A bead of hot sweat drizzled from her forehead, ploughing down the slope of her nose and killing thirty-eight people. Most of them didn’t know where they were, only that the air was so thick they couldn’t breathe, let alone scream – those who just about realised what had happened were given only a second to cry out in shock before a thick globule of salty gel consumed their entire body, the force squeezing them from all sides and suffocating them to death. Some were overcome by the liquid pressure such that their bodies exploded, the red vapour insignificantly mixing with the water and salts, barely shifting the hue of the droplet. The bead slithered to the crest of her nose, tingling the skin.
She thwumped back into the couch, legs splayed out and eyes shut, her mouth hung wide open. Emma didn’t care how she looked, or sounded – deep, heavy breaths of filled the living room for a minute as she struggled to recover. A month into her gym membership and she expected to be used to it by now. Still, through heaving breaths she smiled and started to relax. A great start to the weekend, she thought.
Half-consciously, Emma used her left hand to wipe the tip, the sweat smearing violently across the surface of her thumb and crushing the few survivors instantaneously. It didn’t hurt most of them – it was too fast for that.
“Fuck,” Emma wheezed, finally catching up to her breath. It was a good kind of ‘fuck’, the kind you mutter to yourself when the hardest work of the day is over. Saturdays were good for jogging. The nine-to-five of the weekdays always brought her to the verge of collapsing; mindless hours of reception work, making calls, filing documents. It all blurred together in a painful haze – and why the hell had she volunteered for the coast guard? Wednesday was supposed to be her day off, but that stupid New Year’s resolution hung about like a bad smell. She could hardly quit in March, after only two months. It would look awful. She’d heard it said that you should have your life figured out by your early thirties – and she wondered if that was true for anyone nowadays. Still, the effort of an early morning jog felt different: it wasn’t a pain inflicted upon her, it was of her own volition, and that made it feel different, feel good. She spat a strand of ginger hair out of her mouth, and she smiled, lazily taking off her sneakers.
A hundred nye-nanoscopic people clambered about and screeched as the entire earth vibrated, a powerful gust of wind shoving most of them further down the rubbery cliffside. For those clinging to the fibrous laces, each cotton strand thicker than a tree trunk, they had some chance to hold on, but only for a moment. In the far distance, a swoop and then a dozen screams – then another swoop, louder, and a dozen or so screams – Emma’s fingers danced along the top of her shoe, single-handedly untying her laces and tossing the strings into the void. With every gentle swipe of her index finger and thumb, masses of helpless men and women were either ground into the fibres by the pressure of her grip or flung into oblivion. Some would fall for minutes before smashing into the floorboards, a million miles below. Then her hand gripped the back of her sneaker, and she tugged aggressively to loosen the whole thing. The swipe of dense shoe fabric against sock cotton was followed by a quiet breeze as warm air evacuated from the crevice of Emma’s shoe, like stale air releasing from an ancient tomb.
Still half-wearing the sneaker, she let go of her left foot and it sagged into the couch, the shoe crawling lazily down the length of her foot before reaching the toes and slipping off – half a second of silence – then a weighty clatter against the floor. The process repeated on the other side as her left foot relaxed, the cotton of her tight, short socks stained slightly, clammy to the touch. Taking off a single shoe had been enough to kill about two thirds of those trapped inside, but for the unlucky survivors, they were greeted to the reality of their miniscule size, dazzling light revealing that no one was any larger than a dust particle. The rugged terrain, smooth to her but mountainous to them, stretched for miles into the sky, culminating in the rim of her white (or rather faint yellow-greyish) sock and the endless tower of a glistening hairless leg beyond it. Some of them chocked up, a combination of shock and disgust, the soggy, salt-scented air making it hard not to cough, as if they had teleported to a planet with an atmosphere consisting entirely of vinegar. Others began to scream, scream until their lungs ached in a desperate bid to the get the colossal girl’s attention, though it was made all the harder as her heaving breaths and the hum of a nearby fan made it almost impossible to hear even themselves. None of them recognised her, or if some did, they obviously didn’t have her number; otherwise, this might have ended a lot differently. Her foot shifted slightly into a more relaxed position, and about fifty people fell screaming into the abyss.
That was nothing, absolutely nothing compared to the hell deep beneath the surface. Inside the sock, pitch black peppered with the occasional twinkle of light breaking through cotton, like distant stars. This was all thousands of people could see. Some couldn’t see anything, compressed into the wet fabric under the weight of scorching, sweating skin. It was like a medieval vision of damnation, the darkness punctuated by the endless groaning of cotton fibres, grating the ears, and the animalistic screams of humans who had no idea where they were, why, or how they got there. Women and men, young and old, their voices blended into an outrageous cacophony that made the ears bleed and the heart sink, and every instant, every waking second, the scraping, grinding, mashing of hot toes against creasing fabric would crush hundreds upon hundreds into gory residue so fine that it became liquid, bleeding into the fabric itself and becoming one with the dirt and the salt. Beneath the foot, and in the cavities of the toes, it was so wretchedly hot that human bodies ignited into flames spontaneously and thousands burned to death. The smell of charred corpses was a happy distraction from the stench of thick foot odour and warm rubber.
One example among tens of thousands – Andrew had been a final year college student with a sweet girlfriend and plans to move to Australia. He had been those things before fate twisted him into a mangled stringy mess of blood and viscera between a toe the size of a mountain and damp sock cotton as rough and durable as concrete. At his pathetic scale, the countless fibres making up the delicate surface of Emma’s workout socks were like unbreakable razor wires, each wider than a car, each tangled together and made up of even smaller and smaller wires. He had no chance – one moment slumping back into his bed to enjoy a lazy late morning, the next being shoved full force into a field of twanging tendrils interspersed with rock-hard chunks of dirt, crushed by the weight of a red-hot leathery mattress that seemed to stretch for miles in all directions, not that he could see that far as Emma’s skin warped around him, enclosing him inside a compressed chamber of sticky flesh. Some people would last for seconds, minutes even, but the weight of Emma’s scrunched big toe was enough to crush his entire body within milliseconds of arriving. The brief and confused squeak he let out, hardly a scream at all, was immediately muffled by the surrounding toe walls, never to be heard by another soul. All while his girlfriend slept comfortably a million miles away at her proper size – she would not realise he had vanished for hours, crushed to a pulp by a young woman neither of them would ever know.
Emma’s sole was a cracked landscape of hundreds of undulating creases, a chaos where chasms and caves made entirely of flesh would grow, warp, close in, and vanish. Pockets of people became trapped, exhausting the air supply with their gasps and hollers, quickly suffocating under the weight of a single woman. It was like being trapped in a bouncy castle that had suddenly deflated around them, only the castle was made of rough leather, and it was the hottest summer on record. Wrinkles would crack open, revealing dozens of wailing prisoners glued to the canyon walls like dust to a strip of sticky tape, and hundreds more would be forced inside under pressure – a second later the canyon would close in, the screams growing muffled, then countless soundless deaths as the damp walls kissed. Toes scrunched and skin flexed, the floor of the woollen sock undulating like an ocean. For Katie and Leo, two of the few that were lucky enough to recognise each other in the dark, the friends had little time to console each other before the ground collapsed beneath them, transforming into a slide made of thousands of fibrous escarpments. Katie tumbled into a violent roll and on the way down, her body was mangled beyond comprehension, dashed against pointed lint rocks and twanging wires. Before the body could even reach the skin of Emma’s creased foot, it was already unrecognisable, reduced to a slush that smacked the skin walls as they bent the fabric downwards into a fatal slope, culminating in a tight cavern between skin and sock. Leo just about survived the death slide, cut and bruised and too scared to even notice his childhood friend’s demise – in the flurry of screams, it was every man for himself. He clawed hopelessly as the fabric only continued to steepen, the heat of Emma’s foot wafting across his body and the cavernous maw approaching. To him it was an alien landscape, he had no way of knowing that this hell was simply the interior of a woman’s footwear. His screams for help became senseless cries of agony as the skin creased further, closing the cavern and bringing a mountain of damp skin steamrolling up the length of the slope, smashing Leo to pieces alongside hundreds of other victims.
By the time Emma had peeled her socks away from her feet, sighing as the sensation of cold air hit them, most people inside were dead or near enough. The inevitable residue of grime and loose fabric, tiny specks of black and grey, were littered between the crevices of her toes and glued to the wet undersides of her soles. She would never have been able to tell apart the bodies from the dirt, even though some were still half alive, stuck to an endless plane of skin, howling for some release. One leg crossed the other, and her bundled socks slipped over the edge of the couch and onto the floor. Though making hardly a perceptible sound to her, the balled socks sent shockwaves on impact, sending dirt and microscopic people flying in all directions, the calamitous noise enough to shatter bones and permanently deafen thousands before a gigantic sole came crashing down to the floor and flattened their bodies into a hot grease. Trickles of sweat still killed dozens if not hundreds a minute, trailing down Emma’s gleaming wet skin and absorbing people as they struggled to outrun tsunamis the size of skyscrapers.
Emma leaned further back into the cushioning of the couch, her mouth still half open and eyes glazed over as she scrolled through an endless stream of social media content. Occasionally, she’d smirk or softly chuckle at the screen. There she sat, drenched and physically beat, for about five minutes. It was the usual ritual, one she wasn’t even conscious of, like the tapping of her toes against the cold hard wood or the way her thumb aimlessly twitched and picked at the nails on her fingers.
In that short time, her involuntary movements alone had made her a murderer thousands of times over. And after all of that – the senseless killing, the wet, hot slaughter – there were just enough survivors to count on one hand. ‘A miracle,’ they must have panted to themselves. An insane miracle.
Emma tossed her phone onto a cushion and let out a sigh, absentmindedly wriggling her toes and slapping the other foot down on the floor. ‘I deserve a shower,’ she thought.