There was a dog. It started small, just a little mutt with brown fur and crooked ears. But it didn't stay small. It kept growing. At first, it wasn't anything more than a curiosity, a strange but harmless thing. People talked about it, sure, but they laughed. They figured it was some kind of freak mutation. They didn't realize it was something worse. Much worse.
The dog's owners—two kids, a brother and a sister—didn't know what to do. They didn't want to admit it. They told themselves it was nothing. They saw it every day, feeding it scraps, scratching its belly.
It grew fast, faster than they could comprehend. Each day, they noticed it looked a little bigger, its body stretching and bending like some kind of nightmare thing that wouldn't stop. But they were too attached. Too deep into it. They let the beast stay. They told themselves it was normal.
Then came the night when it stood taller than their house. That was the first time it really hit them. The dog stared down at them from outside the window, its black eyes now a terrifying thing, too big to be real.
It scratched at the glass, its claws scraping with a sound that wasn't like anything the kids had heard before. They screamed, of course, but it didn't matter. Nothing they did made the thing go away.
By the time the dog reached the size of a car, it wasn't just a neighborhood oddity. People started to panic. Some tried to leave town, but it was too late for that. The dog was already bigger than the trees. It was stretching across roads, knocking down fences. There were calls to animal control, of course, but that never helped. How do you stop something like that?
Then, the dog grew so large it covered the sky. The world started to feel too small. People stopped seeing the horizon. They looked up, and all they could see was the endless, wriggling mass of fur.
At this point, the dog didn't just wander anymore. It moved like it was looking for something. It sniffed at the edges of mountains and roamed the vast stretches of the oceans. It wasn't just a dog anymore. It was more. It felt more.
Then, one day, it got bigger than the planet itself. There was no longer any escape. The earth trembled under the weight of the beast, the ground cracking and splitting apart. It watched from its towering height, its enormous paws pressing down on entire cities. The world had become its playground. Its toy.
The world had no choice. Nothing to do but watch. People tried to run, but there was nowhere left to go. Every building, every life, was insignificant. Just toys. And it didn't care. It didn't care about them. It didn't care about anything.
The brother and sister, now grown, were left in what remained of their home. They sat on the roof, staring out. The dog's massive body, larger than the clouds, pressed down on them, as if it had forgotten they were ever there.
They'd known for a long time this would happen. How could they not? They'd fed it. They'd raised it. But this—this thing that had become, well, something beyond their understanding, it wasn't the dog they had once known. It didn't remember the joy in its eyes when it was little. It didn't even remember them.
They watched it for hours, helpless, waiting for it to make the next move. The earth groaned under its presence. The sky above them was choked by its limbs. The ground cracked beneath them, but they didn't move. There was no place to go anymore.
They didn't scream when the dog's enormous paw descended upon them. It was far too big to comprehend. They didn't even register the sound when they were crushed. It wasn't a noise. It was a pressure that consumed everything. A wall of raw power. The earth was their tomb. The family, the town, all of it, was nothing now.
But the dog, unknowing and uncaring, continued to roll the world beneath its feet. It was a toy. A thing to play with. And when the last remnants of humanity were nothing but cracks and dust, the dog licked its paw, satisfied, and moved on to its next amusement.
There was no one left to notice, no one to mourn. The world had been devoured by something that was never meant to exist. But the dog didn't care. It had outgrown its purpose.
Everything, even the earth itself, was just a ball.