Barbara Winters shuffled barefoot through her kitchen, half-lidded eyes barely registering her surroundings as she let pure habit guide her steps. The middle-aged blonde was walking over to the table, freshly brewed cup of coffee in her hand, when she suddenly felt something give a slight crunch underfoot. Her first thought was that it must be some stray piece of food that had fallen tot he floor, and so it was with an annoyed scowl that she raised her foot to see what the culprit was. Instead of the potato chip she was half convinced she would find, though, all she saw was a small, grey patch of dirt. What's more, she noticed that there were similar grey spots, none much more than a centimeter across, spread all over the kitchen floor.

Strange, she thought. They all must have popped up overnight, as they certainly hadn't been there when she went to bed last night. But what could they be? Itching with curiosity, Barbara crouched down to get a closer look. Disappointingly, even from up close they just looked like featureless grey patches. Although, if she squinted... she thought she could see various geometrical patterns in them. Very curious.

She sat there a while, trying to think how she might figure out what they were, when she suddenly remembered: her daughter's microscope! Barbara had bought it for her daughter Sarah's birthday a couple years ago, after the girl had expressed interest in studying microbiology. It was just the thing she needed.

Barbara grabbed the device from her daughter's room and took it back to the kitchen. Sarah was out at the moment, gone for her morning jog, so Barbara would have to work the thing by herself. Thankfully she'd seen Sarah do it enough times that she had a good idea of how it worked. She placed the microscope on the kitchen counter and turned it on, then she swabbed a sample one of the grey patches with a q-tip and placed the sample on a little glass slide. She put the slide into place, turned on the light, adjusted the focus and...

-----

“Oh my God,” Sarah gasped. Was she imagining things? Was she seeing correctly? What she saw through her microscope was too bizarre to be believed, and yet, there was no denying what she was seeing: very, very tiny buildings, cars, and even microscopic human beings, walking around on the little glass slide. “Mom, this is... I don't even know what to call this. I... I'm speechless.” No sooner had she arrived from her jog than her mother dragged her into the kitchen, hurriedly explaining about the little grey patches and the sample she had taken from them before sitting her her in front of the microscope. “You say these things were all just there when you woke up?”

Barbara nodded. “I didn't even notice they were there until I... stepped... on one of them,” She said as if she only now realized what that implied; thousands, if not millions, of people had been crushed under her foot. The thought of it sent shivers down Sarah's spine.

“It's okay, mom. You didn't know,” Sarah said, trying to comfort her mother, but a thoughtful look still remained on Barbara's face. At last she turned back to her daughter.

“What should we do with all of them?”

“Well, let's see... We can't just leave them all on the floor. We need to find somewhere safe for them. Maybe in my terrarium. And I want to keep a small sample of them in one of my Petri dishes for observation,” she said, her microbiologist side kicking in. “The main problem is how to move them without killing everyone in the process. We can't just pick the cities up; they're too fragile for that. It looks like the q-tip kept most of the people alive, so I think that's probably our best bet. We'll grab as much of the cities as we can and then we can just... clean up what's left of them once we're done.” She didn't like the thought of leaving so many of them to die, but what else could they do? Even just by moving them to her terrarium she would be crushing countless micro-people. At least this way some of them would have a fighting chance.

Her mother thought it was a fine plan, and working together the pair carried it through in no time flat. Then once all the samples were in place, Sarah sprinkled breadcrumbs and water into the Petri dish and terrarium; she hoped that would be enough to keep them all alive.

There was still the matter of cleaning up the remains of the tiny cities still on the floor. Mother and daughter just stood in the kitchen a while, neither of them knowing just how to approach it. Eventually, it was Barbara who took the first step, literally and figuratively. She stepped over to one of the little cities, placing one foot to either side of it. Sarah noted just how small it was; her mother's big toe alone could snuff it out. Knowing that felt so... strange.

She wondered what her mother might look like to whatever people still remained in the city. Like a woman trying to figure out how to deal with a spot of dirt in her kitchen? Or like a goddess about to pass judgement on their lives?

Sarah watched in terrible fascination as her mother raised her big toe over the city; the goddess had made her decision. She let her toe fall on the city so casually, the act taking no more than a second, and yet for the people caught under it it must have looked like the end of the world. Could any people still be alive down there after that? They were small and fragile, sure, but Sarah knew the smallest creatures could be unexpectedly resilient. Even if 99.99% of them had been wiped out, that 0.01% would still be alive somewhere down there. Under her mother's toe...

“Sarah?”

“Huh?” Had her mother said something? And why did she feel so embarrassed?

“I said I'll do all the cleaning myself, if you like. You go look after the ones we collected. You said you wanted to keep them under observation, didn't you?”

“Y-yeah, I'll just... go do that,” she replied before heading up to her room. Why was she feeling so queasy? It couldn't be just because of the deaths of those micro-people; she had probably killed just as many when collecting the samples and hadn't felt anything like this. Her mind kept going back to the moment when they had all been crushed, replaying the scene over and over again. How big her toe must have seemed to them...

Sarah didn't yet realize it, but from that day forward she would never be able to look at her mother the same way.