The foot is a stick found in the forest. Not a foot at all, in fact, but a stick, tangled in some other bits of woodland rubbish, behind a tree trunk.
The trunk was covered in patches of brown-green wet-looking moss, and the foot was stood behind it, though now it was clear that the stick was a foot, ‘stood’ felt like the wrong word. Lantern had seen the stick, then still a foot, from the top of the ridge as he reached its peak. He’d found the ridge by accident, tripping face-first over the shallow slope that formed its base. He’d rolled on to his back and looked up at the ridge. The afternoon sun barely penetrated the overlapping canopies. The trees got denser and darker the further up they went. As he lay there he realised he’d been dragging his feet for the latter part of the afternoon, staring at the ground despondently when he needed to be alert.
Since getting lost, or at least since being aware of getting lost, he had stuck to lower ground, where the paths were better trodden. But the stumble caused him to reassess. So he climbed the ridge, hoping for a higher vantage to recognise something he’d passed already, like a section of pathway, a particular formation of trees, or a bloom of colourful wildflowers.
The ridge got steeper as he scrambled up it, and it sharply flattened into an obvious footpath at its peak. The footpath was not visible from the other side of the ridge, and he hadn’t noticed signs for paths other than the one he’d been on. When he got to the top of the incline he realised he wouldn’t be able to see anything recognisable. This side of the ridge formed the wall of a bowl-shaped clearing, seemingly sunken into the forest just up and over the path. He couldn’t see out over the other side of the clearing wall. All he could see, in the middle of the clearing, stood — sat? — behind a tree trunk, was the foot, now a stick.
A foot, stood behind a trunk, in the middle of a bowl-shaped clearing in the woods. Lantern had stared down at it from the flattened peak of the ridge. The stick, when it was a foot, wore a shoe, and a sock. The sock was a dirty yellow colour, and had been rolled down to reveal a chunk of shin, neatly severed about two inches from the ankle. A splinter of legbone jutted out from the shin-stump, proud of the divide, as if the bone and the flesh had been rent a couple of inches apart. The distance suggested some missing leg, from between the cut flesh and snapped-off tibia-fibula. The missing bit must have been pulled from the stump, up and over the protruding bone, like a piece of artic roll, sliced free of its parent and lifted out of the packaging to eat. He visualised the missing piece of leg-roll slipping off the shin-stump, and instinctively put his hand in the stomach pocket of his coat, feeling for the piece of chocolate sponge cake he had saved there. He was just patting Gore-Tex — there was nothing in it. He unzipped the pocket and reached in, pulling out a flattened mess of sponge and icing and chocolate, still wrapped in cling film. He must have squashed it when he fell. The discovery deeply saddened him and he frisbeed the thing across the clearing. He was saddened further by the knowledge that this gesture was totally futile. It was the only food he had left, so he would have to pick it up again and eat it anyway.
The upset with the cake had only briefly distracted him from the stick, which was then still a foot, stood — sat? — in the bowl-shaped clearing. He had wondered then, about the foot. He had wondered if the foot walked itself, or if it had been bought here against its will. He had wondered if the foot had been detached from its owner here, in the forest. He had wondered if the foot’s owner was aware that they would be separated from it. And if so, when? Was the owner present?
What Lantern knew now, but did not know then: the bone was a stick in the forest, another stick found amongst thousands, millions. A dried-up old bit of tree branch, bleached in the sun, maybe painted, but not a bone at all. As he had stared at the stick, then still a foot, from the top of the ridge, he had seen torn flesh, splintered bone, a missing bit of leg-roll, a dirty sock. Then he saw the rest of the foot, which had somehow formed itself from a pile of composting leaves. The pile was shadowy and wet enough at the bottom to resemble dark blue leather, or suede, or rubber, or whatever materials shoes were made from. The stick, when it was a foot, wore a dress shoe. Of course, Lantern had wondered then why anyone would wear formal footwear to hike into the woods. You might also wonder why you’re so unprepared, he chided, to himself. He wasn’t wearing dress shoes, but he had no food, no water, no first aid, no tent.
The foot was a stick found in the forest. Eventually, Lantern had slowly walked down the other side of the ridge into the clearing and approached the foot. As soon as he got within about ten feet of the trunk he could see that the splintered bone was in fact a splintered stick, found in the forest. And then he saw that the shin-stump was also a stick, found in the forest. And the rest of the foot, and the sock, and the shoe. He supposed that in the moment he must have felt relieved that the foot was not a foot, but he now only remembers feeling embarrassed, even though there was no-one else around to feel embarrassed in front of. He had rolled the trunk away from the foot, then and now a stick, so that the trunk faced into the middle of the clearing, and sat down on it.
Lantern had now been sat on the trunk for over an hour, trying to warm his hands by a small fire he’d lit on the ground in front of him. The fire was burning now, but it had taken a while to get going. It had only just stopped smelling like wet leaves and plastic, though he’d used bone-dry sticks to build it. He took off his coat, hoping the fire would soon warm not just his hands but his entire body, and that if it started to rain, or the temperature suddenly dropped, he would better feel the benefit.
He pulled the map out of one of his coat pockets and opened it. He scrutinised it for five minutes or more, looking at it one way and the other. But it was impossible to read. It was impossible to read orientationally, as there was no sense of direction or scale, no index, and it had no legible labels, legend or even a title, and it was impossible to read visually, as the grid was not really a grid at all but an irregular mesh of haphazard linework. Whatever useful geographical detail might have been there was buried underneath. He felt like throwing the map on the fire, but didn’t.
Lantern looked at the foot again. He observed that the foot, now a stick, was still undisturbed, exactly how he’d found it. He’d unconsciously avoided touching it, tiptoeing around it as he scrambled to get the fire going. Because, despite the fact that it was a stick, not a foot, its placement seemed particular. Not left, but put. This thought embarrassed him again. He put the map back in his coat pocket, stood up, and grabbed the foot, now a stick, and threw it on the fire, splintered bone-end first. Why should he care? Why would anyone leave such an insignificant thing around to be found? And if they had, how could they think anyone passing by would see a foot, rather than a stick?
As the foot — stick — burnt, it began to rain. Lantern hoped that the position of the clearing would protect the fire. Sunken into the forest, surrounded on all sides by the ridge walls, with dense canopies above. Should he try and fashion some additional shelter? Shelter for the fire and shelter for himself? He didn’t have a tent, for some reason. He hadn’t meant to get lost, of course, but he should have bought a tent with him. He hovered over the fire, hesitant to leave it, but also thinking that he should go and get some branches, or see what was on the other side of the clearing, over the ridge wall.
Lantern quickly pulled up his coat hood. It fell down over his brow, shielding his face from the rain, which was getting heavier, but obscuring his vision. The hood had a peaked brim that rested on the bridge of his nose. He stretched his arms out, pushing the hood further down in front of his face. He zipped up the coat and took the hood down again. He decided to make a break for the other side of the clearing. He could quickly check what, if anything, lay beyond the opposite side of the ridge, grab some branches, and run back to protect the fire before the rain got to it.
Lantern ran across the clearing and up the ridge wall. He climbed to the lip and stood, confused at what he saw, or did not see. There was nothing there. There was nothing on the other side of the clearing. No trees, no ground, no terrain. He reached back into his pocket and referred to his map in desperation. The map showed… nothing. Not the specific location of the nothing on the other side of this clearing; just nothing. He ran back down into the clearing, just in time to see the rain, heavier still, put out his fire.
It was hard to imagine how to proceed. Lantern pulled his hood up again, over his eyes, and felt around the back of his head for something adjustable. He found a drawstring toggle with a metal aglet on the end of it, and yanked. It raised the hood-brim over his eyes. As he looked up from under his coat and across the clearing, he saw the squashed piece of cake he’d thrown away earlier, lying in the rain near one of the edges of the basin floor. He ran over to it, scooping it up in his palm. The impact had loosened the cake’s cling film swaddling, letting the rain in, turning it to slurry. He slurped it down as quickly as he could stomach.
The charred bone is a stick found in the forest. Lantern came across the clearing earlier in the day, around noon. Though he was lost, properly lost, he wasn’t despondent. He looked ahead and around him as he walked. He didn’t trip into anything. He plainly saw the gradual incline of the ground on the right of the path as he approached it. He saw that the incline formed the base of a much steeper ridge, and immediately climbed straight up onto the footpath at the top, stopping there and looking down to take in the clearing and its particular features. The clearing, shallow but somehow sunken into the forest, was about ten metres across, surrounded on all sides by the tree-topped walls of the ridge. He noted the clearing’s bowl-like shape and the oddly uniform concaving where the basin floor met the inner walls. The floor of the clearing must be higher than the path on the other side, he thought. He scrambled back up to the top of the ridge. A few metres higher, he confirmed. He climbed back down to inspect this new area, close-up. When he neared the middle of the clearing floor, he saw the stick.
Lantern was clear-headed despite being lost, and knowing he was lost. He didn’t tend to panic. He thought things out. So when he saw the stick, which at first glance resembled a human foot, severed at the ankle and charred all over, he thought it out. He calmly regarded the stick. The stick was charred, yes. The stick was one amongst thousands of dry branches that lay about everywhere on the ground. So most likely it had been used to fuel a small fire. A group of people gathered round as it burnt. But they weren’t practising violent rites. They weren’t burning remains, carefully charring the protruding bone, just so much here, above the ankle, and just so much here, where the broken tibia-fibula splintered away into a jagged crown. They were not charring the foot decoratively, creating black bands of blotchy patterning at either end of the visible section of bone, burning off a single toe entirely, but otherwise only lightly singing the flesh.
Maybe it had started raining shortly after the group had got the fire going? And the stick had been the last thing they’d started burning? Everything else was ash. The stick — the misshapen lump of wood that from a distance sort of resembled the grisly remainder of a person, with a bleach-white branch that took on the form of a broken bit of bone, a carbon-black root-mass that took on the form of a broiled left foot, and a growth of fungal matter ringing the root-mass that took on the form of suppurating sores — was a stick. And it had been added to the fire last. Fetched to rekindle the fire (everything else was ash already), and tossed on top just before it started raining. It hadn’t rained today, before Lantern arrived in the woods, but it could have rained last night. It was a sunny, still morning today, which would account for the dry but more or less intact pile of ash and half-burnt stick. The fire burnt for a few hours in all, late yesterday afternoon. It began to rain in the evening, and then the party moved on, he imagined, carefully smothering the flames with their feet before they left.
All of these rationalisations easily satisfied Lantern. Of course they did. The charred bone was a stick. A stick was a stick. As if to demonstrate the fact, he grabbed another one off the ground and started stabbing at the spent fire, instantly dissembling the foot-form and its constituent parts in a puff of ash.
He slowly walked across the rest of the clearing, scanning the ground around him for anything else of interest. Finding nothing, he climbed straight up the opposite ridge wall. This side of the ridge wall also had a flattened peak, of roughly the same height and breadth as the one he had entered over. He stood on the tree-lined footpath at the top, glancing back down across the clearing and up to the other side. As he stepped forward he noticed a black splat of thick liquid goop on the path in front of him. He still had his stabbing stick in hand, so stirred the mess. It wasn’t entirely liquid; it had chunks of spongy matter in it. It wasn’t entirely black either; it was more of a deep dark brown, almost green and red in places. He withdrew his stick and squatted down next to the goop. Excrement? It was tackier than that somehow. Vomit? From a very sick, very big dog? Maybe he wasn’t as lost as he thought. If dogs went for walks here? Were let off their leashes to run through the woods? Ate toxic things, before their owners noticed or were able to intervene?
Lantern stood up again, pushing his stabbing stick upright into the ground next to the vomit, as a marker. He walked across the ridge-top path and discovered that on the other side of the clearing there was… another clearing. This clearing had the same particular features of the last: shallow but somehow sunken; bowl-shaped; uniform concaving; and the far side from Lantern, like the near side, surrounded by tree-topped ridge-walls. And, from what he could tell, the basin floor of this clearing sat roughly at the same level as the last. The main difference was that there was no foot in this clearing. No charred foot that was a stick, no dead fire, no stabbing sticks lying around, no nothing.
He descended into the clearing. The ground was made up of large stretches of dry mud, patched with stubbly tufts of grass. As he walked over it, he realised the clearing floor was almost completely flat, flatter even than the well-trodden footpaths on the outskirts of the forest. He felt a slight imbalance, like the sensation of tottering up an arrested escalator. The ground must have been compacted somehow. By who, and for what purpose, he had no idea. Bikes? The ridge-walls were practically sheer. You could ride around them, he supposed. The clearings were shaped like bowls.
Lantern did a circle around the clearing. There was less of interest in this one than in the last. Again, he headed towards the the ridge-wall on the opposite side and climbed up. Another flattened peak with a tree-lined footpath of the same height and breadth. He walked across the path and discovered — another steeply inclining ridge-wall leading down into a clearing, much the same as the others in appearance. Bowl-shaped, ten metres wide, dry mud, concaving, and nothing in it. This clearing looked emptier still. The ground here was sparser, more non-descript. The tufts of grass were less frequent, and appeared equidistant. Like a surface pattern, under-realised, stretched to cover too large an area, so its limit showed. All of the clearing floors seemed to be the same height, a few metres higher than the paths he had been walking on, which he’d assumed were at ground level. Did the clearings sit on a kind of natural shelf? They looked almost landscaped.
Again, Lantern descended into the next clearing. He walked around it, found nothing, and climbed up its ridge wall. He crossed the path at the peak, and descended in to the next. He explored the next clearing, and the next, and the next. The vertiginous sensation he had first felt walking across the flat basin floors of the bowl-shaped clearings was now long gone. Each clearing was emptier than the last, the ground sparser. The surface pattern was made to stretch further and further, so that in the seventh or eighth clearing, there were no tufts of grass at all, and the ground, which had stopped being ground four or five clearings ago, was no longer even a surface pattern, but a blurry texture.
When he had reached the flattened footpath peak bridging the eighth and ninth successive clearing, Lantern reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a map. The outer edges of the forest were, according to the map, crawling with paths, criss-crossing one another, all with traceable points of ingress and egress. As the map moved deeper into the forest, the paths thinned out. It wasn’t just that there were less paths to map; the mapping itself was thinning too, failing. Certain lines faded from page to page to page, gradually becoming faint before disappearing entirely. Others simply stopped. One crashed into the fold-crease and never re-emerged. One snapped off halfway up a hill. The detail of the surrounding areas thinned too. The path he was on before he found the first clearing overlooked a huge expanse of limestone outcrops, lasting half a mile at least. This entire area — labelled ROCKS — was mapped by no more than a few jagged marks. The clearings, or at least what he thought must be the general location of the clearings, were not marked at all. Pages and pages of map just said: CLEARINGS.
Lantern closed the map and put it away again. He stood at the precipice of the ninth clearing, and decided not to bother. He walked back, through the eighth clearing, and the seventh, and the sixth, and back until he reached the first, the one with the dead fire and the charred foot that was a stick.
He would stay here for a while and figure out what to do. He could camp here if he needed to. He had no immediate incentive to leave. At least he knew there had been a fire in this clearing, and means to make another one. Though he hadn’t meant to get lost, he was prepared. He had enough food and water to last a few days, if not longer. He took off his Rucksack and removed the tent nested inside. He unrolled his sleeper mat next to the dead fire and sat down. The noon sun still struggled to shine through the canopies, but it was brighter here in the clearing than on the lower paths.
