Strip Tease (Chapter 6)

California was no stranger to earthquakes, but the earth-breaking tremors visited upon the coastline state on this day made all prior quakes seem like the gentle kiss of breeze by comparison to the arrival of the Stripper. There was no name assigned to her at first, of course, but by her style of dress, make-up, and swanky strut, it wasn’t hard to guess that this mystery blonde tore away her clothes for a living while spinning around a metal pole. In the panicked doomsday news reports, she was known simply as The Stripper, occasionally with adjectives tucked in for emphasis, like “Sky-High Stripper.” Whatever people chose to call her, though, it was clear no single description could make anywhere near the impact of her godlike feet, housed in those colossal crystal-platformed high heels, and trampling whole counties at a time with each jaunty step.

            The country was thrown into mad uproar, even in places which couldn’t directly see Jessica Lynn on her dancing rampage. Though she was certainly visible for incredible distances: her golden-haired head appearing like an angelic crown as her lovely face crested through the clouds. Commercial airlines, with no updates from down below, discovered the woman the hard way by coming through the fluffy skyline cover and crashing headlong into the powerful pillars of those swinging gams. Dozens of planes erupted along the tanned ecosystem of those thighs and calves sculpted by pole-dancing workouts. Obviously none of these disasters, nor any of the destruction below her feet, was of concern or notice to Jessica herself.

            On the ground, drastic measures were taken. Any American city within one hundred miles of the Stripper’s casual warpath was put under immediate lockdown, though for many, it was irrelevant once Jessica simply lifted a foot and squashed the urban sprawl flat under the dual glass stages of her crystal shoes. The president, already hiding in a secure location underground, promised the nation via emergency address that everything was being handled, though his advisors had already suggested America was as good as lost. Religious figures took to the sidewalks and rooftops with their apocalypse picket signs. Military rolled through the streets with tanks and other hardware they already knew to be useless against the onslaught of those glimmering translucent shoes and accompanying meaty feet. Yet they had to put on the show, as America never surrendered, even in the face of such unimaginable odds. Families locked themselves in basements, bunkers, and bomb shelters, huddled around televisions and radios, desperately praying for the information to come through stating that this was all a hoax: an optical illusion, telling them there wasn’t really a woman dozens of miles tall trampling across the western seaboard, shimmying her hips all the while as she massacred citizens by the thousand.

            Every single one of those hopes was literally crushed when Jessica’s shoe came crashing down on their cities and livelihoods. In light of the shoes’ translucency, anyone hovering behind the ground zero destruction could’ve peered through the Stripper’s stylish footwear and witnessed the uniform stamping of entire districts below those flat-soled shoes into dusty paste and human remains.

            New updates rushed in minute-by-minute. The Stripper was entering Los Angeles, the five-hundred-square-mile sunshine city of opportunity. Battalions, and cities in their wake, transformed to ruins from just a single stride, courtesy of those destructive peds launching a devastating new assault. Next the news stations declared that specialized sub-atomic weapons were being launched upon the nation’s gigantic foe. After the first explosion, there were reports that the giantess was staggered. Though there was a tragic cost to her toppling, as her massive hands and infinite legs obliterated a length of the state, there was a reason for brief celebration as well. It seemed, at least for a moment, that they could harm her. Those dastardly shoes were even knocked away from the landscape of her wrinkled soles. Military personnel and families hiding in their basements alike all clutched one another, crying with joy. Perhaps today was not the end of the world as they knew it.

            Then when the Stripper arose again, however, seemingly unhurt but afraid, there was a redoubling of effort to bring her down. Another assault followed, but the effect was the same. They couldn’t damage the spray-tanned goddess. Their missiles could spook her, at best, and even that was dubious as she returned to her full height, bellowed threats to the foolish world below, and fiddled with her bejeweled necklace. Even after such a bizarre and deadly day, none still could’ve predicted her continued ascent toward outer space. Her height bloomed not once but twice, until the woman was, by rough accounts, somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred miles tall.

            Now with feet literally twice as capable of city-smashing as before, due to her growth spurt vastly increasing the surface area of those sparkle-toned soles and toe pads, the Stripper did what her job description implied. She danced. California itself seemed to rumble and sway, starting with a general clattering that led to buildings tipping over like dominoes for miles around those bouncy feet. Imagining her own musical beat, the Stripper alternated rapid leaps and authoritative sole-slams that altered the fabric of the city and the planet itself. Those structures directly beneath the devil-may-care dancer and the balls of her feet were quickly reduced to ashen rubble. Every time those soles impacted the earth, the particles of cities broke down further and further, until only a fine powder consisting of buildings, greenery, and humanity filled in the foot-shaped craters pockmarking the countryside.

            The president went dark. Even most of the news sources switched to static, and those that remained had only condolences to offer to the state of California, and Los Angeles in particular. The way the invader was carrying on, her bare dancing feet would reduce the standing population to zero, or even lower, within the next hour. Already there were thousands of skyscrapers and homes pounded into the beefy texture of each of her mile-wide toes, crusting like stray dust into the gravitational corpus that was their destroyer. Military forces refrained from launching another attack, for fear of the woman giving that gem another twist and spiraling into the heavens themselves. Most soldiers abandoned their posts in favor of finding the deepest possible bunker in which to take shelter for the rest of their short lives.

            In a tiny Los Angeles church on the edge of the city, a crowd sat together and reflected on the reckoning of humanity. Perhaps, some reasoned, as this dancing archangel smashed the state of California to smithereens under her long-flanked soles, if this joyful display of her sensual talents was to be the instrument of Judgment Day, then maybe they, too, ought to be happy as her. So, depressed with the knowledge of their oncoming doom, the people nonetheless engaged in a dance, even mimicking the sultry motions of their pole-dancing deity.

            This game carried on until Jessica’s seventy-square-mile foot bathed the outskirts of town in shadow. Then their dancing stopped, while the Stripper’s was only beginning. There was a brief and unsettling wind rustling through every street corner below as the sun was swallowed up, and the blue sky replaced with an everlasting plain of peach-esque, spongy sole lined with fleshy furrows like a tilled garden. Jessica’s foot itself was a new eclipse. The dexterous finger-toes with their velvety shafts and globed tips, and in particular that two-mile-thick big toe, waggled about. Splinters of sunlight still streamed between the woman’s digits as she danced, waving and revolving her leg in midair while balanced upon the other. Then at last, when her hummed song came to an end, the Stripper planted her foot firmly in the ground, as if it had always been there and intended to be forevermore.

            The muddy loam of civilization itself oozed up between her toes. That little church in particular was first locked into the grinding spiral-shape of her big toeprint, swirled around the whirlpool-effect of her oily skin, and then gripped into the vast tender cleavage between her meatiest phalange and the second. The destruction unfolded in an instant. Canyons of flesh consumed the rippled urban strips, streets cracking and folding into one another, and buildings spilling like crumbs in all directions. Those districts lucky enough to exist in the half-mile gaps between each of her toes considered themselves lucky as they watched those straddling flesh-canyons assert themselves squarely upon thousands of innocents.

            Just as quickly, though, Jessica’s toes gripped together, sealing the marshmallowy walls of her toes back together. As the woman’s joints popped and caressed along one another, the specks of Los Angeles metropolis were sandwiched on all sides. It was as if the whole of the proud and sunny city was submerged in an ocean consisting only of womanly, sweat-glazed, perfume-soggy skin. Then, the deeper she hugged the structures into her flesh, the less distinct they became as entities, until Jessica had inadvertently made entire districts of L.A. into her personal spa lotion. The little church, in particular, found a home in the side of the meteoric mass that was Jessica’s softly pedicured big toe, which went right on wriggling and flexing for the sake of the dance, as if she hadn’t just integrated thousands of lost lives into her giant doom-bringer of an elegant foot.

            “Well, this settles it,” Jessica declared to the world, as she smeared her toes through Los Angeles for the umpteenth time, feeling the grainy rubble wash through her sole creases. “I am a California girl at heart. Always have been, always will be. I don’t know why I didn’t just come out here to begin with, instead of dirty old Vegas. Seriously! Every greasy-faced asshole over there is just trying to get rich and grab a tit, but over here? They could really love me! I mean, who doesn’t want a piece of this action?”