-Start of Broadcast-
Please, do not turn away. Please. Listen to me. Listen to my story. The story of my people. Our growth. Our triumph. Our end. We are an advanced race and civilization about to meet our end in the most humbling and unlikely of ways. As strange as it may seem, I am sending out this broadcast to any who will listen and am doing so from a shoe.
Despite the great tragedy that will eventually unfold, from the outside this would seem a simple story. Yes. This is a simple story for your people about the plight of my people. About a not-so-simple situation simulating some sort of symbiosis. They were trapped in the shoes of a goddess. Her favorites in fact. This was in some way fortunate for the countless lives whose entire existence depended on this particular pair of shoes continuing to exist.
We know these things because our ancestors were once from her world. Their knowledge has been passed to us as I am passing mine to you. She was a short woman with a unique sense of style. Some of them even knew her before the Great Diminishment. Through a manner lost to the ages, our ancestors ended up here, trapped beneath her feet. They assumed she did not know, for how could the kind girl do this to them? Even if she had done this somehow, our sages assumed she had long forgotten our existence, or had assumed we’d long since perished. We knew of the goddess but we knew not her name. Apart from the occasional glimpses of her face afar in the heavens, we only knew her feet. Beautiful, petit peds for her gait. Terrifying tormentors for our existence.
Unbeknownst to her, and the world at literal large, there is an entire society built into the walls and soles of her shoes. Time works differently in the world of the shoe. Months for her were generations for us. She became a myth, a legendary horror bringing life and destruction. Our ancestors lived off of what her feet collected and deposited in our world. After not being worn for so long, our ancestors learned to recycle what they had and cultivate resources. That was how we survived and how we thrived.
We do not know how we ended up beneath her. All we knew was that, to her peers, the woman was considered small. She had pale skin and jet-black hair and was quite active. The world outside rumbled, constantly shaking our world inside. Occasionally our forefathers would peer through the yawning lit abyss and see her face, or that of her far taller peers. Their height was meaningless to us in the end, as we knew we were nothing to them. To her. We were but insignificant creatures living in the detritus that she was not even aware her feet deposited. Her feet. Oh, her feet.
Massive in comparison to us. Immeasurable. One pale foot would take days sliding into the seemingly endless chasm that held our world. The girl we came to know as a goddess seemed to always eschew socks or stockings. Instead our worlds were made subject to the pure putrid flesh of the pale goddess.
The dark hole of the entrance to their massive cavern would occasionally be flooded with light for hours at a time as earthquakes rumbled in the distance. One day, her heavenly face filled the cavern entrance. A loving smile took hours to cross her face. Artists memorized the visage of the goddess to make future art of as she drew us closer to her. Over the next day we saw the entirety of her body. Her bobbed and banged haircut, the mesh choker around her slim neck, her chest behind a dark top which matched a dark pleated skirt. Then her legs. Normally slender and pale, stretching on for eternity, covered in tight black leggings. Then our cavern was eclipsed by that which legends spoke in horror of. Her feet.
Bare, normally dainty toes hung over our civilization. They wiggled with agonizing slowness before descending towards us.
She chose not to wear socks that day. Instead, once she pulled her pair of tight, black stirrup leggings on, she slid her bare feet into the dark recesses of the well-worn shoe. For the unfortunate citizens of her increasingly humid shoe, the floods would be great as her feet begin to sweat.
It seemed to happen in slow motion. For her she was sliding her dainty size five foot into her favorite shoe, splaying her toes and rubbing them against their familiar indents in the spongy sole until they settled into their familiar places. For the tiny people of the shoe, it was their monolithic deity appearing to them once again to judge who will live and who will die. Decades of hard work and reconstruction were wiped out over the course of days as the monstrous continental digits crashed through cities, grinding them as if they were dust, because they were less than dust to her. She at least knew dust existed.
Our cities were in utter ruin. Fires ravaged the streets until a salty deluge extinguished them. We then had to deal with the floodwaters from her moist toes, drowning our world. Over the next several days, it grew more humid and the floods worse as her massive foot filled our world with caustic, disgusting sweat. The world always smelled of our goddess, but now that it was fresh, it was horrendous. It was all consuming, as was the heat.
People died solely from heat exhaustion as the ground rumbled violently for hours at a time with each step she took. My city was built on the mountain range formed by the ridge between her big and second toe prints. We lasted the longest.
The great rumblings had stopped for a time. Then a great grinding pierced the air. Waves of sweat kicked up a maelstrom as her big toe began to move towards our city. We watched for hours in huddled fear as the lights of our city shone on the pale, wrinkled wall, stained with the remnants of other cities and villages, as it slowly encroached on our home. As I record this final testament of our people, I absentmindedly wonder if any remained alive on her toe. Perhaps we could survive in the great networks of canyons of the print of her toe. Or would we ascend to another world outside of the shoe once she took it off? Could we even live and survive elsewhere on her divine body? No, likely we would drown or be crushed.
It finally breached the gates of the city, one of the largest in our world. With the patience only an apocalypse could have, her toe bowled over our homes and defenses. It seemed painfully slow, as we knew we could not escape, but once the oppressive digit made contact with us, it would be over in an instant. Our entire society snuffed out by the simple act of a girl scrunching her toe. If my testament survives or finds its way to a future generation. Take heed and watch the skies, for the goddess loves you and that will be your undoing. Here it-
-End of Broadcast-
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Suzy was excited to once again be wearing her favorite shoes. She looked into the mirror and primped her Betty Page haircut a bit, admiring herself. A friend called her the goth ideal recently. She looked down at her Vans sneakers. From the outside, there’s not much to look at with these shoes. She had owned them for about six years. She bought them at the end of her freshman year of college. They are simple slide-ons with a black and off-white checked pattern, though they have grown to look more grubby and dull over half a decade of heavy wear. No laces, which aided in her decision to purchase them. The sole and binding of the shoes have constantly tried to separate, but liberal usage of glue and sealants have held this particular pair of flats together. Any branding or sizing printed or stamped inside to indicate that they were size fives had long since sweated or worn away. To put it simply, this was the most comfortable pair of shoes she had ever owned. Her greatest successes, triumphs, dates, all occurred while wearing this singular pair of Vans. She loved them and never wanted to part with them.
She clenched and unclenched her toes as she got used to the feel of them in the shoes once more. She hadn’t worn them for months as she didn’t want to risk them getting in even worse shape due to the bad weather lately. It was a warm one and she was already sweating up a storm, but still, she was heading out to the bar with friends. She knew she should probably wear socks, but hated the feeling of wet fabric against her feet. She liked to let her toes breathe a little. She knew they’d be rank by the end of the night, but it wasn’t like she was planning on anyone smelling them.