The woman dreamed that someone rang her doorbell. She put down the tablet she was messing around on and stood, excited to see who it was. As she walked along the lengthy hallway in her big, fine house, something seemed off; there was something wrong, but she couldn't tell what. The walk seemed to stretch on forever, and even though she could see the door before her -- no further than it should be -- her legs didn't take her any closer. Her legs were heavy, and moved with great effort, as if the air around them had turned to molasses.

The distant door and the hallway around her started to disappear into a fog.

The doorbell sounded again, but this time it was far too long: deafening, painful. The woman hunkered down and pressed her hands to the side of her head, screaming.

Then Marybelle woke up the way she did almost every morning for the last several years: to the rhythmic sound of distant thunder, coming closer with each ominous booom, booom, booom!

The bed shook beneath her; the pictures on her walls -- even fastened as they were with a screw in each corner rather than a nail to hang on -- rattled along with anything else she had in her room that wasn't bolted down or secured in some way.

Marybelle covered her head with her pillow, but it was no use. That, and she knew she couldn't hide: like everyone else in New Barlomie, Marybelle was under orders to go out to the small nook that served as her balcony and greet her goddess.

So that's what she did.

Marybelle shook her head, trying to clear the sleep that still gripped her mind. It was far too tempted to go back to her bed and fall back asleep; really, Marybelle liked being asleep more than being awake. New Barlomie wasn't the worst place to live, but her existence was a tireless and demeaning one. When she wasn't sorting through deliveries -- for food and supplies for the town -- she was practicing for the weekly "We Love Our Goddess" celebrations, or hoping Goddess Circe's pet Bethany didn't choose her as a toy for the evening.

On the horizon of the foyer, Marybelle saw the stairs that Circe was descending from. The tan giant wore a luxurious orange robe about her, and her feet were bare. She had her hair up in a messy bun, as she often did in the morning. There was another deafening ring of the doorbell, and Marybelle nearly cried out; others did, and she saw that the balconies around her were now populated -- those on the first floor came out to the street, as the denizens of Barlomie waited for Circe to notice them, and greet them, and release them from attention. Sometimes, this took hours.

Marybelle held onto the rail of her glorified balcony, really just a nook, and steadied herself as Circe rose high and higher as she approached, her bare feet slapping noisily over the marble floor of the foyer. Marybelle's mind was taken back to the first time she saw the woman, from down the street, before the parade. How beautiful she looked then, and how normal she looked now.

Then, Marybelle saw the woman as a giant. Now, even though Circe was a genuine titan of a person, Marybelle felt more like a piece of dust on the floor. She barely felt human; she rarely did anything other than what she was supposed to do, and it'd been a long time since she'd had a selfish thought. She hadn't looked in a mirror for years -- not that she had one in her small apartment.

Marybelle's eyes lazily tracked Circe's largening form. The woman didn't glance down at the town, which meant it would probably be a long morning standing on the balcony. Marybelle could feel every step the giant took as they shook her legs from the soles upward.

Her eyes widened a little bit more. Typically Circe walked on a path that would take her down the side of the room, as she headed toward the kitchen to get her morning cup of coffee -- if Bethany hadn't stomped through earlier to fetch it to her.

Today, to answer the door, Circe was heading straight toward the town.

The closer she loomed, the more fear Marybelle felt.

No, Marybelle reassured herself, there's no way-

Worried cries rose up from the crowd gathered to greet the goddess, and even Marybelle found a startled sound force its way out of her. Circe's giant form was passing directly overhead, and she wasn't looking down.

Far above, her face seemingly in the heavens, Circe raised a hand to her face to cover her mouth as she yawned. In the next moment, the colossal sole of her foot rose into the air, sliding over the little town of Barlomie like a tan, wrinkled sky of flesh.

Marybelle's eyes widened at the sight of it. Circe often didn't watch her step, and more than once she'd seen the titan's sole soar above the town. But now it was lowering on a path that would see it crashing down directly atop Barlomie.

"No," Marybelle whispered. "Look down," she begged the air. "Oh lord, oh please, Goddess Circe, look down!"

The sky darkened as the sole fell with speed, like a meteor. Marybelle's pleas turned into a wordless scream as she threw up her hands. Down at the edge of town, Circe's heel slammed down and a cloud of debris flew up; a chorus of screams were silenced; the whole world shook violently around Marybelle and she was thrown painfully into the wall of her house as the rest of the tan-colored fleshed fell toward her.

"NO!" Marybelle screamed with terror.

She was thrown to the ground of her nook, her body singing with pain; down the street she could see how Circe's foot demolished and crushed everything in its path -- it was like the end of the world, with New Barlomie getting bulldozed in an instant -- and Marybelle squeezed her eyes closed and shrieked as she felt felt a sudden heat fill the air, as well as a cloying, salty scent, and then an immense weight pressed down all over her and she was rushing downward as the building around her collapsed.

Marybelle's last moments were of the terrible knowledge of how it felt for her body to be completely and ruthlessly flattened, and what it was like to feel her skull explode in all directions as her brain screamed a warning that would go ignored.

###

Circe stopped. She felt a series of crackles beneath her foot where she'd stepped last, as if she'd just walked on someone's sand castle, unnoticed. The woman looked down, lifting her leg a little, and saw what it was she stepped on.

In the space where New Barlomie occupied in the center of her foyer was her footprint.

Circe's eyes widened a little at the sight, and she tugged her ankle up with a hand, inspecting her sole. It was covered with a fine layer of dust, and littered with specks of red.

And just like that, with one step, New Barlomie was gone, and everyone who had lived there was dead.

With a satisfied grin, Circe brushed a hand across her sole, and watched the fragments of the town fall away from it: the dust and debris, and tiny, twisted, speck-like bodies rained from her flesh in the wake of her swipe; the people were smaller than ants, and died like them.

Down below her, all that was left of the town -- that is to say, nothing -- was the imprint of her perfect foot. She knelt down over it and admired the way she'd flattened absolutely everything. Her sharp eyes saw not a single movement: thousands dead with one careless step.

The doorbell rang again, urging her.

Circe hopped back up to her feet and went to go get it, calling, "Be right there!"

Traces of dust and dirt and the little mangled specks tracked on the black marble floor as Circe went to her door.

If she turned and looked, she wouldn't have noticed any of it: the debris blended in, or was too small to be visible.

Her slave Bethany would take care of the footprint-cratered town -- maybe she'd turn it into one of her art pieces, as the girl had taken to creating miniature vistas using the ruins of the old town -- and her robotic vacuum would remove any other trace that Barlomie ever existed.