Time-Out: The Maggie of All Problems (Chapter 2)

“Since I’m in charge now, it’s important for me to have a full-time staff,” Maggie announced to the reporters below, as she stood in the center of a major downtown development project. Several half-constructed buildings surrounded her, populated with workers who appropriately all stopped in their tracks, whether hammering boards or dangled from cranes, to gawk in gape-mouthed disbelief at the 150-foot girl eyeing them all like grocery store produce. “You know, the people who can get stuff done when I need it. Important stuff, like if my clothes have to be washed or my shoes cleaned, or if I just need to relax after a hard day but I don’t feel like polishing my own nails or rubbing my own feet, well… I’ve got a whole city of good little helpers now! Only, I have a feeling the best people for this kind of work are gonna be right around here. Tough little things, just like you boys. I bet you’d sure like to help a girl out, huh?”

Standing beside Maggie’s gigantic foot, Scott looked to his mother, on the off-chance she was about to declare this all a practical joke, but Judy looked more gratified than ever: a mother bird watching her child leave the nest and take wing to soaring success. In fact, judging by the gladness in Senator Stevens’ face, Scott had to guess this was going precisely according to the woman’s wishes.

She had taught Maggie well. Probably too well.

“So who wants a new job?” Maggie bellowed to the men scattered around the construction zone, which beside her looked more like half-finished dollhouses. “I can’t actually pay you money, since I’m gonna need that for more important things, but I promise you, if you work hard and take care of everything I give you, you won’t have to worry about getting a temp job for me instead. Don’t worry, I’ll explain later, but I’m gonna have to hire a lot of people, too, for just a little bit at a time to take care of my meals because… well, I was already hungry a lot from all those drills coach makes us run, but now I’m gonna need it more than ever to be a good leader for all you little things. Well, who wants in first? Whoever speaks up gets first dibs on the more fun jobs.”

Obviously savoring the speechless awe of the workers, Maggie paced in a circle, casually slamming her sandals down in the sand with every stride. She crushed lumber heaps to splinters and cement mixers easier than tin foil balls. As her attention was mostly paid to the upper floors of the construction sites, men on the ground were made to scatter as the girl lumbered through, making a path out of their work areas. Scott flinched, watching strangers sprinting away from the slow-moving destructors of his sister’s peds, with some men even having to dive out of the way to make it in time before they fell under the sandal treads. One man, visibly distressed by the giantess marching carelessly around the zone and trying to entice workers into becoming her indentured servants, made sure the coast was clear, then dashed for his car parked in the corner of the lot.

“Nobody? Really? That’s kinda disappointing,” Maggie sighed. She stalked up close to the ten-story husk of a building, peering over the roof at a trembling group of workers who only had greater reason to quake and simultaneously find strange enchantment in the youthful colossus’s adorable expression. “Would it help if I told you some of the other jobs? Okay, fine. I’m gonna need some of you boys to be my security. I mean, obviously I can take care of myself, but I don’t wanna have to deal with people being rude, and plus, I’m gonna need some of you to go out and find the lucky people who get to take care of my meals. Also, I’m sick of having to brush my own teeth, so a couple of you are gonna get to deal with that too. Hey, how about you?”

Maggie addressed a man holding a squeegee, who nearly fell over when the giantess’s crystalline eyes fell imperiously upon him.

“M-Me?”

“Yes, you, silly thing. You look strong enough to give my teeth a good scrub. Why don’t you soap that thing up and come inside?” Maggie said, stating it like a friendly suggestion but steeping her tone in the grandeur of a command. She opened her pink lips wide, displaying her spit-gleaming pearly whites and sticking out her tongue like an entrance ramp, then topped it off with a dramatic ahhhh that made her uvula undulate. “I like workers who don’t make me wait too long, also, so I’ll be more impressed if you don’t argue. Oh, and by the way, I don’t want you just making it dirtier than it was to start, so you’re gonna have to get naked first. I almost forgot that part. Well, hop to it!”

Scott watched, knowing the unique helplessness all too well of being ordered to enter Maggie’s mouth. He watched one of the nearby zoomed-in news cameras as the jelly-kneed construction worker rinsed the squeegee, stripped his clothes, and stepped forward. Meanwhile Maggie knelt low enough for her chin to rest on the edge of the roof and her tongue to splay forth, beckoning. The naked man tramped uncomfortably up the squishy spit-drenched gangplank and vanished briefly into the humid darkness, before Maggie helpfully arched back to full height and turned again to face the reporters below, thus showing off her smiling open cavern of a maw with the naked stranger inside panic-sudsing the ivory chompers that could so easily pulp him into bloody gunk.

Meanwhile, the worker who’d made his way to his car was stealthily driving toward the exit, which required bypassing Maggie. Scott assumed his sister was too preoccupied with having an impromptu public tooth-brushing from a man she’d forced to put his life on the line within a gooey giggle-rumbling hovel, but apparently she had the total awareness of any strong leader, which she demonstrated by jutting one sandaled foot backward right as the escapee driver tried to zoom his way past her. The car crashed straight into Maggie’s bulky shoe, which didn’t budge in the slightest, instead crunching in the front half of the vehicle like it had struck a highway divider.

“Uh-oh! Some’uddy ‘oesn’t ‘ant a job!” Maggie mouthed, having difficulty articulating while a man was still trapped in her cheeks, though she didn’t seem concerned with her tongue tossing him about either. Puckering her lips, she spat out a watery soap-bubble like she was at the dentist, clobbering another man on the rooftop with her syrupy spit, but was careful to keep the little tooth-brusher squeezed in her jaws.

Then, shuffling her foot off the dented front half of the toy-scale car, Maggie arched her sandal off the ground and planted it back down, heel-first, this time right on the roof of the already-totaled vehicle. Scott witnessed his sister’s stubby toes wriggling, then splaying flat to flex out the rest of her meaty sole, as she began applying pressure. Instantly the car started to groan, flattening inward and shattering the windows.

All eyes remained on Maggie, but with a renewed sense of horror now overshadowing the initial godlike astonishment. Reporters tried to hold the cameras steady, but mostly failed. The workers especially displayed particular dread, watching one coworker get slowly compressed in the tin can of his car beneath a girl’s stylishly-clad and obviously-uncaring foot, while another peer was struggling inside that dark slimy cavern above. Judy looked so happy she was on the verge of tears. And Scott just felt a diseased sense of inevitability taking over.

At first he believed his sister was putting in real effort to only gradually smash the car, perhaps giving the man a chance to escape and teach him a lesson, but Scott soon realized she was only doing this for dramatic effect. Proving the point, the wounded man managed to pry open his door and half-crawl out of the driver’s seat, still with his legs pinned under the ever-flattened dashboard. Maggie, however, stooped low enough to stick out her thumb and gently prod at the entrapped man, shoving him securely back inside the car, before her foot completed its descent. Her heavy-soled sandal ground the metal to a definitive stamp, more effective than any car compactor, and Scott heard the mewling screams go quiet at last.

“I guess he ‘idn’t ‘ike his new boss,” Maggie shrugged. Finally she hocked the traumatized brusher into her palm. The giantess pointed an accusing index finger at his little face, nearly causing him to faint, but instead smiled in satisfaction. “You were the opposite of him, though, little one! You did a real good job! I can taste how clean it is in there now. Guess what, that’s your job from now on, not this boring stuff here. Congratulations!”

With that, Maggie stuck out her tongue and breathed heavy warmth in a spittle-flavored fog over the man, then plucked open her shorts pocket and dumped him inside for safekeeping. Now with her mouth free to shout again, she looked down at the wreckage beneath her foot, wrinkling her nose in some disgust. Scott, feeling some bracing shock himself over the fact that he’d just watched his sister nonchalantly crush someone to death, wondered if this gesture meant that even Maggie thought she’d gone too far. But this hope was quickly put to rest.

“Ew, it’s kind of a mess down there now, isn’t it? That just won’t work for me,” Maggie said, sliding her foot out of its leathery cask and making disgusted faces at the hunks of crunched car now stuck in the crevices of her foot like steel toejam. “It would just be embarrassing for your leader to walk around like this, especially cuz I have to hand out some other jobs to people that aren’t as hardworking as you boys. So who’s gonna be the little go-getters who wanna clean me up down there?”

There was one more instant of reluctance, a knowing survivalist spirit gravely shared amongst all the scared-shitless workers, and then an obedient group of men practically sprinted in close to Maggie’s waiting peds. Ignoring the grisly murder scene of their friend, the guys got to work prying the debris out of the giantess’s toe-nooks and mopping sprayed motor oil and victim-viscera out of the wrinkles in her sole, which she helpfully offered them by propping her foot on its side and looking down in adoration at her tiny public. In no time, she had two dozen workers slaving over just one dirtied foot, scrubbing and even massaging without being asked. Scott could scarcely believe what he was seeing, but also had to realize it was only his fault for continuing to be surprised by the rapid descent of the status quo toward a Maggie-centric life for all. Things seemed their worst now, but he knew better than to think they couldn’t get direr.

The thought of skipping town was still in his mind, having taken a backseat while his sister terrorized a construction zone, but Scott couldn’t quite will himself to make a run for it. The last guy who’d attempted such a thing ended up pancaked, and that was a total stranger. Would Maggie really allow her original brother-shaped toy to get away from her, when she clearly still wished so desperately for him to remain shrunken in her ownership? Today at least, Scott was too defeated to tempt fate.

“I guess this means I have a new staff. Welcome to the team!” Maggie said over the gathered fifty construction workers who’d chosen to fall in line rather than be squashed without a second thought. “Later today I’ll break you up into teams… you know, decide who gets to comb my hair, who gets to wash my socks after a run, who gets to put suntan lotion on my belly… but before that, I’ve got one more important thing to take care of. Because all this excitement’s already making me pretty hungry, so I’m ready for lunch, and like with most stuff, if I don’t get what I want right when I want it… just take my word for it, it doesn’t help anybody out. C’mon, I know just the place to get good food!”