The Great Awakening (Chapter 5)

“Wow…” It was about all she could manage.

            Lilly breathed in and out, doing her best to maintain a zen-like sense of balance, with both feet rooted to the densely textured hub of Chicago. She knew it was only sensory illusion, given she had a pair of socks, a meshy Converse insole, and layers of molded rubber between her bare feet and the world, yet when the girl took each of these two steps, she could’ve sworn she felt the microscopic details of the city terrain prickling her naked sole itself: a tingly wave of numbing pins-and-needles passing from her toes to her heel. It was impossible, yes, but she still couldn’t help but smirk at the bizarre intimacy of this notion. Perhaps she’d have the chance to make that feeling real later on, if she grew tired of walking in her sneakers.

            Well within spitting distance, just a single lunge away, she could see the buildings rising most clearly off the ground like sewing needles standing on end. They sparkled in the morning rays, momentarily making them harder to distinguish from so high up and on such a grander scale as Lilly’s, but it was unmistakable that she’d arrived at the most architecturally developed portion of the city, the tallest buildings of which couldn’t have been half as long as her finger. Even the districts around her feet with shorter skyscrapers became visible now that she actually stood among them, or rather upon them, and she was grateful for the chance to observe from this wondrous new perspective. The dazzling lure of the little downtown center, however, called to her like a candy shop window, and Lilly knew she wouldn’t be satisfied until she’d gotten a better look, perhaps touched it. Likely, in fact, touched it.

            “Careful… careful…” she whispered to herself as a sort of pep-talk, knowing how easy it would be now to misstep and ruin the chance to give herself a tour of town center where the practically microbial life forms lived. “Easy does it now.”

            Slowly the girl peeled one rubber sole off the now-horizontal devastation where buildings and throngs of humans once stood before she crushed them into smoking greyscale flatland. Bits of dirt and grunge sprinkled off the bottom of her shoe during the upswing of her step, though much of the breakable stonework and streets she’d just stood upon remained with her, crammed into the broad pockets of her treads. Extending her leg forth, Lilly launched another stride, but with less of the lumbering reticence she had before, now that she was on a mission. The arc was still ponderous, but determined, and in the span of a few bracing seconds, she smashed her foot back down just a short distance away from the city’s “towering” epicenter. The whole silver cluster seemed to shake for a moment, even knocking a glassy skyscraper or two sideways, but the vast majority kept standing, which again made Lilly happy. With her shoe taking residence in a third new crater of Chicago, she crouched low, arms extended the full wingspan to keep herself composed and avoiding falling on the city, when she so desired to view it from up close while it was still mostly unbroken.

            Now hunkered at the apex of a squat, the girl reached out with both hands, splashing one set of fingers into the puddle of Lake Michigan, and affixing the other far enough away from the fascinatingly high-borne district that the main site of her interest wasn’t disturbed. Those widespread fingertips sunk through a couple crumbling city blocks each, the soft spiraled pinkish pads of her skin proving that no structure here, made of rock nor metal, could withstand this unconscious grab for balance. Steadied, Lilly combed her raven-black bangs out of her eyes, her bangle bracelet jangling, and again bowed her head as low as she could dip for the best possible view of the heart of Chicago.

            Though she was studying the tiny landscape still from at least four miles in the air, Lilly was nevertheless delighted with what she discovered. Now that she’d found such relatively large targets as these impressive skyscrapers, it was finally possible to eke out details that resembled the human world she knew existed down there while she walked across it, yet up until this moment still had a nagging shadow of a doubt telling her this was all mirage. No longer. Sure, she couldn’t quite see people or cars or windows, as she’d secretly but perhaps irrationally hoped, but Lilly could easily tell apart the high-rises from the pitiful office parks lined low like rows of teeth in the surrounding blocks. These Chicago superstructures represented the pinnacle of the city’s achievements, rising hundreds of feet into the sky, though none of them was elevated enough to reach her ankle. Not even the tallest one, Willis Tower, which she identified after several minutes of eye-straining searching. All of the skyscrapers twinkled as the shadow-lines of her individual hairs sifting in the wind flashed above them.

            “Sorry about this,” she said to no one in particular, though her soft yet nonetheless thunderously ear-ringing voice reached every mortified soul still living in Chicago. “But I have to do this. I… have to see. I’ll go slow. I promise.”

            She couldn’t help it. The curiosity was killing her. Lilly pried her fingertips out of the holes she’d jammed in the earth for balance, rubbed the ends of her digits together to dust off, then reached discreetly for the nearest bevy of thin, crystal-shimmering skyscrapers. Moving at slothly pace again, since she was nervous of accidentally knocking them over with the gale wind of her in-rushing hand before she could even have a chance to snatch them, Lilly purposefully held her breath to limit unnecessary wavering of her hunched body. She really wanted to hold one, to see it up close. Gentle as though she was attempting to pet a butterfly’s wing, the girl brought her thumb and index fingers close together, with only a few hair’s breadths separating her fingerprints, and formed a vice around two neighboring skyscrapers. Each of them wasn’t much taller than a single segment of her finger, joint-to-joint, so Lilly used utmost care in pinching them. Yet, despite all her precaution, the very moment the buildings touched the plush organic canyon-walls of oily finger flesh each fifty stories wide, the pair of skyscrapers imploded.

            “Yes. That’s it.” Lilly’s heart fluttered with excitement as she experienced the delicate sensation of those structures against her skin for only a precious second, before it disappeared, turning the feeling and the structures themselves into gritty particulate matter stuck between the grooves of her fingerpads right after. She’d smashed them without even trying.

            “Oh… I guess not,” she murmured in a wistful drone that shook every building directly below down to the basements and bomb shelters. Deflated, she exhaled her disappointment, and held her hand up in front of her eyes for examination. Sure enough, she saw little more than the residue of the powderized buildings left on her fingers, which she cleaned off with a quick puff of air from puckered lips, then resumed her intense focus on the microcosm of hundred-floor civilization below. She was new to this, after all. A little trial and error was expected.

            “Why are you so fragile?” she asked of the city and its people in a perky, roaring drawl. Approaching the next location differently after careful selection, where Lilly found three slightly-taller tube-towers grouped, she consciously brought her fingertips together well ahead of time while reaching out, but instead of using the full pillowy brunt of her ringed prints to gain purchase, she angled both fingers in toward each other like claws, and aimed to use only the rounded peaks of each digit to touch the oh-so-delicate micro-architecture. Maybe that would allow her to focus with surgical control and create a lesser risk for the twin walls of her fingertips, supple and tender though the skin was from Lilly’s point of view, of instantaneously grinding down the stone-and-steel structures that were so breathtakingly feeble, it would take only one budge of the weakest muscles in her elegant fingers to render the buildings to black talcum. Careful as could be, Lilly wrapped her curled digits around the trio of skyscrapers, hugged them in her grasp, and plucked.