Toys (Patreon)

The first step was so much harder than I thought. I wanted it. My whole life, I wanted it, but when the impossible became real, it was almost too much. All the model cars and styrofoam lunch containers masquerading as buildings that I’d crunched under my shoes couldn’t prepare me for this moment.

Ten minutes ago I’d met him in his basement, bracelets clinking as I wrung my hands, tall black boots stretching to the hem of my short dress. I expected maybe earrings or a necklace in the little surprise he gave me. When he said all my dreams would come true, I immediately dreaded a ring.

“Press it,” he whispered when I pushed back the lid and found a small red button, like something from an old arcade machine. I rolled my eyes and shook my head, feeling the mechanical click.

Instantly there was hot sunlight on my skin and warm fresh air. The buzz of the city was suddenly around me--below me.

Plenty of buildings barely reached my knees. Shouts and screams started to ring out in a language I didn’t recognize or understand. Inch-tall people started swirling about in panic, dashing into or out of buildings.

They were afraid--so wonderfully afraid of me, and I just watched as they started to flee. It was so powerfully, stunningly real that I only stood motionless and stared, trying to take it all in.

My eyes eventually fell towards my feet. I hadn’t even noticed it, but one was half-buried in the wreckage of some building I stood on. Tiny people scrambled about, digging through the masonry and rocks, shouting to each other as they worked.

Only half of the structure had collapsed, and a little shiver ran through me as I realized their desperate efforts were to free the people still trapped inside. It just came naturally to me to drag my boot slowly backwards, ripping through the remaining roof and walls with my towering heel and bulldozing everything flat as my sole followed.

The would-be rescuers joined the chorus of panicked screams, and those that weren’t trapped by the spray of wood and concrete turned to scurry away. It took only seconds to turn the building to rubble, but I wasn’t done with it.

I took it slowly, gradually lifting my heel and shifting my weight. The debris compressed and crunched deliciously underfoot as I started to twist my toes back and forth. Three, a dozen, forty? I had no idea how many people had been trapped inside, but every single one had to be smashed to paste under my grinding boot as I crushed the building to powder.

They knew my intentions now. It was one thing to simply stare up at my colossal form and tremble with fear, but I could give them so many more reasons to run.

My lips curled to a grin while I lifted my foot. I liked seeing the imprint my boot left behind, but a nearby supermarket needed my attention. I’d only been here for a minute or two. The people inside might not even know about me yet. The workers were busy stocking shelves, customers picking through melons--some might have started to push towards the windows to see what the commotion’s all about.

I stomped on it. They’d never know about me. They’d never know about the colossal goddess that looked down and decided on a whim to obliterate them in an instant. They’d never know but the whole city shook from the impact. Nearby buildings buckled, shaking apart all around me as a dust cloud rose around my foot.

I kicked the ruins out into the street, sending a spray of stone and smashed bits crashing over the pile of cars jammed up together, filling the roadway in a pathetic attempt to escape the town. I crouched down and plucked one up to take a closer look.

Over the years I’d probably smashed dozens of plastic cars to splinters. This one had two tiny men in the front seats, shouting and scrambling in full panic as I dragged them up hundreds of feet in the air.

I tried to hook the door handle with the back of a fingernail, but it snapped off and tumbled to the ground. WIth a shrug, I decided to just push my finger straight through the door. I chuckled to watch through the windshield while the driver flailed his limbs and crawled over his passenger to try and back away. My fingertip punched through the car’s side like it was little more than tinfoil.

I thought about mashing them both under my finger. I tilted the car more towards its side, keeping the other door against my palm so it was impossible to open. Both men mostly fit under my fingertip, and I laughed at their unintelligible screams and pointless struggles while their tiny fists battered my finger.

I decided I was more curious about their car for now. They earned a moment’s reprieve as I decided to tear off one of the wheels. I rolled it back and forth between my fingers for a moment, enjoying its rubber tread, then let out a cute gasp when I pushed my fingers together and felt the tire burst between them.

They were so desperate to escape, though. I thought about peeling back the roof and dumping them out so they’d splatter across the pavement, but decided I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of success. Instead, I held them up in front of my eyes and started to curl my fingers around their car.

I breathed another happy sigh when the screech of crumpling metal started to overwhelm their babbling and screams, and when those screams turned to gurgling, squelching sounds of flesh and bone being shredded and smashed.

It was easier than crumpling a soda can. I tossed the balled-up mess to over my shoulder and looked out over the roadway with an eager smile.

Hundreds of cars lined the road, all filled with stupid tiny people trying to escape me. I planted my heel and covered the nearest one with my boot. The metal scrunched and groaned beneath my descending toes, resisting my weight just enough that I could feel the crunches and snaps. With barely any effort at all my boot met the pavement.

I shivered and cooed at the tiny reddish spurts that jetted out to the side of my foot. This was nothing like the toys I stomped in my videos. They crushed so wonderfully and easily under my weight, but more than that, there were real, live people trapped inside, staring up at my colossal boots and my wicked grin while I snuffed them out for fun.

Some of them started to pile out of their cars and took off on foot. I enjoyed the slickness of their flattened bodies along with the popping tires and shattering glass under my feet. My steps were slow and deliberate, causing death and destruction with every footfall as I simply walked on them.

I liked the ones who turned and looked. I liked them staring at the bottom of my boot, paralyzed with utter terror as I stepped down. Some of them realized their hopelessness and turned to beg for my mercy. They held their children before them and probably prayed that I’d pass them over. It was almost more delicious to smear the little families beneath my toes.

From the second I’d arrived here, it stopped mattering who they are or what they wanted. All of them and everything they had was mine now. They stopped being people and became my little toys. Decades of my deepest fantasies and dreams had somehow come true, and my body and brain both pulsed and buzzed with a terribly undeniable energy and desire.

My heel punched through the front of a city bus while the back half of it crunched under the ball of my foot. I dragged my toes back towards me, flattening the whole thing bit-by-bit, and watched as a stream of hideous gore spurted towards the back of my shoe. Every seat must have been packed.

Every step, every crunch, every scream just stoked the desire for more. I’d erase every last one of them. They all existed only to suffer for my satisfaction, and nothing could stop me from obliterating every inch of this city under my merciless boots.

But suddenly I was back on my couch. I gasped, blinking as I looked all around, but I was definitely at home all alone.

My phone chimed with a text. How had my bag gotten back here? It was him. Turn on the news.

I started to reply, but as I considered what he’d said a sort of sick dread started to settle in. I turned on the television and it immediately greeted me with a somewhat familiar sight--the buildings and the sunlight, the rubble and flattened debris.

A small city in Indonesia. Thousands missing, hundreds dead. It wasn’t some virtual reality fantasy, some incredible bit of hypnosis. Everything I’d done was terribly, brutally real.

They started showing recordings. I watched my unbelievably massive boots fill the screen, seeing them from below and watching as people vanished beneath each of my ruthless steps. I heard my low, rumbling laughter in the distance accompanying the deafening crunches and screams.

Part of my wanted to be horrified, but the part of me that wanted to lean back and slip my fingers between my thighs while I watched won out. I couldn’t even find Indonesia on a map. It might as well be imaginary to me. I sent a text back and then dropped my phone face down.

My boots are dirty. Wish you were here.

History had shown that he’d be here licking my soles in twenty minutes. I planned to keep him all night, because we had so, so many things to talk about.