My friend Cat lost his foot in a swamp during a war. He was just walking along, he says, trying to mind his own business, when he stepped on a mine and the mine blew his foot off.

I fell down, he says, and the guy behind me just detoured around me and kept going without even looking at me or saying anything. The guy in front of me stopped to see if he could help but when he saw my foot was gone he just shook his head and kept going. So there I was by myself in the swamp without my foot.

Well, I was the medical guy in our patrol so I cleaned the wound and stopped the bleeding as best I could and bandaged up and used my rifle as a crutch, and I hopped out of there, and no one shot at me for once, and I didn’t step on any more mines, so that was good.

Eventually my leg healed and the war ended and some years passed, and I got to thinking about my foot. I mean, that was a good foot, and we parted so hurriedly I never had a chance to really think about how it had worked for me. I missed my foot is what I am trying to say. So I went to try to find it.

First I went back to the swamp but since the war the swamp had been drained and now it was a farm. I asked the farmer if I could look through the ground for my foot and he said Sure okay. I looked and looked all over and he came out after a couple days and helped me, both of us digging here and there where we thought it might be. He was a very kind man. His son was a very good science student and he figured arcs and trajectories and detonation forces and things like that. We found a lot of bones but none of those bones were mine. Those bones had very thin shrill white voices. It’s hard for me to explain. We took the bones we found and made a shed for them where they could rest until someone came for them.

After that I asked the people living nearby if they knew anything about my foot and one old woman said she saw my foot during the war after the explosion. It was in the road, she said, and she remembered that it had a red sock and a black shoe. Yes, that was mine, I said. She said the foot was pointing south when she saw it, so I went south.

I traveled for a long time. Sometimes by bicycle and sometimes walking. Every day I would ask people if they had ever seen my foot and every day someone would say yes and point, so I went where they pointed. I went for many miles. Finally one day I came to a temple and I could hear my foot calling me. It was there in a temple in a holy place with many other bones. You wouldn’t believe how many bones were there. A priest was there praying for the bones. He brought my foot to me. The sock and shoe had been lost, he said, and he was sorry about that. He bowed and I bowed and he gave me a box for my foot.

I stayed at that temple for a long time. It was a very holy place. People brought bones to it from many miles around. There are so many bones. You think that bones are like sticks or rocks or something but they are not. They are still alive although they don’t look alive. It’s hard for me to explain. I don’t know how that could be but that’s how it is. The priest told me it took a long time for him to get used to all the voices. He told me there were many temples with bones in that part of the country. He thought they would never find all the bones in that region but they would sure try. That’s what you have to do, he said. Otherwise the bones just call and call. You can’t just leave them on the ground. You have to find a place for them to rest. Certain things you just have to do whether they make regular sense or not, you know what I mean?