Helen woke up in the middle of a city street, having no idea how she got there or even where she was. She wasn't the only one, either. There were countless other people waking up and looking around with the same confusion she felt. She didn't know any of them, and she didn't know this city either, at least from what she could see of it.
The sky was dark, without even a star shining, but the city lights were on. She could see it was a big one, bigger even than the city where she lived, with skyscrapers in the distance that seemed a thousand feet tall.
She had a really bad feeling about all this. There was something off about this city, and about its surroundings too. She looked away from the skyscrapers and squinted at the darkness, trying to make out what lay beyond it. Was that a mountain she saw out there? It was definitely as big as a mountain, though there was something off about its outline. It was way too regular, too smooth. It reminded her of something else.
“Looks like a shoe,” she heard someone say, and for some reason her heart skipped a beat. Yes, that's just what it looked like. A mountain shaped like a shoe. Or, was it a shoe the size of a mountain? “That's ridiculous,” she muttered, to herself as much as to that other voice, but she still couldn't shake the feeling...
Suddenly there came a tremor, and a rumbling was heard in the distance. Then there came another, and another, each a bit more powerful than the last. Was someone bombing them? But then, where were the explosions? Nowhere that she could see.
The darkness split open and light started streaming inside. Not a second later, everything lit up as if the sun had suddenly appeared. Helen cried out and shielded her eyes, blinking rapidly as she tried to see what was going on. The rumbling noises were still going on, and the tremors had become earthquakes; something bad was definitely coming.
Finally their surroundings darkened a bit, and she could lower her hands and look up at the sky, where she saw a huge expanse of pink hanging over the city, with little spots of black here and there. The thing was so huge it boggled the mind. Her brain tried to make sense of it, but she was having a hard time. The she noticed the five appendages far overhead, and almost fainted when she realized that it was a gigantic foot, and those appendages its wiggling toes.
Looking at those toes, she caught glimpses of a face somewhere far beyond them. Brief, blurry glimpses, but still enough for her to recognize Gia, a thirty year old coworker she had always despised. And that mountain she'd seen before? It really was a shoe; one of those grey, black, and white running shoes she'd seen Gia wearing once or twice before.
This couldn't be real, she told herself. It had to be a dream. A nightmare. There was no way Gia could be that big; no way that Helen could be this small. But whether or not it was real, she still screamed her heart out and ran for her life the moment that foot started descending on the city.
Its heel came first, crashing down right at the city's distant edge. Instantly all the buildings and people caught beneath it were crushed, rendered into nothing but dirt and grime against that massive woman's skin. Tens of thousands of souls ceased to exist all at once, and that was only the beginning. A powerful shockwave rippled out from that impact, shaking the entire city so hard that it knocked down everyone who had been standing. Helen fell and rolled onto her back, then scrambled to her feet to join the throngs of people all running for safety as she saw those titanic toes still approaching.
After the heel, the rest of that giant foot followed, slowly falling onto the city. No building could withstand its power; all of them crumbled as soon as that sole so much as grazed them, collapsing into piles of debris that were soon turned to dust under the weight of that mountainous foot. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions—it made no difference how many people she crushed. Their lives meant nothing to the mature brunette. Did she even know they existed? They were germs to her, and nothing more.
Her toes fell lower, lower, stretching ever closer to Helen, who feared she wouldn't be able to outrun them. Even the pinkie was several hundred feet long; the big toe well over a thousand. Was she really going to die under Gia's foot? The thought hit like a punch in the gut. That woman wouldn't even know what she'd done then, and Helen would be nothing but a spot of blood on her toes.
Helen had never been much of an athlete, but today she pushed herself to her limits trying to escape. Until the very last second she still wasn't sure if she would make it, not until the boom of Gia's toes striking the ground rumbled out from behind her, together with a puff of wind that sent Helen and all the people around her flying over dozens of yards of pavement before rolling to a stop, winded but not wounded.
She watched as Gia's toes curled, heard the grinding, crunching sounds of all that debris being ground down beneath those massive digits. It was beyond horrifying. Those things were taller than any building in the city, each one a mountain onto itself, next to which she was nothing but an insect. And those “mountains” were only the tiniest of Gia's appendages, measuring barely the hundredth part of her immensity.
Far above, Gia's eyes swept over the tiny city with a look of amusement. Helen could have sworn they stopped on her for a moment, but whether or not Helen noticed her, her expression didn't change one bit, as if Helen didn't even exist.
Anger flashed inside her. “Fuck you!” she cried out, extending a middle finger to the colossus above. How dare she ignore Helen like this? Did she think herself some sort of higher being? Well, Helen knew what she really was, even if none of these other people did—nothing but a minor, unremarkable office worker, a waste of space and resources whom the company should have fired months ago. Helen had said as much to their employers, though they hadn't listened to her, and she said so now again, even while everyone else ran right past her as they strove to escape this woman.
Her gesture went as unnoticed as her voice, and all Gia needed was to lift her foot for Helen to fall silent, staring slack-jawed at that mountain rising into the air. Dust and debris, and other things whose identity she didn't want to think about, rained down from that sole as it took to the skies, pelting those untouched parts of the city with the results of its apocalyptic step. Something big struck the ground close to Helen, who cried out and covered her head as if that would do anything to protect her from the building fragments falling like meteors. She shook uncontrollably as Gia's foot passed over her, casting its vast shadow upon the city. Its mere passage sent gusts of wind through the streets below, and threatened to send her flying, if all the dust raining down didn't crush her first. She screamed, and barely heard herself over the sound of rushing wind. She didn't dare to look up, not until another potent earthquake told her that Gia's foot had finally landed.
It rested behind her now—very close behind. Its heel couldn't have been more than an inch away, from Gia's perspective, though to Helen it was a few streets away. As she stared at it, the foot suddenly swept aside, tearing through the city as if it were made of sand and gathering up everything it touched. The movement lasted mere seconds, but when it sat still again and Helen looked at the result, it felt like she had aged a decade.
Nothing stood where Gia's foot had passed; where before there had been skyscrapers and countless city blocks, not to mention probably millions of people, now there was only a wasteland. The city had been casually swept aside to reveal the floor tiles on which it rested. Save for the occasional speck of dust, that whole tract of land was barren now, and though Helen still heard others screaming around her, from that direction there was dead silence.
Helen felt sick to her stomach. If she had kept running with the others, if she hadn't stopped to shout at Gia... would she have been crushed under that massive foot? Gone in an instant, just like that. And that still wasn't the end of all this death and destruction.
A part of her mind urged her to run. Helen looked around. Run to where? No matter where she went, Gia could reach it in a single step. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nothing to do except to sit here and watch as Gia brought about the end of the world, silently waiting for her own turn to die under her colleague's foot.
Gia had received the message mere minutes ago. At the time she had been in the living room, snacking on a bowl of popcorn and watching a movie to relax. A soft beep had made her pause the film and look at her phone, where she found a message coming from an unknown number. She assumed it was an advertisement, and was about to swipe it away when something made her reconsider. She opened the message, and read it in confusion. “Left a special delivery in your room. Will pay you $10,000 if you take care of it. Doesn't have to be anything special; just step on it if you like.” She turned the thing over in her head, thought about it from every angle there was, but it just made no sense. Was it a wrong number? She deleted the message, but remembering the part about a delivery in her bedroom, she thought it best to check that out, ridiculous as it sounded.
The “delivery” jumped out at her even before she flicked on the light, glittering with a million dots of light as it was. At a glance it seemed a weird grey carpet, but it only took her a couple seconds to realize it was a miniature city. How had it gotten in here? Did someone put it there while she was gone? Could that someone still be here? She looked around the bedroom, but there was no one there. She wanted to pick it up and toss it out, but then she remembered that she was supposed to “take care” of this thing somehow. By stepping on it? Those tiny model buildings didn't look very pleasing to the sole—a Lego piece would have been better by the looks of it—but the same curiosity which had led her this far also led her to try it out. She raised her foot over a part of the city, and slowly lowered her heel onto it.
Despite her expectations, the buildings put up no resistance when she stepped on them; they might as well have been made of flour for how they fell apart at the slightest touch. As she let the rest of her foot fall on the city, the other buildings proved just as fragile—even the tiny little skyscrapers which had looked like they would poke into her flesh had instead crumbled away like nothing. Gia shivered with every new batch of buildings that met her sole, until her foot lay flat on the floor. She curled her toes in delight, and looked over the rest of the little city.
How on Earth had something so frail made its way into her room? Gia doubted she could have even lifted it without it all turning to dust, nor did she think that anyone could have put together something so delicate and yet so detailed. It seemed a work of magic to her. One thing she knew for sure, though, was that she would have fun stepping on it even if those ten thousand dollars never came.
She took another step, then swiped her foot to the right, wiping out a good chunk of the city in a matter of seconds, before bringing her other foot into the fun. She stepped back and forth over whatever remaining buildings happened to catch her eye, laughing to herself as she destroyed more and more of the city, until there was nothing but a tiny little spot left standing, maybe a square inch total. She stepped up to it, setting her feet down beside it, never imagining that down in that little area, among the last of the city's buildings, was her coworker Helen.
Would Gia have acted any different if she'd known? Maybe she would have felt bad for that tiny germ and spared her life; maybe she would have simply spent some time teasing her before snuffing her out. It hardly mattered since, short of a microscope, she had no way of noticing that woman's existence.
Her big toes flanked that little patch of land. It amused her to think of it as a real city and not a model, especially seeing that either one of her toes could have wiped it out in a single tap. She wiggled those toes, bringing new tremors to the pitiful Helen, each tap a drumbeat that marked the unstoppable march of her incoming death.
At that moment, Helen would have done anything to be spared. She would have eagerly fallen on hands and knees in worship of Gia and sworn to serve that woman forever, even if it meant spending the rest of her life licking her toes clean. She blubbered as Gia raised her foot overhead, trying in vain to hold back the tears now spilling from her eyes. She begged for her life, apologized for every ill word she'd ever spoken about Gia, promised to treat her coworker better if she could just leave this nightmare and wake up in her own bed.
It all made no difference.
Gia's big toe hovered over the city's last remains now, and over puny little Helen. If death was inevitable, Helen would have preferred for it to just fall and kill her already, but the mighty digit took its sweet time coming down. After all, Gia wanted to savor this last tiny morsel. She went as slowly as she could, delighting in every tiny building that crumbled against her skin. Before long the buildings surrounding Helen had all collapsed, and buried her in that rain of rubble. But even then she was still alive—bruised and wounded and waiting for death. Even when Gia's toe settled down she still wasn't dead, only hurt even more. It was only when that titan of a woman twisted her toe on the floor, grinding everything down, that Helen was finally crushed under it, finding peace in oblivion.
Gia lifted her toe afterwards and smiled at the perfect imprint it left behind—an imprint which now held Helen's remains. With that the whole of the city was eradicated, all the millions of people in it rendered tiny red spots against her skin or in the rubble, their fates never to be discovered, their bodies never to be found—all of their lives ended at the feet of Gia, their unsuspecting Goddess of destruction.