-- Cecilia --
The cold January air sat heavy and low, smothering the back alley in utter stillness. Breaking the silence, a heavy metal door swung open, the squeaks of its rusty hinges drowned out by the distinct sound of a commercial kitchen working a busy night. Cecilia stepped out of the open door. It slammed shut behind her, muffling the harsh clanging and shouting and returning the space behind the restaurant to its typical quiet character. This back alley was Cecilia’s safe haven, a place of reprieve from the incessant demands of her job as a waitress. Back here, there were no annoying co-workers, demanding managers, loud customers who complain to her, or creepy men who leer at her. The noises of the job all still rung in her ears, and so she’d use her break to stare ahead at the snow on the grass. Decompress, reset herself by basking in the peace of the night. For all of fifteen minutes. Then, back to work.
But a presence threatened to derail this effort, as Cecilia spotted a figure to her right. Dressed in the same outfit as Cecilia (black slacks, a simple white button down blouse, and a clip-on black tie) except her footware: Cecilia wore the standard black flats while the woman wore heavy slip-proof work shoes. From her curly, strawberry blonde hair tied in a messy bun, she recognized her as the busser, enjoying a quick smoke before presumably heading back into the fray to collect and turn over the never-ending supply of plates and utensils out on the floor. Thankfully, this employee was not only nice, she was also quiet! Sure to not interrupt Cecilia’s sanity-preserving ritual. “Hey, Anna,” Cecilia greeted her with none of the feigned enthusiasm she uses while on shift. Anna simply nodded back to acknowledge her presence, blowing out a puff of smoke to her right.
The two stood there for a few minutes, each contemplating the way the moonlight reflected off the snow, until Anna started a gentle foray into conversation, “Tonight been shittier than usual, or is it just me?”
Cecilia sighed, “Nah, it’s bad tonight. Way busier than usual, and the customers are extra bitchy. My feet are fucking killing me.”
Anna chuckled, taking another puff of her cigarette, “Tell me about it. At least I’m off till next Wednesday. Just gotta get to close tonight.”
“Lucky. I’m covering brunch tomorrow.”
Anna’s face contorted in sympathy, “Ugh. Don’t envy you there. Fuck brunch.”
“Fuck brunch” Cecilia repeated forcefully in agreement as a gust of wind came through the back alley, blowing flurries of loose snow onto the women as their small talk ended. Seeing a little flash out of her peripheral, Cecilia turned to her left and spotted something startling. “Huh. Haven’t seen one of those in a while.” She was gazing at a small sphere, green shapes on a blue background all speckled with patches of white. A little planet! It floated parallel to her chest, suspended in a sack of spacetime that warped the air around it. Anna turned and grunted in mild surprise, “Well, you’re lucky! My apartment gets ten of those every day. I step on at least one each time I get out of bed, I swear. Though it’s interesting, that one’s a bit bigger than normal.”
Cecilia faced Anna with a raised eyebrow, “How big are the ones you see?”
"About the size of my big toe. So maybe a quarter the size of that one.”
"Well. Let’s see if there’s anything on it, I guess,” She figured this would be a decent way to decompress for the rest of the break. Gently, she grabbed the planet, her fingers digging into the green patches, and yanked it out of the bubble. She brought it up to her face to examine it closer for lifeforms...
-- Janet --
The quakes were not something anyone could ignore. Massive enough to damage buildings, Janet and her co-workers all cowered under desks as they gazed out of the large windows of their high rise office complex. Their building was newly renovated and had a wonderful view of New York City. But now, they were watching the metropolis sway as the Earth itself moved and shook. Janet speculated this had something to do with the fact that the lovely blue sky was suddenly replaced by menacing gray. No one knew what was going on, but any speculation was quickly dashed by the thing that came from the sky.
A tan pillar shot down from the heavens, right onto New York. The entire skyline vanished under the tower of… flesh? Janet thought it resembled a finger, swirls that looked like fingerprints adorned the face of the pillar. A man brave enough to stand near the windows looked up to where the pillar came from and fainted as his eyes reached the top of the window. Janet followed suit, not knowing what else to do. She nearly fainted too as she saw a massive face. A woman, with brown eyes and jet black hair going past her neck and under the horizon. She stared with a look of passive curiosity, as though her finger hadn’t just killed millions in a slight movement. The face grew a little larger, her eyes enveloping the entire sky, a single pupil looked like it could swallow the entire country. Janet could see the very bottom of her eyebrows twitch just a little. Was she… observing the planet? Whatever she was looking for, Janet realized she was unhappy as the brow angled down. If they were further away, the woman would probably be seen frowning. Suddenly, the Earth shook more as the eye was replaced by cheekbone, then soft, thin lips. Janet could easily see the woman who held their planet had a light layer of lip gloss on. She would have considered the implications of this but her train of though was interrupted by the wind. Gales, first strong enough to shake their building, but soon a steady thrust from the West that tilted them ten degrees. The sound was unmistakable: a low, deep hiss. The woman was sighing. Her breath blew cars through the streets like they were toys. Entire buildings toppled over, knocking their neighbors over in an apocalyptic game of dominoes. Janet screamed in terror as she saw the columns on her floor crack and bend. She heard the sound of the foundation groaning and failing as the structure snapped in two. Janet fell back as her floor crashed into the ground, the young professional meeting her untimely end from the passive exhalations of the titan above.
-- Cecilia --
“Can’t see shit. That’s boring,” Cecilia sighed as she brought the planet down from her eyes. Her sigh smacked into the greenery on the planet, sending little ripples over it. She could see some life on the little sphere, but this one seemed far more backwards and depopulated than most planets that appear like this in her world. Most of those have massive amounts of life, to the point where megacities are visible even to normal sized people like Cecilia. This one was a real disappointment in comparison. She dropped the planet onto the open palm of her other hand. The sphere fell, no longer held up the spacetime bubble it came with. It landed with a white circular continent facing her palm, the heat from her body immediately melting the ice which covered it. She inspected her other hand, passively eyeing the results of her fresh manicure, a classy French Tip style. Casually, she poked at random spots of the planet, feeling slight crunches as the dirt above smashed into hard bedrock underneath. She dug a nail under at a few spots, sending little spurts of magma out from under the crust of the planet. Wanting more stimulation, she spotted a lone continent of a roughly rectangular shape, orange in color except for its coasts which were a vibrant green. She brought her fingers around the landmass, encircling it in a cage of tan flesh, and slowly brought them together. The continent put up no resistance as her digits swept it up, compressing it between her pads. She lifted the crunched mass off the face of the planet and rubbed her fingers together, gently homogenizing it. The crunches the rocks and dirt made as she turned it into paste felt nice, even if it would have felt nicer if there was a city painted on the surface. She opened her hand, watching as the rubble fell away from her fingers.
Anna, who had been watching out of boredom, chimed in, “Hey. Mind if I take a bit of that?”
Cecilia looked at her with a smirk, “What, don’t get enough of these at home?”
Anna glared half-playfully, “Never one that big! I want to compare what crushing it feels like. Come on, I’m as busy tonight as you are!”
“Only joking! You can have the bottom, I’ll keep the top.” She brought up the fingers in the hand which held the planet, scrunching her palm slightly to pin the sphere in place. She held out her free index finger and dug deep into the planet, burying her fingernail in the middle. Slowly, she twisted her palm, turning the planet a tenth of a rotation at a time, her nail slowly cutting the planet in two. Hot magma became visible in the leftover rifts, miles wide in the perspective of anything living on the planet. As her cut completed its way around the sphere, she quickly pried the top hemisphere off the bottom and dropped it on her palm as her hand relaxed. She could feel the heat of the planet’s exposed core, stinging her a bit but not nearly enough to elicit real pain. She figured she could use the magma from the core for fun later. Plucking the bottom hemisphere in her other hand, she transferred it to Anna’s open pale palm, her fingers wiggling in anticipation. The busser brought up her half to her face to take in the little details, and to contemplate her plan to toy with her prize.
-- Roger --
Roger sat in the arrested line of cars on the highway, twiddling his fingers in anxiety as his driver looked for any way to make progress through the gridlock. Everyone in his home of Johannesburg was trying to flee to… anywhere amid the chaos. All of Australia crushed by some giant woman. Her fingers striking into the Earth like nuclear bombs to annihilate millions across the globe. New York City, Berlin, Beijing, Mumbai; all turned to dust and bodies by her slightest movements. Then, some massive earthquakes and suddenly now there’s a different woman inhabiting the sky. This one is paler and has red hair, but Roger could see the same disinterested stare worn by the original demoness who held them. The fear and absurdity of the situation was just too much, and now everyone wanted to flee into the night, hoping to find family to either survive or spend their last moments together, depending on how pessimistic one was. For Roger, he held hope of survival. He was quite wealthy, and intended on using that wealth to ensure the safest travel and most secure shelters to ride out the recovery in relative luxury, once the women leave as Roger was certain they would do eventually. His basis for making this prediction was blind, dumb faith.
But as he sat in the endless procession of stationary cars, his faith was invalidated. The wind had picked up as the pale woman breathed on them, the gusts knocking over trees and moving some cars across the lanes, but Roger could see the girl’s head turn away to face some giant white cylinder she put into her mouth. Roger’s heart sank when he realized it was a cigarette. His shock turned to animalistic panic as she brought her closed mouth up closer to the surface than before, her plump lips holding back something sinister. A smirk drew itself across the giant’s face as she opened her lips and blew. The cloud could be seen from miles away, the woman’s face obscured, but the smell hit before the cloud. Unmistakably cigarette smoke, but at an intensity Roger couldn’t fathom. Even with the car as a barrier, the strength of the smoke choked him and his driver. Neither could get a full breath in between their coughing fits. The people unfortunate enough to be outside of their cars coughed even more violently, blood spewing out of their mouths and noses. Within minutes, many collapsed onto the ground and didn’t get back up. Praying to every god he knew about, Roger cowered in his seat, the smoke and oxygen deprivation dulling his mind. Fatefully, he turned his head up to witness the last act of humiliation from the woman. She puckered her lips and spat, her visage again clouded by the release. The last thing he ever saw was the web of saliva approaching him at hypersonic speeds, and the last thing Roger felt was a flash of intense pain as the glob stuck Johannesburg, vaporizing it into total nothingness.
-- Marie --
Even though it had only been minutes since the color of the sky changed, the hospital where Marie worked at was already full. So many were injured from the earthquakes that nearby buildings and the streets surrounding the hospital were being used as triage centers. She could scarcely believe anything that was happening. She hoped this whole thing was just some bad dream, but she knew better. The faces of her patients, their cries of pain, all too real. This was no dream.
Somehow she had to pull it together despite knowing the fate of her family living in Germany. Her husband was away visiting family in Berlin. She heard online that Berlin had been crushed, but she witnessed the finger go over Paris, drag off to the east. In a sense, she saw her husband, all his family, and a good deal of close friends die. But she couldn't spend any time to think of that. If she did, she would break, and then she wouldn’t be useful to anyone. Marie entered the ER room carrying a set of respirator parts to help a patient with a tracheal injury, but before she could get to him, the hospital shook. All inside screamed as loud as they had moments ago when the woman appeared, but there was something new. Heat. Surrounding all of them was an unmistakable, unignorable spike in temperature. Marie dropped the supplies and ran out of the ER into the street. She looked up, and froze in sheer terror. The woman’s finger came back, hovering over the sky. She couldn’t see the gray anymore, just the tan finger and its glossy nail. But surrounding the nail was a glowing orange, pulsating in a hypnic rhythm. As the woman’s finger began to rotate, Marie realized what the glowing substance was: magma!
Marie screamed. It was all she could do as the white hot magma shot down from the sky and landed in massive, block wide globs onto the streets below. Her block was missed in the first deluge, but she could still feel the intense heat. She could see plastic and rubber begin to melt. She could feel herself sweating. The woman ran her fingers north, burying more of Paris under lava. For the briefest moment, Marie thought the giant would avoid her section of the city and traverse northward. Maybe she’ll get bored and leave the rest of her city alone? Marie forced herself to believe in that, but she found that belief to be wrong. The woman turned her finger back south, and a drop of magma fell off, headed straight for Marie. Marie closed her eyes and pictured her husband as the heat outside became unbearable. The screams of those around her drowned out as the ball of magma struck the ground, obliterating Marie and all evidence that her part of Paris ever existed.
-- Cecilia --
As the hot magma enveloped more of the greenery, Cecilia heard a beeping from her phone. Using her free hand, she pulled it out and silenced the 15 minute timer she had running. Her break was over. “Well, that was fun,” she remarked with a sigh, “back in, I guess.” She took one last look at her planet before quickly and ruthlessly clenching her hand into a fist, the tight grip of her fingers pulverizing the battered dome. Little bits of planet squeezed between the fingers, smearing out onto her knuckles as the force of her grip turned the rock into hot liquid. Cecilia opened her fist and rubbed her hands together to disperse the mess. As she wiped the remains of the little planet on her slacks, she turned to face Anna while the busser enacted her disposal of the other half of the sphere. The redhead placed the hemsiphere on the ground and stood, taking one long puff of her cigarette. Blowing out the smoke, she threw it on the ground, the burned end smashing right into a portion of relatively undisturbed green space. The greenery turned into a blackened red as fire spread across it. She brought her left shoe up to the cigarette and placed the front of the sole on top, gently pushing it into the landmass. The greenery compressed into the crust as the pressure from Anna’s foot smothered it and anything still alive on its surface. Bringing her shoe off the land mass, Anna turned away and let the rest sit there. She turned to the door, not even bothering to say goodbye as she opened it with her key and walked through. Cecilia straightened her outfit to ensure it was presentable and walked up to the door. She turned back one last time to see the snow and realized Anna’s cigarette was still lit. “Dammit Anna,” Cecilia scolded out loud to no one as she stepped up to the burning planet. With a sigh, she brought her flat over the sphere and quickly slammed it down, smashing both the cigarette and the planet totally flat. She could feel the rock crunch underneath which gently tickled her sole through the shoe. With a final twist of her flat, she scraped the remains of the cigarette and planet on the pavement and walked into the restaurant, ready to face the rest of her shift.