The dim ceiling of my bedroom had vanished, revealing an open, fuzzy white sky above. A broad, pale plain stretched out beyond.

I was standing on a hard shiny pink plateau of flat stone as big as a tennis court. Shallow ridges ran in straight lines down the faintly curved surface.  Crouching, I ran a hand across the surface. It felt smooth but faintly gritty, like it had been sanded, and gave off a faint shine of reflected light.

It was daytime, I was outside, only that was clear. I lifted my head skyward, but instead of the recognizable blue, cloudy sky, found the air misty and off-white, in every direction. Warmth beat in tiny currents up from the ground like timpani drum patter. The air carried a confusing rush of scents: a surface fragrance, raw and sweet, seeming to mask a richer odor of vintage cheddar, bitingly sharp. I took a deep breath, waiting for my olfactory sense to filter out the heady nasal cocktail, as the hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up.

At one end, the plateau ended in a white, slightly curving bar that seemed to drop off into the air. A dead end. At the other end, the stony plate fused into a strange plain of something like tanned couch leather. Dazed and entirely lost, I began making his way towards it.

The landscape was like nothing I’d ever seen before. What was I even doing out here? – there was nothing; it was a barren, beige wilderness swathed in fog.

i stopped at the edge of the stony plate, which seemed oddly to be emerging right out of the barren plain. Then stepping forward, my feet touched down onto soft, cushy padded ground, it felt like a soft leather sofa as much as it looked like one.

The soles of my feet quickly grew warm, even through my shoes; the unidentifiable surface radiated with heat. I bent again, running a hand over the soft flexible ground, wondering vaguely if it was a desert, but the warmth wasn’t coming from the sky – the air was fairly cool – the warmth instead seemed to be radiating from up within the ground, like there was a volcano buried under there or something.

Up ahead the ground had a long crease running through it, perpendicular to me, like the channel of a creek bed, with no water in it. Actually, that was not entirely true.

Water shimmered out from little holes in the ground, regularly spaced along the ground. At least, it looked like it was water, but when I crouched over one and dipped my fingers in, my nose crinkled in response. The blobs of fluid that clung to my fingers were thicker than water, slightly gelatinous. It looked like a thinner kind of Vaseline.

I dabbed my tongue experimentally against the fluid, expecting it to taste like water. For the most part, it did, except for a lingering oily aftertaste that turned me resolutely off trying another sample.

I stared across at the field covered in holes, bemused. It looked like someone had taken an auger out here and been drilling for oil or water. Well, judging by the taste of the gelatinous fluid, they got both.

It must have been a machine that did this, I decided; the holes carried on as far as I could see. No one could have done all this on man power alone.

Up ahead of the long crease in the ground, there was a wide but shallow bulge, and out of the bulge grew a handful of tall pale stalks, like bamboo, but the tops of the stalks tapered into points, far above my head. Each stalk grew directly out of one of the holes. I gauged that he could have shimmied up one of the stalks, if not for the thin sheen of gelatin fluid oozing along the trunk of each stalk, making it glisten.

I reached out for one stalk, feeling the papery bark, and wondering if it was tree sap. It had a very faint yellow tint, like very pale honey, and was a little sticky. Again – struck by some desperate need to understand – I brought some to my mouth, and nearly vomited for my trouble. It tasted even worse than the fluid in the holes. It was salty. You didn’t expect something that looked like honey to taste salty.

Passing the tree stalks, I kept moving.

To the left the ground plunged down a valley and out of sight. Across that way I could see there were other stone plateaus, a row of them, each smaller than the one I’d been standing on. Ahead the pale plain expanded on and on. I kept following the plain, which seemed to carry on to the horizon. I began to run.

My running pace carried on comfortably without breaks or over-exertion. Not only was I not getting tired at the normal rate, but I wasn’t getting tired at all.

The minutes stretched into what felt like an hour. The sky never dimmed or changed. It looked as though it was covered by clouds, but it was still as bright as a sunny day. It didn’t make sense.

My thoughts had muted into a numb acceptance of where I was, even if I didn’t understand where that was precisely. I was here, wherever here was. I was only aware of my pumping legs, the satisfying impact of the ground, the insistence driving me that the seemingly endless plain must lead somewhere.

A couple of times my reverie was broken when I accidentally slipped on some fluid and went skidding, or landed on my butt. But the soft ground was forgiving, even springy, like a jumping castle, and I didn’t injure himself. When I fell over, a haze of fine white particles puffed up around me, some kind of dust, which was strange as the ground looked like it was made of leather, not earth or stone.

I was following a gradual incline, until, eventually, the plain abruptly ended, and I was met with a confounding sight. The horizontal ground did not actually end, but turned at a right angle and carried on up a vertical face. A couple of creases, thick like pale truck tires, ran along the junction where the ground met the wall.

It was a bizarre sight, like something out of that movie, Inception; the ground rising up at a right angle. It made me shiver. Just when I was starting to get a grip on the scenery here, it had to turn around and freak out on me again. Once again I was troubled by the question: where the hell am I? It was some barren nether-nether desert world of alien architectures and there was no obvious way out.

I was trapped.

Impelled by desperation, I started climbing the wall. Although the wall ran straight up, it wasn’t difficult as a typical rockface. I grabbed handfuls of the spongy surface, dug my feet into it, and was surprised how rapidly I was capable of ascending. It was easier than normal rock-climbing, or even bouldering.

The springy wall enabled me to bounce a little, giving me extra lift. It grew so comfortable and second-nature to me, I began to feel an exhilarating feeling, like I was Spider-man flexing his powers.

Like the plain below – probably so far below now that it was too dizzying to imagine – the wall was specked in holes. I avoided touching these, and the short stalks that grew out of them, as they were covered in oozing oily fluid.

I fell back into a steady, mindless momentum, and maybe because I enjoyed it so much, I seemed to be moving up the wall faster than I’d crossed the plain. Again, I found myself not growing tired. I felt like Superman, and dimly congratulated myself for being persistent with the Roburfortis. Or maybe it was a side effect of drinking so much Kolade.

Time passed without notice. The hair on the back of my neck was prickling even more sharply.

The wall began to jut out into some big rounded outcropping, like a huge bulge. Climbing up onto this, I found it was pitted and gashed with creases, which made it a little easier to cross, as I could work myself into the grooves. Huddled in one of these, I dared to peer out over the edge, and saw only mist. There was no way of telling how high I was. No idea of determining how long I’d be falling for if I leapt off the edge.

Then again, why would I do that? I was having too much fun climbing. And there was something primitively satisfying in scaling the face for the sake of itself, just because it was there, as they said about Mount Everest, or the Moon.

Passing over the jutting bulge, I came upon, and began ascending, another very long section of the wall. At this point, it seemed like it had been countless hours since I’d started this mysterious journey.

Then I did something I hadn’t thought of until just now.

“Jennifer!” I yelled out.

My voice raced into the sky and seemed to drop away into nothing.

There was no response.

Then again, I hadn’t really expected one. I seemed to be totally alone out here. Yet, I had this niggling feeling that my fiancée was awaiting me at the top of the wall. No reasonable justification, just a strong intuition. Or, I needed to believe that there was something worthwhile waiting for me at the top of my ascent.

Sometime later, the climb took me up to a point where the wall met another intersection with a deep crease where the intersecting walls met at a kind of vague ‘T’ bend. In order to scale this section I would have to cross the crease onto a somewhat bulging area of wall which was covered in more bamboo stalks, only these were shorter, spikier, and dark, like little black spears. They glistened wetly, so I made a mental note not to touch them.

As I neared the spiky bulging area, I noticed a great shadowy cleft running down it, a huge crevice, below which segments of the wall drooped down. Each of these segments, or edges of the crevice, were a darker pink color than the surrounding wall. At first, crossing over onto one of these drooping segments seemed to be a mistake, as my head spun and eyes watered as I was hit by a thick, sharp wave of indescribable odor. Whatever was in that crevice was radiating a fierce clammy, hot mildew-like scent, like some exotic pungent flower that grew in the middle of a dark, dense, humid jungle. I guessed it was a cave overgrown with some strange plants.

This served as my first real challenge, as the waves of odor beat over me with ruthless persistence. The cool air did little to clear the smell, and try as I might, it was too foreign and overpowering for me to get used to. The heat and odor made me giddy, my head throbbed in weak protest at the olfactory assault. I thought of nothing else but keeping my grip and moving up, up, as my eyes threatened to roll up into my head.

But there was something familiar about the smell. It was meaty, sweet, and briny, like human body odor, but intensified to a savage degree. Below that, barely within consciousness, the scent of leather and moisturizing cream.

Using every ounce of willpower, I scampered up the bulge in the wall, avoiding the oily black spikes, and desperate for fresh air. It was as effective as motivation as any to hasten my ascent, and soon enough I came to a new part of the wall, where the ferocious smell had faded significantly.

The wall flattened out now as the spiky hairs grew sparser and disappeared. Around here I could make out an interesting geographical marker in the wall above me, and maneuvered myself up towards it.

It was a big hole in the wall, curving inwards, as if a chunk of the leathery substance had been pulled or sunken in, like a sink hole, but sideways. Gripping the edge, I pulled myself up into the cave to pause for a moment. At the far end the back wall was folded up into big crinkles that I easily could have slipped into.

The acoustics in here produced an echo, conveying a dull thumping noise which seemed to resound through the walls themselves:

ka-THUMP…ka-THUMP…ka-THUMP…

The sound beat up into the soles of my feet, like bass thumping out of a subwoofer, but that simple beat was more instinctively familiar than any pop song. It was the sound you heard when you exercised strenuously, or got embarrassed, or swooned in love. It was a heartbeat.

The flashes of memories of my climb up here started clicking together like jigsaw pieces, and then the realization crashed over me in an instant:

I was inside a gigantic bellybutton.

Not just gigantic, but unthinkably big – leviathanic. If this cave was the bellybutton, then I was hopelessly miniscule, microscopic, smaller than a flea. I was less a millimeter compared to the owner of the wall of flesh I was huddled inside. Less than a bed bug. A microscopic fleck; each follicle of the body hair was almost my width. I could dig my foot into one of those holes dotting the surface of the skin; a pore.

Earlier, I’d recklessly tried eating that gelatinous fluid in the pores, which I realized was sebaceous oil. Now my stomach turned at the thought. The salty honey-colored stuff on the hairs must have been sebaceous oil mixed with sweat.

Judging by the passage up between the legs – and my encounter with the sickly sweet crevice, the body belonged to a female.

How was I supposed to reach out to anyone out here? – unless there was someone else trapped here on the wild wasteland of this woman’s body with me. But even if there was another person, they could be anywhere.

I needed to figure out a way to communicate. Heading to her ear seemed the obvious method of doing this. No need to get closer than necessary to her face – imagining a great gaping maw awaiting me somewhere up there – but at the moment, I had no choice.

Pulling myself out of the yawning bellybutton, I carried on up the wall which was the bare flat expanse of the woman’s stomach. My fantasies of being Spider-man lay ruined, now that I knew I was actually in the incredibly humbling position of being a skin mite – more like a literal spider man.

The climb took me up a great curving bulge, much bigger than the previous spiky-haired covered one. There was a great crevice running underneath where the wall met the bulge. But I was too distracted by thoughts of how I’d get the woman’s attention and what I’d say to her, to notice where I was going. I wondered vaguely if I’d come to an arm; the bulge of a deltoid muscle, or a shoulder. With everything scaled up, it was difficult to recognize anatomy by pure sight alone. To identify where I was I needed to remember where I’d been and keep a tally of the distance I’d travelled, and which direction on the body I was heading in. All I knew was that I was still somewhere in the vicinity of the torso.

Clinging upside down to the underneath of the bulge, I moved along as if crawling along a ceiling, and proceeding around a long gentle curve until I was upright again and the wall was vertical again. A red hill loomed before me, pushing out sideways from the skin wall. Without thinking, I climbed up onto it, and sat on top of it. There were furrows in the skin encircling the red hill. I stared at the object in wonder, trying to place it on the human body. The bass thumping was even louder here than in the bellybutton, and caused the flesh to jiggle under me with each steady thump.

With a jolt, I realized where I was, and it was a great cause for discomfort, and in another sense, absurd thrill.

I was sitting on top of one of the giant woman’s nipples. The nipple was so immense over me, her breast must have been positively gargantuan, a mountain of soft flesh. I had no way of seeing it in full, tiny as I was.

A sound made me jump:

“I know you’re there. Interesting choice of destination.” Adding, with mock accusation: “Provocateur!”

It was Jennifer’s voice, as close and clear as if she was standing right behind me, tantalizingly normal size.

I spun around but she was nowhere in sight. Maybe I’d hallucinated the voice, like an aural version of a desert mirage. There was no one for miles in this desert of flesh.

But her disembodied voice came again as before, somehow surrounding me at all sides:

“You know how we thought Remy had gone?” she said brusquely. “Well, we were wrong. He came back.”

Her voice was originating from inside my head, like thought being beamed into my mind by psychic power. There was no explanation but I didn’t question it.

“Where are you?” I said, blinking and staring around across the pale flesh surface, and then out into the white bleary clouds.

“I’m here,” she said. “And you are in the best possible place right now, baby.”

“Yeah? Where’s that?”

“Let me finish, and stop moving around. It’s distracting. I said you shouldn’t use the machine again but,” she said blithely, “you didn’t listen. And now where’s it got you?”

Unable to recall using the machine, I said nothing.

Her voice softened, but remained at businesslike distance, like I was a protégé and she was my mentor; and her affection for me was ousted by her responsibility over me.

“This is you, babe, I’m sorry. This is not my fault and I can’t fix it up for you. But I’m determined to make this work out. And it will, and we can even have some fun. But it’s not always going to be fun. Actually, it’s going to be pretty hairy. There are twenty-four hours in a day and you’re going to need all of them, and if you want to sleep –” she chuckled as if amused at her own audacity “– you’ve gotta work that in somewhere else…or ask nicely. And remember to lay it on thick.” Her voice fragmented into low laughter again, she was outright teasing now. “Praise something unusual. Never hurts to be original. Like, my pores…” more laughter.

“Twenty-four hours for what?” I called out. “What am I doing here? – this is an accident!”

She was silent, awkwardly so, as if trying to figure out which of us was grossly mistaken about the current situation. Then, plainly:

“For your survival.”

She explained dryly:

“A little misstep here, a tiny miscalculation there…and we might be in serious trouble, Mister.”

“Hey!” I grunted. “I’m your fiancé!” The sight of her blown up nipple, like a towering, fat, crenulated red boulder, was starting to make me sick with dread; the only immediate land marker and a shocking visual symbol of how hopelessly miniscule I was. At my smallest I had been a centimeter tall. Now I was a millimeter tall. I must have been virtually microscopic. With this realization, the hair all over my body was prickling with static. I pivoted from the red boulder and began to race over the springy flesh floor.

“No!” she hissed, like I was three years old and about to touch an electric fence, “Jerry! – I said stop moving! You know exactly what’s going to happen!”

Her voice made me run even faster. There was groan of feminine vexation.

—And a colossal object dropped from the sky like some spacecraft landing on the surface of the flesh ground. It was like the plate I’d been standing on way back when I first came to consciousness on her body. That had been her big toe, I now realized, and this new object was similar, but something else again. A flesh colored plate with a white tip; a gleaming monolith, the shape of tombstone. The flesh was pulled taut and depressed under its weight.

The air rattled with a dry crackling sound, like a rake sweeping concrete as the monolith came racing at me with insane speed, faster than I could ever hope to run, sending up gossamer puffs of dead skin particles, so much dust I was immediately destined to become.

“Noooooo—!”