“MICHELLE!” Mrs. Brown screamed at the top of her lungs, her voice now giving out. “OH MY GOD. PLEASE, PLEASE, SEE US!”

            By a combination of fear for her son Thomas and gently whistling breeze, though, Michelle remained peacefully seated on her chair, oblivious to the fact that she’d just killed her neighbor simply by setting her foot down.

            The remaining five were beginning to scatter. Mr. Brown could no longer convince them to follow his lead. They were now so small, they had no hope of climbing off the patio again, nor up any of the furniture to get closer to a human ear. Mr. and Mrs. Foster attempted to drag the widowed Mrs. Dutton along with them, but after realizing her weight was slowing them, coolly set her down. Then they took off toward the opposite leg of the towering chair upon which their beautiful savior and possible murderer sat.

            Michelle wriggled her toes against the gritty surface of the patio beneath the chair, feeling her blood pump with increasing speed from anxiety. She kept herself from nibbling her fingernails, and instead resorted to letting off steam by bouncing the balls of her feet against the straps of her sandals.

            A gale force of wind flowed out on all sides from the building-sized monsters which constituted Michelle’s long feet. All five shrunken neighbors fell to their backs, scattered even further apart by the blast of air. Jaws dropped, then, as they watched the statuesque body of their neighbor ascending again.

            Michelle stood and began to pace. She crossed to the flower beds, meandered about, and then strolled slowly back toward the chair. Though she took all the time in the world, raising up each bronzed bare foot and planting it back into the stone with great gentility, for the world below it, it was anything but. With mighty typhoons of wind and earth-shattering weight under each heel, Michelle approached the group again, perfectly unaware.

            Against all rationale, both Mr. and Mrs. Foster were making an insane attempt to scale the back of Michelle’s leather sandal. Though it was a tough ascent, their fingers could just barely fit into the thin rivets of the stylish footwear. After a few minutes, they’d nearly reached the first opening beneath the straps, which might allow them to get Michelle’s attention when next she approached.

            Mrs. Brown tried to reach the center of the patio, where she would have a better chance of being seen. She soon found herself far from any protection, out in the burning sunlight, and easily in the path of the returning goddess of a mother.

            “MICHELLE!” the woman shrieked. She threw her arms over her head, cowering on quaking knees which refused to let her run. “MICH-”

            Her scream turned to an almost-silent squelch as her insignificant body met the gridded, dewdrop tip of Michelle’s pinky toe. The deep green paint of the giantess’ nail glinted in the light just as the meaty digit came down on Mrs. Brown’s body. No more than a little dot of goo on Michelle’s skin remained of the other woman’s memory.

            “Be careful when you climb those boxes, honey,” Michelle called out to her husband. She watched him scaling the side of the house to reach Thomas, her whole attention span squared on that bedroom window.

             Driven by adrenaline, and empty of all logic, Mr. Brown charged with righteous fury. He followed Michelle’s left foot, that which had just killed his wife, and approached as those barreling toes came to rest again. With a mad lunge, the tiny, naked man smaller than an ant threw himself into the deep, gaping crevice between Michelle’s pinky and fourth toes. Narrow as the fleshy opening might’ve appeared from above, there was plenty of room for one so small to fit.

            Mr. Brown bit and clawed, kicked and punched, screaming all the while. Unsure now if he was trying to get the woman’s attention or simply take revenge for Mrs. Brown’s death, he couldn’t have said which direction he was attacking. Buoyant, impenetrable toe flesh surrounded him on all sides, slicked by nervous sweat and punctuated by a pungent, earthy odor he could only smell now that he was truly among the woman’s foot. Coughing and hacking from weakness, and unable now to even fight his way out to the opening of his neighbor’s powerful toes, the man was clenched between opposing walls of tan skin.

            “I’m up, Michelle,” Greg announced from the side of the house. He gripped the window sill, balancing on a box. “I don’t see him in there. Just… his clothes, on the floor.”

            “WHAT?” Michelle shrieked.

            Though he vomited from fear and vertigo, Mr. Brown remained alive as Michelle’s toes absentmindedly squeezed gently back together for another step. Her foot rose, hovering longer than usual, and then dove toward her sandals again. In the confusion of tipping momentum and writhing toe flesh, Mr. Brown realized he was now upside down, his granular head poking out the bottom of the giant woman’s muscular toes. Despite the strength of her grip, the slick sweat painted over her flesh allowed him to slide, and almost to freedom.

            Down below, he saw them. Mr. and Mrs. Foster, so stupidly windmilling their arms and shrilling for attention where they stood, on the very heel of the enormous sandal. As if they had a hope. From up here, Mr. Brown could make out the wet, formed craters along the leather insole of the shoe where Michelle had deposited her enormous foot and toes countless times. As she was doing now.

            The last Mr. Brown saw of both Mr. and Mrs. Foster was in a whoosh of shadow and jammed foot skin eating up space inside the shoe. He couldn’t be certain, as they were so far away, but in his last moments of visibility, the tiny man was almost certain he heard them splatter again the winnowing valley of Michelle’s arch. Surely they’d died hand-in-hand within a spongy sole wrinkle of the woman’s foot. Odds were, no one would ever know. Their remains would wash away the next time she scrubbed a bar of soap on her skin.

            Mr. Brown’s body popped, much like his wife had, between the caving walls of Michelle’s toes as she took her first step in the sandal, its leather straps squeezing her digits that much closer such that the man’s helpless, naked body stood no further chance.

            Michelle, exclusively concerned with her husband’s discovery and the safety of her son, sprinted toward the house. She took one last step upon the patio, the rubbery sole of her shoe slamming to earth with the speed of a meteor. Unbeknownst to her, the woman’s broad sandal came down hard on the peacefully unconscious body of speck-sized Mrs. Dutton, who’d fainted after witnessing her husband’s crushing.

            The final neighbor’s body smeared into a crevice of the rampaging shoe treads, and with that, all six neighbors were extinguished as simply as Michelle could ease her foot inside a sandal.

            Of course, there was no one left to mourn the secret massacre of these couples. Michelle was on a mission. She kicked off her shoes again by the house. Next she clambered up the stack of boxes, passed her husband by, and pried open the window. She lithely ducked through and set one foot, toes-first, upon the carpeted floor of her young son’s room. Indeed, there was no sign of him, except the clothes he’d been wearing that day. She heard no bath or shower running to indicate he’d simply stripped to cleanse himself. The answering machine beeped downstairs.

            Her toes scrunched at the carpet fibers in worry.

            Terrified of treading across her boys without knowing, Michelle retreated back out the window, trembling with oncoming tears.

            As the woman descended toward the earth again, sobbing into her husband’s shoulder, the woman had no idea that in that single step she’d taken into Thomas’s bedroom, she’d adopted a new passenger. Hugged naked between her dirt-powdered, sweat-greased big and second toes was Thomas: shrunken and screaming with terror just as furiously as his unaware mother above.