The portal closed behind me with a fatalistic clunk. The air thinned and my lungs pulled at the weak air like a smoker running out of time. I smelled the coming sweetness, cloying and wet, as if the carnivals of the universe gave birth here. As the two suns crept over the horizon, the child inside me searched for a landmark, but found only a wasteland of dead, stalking trees. Lumbering came from here.
The child giggled, vibrating my ribcage from inside. She lingered in my stomach, allowing me, for a time, to see this new world through her eyes.
###
I got lost for a time, in my head and in the world. So it goes.