Walking to the End of the World

by Phoebe Chan

Illustration by Aubrey McConnell

On the third Tuesday of her nineteenth March, a girl stood up from her seat at the empty lunch table, threw away her uneaten food, and left the dining hall with a bag full of books and pens and other such things. She took a turn to her left, and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked in a straight line. She had nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to see. So she continued to walk in that straight line, passing by buildings and parties and people and parks and coffee dates and unhappy businessmen and shops and sale signs and penniless war heroes. And then the girl thought, “Maybe I will walk to the end of the world. Maybe the answer is waiting for me there.” This seemed such a good idea that she managed an empty smile and continued walking.

The soles of her shoes were the first thing to disappear. One day, she looked down and found the bottoms of her feet uncovered; all of her walking had worn away at the rubber separating her feet from the floor. She shrugged, finding the bottomless shoes mildly amusing, and continued. After that, she noticed her feet getting flatter, the arches coming to meet the ball and the heel as both were worn away. She found her flat feet somewhat amusing and spent a day walking around a duck pond, seeing for the first time what the ground must feel like to the ducks. And then she continued.

Several months later, the girl looked down and found herself without any feet at all, her body instead carried on the stumps of her ankles. She found this rather amusing, especially because she was now much shorter than she had been before. “I must have walked very far,” she thought. “Perhaps I am getting close to the end of the world.”

Over time, the streets wore her legs away to her knees, and then to her hips. When her torso began to disappear, she laughed and thought, “I wonder if I look like a zombie coming up from the ground.” This seemed fitting to her, and it filled her with such amusement that she continued walking.

By the time she had lost most of her shoulders, the buildings and parties and people and parks and coffee dates and unhappy businessmen and shops and sales signs and penniless war heroes began to look familiar again, although she could not place why. It was not until she found herself back at that dining hall—nothing but a bodiless head sitting on the lunch table—that she realized her whole body must be scraped all the way around in a wonderful ring, encircling the world. She imagined those ducks waddling over her back, and the soles of others’ shoes leaving footprints on her invisible skin, coating the streets she had passed through. She imagined the unhappy businessmen and penniless war heroes standing on the same block of pavement, sharing breath from the same stretch of air, unaware that their boots all felt the same to her. “Ah ha!” she thought, triumphant and tired. “I have found it.” And this filled her with such satisfaction that she closed her eyes to rest and never opened them again.