The Great Awakening (Chapter 11)

If anything, Lilly neared with even greater caution now, knowing her arrival was sure to be announced with seismic adjustments in the streets and cars going airborne like jackrabbits, and it would be an even bigger waste to shatter this lesser metropolis before getting a closer look. While it would be difficult to recapture that first-time thrill of picking apart a city by hand and foot, doodling her fingertip among toppling skyscrapers and cutting two-mile trenches with the rounded cusp of her shoe, the girl was treated to the wonderment of an aerial scope over the city’s night life. Her eyes widened and her lips ringed as if she was gazing through glass into an immaculately sculpted and rather spacious snow globe town, and in a way she was, minus the translucent barrier or falling flakes. Though, certainly Lilly was more than capable of “shaking” the place up, replacing decorative snow with falling ash.

Unlike the few-and-far-between rural towns from earlier, some of them barely enough to register as family plots, the glow of Cleveland’s buildings was substantial enough to reveal the whole metropolitan area to Lilly, rather like fierce campfire embers otherwise surrounded by ambiguous blackness. Resting on her stomach to observe the place from up-close, the giantess’s face hovered at the edge of the city, now feeling like she was staring over a filled-in toy Lite-Brite, complete with peg-like buildings packed so tightly together that, in the dark, at first they appeared to form a singular shape, until the giantess’s eyes adjusted and she saw them standing as lone entities, extremely thin and fine as tender greenery stalks, but persistent in their glitter. Her skin tingled with goose bumps to think that, in all likelihood, thousands of citizens were looking right back at her gigantic face, haloed against the night shroud behind her. Not wanting to alarm them unnecessarily, she put on her best smile, knowing the concentrated gleam from all the buildings combined would make her grin-displayed pearly whites absolutely light up.

When she could stand to simply observe no longer, Lilly reached forth, her fingers gracefully dangled above as if she was offering her hand for a formal kiss of greeting by the city itself. Instead, she raised her flattened palm over the middle of the downtown area, where the city-light radiance was most intense and its precious details easiest to spot, then curled her index digit straight downward toward the earth like a drill.

With enchanted fascination, Lilly withdrew her hand just far enough so her fingertip ticklishly grazed against the tallest high-rise in Cleveland. She moved so slowly that she felt the stony needle-like shape of the building brace against the oncoming spire of her digit, the steel-laden structure only able to combat the slightly-doughier inner pads of the girl’s hand flesh for a fraction of a heartbeat before it cracked clean from its foundations and was swept along with Lilly’s ethereally hovering appendage. Then just like that, the girl halted her beckoning motion, having managed to reach right into downtown but only directly contact one building, and felt the skyscraper come unpeeled from her warm skin, then teeter into its closest neighbor in a devastatingly fiery impact that barely registered as a tap in Lilly’s ears, like a pair of dry flower stems brushing together, and only because she was listening so closely.

The effect was a tad underwhelming for the giantess, considering Willis Tower was nearly double the size of Cleveland’s tallest achievement. But then again, human structures were now all so unbelievably thin and fragile by her estimation, none seemed to stand even a prayer of a chance anyway against the oncoming oily print-lined bulge of her fingertip. Still scrutinizing the multicolored little hearth of the incandescent city, Lilly couldn’t help but notice the vividness of the light diminishing by a subtle shade.

This was to be expected, however, considering she’d liberated a nine-hundred-foot-tall building from its electrical connections, as well as literally ripped it from the earth and flung it into another skyscraper. Its artificial bloom had been replaced by smoldering flame, creating a miniature light show for Lilly in varying hues that contrasted against the white beams of skyscraper spires and rainbow-tinged neon brilliance lower to the ground that only became visible after the giantess let her eyes adjust again. And this gave her another idea.

Now that she had a taste of the way a tiny city’s light-up presentation could so curiously and artistically shift for her amusement with the simplest of finger-drags, Lilly found it irresistible to keep playing. And to think, she’d even considered napping on her way to Cleveland, so she could be fresh and bright for more cross-country visits in the morning. What fun she would’ve missed. Raising her hand over downtown again, this time staggering her manicured extremities apart like claws, Lilly proceeded to gently comb the precipice of five fingernails along the upper floors of Cleveland’s tallest high-rises. Like miniscule bowling pins, they leaned into one another, teetered for a delightfully heart-stopping instant, then clattered over in a chain reaction. Unlike that first pluck at a single skyscraper, the giantess could not only see the effect of her feeble touch better, but hear it, everything from the quiet percussion of tumbling fifty-story buildings to the homey roar of the fires. Immediately the light changed again, dimming more considerably, but still proudly blazing with an oranger tint where Lilly’s exploratory fingers had scraped once-sturdy architecture into a thatched heap of flame-consumed debris right in the heart of Cleveland.

Cautiously then so as not to prematurely disturb more of her new playset, the girl crawled back onto her haunches and sat up, still at the edge of the city, with her knees pulled to her chest. The broad mile-wide rubber boughs of her snowy-hued footwear were the first to cross back into Cleveland territory, the curved rims bulldozing through buildings and bridges alike that were so low to the ground they may as well have been desert ground in Lilly’s eyes. All this transpired while she simply adjusted into a more comfortable pose to witness the light show, the geometric squares of her sneaker underbellies filling quickly with greenery and architectural wreckage like wet cement.

Then, with her fingers clasped together over her shins, the girl observed the ardent candlelight glow of her handiwork taking over the center of Cleveland. As the fires spread and more nail-thin towers collapsed into one another, until there wasn’t even a city skyline to speak up, white light transformed into softer fire-red. When she squinted so only the downtown flare of smoking micro-skyscrapers became visible, for an instant the giantess could convince herself she was back in a state park, alone with nature, and warmed by a campfire. Though she was certainly a much more “public” figure now, Lilly still felt that valuable solitude, and could even detect the gentle heat of the raging infernos wrapping around the center of the little metropolis when she reached forth, holding her fingers above the light.

When the initial burn lessened to embers, and her view of the city was diminished, Lilly helped herself to more light by scraping her cuticles gently but firmly across lower-tiered rooftops in concentric circles surrounding the downtown area she’d already ravaged. It hadn’t occurred to the girl until night fell just how much impact her slightest touch had on the cities, particularly when it came to creating light. It was like finger-painting with sparks that left adorable hair-thin trails of fire in her wake, and Lilly just couldn’t get enough of it.

Soon she was expending the streets of Cleveland three and four at a time, raking her lazily dangled fingers and tingling with glee at the results. Hoping it wasn’t too cheeky of her, the giantess even did her best to illustrate a smiley face by clawing out shapes in the ground where apartment complexes and office buildings once stood. The image wasn’t exactly clear, as the destruction and accompanying flame were difficult even for a ten-mile goddess to control, but Lilly was satisfied nonetheless.

In short order, the whole city proper was engulfed in destructive yet pleasing light, with all the puny buildings even tall enough for the giantess’s eyes to perceive their depth either flicked, poked, or lovingly brushed over. Just for good measure, too, she’d turned paved roads into a carved-up mess like a playground sand pit by curling and spiraling the malleable stone-laden earth against the gridline-patterned segments of her peachy digits, while the city blocks themselves were made unrecognizable thanks to the slender citadels of the girl’s elegant fingertips giving them just enough of a nudge to turn them into skyscraper-scale torches. Of course from the giantess’s vantage, these blinding blazes registered only as rows of half-extinguished matchsticks, a sight she found charming and overall a major improvement to the appearance of the city, even while knowing it wouldn’t exactly be as “habitable” for the invisible speck-height people below following her visit. Then again, there weren’t likely to be many citizens still alive once she was through, so it was a non-issue.