedly, but he most certainly did not wish for his peers and classmates to find themselves obliterated by his mother’s feet. However, this clashed directly with one of the very few things he did care about: his grade. Micah knew that if the group grew back to their previous size and told the rest of the school about what happened, then he would certainly have his honor status revoked.

But there was another way. A way that everybody could walk away happy.

Time dilation. A combination of atomic redistribution and the melding of the fabric of space time. The machine worked; it would simply be a matter of turning a dial to reset things to the way they were. And if his mother was accurate enough and she managed to kill everybody successfully, then the reorganization would return everybody back to life, and to their normal size, retaining no memory of this freakish, hellish incident.

Hopefully.

On the other hand, anybody living would only have their atoms reorganized, and therefore keep all the memories of what happened. For Micah, this was not a problem (unless the PTSD from watching his classmates be on the receiving end of summary execution was considered a problem) but if even one person let this story get out, Micah could say bye bye to ever seeing the interior of Cambridge University. ADX Florence, maybe.

It was while he ruminated on this that he heard a worrying sound. “Whoops!”

Then the surface upon which he stood began to slant.

Micah was beginning to fall. His mom slipped, likely as a result of trying too hard to crush everything quickly and all at once on the smooth floor barefoot. As a result, while she tried to regain her balance, Micah started to slip himself, sliding down the fabric slide of his mother’s shoulder. Desperately, he remembered his mother’s advice, “Grab my hair if you need to!” and reached out to attempt to take hold of his mother’s forest of ropelike hair that fell around her head, successfully wrapping his hand around a strand before dangling helplessly from her head.

“M-M-MOM!” Micah stuttered, out, before the strain of holding onto the rope got to him, and he began to slide down, friction burning his hands. “ACH!” he yelled, letting go, and descending to the floor below.

“Micah?” cried Sharon, turning her head and trying to use her peripheral vision to glance at her shoulder. “Micah!”

Sharon got down on her knees, attempting to locate her wayward son on the floor, simultaneously smothering the last remaining running students under her kneecap in a total accident.

Micah had fallen behind the machine. Once he got his bearings and stood up, dusting himself off, he heard a sound he did not want to hear again. 

“YOU!”

Ms. Wraith, her face contorted into a mixture of fear and primal rage, had the idea of taking refuge behind the box herself. She executed this plan after the first half dozen of her pupils fell, and had been hiding, praying ever since. Now, it seems her very very specific prayerful request had been answered.

Micah backed up from his advancing teacher. She may had been a woman, but she was older, and Micah was not exactly a star athlete. Needless to say, he was quite scared of whatever she had in store for the child. 

“What the fuck did you tell her, Micah!?”

“I-I-I-I I promise, there’s a good reason for this!” said Micah, holding up his hands in a peace gesture.

“Oh yeah?” cried Ms. Wraith, grabbing the genius’s shoulders and restraining him. “What might that reason be, precisely?”

Micah looked in her eyes, reckoning his teacher’s rage, and in an act of uncharacteristic physical ability, he wrested himself from her clutches and began to sprint around the black box, back in the direction of his mother.

“GET BACK HERE!” yelled Ms. Wraith, beginning to follow the boy before the black box lifted, ascending and casting an eclipse-like shadow over the two.

“Micahhhh?!” Sharon cried out, looking underneath the machine, needing to use both hands to lift the weighty thing. There, both Ms. Wraith and Micah could see the controls, still glowing softly beneath the mechanical components. But Micah had no wishes to see the controls at the moment. All he cared about was reuniting with his mother. He ran into the shadow of the box, waving his arms, saying, “Over here! I’m here! Mom!”

Ms. Wraith began to follow him, but stopped, upon seeing the face of Sharon. She had not spotted him yet. “Micahhh?!” she repeated, still encompassing the floor beneath her in shadow.

Micah’s enthusiasm began to wane as confusion crept in. He called out gently, “M-mom?”

Then, he looked around him, and his face became the epitome of fear. 

Before Micah had the opportunity to even run, Sharon dropped the box, likely on accident, as she reasoned that her son must be somewhere else.

Micah was directly under the box.

Ms. Wraith saw the sight and felt a twinge of sadness come over her as the last of her students was obliterated, entirely on accident, by the cruel, uncaring woman above them.

But this itself would be replaced by fear, as the box’s controls, activated inadvertently by the sudden impact, began to glow. Sparks emanated from the object, and Sharon stood up to put distance between herself and the box. “What the… what the?!” she yelled as the box began to once again emit a solid glow, bright enough to fill a football field. It leaked out of the mechanical seams of the box, blinding Sharon with blue until finally a BURST of a blue shockwave, upending the desks, blowing over the bookshelves, and circulating through the entire school.