This Body is a Grave

From the depths of my core to the moons in my sky, I am dead—let me stay like that.

Dead or drowning in corpses, the difference is pointless after a while. I grieve them; I devour those who try to fill the holes they left behind. My beloved children, my removed limbs, the fire I no longer have.

This is what I am now that all life has gone from me: a freezing sphere, pale in my redness, orbited by spectral twins. My vermilion sand is the ruins of my cities. The dust that clouds me, the ashes of my past. The water that once flew down my geological veins exists no longer in my drained valleys. Feed me, they say, but my lands have no nourishment left. They are just the bones from which my remaining skin hangs.

I wasn’t always like this. We weren’t.

Once, I was full. I had streams and ponds and lakes. I had rivers brimming with fish and colonies of intricate coral in my oceans. Most importantly, my offspring roamed the deserts of my body, and they were alive. Their labyrinthine burrows extended for miles, their marvelous artistry swirled in my dunes, their musical languages were the only ones I allowed to give me a name. Crimson in my home, they called me. I refuse to accept any other title.

Nowhere would you have found better children. They sculpted the rocks in which they made their shelters with the end of their curved stingers, creating devoted love letters to their motherland. In return, I warmed up, protecting them from my natural coldness. At night, when they woke up, their bodies were alight, fluorescent, glittering in my otherwise empty darkness. From above, their golden tagmata looked like specks on the sand, and they lit up tiny lanterns that served as perfect roads and maps.

They sang as they traveled, the clicking of their pincers and mouths blown by my loving breath, and I sang with them. They found my oases, my walls of ice, my hot springs. Careful, meticulous claws snatched burrowed worms and fished mollusks with devotion, as if my body was a temple, and they were grateful followers. My little ones never took more than what they needed, and if they did, I would have forgiven them for their self-indulgence like a parent who can never say no.

And then it ended.

The end is never as fast as we wish it to be. Nor is it as easy. I first noticed the invaders as I swallowed a strange substance into my atmosphere. It was stiff, indigestible, so unlike we. From that foreign matter I had mistaken for a meteorite came the creatures, marching, organized, severe. At first, I was curious: they were much taller than my delicate children, whose bodies were flat and near the ground to move gracefully on the soft surface of my sand sheets. They were also numerous and powerful, their muscular bodies moving with impressive synchrony as if they shared a single mind.

The trespassers landed early in the morning. My children slept soundly, but they would not have had a better fate if they were awake. Their ten pairs of eyes could not form images and were ideal for their dimly-lit lives, but that made them more fragile to attacks.

My perfect creations never stood a chance.

The enemies followed their trails of lanterns and saw their glimmering bodies, star-like, on a mantle of darkened sand. It was then that I found that their external skeletons were very easy to break. One by one, they were taken down and used for different purposes: their complex venom was milked and bottled, their hard shells were used as raw material, their fluorescent claws were removed and kept like prizes. Soon, the trespassers realized they could eat them as well.

When they ate, they devoured.

Immobile, I could do nothing but watch as they cracked their abdomens with their jaws while they were still alive. But I love them, I wanted to say. But they’re mine. My docile heirs succumbed, their lanterns stolen, their sculptures removed to be exposed elsewhere. As if it had not been enough, they began taking from me as well. They drained my water, they drilled my land, they farmed my minerals.

My anger shimmered, rumbling. Those were my children. My most beloved descendants. I could not bring them back to life—I am a limited maker. What I could and did was to avenge them. So my groundwater boiled, my volcanoes erupted, and my seas washed over them. Reacting to their presence, my immune system triggered an inflammation; I burned, hurt, reddened, swelled. The vessel in which they came drowned in my magma, consumed by the quakes breaking my soil.

Inhale.

Exhale.

The thieves were dead; everything in me was dead; I was death itself.

As I assumed my new role, my structures began to decay. There was no place for oceans and rivers in a corpse, so my water dried and froze. There was no place for heat, so my volcanoes no longer had supplies, turning into hollow craters. At last, the cold took over me.

Millions of years have passed, and I grew more and more frigid. My carcass shrinks. My pain keeps moving in waves, from the inside to the outside, a ghost of what I once was. I will rest, I think, feeling my residual conscience dissolving in a pool of molten gold. And I would have, but a new invader came.

And another.

And another.

And they keep coming, leaving little seeds of activity in this vast graveyard. My soul reanimates as it moves on my sand, a mockery of the children of my past. My liquid center stirs. My wind blows, covering the new assailants in dust. It’s not enough. They pierce me and violate me. They take samples, like the ones before. They plan to live on me. They plan to rob my children of their catacombs.

Now, I’m awake again. Silent, watchful, resented. Turning colder by the day. My spirit might be weakened, but I remember and will gain control of these aged bones. When they return, I will be ready, and I promise—anyone who dares disturb my silent mourning will be as dead as we are.

H. Pueyo is an Argentine-Brazilian writer and translator. She was awarded an Otherwise Fellowship for her work with gender in speculative fiction, and her stories have appeared before in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, among others. Her debut bilingual collection A STUDY IN UGLINESS & OUTRAS HISTÓRIAS was published by Lethe Press in 2022. Find her online at hachepueyo.com.