A Tale of Little Cities (Chapter 8)

Tara cut across several adjoining backyards in her pursuit of her friend Laura, whose peculiarities just couldn’t go ignored. Not only had the usually cool-and-collected blonde showed up to hang out for a mere fifteen minutes before departing, she’d done so without putting her shoes back on. The final straw for Tara was discovering that one of her sandals was missing, and it seemed pretty obvious who’d swiped it. She’d had to fish out some flip-flops from the closet just to give chase.

The girl wasn’t upset, of course; it was just a shoe. But she was slightly worried, and more than a little curious, at Laura’s behavior, especially after how strange of a day it had been, given the reporting of two magically vanished cities. There had to be something afoot.

Arriving at Laura’s house, Tara opened the backdoor, which was still unlocked from when her friend entered not a minute before. The intruding brunette was just about to raise her voice to announce her presence when she heard the eruption of sound in the other room.

“DAD!” Laura shouted. She stormed through the kitchen, her bare feet slapping on the tiled floor. Those summer sweat-glazed soles squeaked when she came to a halt and gingerly set her purse down on the table. “What did you DO?”

“Laura…” Dr. Weaver gasped, emerging from the basement. He rushed to his daughter, but saw her crossed arms and frightened demeanor and understood then that there was no point in denial. The man wilted before her. “So… how much do you know?”

“How much do I know? Um, I know that thanks to your science project down there, Paris andBerlin are gone.”

Tara was about to speak up again, but this time chose to stay silent and take up hidden refuge in the laundry room by the door. She slid behind some hanging shirts and listened intently to the bizarre conversation. Was it truly possible that Dr. Weaver, Laura’s dad, one of the kindest and smartest men she’d ever met, was in some way responsible for the international tragedies?

“Did you find them?” Dr. Weaver timidly questioned his daughter. “The cities?”

“Yes, I found them,” Laura scowled. She held her own well-worn, sour-reeking pink Adidas in one hand, and Tara’s stolen leather house sandal in the other. Each piece of footwear contained the flaming, ashen, sweat-flooded remains of a world capital. After such a thorough oblivious pounding by both young women, there was almost nothing left to identify each one as its original location. The scientist had to squint and all but press his nose into either shoe to even get a sufficient glimpse, but once he did and got over the stench, there was more than enough proof littered on every curve of the attire.

Each girl’s insole, both the black cotton and the open-toe leather, was ingrained now with buildings and concrete threads stomped and pounded into the very fibers of the shoes. The streets were mashed like clay into the creased imprints of feminine soles, and the distinct craters of toes along the upper border were stamped without mercy. A few trickles of perspiration managed to douse some of the lingering flames, but these were the least of anyone’s worries, if there were still any surviving citizens below.

“I see,” Dr. Weaver said gravely. He guided his daughter’s hands to set the shoe-cities back on the kitchen table beside her purse, then cupped her cheeks. “Does anyone know about this?”

“No, Dad,” Laura said. Her voice cracked, and her eyes watered on the verge of crying. “I knew what would happen if I said anything. What they’d do to you. That’s Tara’s shoe. I had to steal it from her. I tried to save Berlin, but it was… it was already…”

“It’s not your fault, darling,” the doctor said. He pulled his child into a tight hug. “It’s my responsibility, of course. All of it. Every single square inch of terrain and each life within those cities is my burden to bear.”

“What’s going to happen now, Dad?” Laura sniffled. “Can we do anything to fix it?”

“We might have if the cities were preserved somehow, but seeing what’s happened, well…” he sighed, and shook his head. “My priority now is just to ensure this doesn’t happen to any more cities. The technology’s gone haywire. It may have even already targeted another location and sent it miniaturized to God-knows where.”

“You have to do something!”

“I will. There’s some equipment at my lab downtown which I think could help stabilize the machine. I have to go, now, and put a stop to this.”

“Please hurry, Dad,” Laura begged, wiping her eyes and taking a brave deep breath. “What… should I do?”

“Take those shoes to your room. Keep them with you, away from the windows, and stay there until I come back,” Dr. Weaver said. He kissed his daughter on the cheek, then departed through the front door. His car pulled out of the driveway less than a minute later. With no other recourse, Laura dabbed away the tears, then tenderly picked up the shoe-sized graves of the former capitals from France and Germany and gave them a macabre burial process march as she walked up the stairs to her room, closing the door behind her.

With the coast clear, Tara crept out of the laundry room and tiptoed for the basement door. The conversation she’d just eavesdropped on was a lot to take in, and terrifying as it was to learn that Dr. Weaver’s technology had taken on a mind of its own and was likely transporting tiny cities at will into shoes, Tara was now possessed of infinite wonder. What was happening down in that home laboratory downstairs? She just couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t find out.

The machine still hummed and whizzed with energy, which helped mask the sound of Tara’s footsteps down into the scientific dungeon. She drunk in the unassuming sight of it all, somewhat unimpressed, and made her way to primary computer terminal. A wide gray shag rug stretched out in front of the control panel, which she gently stepped atop. Tara had no intention of screwing with the tech, which would probably only make the situation worse, but her curiosity magnetized her toward the screen regardless. There had to be some kind of explanation here about the apparent cities she and her BFF had inadvertently turned into urban rubble inside their shoes.