My Diary from the Edge of the World Read Free Page B

it seems that way). Even at the hospital tonight he kept asking the doctor to give him the details of how they were resetting my bone, as if I wasn’t sitting right there wincing and trying not to cry. (“Dragons breaking arms in Cliffden in September!” he kept saying. “And migrations didn’t even used to start till mid-October. That’s what the world is coming to!”)
    â€œJust hungry,” I said.
    But he’d already forgotten what he’d asked me—Icould tell. I shuffled up behind him, unnoticed. The chart was scrawled in his handwriting with markings of longitudes and latitudes and degrees, cloud appearances at various heights, and phases of the moon. The map showed the familiar rectangle of the earth: Alaska all the way to the upper left (a paradise for sasquatches ever since the Alaskans lured a lot of them up there to solve their rodent problem), Royal Russia to the right.
    Clustered on each continent were the red dots marking the major cities: Moscow, Beijing, Paris, London, Istanbul (I’ve always liked to look at those dots and imagine what the cities are like) . . . surrounded by empty, barely marked space. It’s the same in the US: The major cities—New York, Boston, Washington, DC—sprawl out toward towns like ours, and then mostly wilderness covers the rest of the continent. Dad calls the cities of the world “industrialized pockets” and the empty spaces “wild.” Though I guess the spaces aren’t really empty, at least not here—there are towns stretching as far west as Arkansas (a lot of them grown over by the woods) and then scattered frontier towns beyond that. But mostly, the farther you get from the cities, the farther you are into the territory of the beasts.
    Now Dad was running his fingers out toward theedges of the map, and down over the Hawaiian Islands (which have always sounded wonderful because they’re ruled by someone called the Sugar Queen—Hawaii is the world’s biggest exporter of sugar), muttering something unintelligible about something called superstrings.
    *  *  *
    Most of the world, according to my geography teacher, was connected because of spices. People got tired of eating food with just the spices that they could grow in their own backyards, so they sent explorers out into the world for pepper, salt, cinnamon, and whatever else they could find. But people found more than that: They also found sea monsters, tigers, horses, mermaids, dragons, and eventually the edges of the earth. (When I showed Mom my homework essay about this, she smirked in her wry way and said, “I guess there’s something to be said for never being satisfied with what you have.”)
    Ferdinand Magellan reached the western edge in 1520, confirming for the first time that the earth was flat. There’s a famous quote by him that goes, “I have seen the earth’s shadow reflected on the stars. I’ve seen that, compared to what’s beyond our edges, we are very small indeed.”
    *  *  *
    Anyway, after planting a flag there and splitting off from his flotilla, Magellan set a course due south to see the remote continent known as the Southern Edge, but was never heard from again. It’s widely assumed he accidentally sailed off the earth, but others think he was drowned by the Great Kraken at Cape Horn, who’s still alive and drowning sailors to this day.
    Dad has a different theory. He thinks Ferdinand Magellan went to look for the Extraordinary World. He also thinks that he found it. Dad thinks that once you cross over to the Extraordinary World, you can never come back.
    â€œWhat are you doing with that map?” I asked now.
    Dad snapped his head up, seeming to really notice again that I was there. My dad and I have the same eyes—hazelish-brown—and the same pointyish chin, even though I wish I looked more like my mom instead. My face is pretty