New Gods

Mrs. Rosi sat back in her lounge chair, arms folded lazily behind her head, her sunglasses caught the raw, unfiltered blaze of the sun, twin glares of white fire gleaming from lenses high above the weather, where no cloud dared climb. Her rich bronze skin shimmered like a landscape of its own, glowing in the raw blaze of unfiltered sunlight high above the clouds, in air too thin for weather and far beyond the reach of airliners. Her legs lay spread in total ease, the vast weight of her bare feet unthinkingly grinding the urban landscape beneath them. One heel twisted slightly, carving deep ruts through the Earth’s crust where a big city had once stood, while the other sole pressed down so heavily that the landscape vanished into the flaking ridges of her callused skin, as if caught in the folds of some immense, indifferent memory.

Perhaps her husband had never grown. Or perhaps he had, and was now off somewhere in the Midwest, wandering between shattered states, casually flattening cities beneath his bare soles he barely remembered lifting.

Not far from her—though "far" had lost all meaning at this scale—Clara knelt on her towel, adjusting her topknots with an almost bashful innocence. Her rear, however, eclipsed the entire region like a twin range of flesh and youth, and her knees—each one broader than lakes—dug casually into the crust, triggering seismic spasms that tumbled entire townships into dust. The ridges of her soles, rising behind her like living monuments, bore a devastating truth: the remains of the Sierra Nevada mountain range were trapped between the creases like errant grains of beach sand, forgotten and insignificant.

Her husband Jason lay on his back in front of her, his breath stirred tornadic winds in the atmosphere. His aroused manhood was speckled with what once might have been cities—now debris caught in an apocalyptic game serving only as foreplay.

Clara giggled—a warm, casual earthquake that reverberated across the continent—and reached out to adjust their towel, which, with a flick of her fingers, changed the landscape forever.

“That’s enough noise,” Mrs. Rosi called out, flicking a toe lazily. The movement alone cracked bedrock, displacing a swath of landscape that folded like cloth beneath her arch. “If you’re gonna get frisky, go to the other side of the continent. Some of us are trying to unwind.”

Jason laughed, but even that light, meaningless chuckle shattered mountain passes and sent avalanches careening off the trembling edges of what was once the Pacific Northwest.

Another great day of being a hundred miles tall. The Earth felt like warm, crumbling sand beneath their skin—familiar, soft, and utterly forgettable. Their bodies glistened under the sun, framed by drifting clouds and dancing jet streams that clung to their limbs like mist to a cliff. Entire airliners veered around Clara’s calves, engines screaming silently in the atmosphere as they tried to stay clear of the thermal chaos rising from her sunlit skin.

They had grown. Not by magic. Not by war. Just by will.

And below—far, far below—the world lay stunned and shattered, reshaped by lounging giants who barely noticed it was there.