A Tale of Little Cities (Chapter 11)

Laura Weaver peeked between her fingers as the flash died back down. Still trembling from the unknown event, she tried to recount the last few minutes in her memory, though it was shaky: returning to the basement to find her friend Tara toying with her father’s technology, discovering the little helpless city smashed to dusty smithereens under Tara’s soles, and wrestling her friend away from the controls just as the machine sprang back to life. Then there was a surge of electric chaos, followed by blackness. After a day full of horrific revelations, not the least of which was the truth that her father had accidentally caused multiple populous cities to meet their doom by shrinking and teleporting, this was the first moment where there truly seemed to be no reasoning. She was at a loss.

The girl brushed a strand of golden hair over her ear, then gingerly set both palms on her sides, pushing herself up to a seated position. Sun blared in her pupils. She was too dazed to recall having gone back outside after descending to the basement laboratory, but Laura was assuredly outdoors, even if she didn’t recognize her surroundings. The ground was patchy and uneven, unlike the smooth concrete drive, and was speckled with crunchy jagged flecks of what she could only assume to be earth ravaged by tire treads. Then as she rose up onto her knees, she noticed the indentation made by her body in the loamy ground beneath, like a snow angel in the earth itself. Laura rubbed her fingertip through the nearest dip in the crater, and examined the end of her digit up close, frowning at the gritty contents smeared over her manicured skin. She couldn’t identify the substance at all, with its bizarre combination of malleable texture and aluminum-silver chrome. What was this, and perhaps more importantly, where was she?

“Laura?”

A familiar voice rife with anxiety rang out from somewhere unseen. Though Tara’s voice was frightened, Laura was instantly relieved to know she wasn’t alone in this strange experience.

“Tara? Tara, where are you?” Laura pleaded. Her fingers traveled down her bare leg, caressing her palm over her nervously quaking knee, and came to rest on the mesh padding of her left Adidas sneaker. The loosened pink lace strings hung in a crisscross, which Laura instinctively began to twirl around her finger to soothe herself. She turned her head, looking to the sides, and finally behind, where Laura discovered her best friend crouched over the mysterious silvery ground and raking her long fingers through it.

The tall and tan young woman, dressed far skimpier than Laura for the pre-summer months, allowed her brunette locks and platinum highlights to hang in a shimmering cataract as she stooped down to examine the earth. Her French-tipped fingernails clacked and sliced with ease through the clay-like material which made up the ground. Several footsteps, courtesy of her favorite thong-strap sandals, were already stamped into the ground alongside her own body crater, which matched Laura’s own post-wakeup.

Drowsily, the blonde pulled herself up to her feet, and gave her pink laces a tug so she wouldn’t wobble at full height. She scratched her head, still searching for an explanation, but coming up empty. In two languorous strides, Laura closed the distance between herself and Tara. The hardy rubber toe-tip of her athletic footwear scraped up more silver material with each gentle launch, arced through the air to propel her forward for the step, then sunk weightily into the metallic mud, squishing up the chintzy earth between the zigzagging treads of her shoes. Laura took these two steps with scarcely a thought, of course, and had no way of knowing the untold tragedy enacted just by planting her Adidas-adorned feet twice down in the ground.

“This is freaking weird, isn’t it?” Tara muttered, and let slip a sly smile. The anxiety of a moment before had seemingly melted away in favor of curiosity. She dug the spires of her fingers deep into the ground, almost down to the knuckle, then ripped upward. A hunk of soft earth came away in the thrall of her five clawed talons, quickly spilling out in the crevices between like a handful of sand.

Laura frowned, watching the same divoted clumps of silver earth pouring over her friend’s elegant digits and splattering on the stamped grounds between her flip-flops. Something about it just didn’t seem right. But then again, nothing about this day was anywhere close to right.

“Yeah…” Laura agreed. She wiped the silver remains off on her thigh, then crouched down beside her friend. “What happened to us?”

“Beats me. Hey, this stuff on the ground is kinda neat. A little like sandpaper, but soft enough you can crush it up. You could probably use it for spa treatments and whatnot,” Tara said. She molded the lump of grey earth between her palms, rolling it end over end, and mashing it into a sphere like Play-Doh. As she squatted, with her soles arched up high in her foamy flip-flops, the back end of the footwear occasionally slapped upward for balance, then flattened back down with a soft clap. Each impact was slight, doing little more than lapping at Tara’s sun-kissed sole, but when the sandal lip came back to rest on the ground again, it sent a puff of silvery debris flying backward by gale force.

“Maybe we shouldn’t touch it until we know what it is,” Laura said, uncertain again. She nibbled anxiously on the corner of her thumbnail.

“Nah, I’m sure it’s okay.” Without waiting to further consult her worrisome friend, Tara did exactly what she hypothesized, and pried her left flip-flop off her foot. Her toes smushed luxuriously through an untouched square of the patchwork ground, and she let out an involuntary moan as her sole settled down. Clearly pleased with the experiment, Tara proceeded to massage her sole back and forth in the silvery terrain, grinding it into every wrinkled nook and stippled cranny of her foot’s underside. The papery flecks scattered under the heft of her heel and sole, even scrubbing like raw suds into the rosy canvas of her skin. Eventually, a paste-like form of the grunge started to ooze up between the girl’s bronzed toe shafts, which she quickly squeezed right out like toothepaste by alternately cinching and spreading her toes.