“Hey, are you alright?”

Natalie’s soft voice snapped Noah out of his trance. His eyes tarted up from their position staring at the floor.

Crawling along the acid-stained concrete that ran throughout the French bistro, a small bug had been crawling around the crumbs falling off of Natalie’s croissant as she ate.

She had been a lovely first date. The two had matched a week ago and finally got the chance to meet up for a quick Sunday brunch after texting back and forth endlessly on various topics.

She was cute in a bookish sort of way—she had arrived at their date with lightly curved, brunette hair which just grazed at her shoulders if she ever raised them. Thin-framed circular glasses framed her fair skin and freckles beautifully. She wore a cropped white top and a flowy plaid skirt. On her feet were well-worn combat boots, which white socks just peering out from their tops.

Their conversation had been going swimmingly, and their second date was already on the books. She was just finishing up a quick phone call from her mom she deemed an ‘emergency,’ and so Noah had let his mind and eyes wander a bit.

The bug on the floor had been enjoying Natalie’s scraps—oblivious to the imminent danger those cute combat boots posed to its life. He had been watching the poor thing mindlessly wander around her shifting feet. On more than one occasion, the bug would walk forward, only for the space immediately behind it to be filled with a thumping, massive boot.

“Sorry, yeah,” Noah said, his eyes raising from the floor to Natalie’s glasses. “I zoned out for a second. All good.”

“I really hate taking calls on dates,” she started, as her own eyes followed Noah’s prior path down to the floor. Her gaze locked onto the little bug at her feet as she continued to talk. “Sometimes mom can be a pest.”

As the word ‘pest’ left her lips, she lifted her right boot slowly, methodically, over the bug. From Noah’s angle, he could see a brief moment of panic in the bug’s movements as the overhead lighting was blotted out by Natalie’s sole.

Natalie brought down her boot calmly over the bug as it disappeared from Noah’s view. The small crunch it gave as the life was crushed out of it sent a shiver up Noah’s spine.

“Some pests are easier to take care of than others,” she said. Her voice was gentle and soft as she twisted her boot on top of the little bug, back and forth, back and forth. The boot lifted to reveal a small wet spot on the concrete. Noah could just make out the mangled corpse of the bug, smashed in between the treads of Natalie’s boots.

Her casual cruelty turned him on in a way he struggled to understand. He had always been a bit of a macrophile—but it wasn’t anything that came up in his daily life outside of a porn search.

He tried to think of other things. Now wasn’t the time to blow things when they were going so well.

“Anyways, I need to pick up a few things at the shops around here, so…I’ll see you Saturday, right?”

“Saturday,” Noah repeated eagerly.

The two stood up and hugged, and as he returned his arms to his sides, Natalie’s fingers held onto his for just a moment longer.

“See you soon, Noah,” She almost cooed into his ear. She turned on her heel and made for the door.

As she walked, Noah couldn’t help but look down at her boots. With every over step she took, he could just make out the smushed bug still ingrained into her tread—with smashed pieces of croissant dotting the black sole.

**

A few minutes later, after paying the bill, Noah stepped out of the French Bistro and into the open air of The Shoppes at Johnson’s Brook.

Out here in sprawling suburbia, open air spaces like this were essentially the only place a twenty-year-old like Noah could take a date. It was a sterile, safe environment. Rent-a-cops littered the edges to keep out the nonexistent ‘riff-raff,’ and high schoolers loitered outside of the movie theater until they were chased off-property.

In a few months, he’d be twenty-one, and he could finally trade in The Shoppes for the bars, and he couldn’t wait.

Noah lived a pretty boring, safe life. He still lived with his parents to save money, he worked a part-time jobs, and he took night classes at the local community college. Beautiful, bookish women like Natalie were right up his alley.

Sure it wasn’t very exciting, but he had simple dreams. A beautiful wife, maybe a few kids, a good job. His friends scoffed at the simplicity, but hey—at least it meant his dreams were pretty attainable.

That’s why his macrophilia wasn’t something he was interested in thinking about. Sex was always a shameful topic at his place growing up, and he had no doubt some of that had bled onto him over the years.

Images of giant women crushing city streets with ease were something he viewed in its right place—in the dark, on his computer screen, so he could quickly jerk off and go to bed.

Women like Natalie wanted nothing to do with anything like that, right? Telling his girlfriends he wished they could be a thousand feet tall didn’t seem like a good idea. In fact, his former high school sweetheart and him dated for three years. Not once did he ever tell her what he was really into.

He shoved the thought aside and started towards the parking garage on the other end of The Shoppes. If he hurried, he would still have time to make his virtual study group session.

He walked briskly across the nearly one-mile long outdoor shopping mall. He thought briefly about whether or not he should avoid Natalie should he see her, but the was out shopping and he was simply heading to his car. There wasn’t much of a chance he would see her in all of the people out today.

He had just passed the Sunglass Hut and was about to pass in front of the Sephora when he suddenly, and quickly, lost consciousness.

One moment, he was sliding past some slow-walking women, and the next, everything went black…

**

Noah’s eyes opened, then shut quickly as the sun beat down on him.

His head hurt like hell, and his arms and sides felt bruised from some sort of fall.

He rolled onto his stomach and started to push himself off of the ground.

‘God, it’s so fucking bright,’ he thought to himself. His eyes lowly began to adjust, and the more his vision cleared, the more he wished he couldn’t see what was happening.

Above him, the Sephona sign stood impossibly high above him in the far distance—seemingly thousands of feet away. Beyond that, the two or three levels of apartments on top of the shops seemed to stretch out into white oblivion.

He quickly spun around and looked out to his left, where the road was.

The earth itself seemed to shake as a mid-sized SUV drove past. What was once a car rolling past him a few feet away now seemed to be a mountain roaming across the earth.

His heart was really beating now. He looked down next, and saw the individual brick he stood on. It stretched out in all directions.

Everything started to click together now.

Noah was tiny—likely no bigger than an inch tall, if that. In the exact spot he was walking in, he had suddenly become very, very small.

Any excitement about the situation was gone from his mind, and in its place, sheer terror.

“Help! Help!”

He started to shout, then scream as hard as he could. Across the street he could see shoppers on the opposite sidewalk lining the storefronts. They were distant giants, and they must have been miles away, relatively speaking.

“Somebody help me! Please!”

All of a sudden, the floor began to shake again. But this time, it wasn’t the low rumble of the car as it soared past him.

No, this time it was methodical. Boom. Boom. Boom. Moving ever closer to him.

Noah was able to turn to the source of the noise just in time to see the top of a woman’s head blot out the sun as she approached.

She was sharply dressed, even in the sun. Her dyed blond hair flowed down on either side of her face—which was almost entirely consumed by her massive sunglasses, even at a normal scale.

A brown jacket came next, over a black top. Noah’s eyes moved down past her black pants to find a pair of black, chunky-heeled booties.

She was hundreds of feet tall, and he was in her way.

For a brief moment, the awesome sight of this woman—a goddess at her size—froze Noah in place. But his blood ran cold as he saw her look past the cell phone in her hand, her sunglasses angled at him.

She was looking directly at him.

“What is…” she muttered to herself. Her words echoed out as if they had been blasted through a baseball stadium. Her right hand lowered her sunglasses enough to show her hazel eyes to Noah.

Her expression went from flat, to one of vague annoyance.

“Ew.”

Noah felt terror, shock, and pure arousal all at once. His member throbbed in his pants and instinctually, he lowered his right hand towards it.

The reality of what was about to happen didn’t sink in until her hazel eyes were blotted out by the monolithic sole of her right boot.

The woman had blotted out the sun with her arrival, but as soon as her boot sole raised over Noah, it was as if the earth itself turned down 20 degrees.

All time seemed to stand still, as Noah watched the boot sole rise, higher and higher, angling itself just above him. His neck craned to see it.

Aside from a few horizontal lines, the woman’s boot sole was perfectly flat both on its sole and heel.

Dirt and debris from the street had made its way onto her boot sole. Impossibly high above him, he could also see a faint pinkish, blackish form. Some gum that had been stepped on so long ago it was a part of the boot itself.

It was only once the boot stopped rising did reality hit Noah like a tidal wave.

He was about to be crushed.a279;