You Build Your House on Your Father’s Corpse

WINTER 2026, SHORT STORY, 4800 WORDS

You build your house on your father’s corpse. The grounds are overgrown with patches of bramble and thorn—your father was a hairy man. The foundations, its borders, are shifting, amorphous. The tides come in and wash away the shore. Your house is built on a bedrock of flaking shale. Yes indeed, this is your father’s body: his chest, his arms, the degrading slope of his gut. You walk down the hill to draw water, and you have to watch your footing. Navigating your father’s corpse is a perilous affair. 

The grounds are worse at night. There are no creatures that chirp or scurry in the darkness, nothing to accompany you but silence. Your father’s corpse in the dark is indistinguishable from shadow. You can see him in the hollows of the caves, in the spaces between brambles, atop rocks slouched together as a throne, as if the very emptiness itself takes on a mass and weight and form. By daylight you unearth rocks streaked through with veins of iron already corroding in the moist earth, stinking of rust and sulfur. You strike iron against flint. You make fire. You carry a flickering torch with you when venturing out after dark, and the landscape shifts according to where you shine your light, hillocks and boulders and outcroppings of rock all invisible until they are banging against your knees and shins, threatening to topple you over. Shadows dematerialize and re-form, stones emerge and are swallowed up again into the ground. You are navigating a restless sea, one that shrinks at your gaze and wells up everywhere else. 

You had once lived in a cave, a grotto, a hollow sunken into your father’s gut. It was raining when you first came here; there was a squall. You lifted your head and yowled into the storm, thrilled and terrified and utterly free. The rain was hot and stung your face, and you welcomed it. The cave was less refuge than a promise of shelter to come. Sweat beaded on the walls and cooled in rivulets down the pockmarked stone, leaving the inside of the cave both feverish and clammy. You curled up against a patch of matted lichen and listened to the rain, slowly succumbing to exhaustion. The walls and floor curved around you, cradled you, and in that way you slept. 

Your father’s corpse is mostly rich and fertile, at points sinking into bog. Grass grows everywhere—yes, there is bramble; yes, even the blades of grass are stiff and sharp and curving and scratch at your legs and thighs—but there are also wild stalks of wheat and millet and corn, clusters of grapes dangling from the vine, black tomatoes taut with juice, the skin bulging beneath your thumb. Once you uproot the weeds and brambles, the earth settles itself into striated furrows, ready for planting. You have made primitive tools, rocks painstakingly chipped away into sharpened edges, their black surface rippled with whorls. You lash them to sticks. You make an ax, a spear, an adz—or at least the crude approximations of them. You drive your blade into the earth and it almost bleeds. 

The trees are black, the grass is black, the corn is black; all that grows here is varying shades of black, all except for the dead. One out of every three stalks comes up pale and lifeless, stunted at germination. You go through the rows and weed out the white stalks, and they come out at the root. They crumple in your hands, hollow and rustling. You hack down a white tree, and inside there is dust and dry rot. So much of what you grow is useless. Ghostly shapes watch you from the woods, bulbous and loping and pinheaded, their faces like the barest glimpse of sun from the bottom of a well. They bound away, skittish like deer. When you investigate, you find cool clear springwater welling up from where they once stood. 

The first time you kill one, it is almost by accident. An afternoon spent crouched in the tall grass, waiting, watching their movements, scarcely daring to breathe. They mill about almost mindlessly, like water droplets creeping down a pane of glass. Tentative, gathering momentum, tracing each other’s tracks. When you finally lunge forward, spear in hand, it is less attack than a surprise. Your thrust goes wild and hits air. They scatter. A slender leg catches on an arched root, a joint splinters backwards. One of the creatures crumples to the ground. The membrane of its flank stretches taut as it sucks air, expands, deflates, a dying pulse fluttering through its body. 

It takes minutes to die. You feel sick looking at it. Its skin peels off in cloudy, translucent strips, coming apart in your hands. It does not bleed. An oily serum seeps up from its flayed musculature, clear and weeping. Its flesh crisps over the fire, turning a carbonized brown. Shards of it stick between your teeth.  

It is the extremities of your father’s corpse that offer the most opportunity for exploration, rocky, callused promontories stretching out into the sea. The stones are blunt and hostile and dig into the soles of your feet. There is grit collecting beneath your father’s nails, barnacles and chitons and small meaty mussels, tiny gray shrimp with black polluted veins running along their spines. All the creatures of the land, the things that pass as rabbit and deer and quail, have clear delicate bones, white bloodless flesh that reminds you more of fish. It is the creatures of the sea that are truly redolent of meat, the metallic tang of iron heavy on your tongue. They stain the lines in your hands black as you slit them open and extract their entrails, spreading them out to dry in the sun. Exposed sheets of coral stand brittle and yellowing above the waves, sun-bleached and flaking. Ships have torn themselves to pieces against your father’s corpse, leaving flotsam wedged among the rocks, and although you have kept your eyes peeled towards the horizon you have never seen an intact ship sailing, never found another survivor. You are surrounded by ghosts. 

You have a bounty to salvage. 

Sand eats everything. Sand swarms over the wreckage, teeming from crack and crevasse as you dislodge your finds. The grains, held up to the sun, are translucent husks, rough with ragged limb and pedipalp. Whatever microscopic creatures lived here once have since molted, embryonic flesh emerging from the shell, leaving home for better prospects. The shore is a graveyard of their former lives. Sand grits between your toes, clings to the folds in your skin. 

You dislodge gray and waterlogged planks, splintered and uneven, more than enough to build your house. You lug them up the shore, picking splinters from your palms, and then scavenge frayed lengths of rope to lash them together in bundles, fixing together a crude sledge to haul behind you. A curved section of hull becomes a roof, half a hovel to crouch under and sort through your haul. There are treasures, of course, ivory dentures and cufflinks and spectacle frames with the lenses dashed out, all sorts of trinkets that are largely useless to you. The sea brings you furnishings: a legless chest of drawers to be propped up against a tree trunk, three-legged chairs, scarred tabletops and battered copper pots, miraculously intact bottles, a tattered knot of fabrics that must have once been a chest of clothes. 

The wood is rotten, the metal rough with corrosion, the cloth stringy with holes. The accumulation of lifetimes, reduced to so much detritus. You drag them up the hillside and begin to assemble the tentative outlines of a house, like tracing out a constellation through long-dead stars. This is what has washed to the surface. There is more still lying in the depths. 

You swim through hidden coves, run your hand across glistening cavern walls. There are broken white stones you have clung to and dived off from, arranged in jagged semicircles; there are vortices and bloodstains and gaps. There are points of suction, undertow. You nearly drowned once, sucked down into a darkness that blotted out all light, and your foot pushed off against what felt like a rubbery carpet of kelp, or perhaps the back of an impossibly large tentacle. Perhaps it moved, or perhaps it was merely your fear that made it so. You came up gasping and vomiting water. There are networks of sunken caves beneath the water, impossibly deep and complex. Who knows what things have drowned down there, what dissolving corpses filter up to the surface. The waves break against the stones in a constant spray of mist that stings at your shoulders and face. Whenever you are down here, you feel as if you will never again be dry. You have delved between the crevasses of the rocks for treasure and come away with silver, come away with handfuls of flaking coral. The lip of the cove is lined with spiny urchins and sea stars and anemones. You stab yourself with their venom each time you leave. 

You salvage a silver pocket watch, corroded gears gritted together in their glossy shell, a set of silverware gleaming like slats of moonlight. As well, a kit of rusted tools: a hammer, auger, saw blade, dozens upon dozens of iron nails. Now that the weather has cooled, new figures skulk through your father’s corpse. They are long-legged and pale, much like the deer in the forest; unlike the deer, long-fingered and upright. They are inquisitive, and bolder than any of the others. Their footsteps do not crush grass. They approach the edges of your clearing in the dark of night. 

The first time they came, you were asleep. 

You had spent a long day scavenging, hauling, sorting, fitting together, laying stones to mark the boundary of your field. Your house was a hollow tree back then: an upstairs in the branches, planks laid out across them to make floorboards. You had pulled yourself upstairs at the end of the day and fell back on a mattress of dried stalks, sinking into sleep beneath the pinpricks of stars. You’d long since had to give up sleeping on the ground. The earth was soft and loamy, easy to sink into, but even with a barrier between you and the dirt you could not shake the sensation of microscopic legs crawling over your skin, overtaking you. Filtering through the fronds, ever so gradually swallowing you, like a warm dark salivating mouth dissolving a morsel on its tongue. 

You woke to nightmare, jolted awake with the sensation of falling down a pit. They were standing over you, an indistinct number of them, blurred like fingers hovering inches from your face. You could make out nothing of them in the dark. An awful stillness; a coffin lid weighing down on you like eyes. You screamed. There was rushing air, the sound of wings, and then you were alone again, set adrift in the darkness with only the pitons of your heartbeat to act as anchor. The moon of your father’s eye hung overhead, full and clouded. From your vantage, you could see the shadows of their figures streaking across the grass until they vanished into the woods. 

Your father’s corpse is inhabited by vampires. 

They approach in groups, shoulder to shoulder in funereal procession, waxen faces staring from rough-spun black shrouds. In the days that follow, you sleep fitfully throughout the day, sit awake by night next to the crackling heat of a bonfire, watching for their ever-so-faintly luminous pallor by the boundaries of the firelight. Their presence has upended your understanding of the world, of your place in it. You are not safe. You have never been safe. You are a child playing at survival, surrounded by stones and sticks and rusty tools, the pitiful evidence of your make-believe. 

Your mind races with plans to trap them, defend against them, kill them, retracing the steps until you can feel ruts wearing into your mind. Deep dark pits papered over with leaves, open graves waiting for sunrise. Barricades hammered through with stakes. Trenches of running water. More bonfires. Burning flesh. Staggered piles of ash. The bonfire turns the night sweltering, waves of heat beating down your neck. So much of what you have built is useless. You will have to begin again. 

An autumnal senescence settles over your father’s corpse. The leaves are changing color. Pigment bleeds from their black-veined laminae to become a clotted red at first, imperceptible but for a smeary haze of sunlight through the canopy. The early morning air brushes your nape with clammy fingers. The foliage grows anemic, paler still, color retreating beneath the surface. Dead grass crumples beneath your footsteps into dustings of dried blood. 

The landscape blossoms into a motley of streaky reds, scabbed umbers, fading crepuscular blues. The grounds are spotted with rosacea. Raspberries blister up from the sunken earth, already oozing and overripe. You can pick them by the handful, juice dripping down your chin and fingers, staining your teeth and palms. 

You trek deeper into the interior of your father’s corpse, your keen eye finding traces of habitation hitherto unnoticed. The wild clusters of wheat and corn, now evidence of field and farmland before yours, gone wild perhaps, or maintained only sporadically. A sinkhole that might be the mouth of a well. Cairns collapsed into mounds of dirt and stone, spaced together to suggest settlements, nigh indistinguishable from the rock-strewn landscape. You sweep aside the wet leaves to press a palm against the graves, imagining their inhabitants shifting beneath their blanket of dirt, monstrous and blind, dreaming of moonrise. The raspberries you fail to eat rot from the branch, sickly-sweet spatters of pulp clotting the soil. Everything is dead, or dying. Roots swell beneath the skin, darkening and contused, bloated with the dregs of dying leaves. 

You thrust red-stained hands into the dark loam and unearth distended yams, deep black and purple potatoes, twisted masses of unrecognizable tubers. Everything is distilling to its lowest point. The earth calls out for harvest. Perhaps the animals likewise are retreating, withdrawing into burrows of their own beneath the soil. Game seems scarce these days, or perhaps you have never quite become adept at hunting. The chill in the air raises the hairs on your skin, leaves you anxious. You work feverishly, dirt caked beneath your fingernails, between your toes, in the creases of your neck and wrists and thighs; you fall asleep tasting it. Dawn, till dusk; days, then weeks. Beneath the roots of your house, a stockpile grows: bushels of yams and teratomata and potatoes, dried ears of corn, jars and jars of congealing jelly, long flayed strips of preserved meat. 

Your house has grown to accommodate your urges. A cellar, the beginnings of a tunnel painstakingly excavated into the earth, cool and dry with gently curving walls and shelves of jutting shale. You can descend into the musty solitude, lit by candles of rendered fat, and take inventory. You have built walls, simple fortifications of poles driven into the ground, logs piled high and wedged between them. Silverware juts from the gaps, warding. You have strung a roof of sailcloth across the branches to shield you from the rain, partitioned out rooms and laid walkways of planks between them. A ghost lantern hangs from your window, a dying breath of methane rescued from a swamp, shivering with pale blue fire. The silver casing of the pocket watch sits in the middle of your door, repurposed into a doorknob. The vampires come in the night and sit under your window and barter for your blood, and the silver burns whorls into their palms. 

Apart from that, they have proven peaceable enough. It was on the sixth day that they finally approached you, one of them nudged forward, palms outstretched like blind probing feelers. You did not trust them. You had no choice but to trust them. They seemed hesitant, and almost deferential to you, shuffling backwards to accommodate your gaze. You communicated through pantomime at first: tensed postures and darting eyes, small placating gestures. A spear raised up. Shadows dancing by the firelight. A mouth unhinged to display fangs. Eyes glinting in the darkness; the turning of a hand palm-up, the wrist exposed. The deliberate withdrawal and procession back into the shadows. The long minutes of silence. The sinking terror and relief of knowing you were, at least for the moment, completely and utterly alone. 

From your daylight exploration of the cairns you have seen the progress of their once-abandoned fields, new furrows hewn, tender shoots sprouting from the soil. Scattered amidst the graves you have found discarded shavings of stone, shards of pottery, figurines of twisted rag and twig; no sign of weapons. They are farmers. They do not hunt. Your presence here unnerves them. They are overly accommodating, unfamiliar with the roles of predator and parasite. They are unused to wanting to feed on someone, and the sudden rush of desire they experience around you leaves them trembling. Every bird and beast and daemon on your father’s corpse is a scavenger, vampiric and bloodless, used to living off the soil. You are the only thing on your father’s corpse that bleeds. 

You hang the ghostlight in your window to signal for them to approach, and talk well into the night from the safety of your bedroom. You sit within the shivery circle of light and listen to the sounds of their flesh burning against the silver, the hisses and quiet exultations of pain. Come dawn you retrieve the empty vials left on your doorstep, and you prick your fingers and measure out your blood, drop by precious drop. 

Your blood is as a drug to them, a ley line drawn from wrist to throat to heart, its gleam anointing their lips or used in hallucinogenic rituals. They trade freely for it, baskets of goods paraded beneath your window, wheedling in their sibilant tongue. A vial buys you a newly crafted tool, a week’s worth of grain, a night of labor. You have spent nights awake, supervising, watching pale flocks of hands lay beams across rafters, raise wooden frames into place. They work in near silence, uncomplaining, the walls rising as if by pantomime. 

Your house is furnished with conveniences you could have never imagined for yourself, crafts refined beyond your fumbling attempts at trial and error. Blankets and serapes of intricate patterning, soft and tufted, with a faint gamey scent when you bury your nose in their warmth. What beasts they may herd are unknown to you—all the game you have seen thus far are hairless, callow striplings—but some nights you imagine you see the shadow of clouds rolling across the blind expanse, for a moment engulfing the heath in a denser, deeper dark. Their territory is unmapped; their cairns go deeper than you have discovered. Your shelves are laden with bowls and jars tinted green with verdigris, knives and awls of alloyed copper, rows and rows of vials of clear glass. 

 They have taught you their songs and gifted you with little effigies of rag and twig and glass beads, either toys or things of ritual. They are generous with their offerings. Come summer they will be gone again, though to where they will not tell you. There is a wistful acceptance on their lips as they fall silent, as if imagining a faint and distant shore. Once the heat starts to rise, the swelter of your father’s corpse will become inhospitable for their pallid constitutions, and they will by necessity take their leave of you, their abandoned villages sinking back into obscurity. You will be alone again, hermitic and wild. All will be as it was before. 

You stand on your doorstep hefting your new ax, the counterweight of the ax-head cast in alloyed copper, metal burnished into fading sunset. The handle sweeps low, gently curving like a spine. Your new tools sing. You have refined your own technique through study and imitation—the same principles applied to a hoe, a scythe, a pick—but have yet to match the artisans at their craft. The polished wood of the ax handle is rippled black, smooth and sleek as a coffin lid. Cold to the touch, no matter how long your hand has gripped it. You study the shapes of trees littering your territory, the slouching angle of their trunks, the inclination of their branches. You pace out the edges of a new clearing, one vaster still, carving the overgrowth of forest back. 

The ax bites down. The wood flinches and gives way. A gash of splintered teeth becomes a scream. You swing again, again, again, the weight of a fresh shovelful of dirt thudding through your arms and chest with each stroke. The tree shudders, sways, stolidness sublimating into momentum. You used to have dreams of slitting your wrists open and letting the vampires swarm over you, raising you up and upturning their mouths to catch the falling blood. You could not have built your house without them. The world tilts on its axis, topples. Your veins bleeding dry until they had sold you every last thing they owned. 

You no longer trade your blood with them. You like to think you’re past that now. Self-sufficient.

There is an interior to your father’s corpse still left unexplored. The great black tangle of the Wilds, inhabited by things howling and open-mouthed and chthonic. Creatures shriek in the branches and make abortive attempts at flight, trying vainly to escape the strangling ceiling of branches that snares their wings and keeps them trapped. The vampires venture into the Wilds freely, and bring back tales of the World Tree, fallen, its trunk sloughing into rot. Once it touched the sky, they say, branches extending into undiscovered worlds, but now it is dead and shrunken and takes merely a day to circumnavigate. They bring back scrapings of its bark and sap to use as fertilizer, as it bears the rot of a dozen worlds and can make anything grow. It stinks horribly, the smell clinging to the inside of your nose and throat, and you refuse to use it. Of the beasts within they say little. You believe it is because the vampires refuse to speak ill of their kin. 

Your father’s corpse used to be a vibrant jungle once, and the air rose humid off the sea, but now the rivers and oceans are cooling, succumbing to gravity. Everything trickles down to the depths, carrying the refuse of the world with it. The ocean is a deep purplish blue and it chills your flesh to touch it, and the winds bring in the taste of salt. There is a melancholy to the world out by the sea. The wind drops low and sighs. It tells you everything that you have built will fall away.

There is the insurmountable peak of your father’s skull, so massive that it drags the clouds from the sky, keeps the moon and sun in its orbit. It is hollow, you believe, lifeless, and only the slow collapse of its walls accounts for the growl of thunder. And yet it stands prominent in the sky, judging everything beneath it, calling for you to conquer it. Deep beneath the earth are deposits you have yet to mine, pitted outcroppings protruding from the hillsides as the dirt erodes. Erosion grinds away implacably over months, thunders past in seconds. There is a storm, a flood, a tremor, and the next day you find exposed ridges of feldspar and pumice, porous and reeking and still warm to the touch, a roiling heat bubbling up from the damp soil. You live in the middle of the world, surrounded by hell above you and hell below. Your father is dead, and decaying, and still he contains multitudes. Still he contains you in your entirety. 

For a while you lived in a tree, the biggest and tallest one you could find, so as to better survey the world beneath you. You rigged a primitive pulley system, clambering up into the tree and looping a rope over branches, suspending planks and then pulling them up after you. You had no idea how complex it was to make a treehouse, but you managed it in the end, a precarious arrangement of walkways and ramps and ladders and canvas tenting. Later, you hollowed out the tree itself, tunneled down past its roots to find the abandoned caverns beneath. The shale was fragile as chalk, and you widened the tunnels at your leisure, listening to the walls shift around you. New walls rose. Rafters replaced sailcloth. You have laid down stones to solidify your foundation, churning together clay and lime. 

Your house has grown. It’s become respectable. Its walls are gleaming and black, its perimeter ringed with silver and thorns. Your expeditions have produced uncapped reservoirs of sebum and bitumen: oil to feed your lanterns, pitch to varnish your walls watertight. Lanterns burn throughout the night, the pitch-black patina of your house painted with false sunrise, the boards themselves pungent with eucalyptus and garlic, a repellent primer infused into the wood. You have swept the vials from your shelves, unstrung beads to clatter alongside them, the shards of glass going white-hot and shapeless in your kiln. Light warps through the pebbled surface of your windows, the world painted through compound cataractous eyes. 

You are planning a new wing to your house, expanding into further storerooms. Your cellar swells, teeming and gravid, cured meats dangling like entrails from the rafters, jars cradling skinless and unborn things. You have grown adept at butchery. Implements of bone and ivory adorn your table, serve as rasp and hook and knife and needle; all the things that puncture, rend, incise. 

Your forays into the Wilds have revealed to you all variegation of new beasts: two-limbed, three-limbed, four-limbed, lurching and slavering and in advanced stages of decomposition, muscles unraveling into fraying strands. They are horrifying, suppurating mockeries of the beasts of the forest and the field. They die as easily as any other. It takes a week’s worth of soaking to get the stench out of the fleece, a putrescent bacterial film forming on the surface of the water, hungry for the next hide to be submerged. Pelts carpet your floor, serve as binding and upholstery and bedspread. Their meat is heady, almost sweet, carrying the tang of fermentation. Drippings of yellow fat hiss and sizzle on the coals of your firepit, warmth against the encroaching cold. A black plume rises from the chimney of your house, serving as warning and a sign. 

You will reshape the world. You have driven back the wilderness, with ax at first, and then with fire. Dry leaves catch like tinder. Days of burning, shrieking tides of vermin driven out beneath the waves of smoke—you stand by with gunnysack and club and slaughter them by the dozens, exhume curled-up bodies still slowly cooking in the ash. Your footprints mar the gray landscape, charred remains crumbling back into loam, all fertile possibility, as if you were settling the surface of the moon. You have cauterized the earth, burned out thorn and briar by their roots. The budding grafts of your farmstead span to the horizon. You have slit your palms open on thorns, pissed markings onto your boundaries, and churned earth into clay. You have pressed clay into brick, hardened brick in fire. You have scavenged together lumps of cold iron, turning their scarred surface over in your hands, imagining molten plumules of radiance emerging from the seedbed of your forge, a harvest sheathed anew in iron.

You have begun the work of reclamation, carving canals into the earth and damming off ponds, watching your stock of sea life grow. Beds of oysters slowly suffocate in brackish furrows, translucent eels make sluggish loops in their shallow pools. You have hunted down the reclusive beasts of the forests and leashed them to your cart and butchered and bred them for meat. You have witnessed birth, gangling bodies slick with amniotic fluid, squeezing your arm past the birth canal to unhook hoof from hipbone. A great wailing rupture, a cold snout snuffling mucus into your palm. The babes have imprinted on your scent. The harvest has been seeded with your blood and fluids. The fish lap up your blood, and it circulates dark in their translucent frames, clotting and becoming something substantial. New shoots spring from the earth. You are growing your own monsters.

You will stand atop the peak of the world, atop your father’s skull, and look down and claim all that you survey. The wind will roar with your voice, the ground will beat with your pulse. You will look upon your own corpse, and delight at the recognition. On that day, your house will be complete. 

Return to Issue #41 | Support the Deadlands