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The long-stepping arc. Its shape is different for everyone, but in general, the traveller should be lifted into her own throat, kept there long enough to realize she is alive.
 We speak of the past when we speak of the arc. Somewhere in the sea, centuries ago, newborn stones were swimming. There was a time when stones could swim, migrate across the water on each other's backs, cluster together in cobbled layers of tissue, muscle. In schools tightly clustered, clacking together, they flexed through the sea, often without sight.
Colonies caravaned along. The most sanguine rock was elected to further their congress, calling upon each cell to replicate a hand, an arm, legs, a torso. Sheets of pebbles stretched epidermally across, arcing over the surface of the water, rising in hills and mountains that solidified in the sky and formed long hollow rods, tubes that fluxomed and torqued and commenced to bury themselves near the north shore.
Eight-thousand stones ankled along the bottom of the ocean, cratering the floor with every planted pylon, combed the ocean with long petrified pinchers. The creature settled in the oceanic crust and isthmused its long body across the neck of the ocean and hoisted its dorsal fin, a dazzling beadwork that summoned flocks of women, those who refused to believe and those who swam towards, scaling the stones and slipping, crushing their own children. Its tail unfurled inland a gravelled road to the fin's petrified edge -- a sun rail no woman dared walk -- but children, fearless, lightstepping, disappeared into the sun. They brought back gifts, baskets of new emotions. Sage. Thyme. Birds, malnourished, dove face first into the fin, puncturing it with light and wind. Four years later, the cartilage collapsed. Wide-eyed women were buried under a cascade of rubies and emeralds, amethysts. The remaining arc halved the sky, tendons streaming off bone.
Women and children gathered at the base of the arc when a child became of age. They would load her with water-filled stomachs, giant sun shields, long balance rods, and ribbons of food. In the presence of a tongue artist, they set to motion the inevitable decay of the face, the masking of the eyes, pressing the chest, massaging the spaces between the ribs to birth from the little mouth the final prayer of childhood:
The arc is forgiving. The process should take three months at most. If one follows the thread to its natural conclusion, one will find, despite the purple lacerations, despite the lake-shaped bruise, a tightening of banks. They will kill together the remnants of our disillusion. We can only promise this.
But
they promised more and stood next to their promises with long, curved sticks and they arranged their hair as hoods over their faces. No child in history had fallen. Children walked over the sea this way and came back in the late afternoon. The sun cast the shadow of the crossing child, and in this cold black wet scar swam a laoshi. Every child had a laoshi replicating the journey, guiding the little one with flowing limbs and hair, recording the stops and stutters for historical purposes. The Leaves of the Laoshimen, or, The Gospel, rustled in the Flying Fish Forest, its veined travelogues throbbing, as it were, among the silver scales. Cyclamen debated the patterns and prescribed strategies, and muqins went to tongue artists for second opinions and opium. The sweet seeded pulp, cured in the holy mouths, soothed the muqins when their child crossed, and was not addictive except in dreams, wherein muqins themselves were saved from drowning by the resuscitating lips of virgin elders.
The shape of the arc differed for every child. The muqin, who swallowed her prescription and was called Celandine, believed she knew which shape her child would have. It was the season of the Pageant in the child's eighth century, but she was small and pale. Her hair was sun-colored and strong, hard on the eyes like dawn after no sleep, but pretty. Celandine made the announcement. All gathered at the base of the arc, gifting the child with sun lotion and earth sheaves. Her little face trickled as she tested her balance on someone's strong arm. Already the prayer was coming from her mouth. The naysayers looked upon the scene with half-opened eyes. They pointed out the sudden wrinkles on the back of the child's legs, her sagging breasts, the looseness in her throat.
Celandine directed her longstaff at the crest of the arc. The child walked slowly across, steps close to nothing, not spreading the fronds as told. She looked up. Her skywalk was helical in structure, narrowing to a thread in
some other world. Hammered light burnt the spectators' curious skulls. Celandine extracted a prayer from each of their bony hands, a spring fictional from the collective throat. The song's neck stretched into the sky and grackles gathered to put their beaks on it, but the child could not reach with her small hands.
Celandine blamed herself for what happened, at first. It was the shortest vein in the Gospel. The splashing figures -- the child and her laoshi -- scarred the vision of all in attendance, as the resulting aberrations coincided with the prophecies of the naysayers.
A cyclamen was summoned to repeat the fifth prophecy of the naysayers:
And the laoshimen shall locate Her radiance and spirit Her under where red-faced serpents shall inscribe Her wrists and ankles with ancient glyphs to govern those above. The Word shall be mistaken for aberrations -- small, misguided birds swirling in dead crops of skin -- and the Word shall attract flocks of women, and they shall consist of hands. Those close enough to hear -- sound travels through bodies five times faster than water -- though not close enough to smell, shall not weep. The elders shall weep.
The elders did weep, those who hosted the same discolorations, the array Celandine came to associate with the remains of the arc jutting from the pelt of sea centuries later. The child, on reviving, ran her fingers over her new skin, reading a mostly wet call to enrobe what anyone could misinterpret. Twelve times the moon showed its cresent horn before the child could try again. Some stones when broken exude a clear, sticky substance that can be applied to wounds and scars. We pressed mouth-moistened jades and beryls against the skin to burn and soothe, in her case. Slatejuice on the temples, the neck, her lisp.
After a soak in saltwater, the child was hung upside down and dried with a giant leather wing. They hoisted her higher and started a sway to approximate the arc's upper reaches. Her arms and legs swelled the farther she swung; skin boiled in angry patches, spewing milk and amber. For some children the distant gardens crossed the sea and flowered between their legs, inviting them over, said a skin farmer. For others small lumps or tubers formed under one or both nipples. Anything meant something.
The next morning krynae presented her with a dog, captured and cooked, of which she hid from, at first, then apologized and ate. One of the first words she learned was the word for apology. Haizimen entered the house carrying stacks of shirts in two glorious piles. They screamed like birds, pecking at the child's body. She tastesd different, they said, and flocked to their mothers in warning, and were slapped. The tongue artists followed with long coils of liane. They bowed before the child's sudden leech of darkness, the ruptured sores eyeing them, weeping.
The ones with white skin shall lead the way for others, the tongue artists proclaimed.
But floating bodies have the same hue, Celandine countered; dead halias, lost krynae. Your gifts -- the gray cloth, the balls of twine -- resemble the shrouds of last rites, or maybe actually are, as haizimen like to wander where drift collects.
The tongue artists withdrew from her house.
The muqin began to know this about herself, that she could not stop her tongue from gliding across the surface of the back of her teeth, launching out sounds. She spilled her hair over her face so that she would not have to watch the effect. A hexamonth passed this way, first the feet, then the legs of the child finding cover beneath the cloth. The muqin called out unknowingly what became new patterns, and the cloth would extend further up the small body, a cocoon against dark sentences. Even the name of the child fluttered about the house, losing itself in the hearthfire, shrivelled there and died.
There was no skin left but on the face, when they were done. No one knew. Outside a procession to the nucleus of the pavilion shuffled past their house. It was the day of the Pageant in the Year of the Sea Lion. Celandine pulled the child from the shadows, opened the door, and pointed outside. Faces floated in the threshold, attached to bodies of friends waiting, standing outside in lines that stretched to the hills. A stick whistled and the child walked forward.
The crowd dusted her with pebbles and chaff.
The metalwife in her leather apron; the metalwife's daughter; sea shepherdesses with their hooked staves; the mummer Observance, with her sideways walk, her expert re-enactment of our subject; salt musical surgeons with their sharp instruments. They fashioned clothes out of fronds and dead animals and dervished behind her, raising a cloud of dust. Five octopuses followed -- move like this, you will be in bliss! Seven octopuses dancing, come frolic with us, bringing consternation to feet. Pointing, screaming laughter. They circled the child on the last hill and tore apart the shirt and waved the pants in the sky. But a mushroom of silence blossomed in every mouth on sight of the child's sudden skin. The shadow of the muqin loomed over.
Tell everyone what you want, it said.
I want to be covered.
Say it louder, said the shadow.
I want to be covered!
Show us, said the shadow. Show us how you want it.
The child folded into a small heap on the earth, rocked on her back with ankles behind her head. Her tiny legs flowered open, bright thighs catching the sun, presenting the sky a bruised, swollen mouth. Come see, the muqin invited. The crowd swirled widdershins as the child circled herself there, how many times told not to, how many ways to cover. She stretched herself, cried, gave birth to a fountain. It arced past her hands. A skirt of water spread across the earth, and the others moved away. The river soaked their feet and legs. Keep it up, said the muqin. The speechrods of the tongue artists could not locate a word to match the sight. They resorted to drawing it out, scratching the roofs of their mouths until the final representation failed itself.
The muqin knew how meaningless words were, how any creature plant or phantom could wear her words as well. Nowhere was found an artifact that could read in its symbols the answers to the questions the muqin asked, year after year, with so much emptiness in her eyes, questions that had no answers, naturally, and by design led her further away, as hooks and snares in captive flesh pulling one gently towards darker reaches, towards ocean depths already. Waves writhed and beckonned as always at the base of the arc. Stones licked the clouds, spoke in tongues understood only in dreams, the murk of the past. There you shall rise, Scarchild -- pointing again at the heights with her longstaff. No record of this attempt in the archive of Leaves, no laoshi this time riding glittering eddies. The child climbed covered with flying fish fins pulled from the laoshimen's temple, her own foreshortened Leaves ripped from the Gospel and pasted to her forehead. The stale breath of the sea blew up at her. Every time the arc twitched, Celandine smashed the shell-tipped thrysus on the child's shrouded back, unholyly, their union in the sky.
Celandine was found later that evening splashing in the salamander glade, the rags of her child draped over her head, pale as the sky sylphs sighted every other millenia. In the distance, History. The first pylon cracked toothlike, shattered into arrowheaded shards that pierced the sea, exposing its femur -- then and forever a white scar on our pupils and daughters. The spine of the arc, free of one end, whipped and popped; the taut mile of tendons snapped down the line and sang in sibylline voices; and the path, in fury, reared like a giant centipede no tongue artist could have prophesized. Ask not what brought us here today, they said, gathered as we have been, apparently, for some time; but let us watch under the cover of our hoods. The child, when she came, came inside-out, the core of her self, the stem of her skeleton, yanked free and pulverized in the crash. Shreds shamed themselves to be seen, rising to the surface, spreading out, and the blanket of skin, still limbed, though losing resemblance, swam uselessly before sinking, plunging very quickly under. All watched in silence. Pieces of the second pylon curled and fell and blossomed redly on the sea, putting the four or five naysayers at ease, though many dove in and swam. The hot and the tall sank first.
For decacenturies after, pieces of the arc drifted to shore. Their fibrous construction revealed a cross history, bands of ocean conflict which forced it finally to rise skyward. The earthwives, after years of study, announced the structure holy, for its anatomy could not have supported a life. The falsity became Gospel, and the fallen child stricken from the records, a myth,
a legend, though every century hundreds of children gather on the edge of the glade, carrying stacks of shirts. They help each other dress and one by one wade into the water, linking arms with the next, all the way back to shore, a python of children straying far and deep, delving hard, digging into the thick musculature of the sea.
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