Amniotic Journey

We set out toward the Islets of Langerhans, those far-flung specks of sweetness that rumor kept insisting were not islands at all but the aftertaste of islands. By dusk we were punting through the Canal of Schlemm, its water clouded by things best not identified. In the evening we walked under the Plantar Arch. The colored lights hung on thin wires and swayed a little as the air cooled. Past the Arch the ground fell toward the Valley of Hebula, and the sun dropped behind it in a hard red line. We went down because there was no sense in staying where we were.

At the Isthmus of the Thyroid we stopped to look back at the coast, but the haze had already taken it. We crossed the narrow spit and climbed the slope to the Iliac Crest. From the top we saw the dry hills to the east. They looked close, but seemed recently exhaled by clouds, and not fully settled on staying.

The Pelvic Inlet was shallow and slow. We waded through it with surgical care around the many stones impacted there. The water circulated around our legs and permeated our shoes. Beyond it, in a small cavern, we found a few scrolls sealed in jars. Someone said they’d come out of the Cavernous Sinus a long time ago. No one wanted to say who wrote them or why they’d been left there, so we didn’t ask.

We moved on. A mile out we passed a hollow the locals called the Cusp of Carabelli. It didn’t look like much—just a shallow place where the grass grew thin—but they spoke of it with reverence. From the Tibial Plateau beyond it, the whole plain opened up, and you could see the storms forming a long way off.

Strange trees grew near the Femoral Headland. Their leaves were broad and gray. We didn’t know what they were but they made a steady rustling sound in the wind. In an abandoned hut we found an Acetabular Basin, still holding the remains of someone’s meal. There was no sign of the man who left it.

The Orbital Ridge had a scatter of houses along it. They were simple and weather-beaten, and one of them had a door that didn’t bother to resist us. Inside, on a low shelf, I found something oddly moist. I picked it up and felt obscene carrying it, like I had swallowed something the place meant to keep. We left the house the way a lung releases air it doesn’t need anymore.

Past the Navicular Notch, the falls came into view. The spray drifted over the path. We camped on Sphenoid Ridge, where the ridge had cramped up years earlier and left the terrain convulsed. In the morning we found violets set out on a Cribriform Plate. The wind moved through the holes and scattered the petals.

At the mouth of the Thoracic Outlet, the daylight felt newly cast, as though we were the first to notice its seams. We followed the Inguinal Canal for sixteen miles. It was long and hard, and the pass constricted around us at intervals, a strange sort of peristalsis as if it wanted to expel us, inch by inch.

Farther on lay the Sacroiliac Territories, where the tribes did not trust outsiders and did not pretend to. We showed our papers of passage from the Atlantal Commonwealth, and the officials prodded them the way a body tests something it isn’t sure it should swallow. Our passports still carried the faint stamp of the Lunate Republic, and that seemed to provoke a spasm of concern. I admitted I had once attended the Clavicular Marches, but I was willing to sign an affidavit that I had never been associated with the Patellar Confederacy. We waited, content to enjoy a dormant interval. The Caudate Federation claimed oversight over the whole process. What oversight meant in their system was synaptically vague. We knew it would take quite a circadian stretch, so we did our best to achieve a homeostatic lull. Eventually they discharged us.

We made our way along the Metacarpal Coastlands toward the coast’s narrow neck. The vessel waited for us, patient in a way ships rarely are, as if it had been assigned to gurney us home. We stepped aboard, and we felt the systole of its engines pulsing through the ribs of its hull. The tide drew us out without ceremony, ferrying us away toward lands less gelatinous.