I decided that I was going to ask Mark out to prom tonight. I had been thinking about the idea for a long time, but tonight was it. I was writing in my nightly diary and something just clicked. I needed to marry him, right then and there. I was dressed in my pajamas, but it was a quick snap to pop on a nice dress for the occasion. Something nice, colorful, somewhat playful, but also elegant and mysterious, as if I were a character in a storybook, calling out to my storybook prince. Sometimes being overdramatic was a good thing.

I appeared in front of his window, having rehearsed this scene so many times before. The nighttime background noise as it always is. A tree rustling in the distance. The sound of a truck rolling by, somewhere far away from here. As always, it took a few seconds for him to wake up. I tapped on the glass a few times, chuckling as he slowly turned over to face me, completely tangled in his sheets like a fly wrapped in spider silk. He looked at me for a few seconds. He reached up to grab his glasses, sitting at the head of his wooden bedframe. He slipped them on, and only then did he scream. 

Well, not scream, more a combination of angry shouting and heavy breathing that came out as one quick blob of sound that seemed to fall silent as soon as it left his mouth. He instinctively tried to back away from the window. Instantly the window swung open, letting in a freezing chill of icy cold air. Looking at his shivering, I realized my mistake, and instantly the wind stopped. The air took on a comforting warmth, and a strange hint of fruity mint. He looked up at me, then down at me, then somewhere in the middle of me. 

“Chloe?” he whispered. “What are you…. How are you here right now?”

I looked down, and realized that I wasn’t actually standing on anything. For some reason it only now occurred to me that his bedroom was on the second floor of the house, and that I was indeed flying. 

“Oooh,” I said, not paying attention. “That’s why you were so freaked out earlier.”

I sometimes forget what I can do. Well, not really, it’s hard to forget, but I sometimes take it for granted. It’s one of my personal flaws, I’ll admit it. Last week I went ice skating with some friends of mine in Boston and it only occurred to me after a sizable crowd had gathered that I was doing something wrong. I didn’t even realize it, the ice cracked and I didn’t want to get wet, so I didn’t. I forgot that people didn’t just float on water, or dance on it for that matter. Or last month, when I totally freaked Natalie out because I grabbed a soda can from out of her hand, from across the room, without lifting a finger, or even physically moving the can at all. It just appeared in my hand, and she started completely freaking out as if I had burnt her house down or something. Not that I hadn’t done it before, just that I didn’t do it this time. Usually I was able to nip that stuff in the bud before it became a problem, but this time, right here with Mark I wanted to let it play out. I wanted to see what he thought of it.

“Y-you’re flying,” he said.

“Yeah, I am,” I said. “I’m flying. Flying is what I’m doing right now.”

He continued staring blankly at me. “You’re flying.”

“I am indeed hovering in place, about, uh, twenty two feet above the ground,” I said.

“You’re flying…” he said, while drifting off.

It was at this point that I decided that the conversation wasn’t going anywhere, so I decided to make a do over. Do-overs were an absolute game changer. Before I just made people forget about what happened, but then they’d remember that there was a period of time where they couldn’t remember anything, and they’d get weird and confused and scared. I could add nice peaceful memories of things actually going right, and I did sometimes when I just wanted to get on with things, but there were times where I really messed things up and just wanted a chance to get things right. 

So instead, I appeared at the end of the bed, sitting on his bedframe, a minute or so into the past. In the background I could faintly hear a tree rustling, then a truck or something drive past the house. I sighed quietly, looking over at Mark sleeping, still tangled in his sheets like the adorable prince that he was. Usually it took a second or a third try to get things right. This was the fifteen do-over this night. 

The air was still really cold. Not that I usually noticed these things, but I could see Mark’s breath fog up the air above him every time he breathed. The air filled with the same warm aroma from earlier.

“Hey there, Markie,” I said, and then wished I hadn’t. Markie was an incredibly stupid name.

Mark slowly stumbled into consciousness. He looked up at me, grabbed his glasses, blinked, and backed against the bedframe in a panic. 

“Chloe?” he whispered. “What are you doing here? How did you get here?”

“Oh, you know,” I said, chuckling to lighten the mood. “Just kinda, popped in here, you know?”

“Yeah I don’t think people just kinda pop in places,” he replied. He tugged on his collar. “It’s so humid in here..”

I might have overdone the air conditioning a bit, but I decided to leave it be. It worked better that way. 

“So, whatcha doin’?” I asked. 

“Sleeping. How are you in my room?”

I paused. He paused. Everything in existence paused. Every tree, every snowflake, every deer in the woods. The truck in the background, everyone in the entire town. Every over of every nail salon closing up shop for the day over on the west coast, every businessman hurrying home to a warm dinner in Hawaii. Every human, every story told or untold on earth stopped. The movement of the planets, the burning of the sun, the heavens and hells twirling up in the cosmos, the slow, inevitable death of the universe, all took a quick timeout. All things, everywhere, and the laws that bound them, were temporarily put on hold for a few seconds while an omnipotent teenage girl thought through a promposal to her crush. 

I hadn’t gotten this far in the conversation yet. By now something always went wrong. How could I answer that question? I guess I had always been in some weird situations as a kid, and then one day during freshman year I could just.... do whatever. I hadn’t even noticed it at first. Maybe I felt a bit healthier and I felt a bit lighter, but nothing really stuck out to me as weird. Maybe it was just how I was feeling at the time. Everything felt like shit, and everything in my life kind of sucked. And one day I was alone at home, because mom was out at work, and I was in the kitchen because all of my homework was done, and I noticed the knives, and one thing led to another and I slit my wrists. Except I didn’t, because the next thing I knew I was in my bed reading a book from the library that I had never checked out, and when I ran downstairs the kitchen knives, all of the kitchen knives, were gone. Poof. As if they had never been there. But I couldn’t tell him that. It was too angsty, too personal, too real for this perfect moment. I thought for a moment, then unpaused time.

“I’m a witch,” I said with a grin, tilting my head a bit to really drive home that cuteness.

“A witch?”

Well, not actually a witch. It’s not like I have to do magic spells or anything. Or even really think too hard about it. I just want something to happen, and it happens. I don’t even need to consciously plan everything out, it all just works on its own. Or doesn’t work, if that’s the way I want it. It’s like my powers have autocorrect, they look into what I want, what I really want, not just what I actively think. I really want to tell Mark this, but I’m afraid I’ll scare him. And honestly, considering all I’ve done, I would be scared too. He should be scared. Everyone, everything should be scared of me.

At first I was shy about it. I didn’t want things to become “too easy” for me, for some stupid reason. Maybe bump up a test grade or two, make lunch taste less shit. Things that no one could notice, things that no one would care about. After I started to realize that this was a thing that was really happening, I got bolder. One time, I had a project due the next day and hadn’t started it yet. I almost cried going to bed. I woke up the next day, and the entire east coast was buried two feet under in snow. Then I really started to play around with it. I stopped time to study in the middle of tests. I stayed home from school for a week, and no one even questioned it. After a while I stopped taking school so seriously. It wasn’t like I had to do any work, I could doodle on the test sheets for 45 minutes and still get the highest score in the class. I could just know the material front to back without having to crack open a single textbook. I could relax, all the time, forever.

I still remember the first time I did something really fucked up with my powers. My mom was out late for work, again, so I was alone, at home, in the dark. I didn’t have any homework to do, I didn’t have any responsibilities to attend to, so I just stared blankly in the dark at my laptop screen, browsing through weird porn on Tumblr. I’ll admit it, I’m a sexual deviant, sue me. Nothing major, I just like the feeling of being… big. I look up art of strong, towering women overpowering soft, fragile tiny people, and do as horny teenagers do on the internet. I just…. Like that feeling of control and power, I guess. It’s corny, B movie corny, and pretty weird, but it’s what I like. As I browsed through the usual mess, I kept thinking about that satisfaction of being in charge, of being noticeable, of being unmistakable. 

I thought of the idea of having a little tiny person the size of my finger that I could keep with me at all times. I looked down at my hands, thinking about how it would feel to have someone so fragile that they would have no choice but to do what I said. And there she was. Natalie, my best friend in the whole world, now curled up in a ball smaller than a wad of bubblegum in the palm of my right hand. And then, just as instinctively, I closed my hand, crushing her instantly. 

I don’t know what I was expecting; I just wanted to see what would happen. Despite everything up to that point, I still didn’t believe I could do something that weird myself. I could feel all the near liquefied gore caught between my fingers, all the thin bones and tissues that used to constitute a human. It still didn’t feel real. I closed my eyes, opening my right hand up again. When I opened them again, there stood another Natalie, just as small, just as fragile, seemingly unaware of her death mere moments ago. And that’s when it all clicked. I swept my hand out from under her, watching as she stumbled and fell, a high pitched squeak coming out from her lungs. I watched as she grew in midair, finally hitting the ground coming up to about my knees. I was curious. I wanted to see more. She grew again, much faster this time, smacking her head against the ceiling with a loud slam, knocking out some plaster chips with it. As she bowed her head she grew again, almost filling the living room. She looked almost comically oversized, as if an adult had stumbled into a young toddler’s playroom. She could lift the sofa with a single hand. I was tempted to grow her further, let her destroy the house entirely, but I didn’t want that just yet. Instead, I watched as she shrank, leaving an imprint on the ceiling, down to my own size. The Natalie I knew was brash and sarcastic, this Natalie was scared and confused and probably hurt. She wanted to scream, but she no longer had a voice. I let her shrink further, picking her up in my hands. She kept shrinking, further and further. I watched in the palm of my left hand as Natalie shrank down to her original size, then smaller, the size of a drop of water, then smaller still, the size of an eraser. Smaller and smaller she shrank, until I could no longer recognize her as human, just a dot in my palm, and still she shrank, until the dot disappeared entirely. 

I smiled at Mark, his blank face betraying a deep naivety. “Well, I’m kind of a witch. Kind of not a witch. It’s sort of complicated.”

He was breathing heavily. He looked around the room. “Yeah, no kidding.”

I don’t know what happened to that Natalie, she probably sailed away on the air currents. Maybe I breathed her in, and her body’s stuck on the walls of my air ducts. It didn’t matter. From there on out I played with no rules. The next day I came into school, bored as usual.  Physics was up first. I looked up at the teacher. Mr. Howard. I hadn’t done any work for him all year, and I didn’t intend to now. I expected him to start teaching, but for some reason he just looked at me.

“Miss Chloe, you haven’t turned in your acceleration lab report yet. Would you mind explaining to the class why you thought that this wasn’t important?” he said.

I froze up. No one ever called me out on anything. I didn’t know what to do, or say, for a second. And then I did. With a wide grin on my face, I decided to let loose for the day. Suddenly my desk seemed quite a bit too small for my butt. And then the ceiling seemed too low for my head. And then the walls seemed too close for my chest. I heard screaming and shouting, the frantic moving of desks, but I didn’t really hear them. I turned my head and saw Mr. Howard, who was gasping a lot and making a lot of noise but not quite saying any words. Behind him students bolted for the door. People I knew, people I didn’t knew. And then, to the widening horror of Mr. Howard, my crouching form suddenly burst through the ceiling, collapsing an entire portion of the building. Students from the upstairs classes tumbled down onto my back, but I kept growing, and growing, until soon the entire building was too small for me, and I exploded from it without a hassle. I smiled. It was weird, like looking down at a children’s playset, except the buildings really collapsed when you pushed on them too hard, and the ground sank like sand below your feet, and there were tiny doll sized people running around, screaming to each other, blaring alarms far below my ears. In the mess of the crowds, I saw Josh, another of my crushes and the star receiver for the football team, running for his life on the walkway right outside the science building. He ran fast, faster than anyone else in the school, faster than the track stars even, fast enough to qualify for a D1 college scholarship, but all the running in the world couldn’t save him from being swooped up in my grasp like the action figure he was. 

I looked at him. For years I had imagined absurdly elaborate fantasies of being absolutely destroyed by this man, of screaming in pain/pleasure while he rolled deep into me time and time again, biting my lip against the currents of his love. But here? Here he was just another scared little boy, running away from the big scary monster girl. And I laughed. Out loud. Very loudly, in fact, because I could see Josh struggle against my grip, trying to bring his arms to protect against my laugh. Either that or he was getting sick from breathing in my morning bagel with cream cheese breath. One way or the other, he was terrified of a girl that fifty minutes ago scurried under his shoulders on her way to class, and for some reason that was the funniest thing. 

“So, what’s a big bad boy like you doing way up here?” I said, thinking of all the years of mediocre fetish writing and art that I had exposed myself to.

He said something, but I didn’t pay attention. 

“I bet you’re feeling pretty pathetic right now, squirming for air like a worm. Hell, I bet you’re even a little bit turned on right now.”

His uncomfortable face confirmed my baseless accusations. 

“Here, let me help you with that.”

I loosened my grip a bit, opening up my hand to get a good look at him. With a knowing look on my face, I looked straight at his crotch. I wasn’t even expecting anything, but no, he was straight up hard right then. I moved a thumb towards his crotch, pressing it down on the boner. And slowly, surely, deliberately, I moved it slightly up and down the length of his crotch area, letting him take in every movement. I honestly didn’t know if any of this was working. He actually looked rather in pain from it all. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t for him, anyways. None of this was.

“You like that, little man?” I said. I immediately lost it. I fell into a giggling fit amongst the fleeing student body, letting Josh drop to the floor, not caring that he didn’t get up. I bent over, holding one hand over my belly and hitting the other hand against the pavement, ripping it all up. For some reason this was all hilarious from my perspective. My eyes were beginning to water as I began to grow again. As I laughed, my voice began to carry across the town, across the county, across several counties, and by the time I was laying down looking over the entire town, my body extending into the distance for miles, they probably carried across the eastern seaboard. I finally came to, looking over the entirety of my hometown. Where I was born, raised. Where I learned to eat, walk, drive. The only home that I had ever known. All of it, now the size of a coin on the landscape below. And then a single teardrop fell from my eye, directly onto the town I so loved, and it was suddenly gone, washed away. 

I wondered what my mom was thinking. Was she watching this on television? How would she react to seeing her own daughter becoming this unstoppable force of chaos? How would anyone react to the sight of someone so young suddenly becoming a weapon of mass destruction? I could have checked right then and there, but I didn’t think of it. All I thought of, as my clothes faded away, leaving me bare and naked, was getting bigger. Bigger, until I could lay the entire state on my back, and I could suck half of New Jersey up into my nostrils with just my breathing. Bigger, until the ground began to crack under my tremendous weight and fires and earthquakes broke out worldwide. Bigger, until my right foot fell on the Baltic Sea and my left foot fell into the Mediterranean Sea and I could grind all of London into pussy walls higher than the Himalayan mountain range. Bigger, until Earth itself was no more than a bowling ball, no more than a marble floating in infinite space. 

I looked at that marble Earth, the sum of humanity’s place in the universe. I thought of licking it, but licking dirt was still too weird for me. I blinked, and in an instant all of Earth turned to a beautiful chocolate. The mountains became monuments of solid brown, the seas into roaring warm tides of melted milk chocolate. Every frozen tundra, every burning savanna, every blade of grass in every forest not yet touched by my presence became a beautiful edible chocolate. Even the people of Earth, I’d imagine, must have turned into chocolate caricatures themselves, one last horrifying absurdity before a tongue larger than anything humans could ever possibly perceive ripped open the very crust itself as they and everything around them melted into a slimy gooey mess of sweetness. I bit down hard into the Earth-candy, making sure to take my time chewing it, letting it all glide down my throat. And then there was nothing. 

And in another second, I was back in science class, Mr. Howard teaching physics per usual, my incomplete lab ultimately forgotten. I suddenly understood how little anything really mattered, and gained a deeper understanding into the universe than a thousand hours of listening to Mr. Howard rant about quantum mechanics could. I couldn’t even look at Josh in the halls from then on without having to stifle a chuckle. And thus began a beautiful, extravagant, hedonist cycle of destruction and rebirth. It wasn’t always as extravagant, sometimes I just wanted to feel a building crush under the weight of D-cup boobs. Other times I squirmed in class as I felt a thousand dust sized Joshes crawl around my inner lips, many more stuck drowning deeper inside. Every time I would do what I did, get bored, and return everything to the way it was, without punishment and without consequence.

This went on for longer than it should have. Much, much longer. I still liked to have time flow regularly, it kept me sane, but occasionally I’d make a day 36 hours long, just so that I had a bit more daytime to roll around, crushing chocolate covered cities under my ass. Chocolate was a recurring theme. As I got more comfortable my ideas got stranger, more esoteric, and with it my manipulation of time, looser. I began to play around with changing the world itself, shifting and shaping its history as I pleased. Maybe I might spend a year taking a little vacation in a world with all the same people in it, but all men were three inch high playthings for the physically perfect women. One time I went full out, spending twenty long years as cruel omnipotent tyrant of the stars. If I counted all the time I spent in these alternate worlds, I would be a lot older than 18. Honestly I wasn’t even counting, but I would probably be a lot older than people were alive. But I didn’t, so as far as the “real” world was concerned I was still 18 year old Chloe. I still felt 18, in any case.

Some people got it worse than others. I already mentioned Josh, but Ashley was another frequent target. Before I had become, well, me, she was the bane of my existence. She made my life hell, made me look like a joke in front of everyone constantly. Your typical stock high school alpha bitch. So, as punishment for her (and, of course, as reward for myself), I broke her. Constantly. I made her spend months at a time as my whimpering slave, making sure to reset her every time so that I could crush her spirit again and again. I had her spend two years lost in my hair in another world, running blindingly through the forest smaller than a speck, unable to fall off or otherwise leave. By this point I had mastered omniscience, and could watch her every panicked moment, every time she hopelessly clawed at my scalp for just a hint of skin that she could eat. By now every inch of my body had probably served as a cage for her at some point on the prison of my body. I ate her countless times, laying her sweet form out on a dinner plate in front of me and biting in as she looks on, paralyzed and unable to scream out in fear. At a certain point it stopped being revenge and started being more a game. How could I make Ashley’s life hell next? One time I, for just a second, gave Ashley back all the memories that I had stolen from her over the years. Her face turned pale, suddenly remembering decades of unending hellish torture and pain. A primal fear filled her, one that sent her clawing and screaming through the crowded hallway, as far as she could get from me, before stumbling at the end of the hall, and falling into a catatonic state. 

I was aware that I was a sociopath, but could anyone blame me? The ground they walked on, the air they breathed, and the stars they gazed upwards at were nothing more than furniture for my personal dollhouse, and they, everyone on Earth, everyone sentient being that had ever, will ever, and could ever possibly exist were nothing more than its dolls. Nothing I did mattered. I could kill everyone twenty times over and bring them all back just the same. Josh would go back to being a jock, Ashley would go back to being a cunt, and the world would keep spinning. I fell away from Natalie and my other friends. I couldn’t keep up the act of being on equal grounds with people that I had seen naked, screaming for mercy. People whose thoughts I could read like word clouds in a comic book; people whose every emotion, regret, memory, was available to me at any time. I could know anything about anyone at any time. I knew, for instance, that Natalie had a crush on me, and lay awake almost every night fingering herself to the thought of me gently caressing her body. I knew that Josh had a boyfriend, but was too scared to come out to his teammates and family. I knew that Mr. Howard was having an affair with one of the freshman girls. I saw them, all their worries and fears and doubts, in my little dollhouse, and I played with them as I saw fit. And when I was done with my fun, I’d clean up and put them back in place for the next round. I grew distant from everyone. 

Well, everyone except Mark. He was different. I rarely played with him. Despite everything else I still dreamed of Mark. I still laughed at his faux confidence, and I still smiled at his shitty jokes, and his smile still made me nervous. And despite all logic or reason, I loved him with all my heart. And I knew he loved me too. And that was why I was there, on the edge of his bed, pretending to be a good little witch rather than an omnipotent abomination of nature at one in the morning. 

“So, uh, what can you do?” he asked.

“You know, all sorts of weird stuff,” I responded. “I can, say, made your arm taste like bubblegum.”

He turned to his right arm, carefully glazing his tongue along it. 

“Kidding kidding, I can’t do that,” I lied. “But I can do lots of other things. Lots of things.”

“Things like…”

“Things like making the air taste like my breath. And making your heart beat a little faster. And making the stars in the sky just a bit closer to Earth.”

He sniffed the air, expecting another joke. I slid on the bed towards him, washing him in my breath. His smile gradually dropped as he realized I wasn’t kidding on that first one. I wasn’t kidding on the other two either, but one out of three was good for a start. 

“I want you to know the taste of my breath when I kiss you. I want to feel your arms wrapped around me. I want you to look into my face and know from the bottom of your heart that I love you so, so much,” I said. I might have been laying it on a bit thick there, but I didn’t care.

“Chloe, I…”

“I love you, Mark,” I said. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time. And I knew things are a bit weird right now, and that I’m a bit weird, but I want to take you along for the ride, and show you all sorts of weird, wonderful things.”

That part was a lie. I wasn’t going to show him shit, for now. I had tried that earlier. I tried showing him a copy of the Earth held in the palm of my hands. He didn’t believe me. I tried holding the actual Earth in my hands, and watched him break out into screaming fits when he saw my massive form looming far in the atmosphere, and the even more distant structures of his own room, unthinkably huge. I tried showing him love itself, wonderful and beautiful in all the ways that human words and cheesy red and pink poems just couldn’t. I tried showing him how good it felt to be powerful, taking him through a city and letting him fuck me on top of a stadium, his proportionally large dick tearing through the seating as our shaking shook the ground itself. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t go with that last one, but in any case I reset it. I reset every time, because there was no way to show Mark exactly what I meant when I said I could do anything. 

“I…. I don’t know what to say, I…”

He was stuck. Caught on his own words, and emotions. I saw it all behind his face, his worries, his doubts, his concerns, all the purplish green emotions that we as humans cannot put into proper words but instinctively just know, the fears creeping behind his eyelids like creeping shadows, blacker than black. He was stuck, stuck between his desires and his instinctive fear of the unknowable, of a being so powerful that she could in a flash remove him from existence, remove his family tree from existence, remove his name from existence, and make the very concept of him or anything associated with him so impossible, so inherently contradictory that the very concept of a Mark could no longer be fathomed by sentient beings. I was more than anyone could ever bargain for. 

“I know what you should say,” I said. “I know exactly what you should say”

I looked at the whole of him, his joy, his lust, his concern, his fear, his purplish greens. And with a single wipe, I washed it all away. 

And in its place was a genuine smile.

“Can I take you to prom?” Mark asked.

“More than anything else in the world,” I replied.