The Caretakers
When I'm gone, who will compost me?
You’re reading the first story in Bodies, Tractor Beam’s Halloween mini-issue, a collection of three short stories on death and decomposition. You can read Sophie Strand’s guest editor note here. Subscribe to receive future mini-issue editions as they drop exclusively here on Substack!
Story by: Geoff Holder
Annotations by: Sophie Strand
Art by: Molly Marshall, Daria Tommasi, Amanda Zhu, Maria Snetkova, Deborah Whyte
I have acquired a leopard.
Or, perhaps I should say a leopard has acquired me.
The big cat usually turns up in the afternoon, when it’s too hot for me to work and I spend a few cicada-serenaded hours in the shady plaza on the corner of my street. It’s a welcoming spot, with comfy benches, and its southern elevation on a ridge means I have a wide view of at least seventy percent of the sky. I’ve already seen two of the last satellites fall and burn up.
The leopard appears silently; if I’m concentrating on my book I won’t even realize she’s there until I look up. She makes no attempt to hide: just lies on the warm stone beneath an Aleppo pine and watches me with intent eyes from a distance of several metres. There’s never a hint of menace—there’s plenty to eat elsewhere—and after an indeterminate time she gives a big yawn and pads away. See ya later, lady. Perhaps she is curious. Or she could just be bored. It’s just as likely she is looking for company; as far as I know there’s no other leopards in the city.
I assume she originated from the zoo. All the cages were already open when I got there. I like to think the keepers freed the inmates in a last-minute act of mercy so the animals wouldn’t starve to death. I’d already spotted several groups of antelopes and meerkats, and I’m pretty sure I glimpsed a troop of monkeys in the trees the other day. What happened to the rest of the fauna, I have no idea—some must have died, while others have adapted or ranged further afield, far outside the city limits.
Once the early evening breeze starts up and the sun sinks low enough to take the sting out of the heat, I go back to work. In the beginning I covered myself completely in a protective suit, but now I’ve grown used to the smell and my handling process has greatly improved, so I just wear gloves, a pair of solid boots, and a face mask to avoid breathing in particulate matter.
“Somehow the weeks turned into months and into years. My city bloomed. The boulevards are now linear forests. The DIY store is barely recognisable under its coat of vegetation. The soil from my burials has given rise to an entire ecosystem.”
The city had been home to well over five million people, which is a lot of corpses in one place, I can tell you. I’d been tempted to simply let them rot, but the smell of decomp really is as bad as they tell you, and I was having to make long detours to avoid the worst streets. The solution I arrived at originated from a simple, practical point: I’d found an apartment that was the perfect location for me.
My choice was an older building with thick stone walls that retained the heat in winter and remained cool in summer. The apartment was bright and luminous, with strips of abstract stained glass on the doors and several attractive Art Nouveau flourishes worked into the fittings. The elegance of a previous era had not been eclipsed by the modern school of concrete hideousness.
The problem was the body on the balcony. Although partially decomposed, it was still home to teeming colonies of various invertebrates both winged and crawling, plus it stank. I’d considered pitching it onto the street below, but not only did that feel deeply disrespectful, I knew it was simply displacing the problem. Most of the surrounding apartments had their own complement of cadavers. The inhabitants had been struck down before they’d had the chance to flee (not that that would have done them any good). If I wanted a life free of flies and unpleasant odours I would have to do something.
One of the characteristics of the city was the large number of gardens situated on balconies and rooftops. The trend had been encouraged by the government, which had seen a way to reduce the chronic pollution while enhancing the visual quality of the architecture, both important considerations for a major tourist destination. What I now considered to be “my” apartment had three oval flower beds on the extensive projecting balcony, planted in large terracotta troughs each longer than I was tall. The plants had suffered from a lack of watering recently, but a brief investigation showed the soil was still virile.
There was a DIY store a dozen blocks away, which had everything I needed. So, over a long day I emptied out one of the heavy plant troughs, taking care to preserve the root systems, and deposited the body inside. Shrunken by decomposition and the sun, it looked like it had been placed in a coffin too large for it. I replaced the soil and flowers. I had considered using some of the chemical fertiliser that was stacked ceiling-high in the store, but I thought that might not be the best plan. Once I’d washed down the dark stains where the body had been, I was exhausted, but at least I could sit out in a lounge chair and not have to endure being stared at by eye sockets squirming with maggots.
The next step was tackling the rest of the building. By and large I buried the bodies in situ if they had sufficiently large planters or flower beds on their balconies. From the start I’d underestimated the investment of time and effort required. Even partly-decomposed bodies are heavy, awkward and lumpish, and sometimes sheaths of skin would slough off in putrid folds. After a time, this became a routine job just like any other. On occasion the horror of what I was doing overcame me and I had to take a break to stabilise. Mostly this happened when I was dealing with a child, or where the features of the face had survived so far—the more “human” the corpse, the worse it was.
When there was no convenient receptacle in an apartment, I had to haul the bodies up onto the roof (not my favourite activity, it has to be said, even with the aid of a wheelbarrow). The garden there had been installed across the entire surface, with the exception of the now-redundant air-conditioning blocks, and had clearly been well-cared for.1 I suspected the upscale residents had hired a gardener, or at least a conscientious building superintendent. It was considerable labour creating enough space for the bodies and restoring the soil and plants on top, but I reckoned it was effort well spent.
While on the roof I also rigged up an impromptu dew- and rain-gathering device I’d found in an outdoor-survival shop, and channelled the water into the roof garden’s existing irrigation system. Sorted!
At sundown I stood on my own balcony and tried my best to admire the view of the city as the light of magic hour turned the red tiled roofs of the historic quarter into an estuary of liquid gold.
But all I saw were the bodies. Thousands of bodies. Bodies lining the grand boulevards, bodies stacked outside the hospitals, bodies sprawled among the chaos of crashed cars and looted shops.
Something had to be done.
In the beginning I was so overwhelmed by the scale of the problem I simply didn’t know what to do. Thankfully, the chat forum sorted me out. I was lucky that my city had an older-generation satlink station on the low hills just to the north. The equipment was borderline antique, which made it more durable than more recent and more sophisticated kit. Once I’d chased away the packs of feral dogs, dieselled-up the generator and fixed a hundred-and-one technical issues, I had a working dish. Lo and behold, there was still a vestigial satellite network in operation, and after weeks of trying, I made contact.
Devinder was in Madras. Rodrigo in Chile. Vanina had ended up in New Zealand. Aoi declared herself the queen of Yokohama. Damiana had opted for Vancouver. Baptiste had stayed in Benin. If there were any other human beings alive on the planet we didn’t know how many or where. If they were out there, they certainly didn’t have access to a dish and a localised supply of electricity. Were we the last humans on Earth? We couldn’t be sure, but it seemed plausible. We’d all seen the huge fires that had broken out everywhere when the infrastructure failed.
Once we’d gotten over the slightly eerie experience of talking to actual people, the first topic of conversation was, inevitably, why we alone had survived. The speculations went around and around, but the general conclusion was that we were probably the recipients of a lucky genetic fluke. None of us were epidemiologists or DNA experts so that was where we left it. Once we had exchanged our backstories and experiences, we got down to brass tacks. Although our locations were all very different, we faced similar challenges. Ensuring a reliable supply of fresh, clean water. Obtaining a healthily varied diet, especially fresh food (canned goods were in abundance, of course). Laying in adequate stocks of medication, and ensuring they remained viable in the absence of refrigeration. Keeping cool, or keeping warm, depending on circumstances. The importance of maintaining a journal, at the very least to keep track of seasons. And of course what to do with the bodies.
I explained about cleansing my residential block, which prompted a great deal of debate about whether that was the right thing to do. There were a lot of comments about the sheer physical effort involved, and whether it was justified. Seven people were not going to make a dent in nine billion corpses.2 But in the end we all agreed we had to do something on a local scale. In addition to the question of hygiene and quality of life, several of us felt we needed to somehow honour the dead.
Baptiste suggested I start with an assessment of my results so far. In truth I’d not re-visited any of the apartments I’d cleared, and I discovered my success rate hadn’t been as high as I’d hoped. In several of the planters the flowers had died completely, while in others the leaves were sickly and diseased. Only about a quarter of my soil burials had produced positive outcomes, with flourishing plant populations. This prompted several in the group to do a deep dive into whatever libraries and bookshops were available in their locality. We read and shared whatever we could get our hands on regarding natural burial, which in truth wasn’t that much. There were stomach-churning manuals on embalming, and extensive regulations on the temperature and conditions to be employed in cremation, but quite likely most of the written material on what you might call the alternative disposal of the dead had existed online.
Sometimes I do miss the internet.
“Although our locations were all very different, we faced similar challenges. Ensuring a reliable supply of fresh, clean water. Obtaining a healthily varied diet, especially fresh food (canned goods were in abundance, of course)...The importance of maintaining a journal, at the very least to keep track of seasons.”
Then Vanina stumbled on a few references to a recent (well, recent-ish now, I suppose) trend called “human composting.” This had been adapted from how some farmers disposed of animal cadavers, and apparently involved covering the body with straw and wood chips in a covering or closed container to maintain the required temperature. If successful this reduced the body to particles of soil much faster than depositing the corpse in the ground without a coffin, which was effectively what I’d been doing.
This discovery sent every one of us on treasure hunts in our respective areas, seeking out sources of the required materials. I’m pleased to say my local DIY megabarn came up trumps again, having a large stock of straw bales and wood chips in its garden centre. By now I had requisitioned a van that still had a mostly full tank of petrol, and I’d worked out the best routes to avoid the worst of the clogged streets. So I set up operations in a neighbouring apartment block and started a new round of experimental burials in personal urban gardens. My colleagues across the globe were on a similar mission. None of us had experience in agriculture, soil science or similar disciplines, so it was through trial and error that we bodged together a set of guidelines:
First, lay a bed of soil beneath the body. Fertiliser such as natural peat also works. Soil that already has fungi embedded within its matrix produces the best results.
Cover the corpse completely with straw and wood chips.
Add another layer of soil above. Make sure this layer is aerated.
Cover the inhumation with some kind of material to maintain a constant temperature—pure cotton sheets are a good choice.
Avoid any kind of artificial chemicals or fertiliser. This was a notion we generally agreed on, working on the assumption that we should avoid the mistakes of the past.
Return in two to three months. You should now have usable soil for flowers and vegetables, either in situ or transferable elsewhere.
Needless to say this wasn’t always successful, yet by and large we were happy with the results. And we had collectively learned vast amounts about watering, shade, elevation, aeration, alignment and the importance of worms, beetles and other sub-surface burrowers. I’d never realised growing plants and creating quality soil was so complicated.
The principal issue, however, was resources. Once we’d ransacked the remnants of the consumer society, including every gardening centre, florists and home construction depot within reach, we found ourselves having to improvise. Diesel generators; diesel itself; electrical cables; wood chippers; branches for chipping; all had to be sourced. Solar panels were great for low-level daily needs, but they couldn’t provide enough juice for several hours’ worth of chipping. Straw proved to be an even greater problem when the commercial bales ran out, until Damiana introduced us to the concept of battery-operated strimmers, as previously used by your local municipality to keep the streets clear of weeds. Grass, inevitably, had overtaken every available surface, and local parks were rapidly turning wild. Soon we were harvesting all the growth we could handle and, following tested guidelines, turning it into the required quantities of straw. Not surprisingly all this was a massive effort both physically and mentally. I wasn’t the only one in the group to notice a build-up of muscle (and hand callouses). We were so fatigued none of us had any problem sleeping.
Finally we reached what you might call a professional level of competence. Although we all worked at our own pace, we were each dealing with dozens of bodies a week. Devinder and Rodrigo became very competitive about their numbers, which the rest of us deplored as unnecessary male posturing, though it admittedly did provide sporadic entertainment. Rodrigo was the first to master a mechanical digging machine, which made possible the excavation of multiple graves at a time, and soon most of us followed suit, with variable results (Baptiste said he could never master the complicated gears, and his sources of diesel were running low).
For myself, I had gotten a little bored with apartment burials, and moved onto grander things. The long straight four-lane boulevards of the city had all been planted with a central strip of green, usually home to holm oaks, stone pines and nettle trees, all of which provided much-needed shade in summer. The trees had suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning, vandalism and littering, but somehow still managed to thrive. By now I’d become an expert handler for a tiny mechanical digger little bigger than a motorbike, and I’d discovered how to pull away the upper surface of the central strip, exposing the soil beneath.3 There were still uncounted decaying cadavers in the jammed vehicles so it was relatively easy to drag bodies into the shallow graves and cover them as usual. I did the same in parks and even in the smallest of plazas where there was a smidgeon of greenery. My favourite spot was the city’s Botanic Gardens, not least because my job was easy there—it appeared many of the inhabitants had chosen to spend their last moments in the beautiful, restful grounds.
Somehow the weeks turned into months and into years. My city bloomed. The boulevards are now linear forests. The DIY store is barely recognisable under its coat of vegetation. The soil from my burials has given rise to an entire ecosystem. Mind you, the daily toil has taken its toll on my back and knees, and the arthritis in my fingers aches badly on winter mornings. Aio dropped off the grid; we never knew whether something had happened to her, or whether she had simply encountered a technical failure. After a while the rest of the group settled down into a comfortable routine of meeting once a month, where we mostly discussed what novels we had been reading recently; Rodrigo smirked that the most significant consequence of the apocalypse was to create the world’s most disputatious book group.
“Perhaps she is curious. Or she could just be bored. It’s just as likely she is looking for company; as far as I know there’s no other leopards in the city.”
And now the leopard has acquired me. I enjoy her presence, as I take pleasure in the sheer number of birds that have now taken over the city: the population of sparrows, blackbirds, pigeons and collared doves has exploded, which has consequently seen an uptick in my sightings of black kites and hawks. They keep the rats down too. I’m convinced I saw a pair of vultures off in the distance the other day. There are lizards on every wall, and the bees have returned in numbers uncountable.
They say you can get used to anything, and it’s true. It’s not just the routine of dig grave / dispose of body / add composting materials. I and the other survivors had endured the deaths of everyone we knew, and the annihilation of the human species. Yet somehow, we had got over it, I suspect largely because the daily task of body disposal gave us a sense of structure and purpose beyond just the survival issues of food and water.
Of course I needed to take care of myself too, and that means growing vegetables. My roof garden is my main patch, with some supplementary ground-level plots within walking distance.
The soil from successful burials is now supporting potatoes, courgettes, aubergines, onions, carrots and much more. The insects and slugs take their share, but there’s enough for my needs. I’ve also been feeding all the fruit trees in the district, even planting new ones, so in season I have a supply of plums, apricots, pears, even figs. Life is still hard, and challenges and inconveniences erupt every day, but I consider myself to be mostly happy. The others agreed with me.
This was the subject of the group’s final conversation, while we still had a glimmer of bandwidth (the network had been steadily decaying; we lost video last year. The audio signal limped on for a while, but the entire thing gave up the ghost a few weeks ago).
In his last message Devinder said that we are caretakers. I like that, being someone whose job is taking care.
So every day I turn bodies into soil.
And when I am gone, the human race will be one step closer to total extinction.
I tend to my soil. And in the hot afternoons the leopard watches me as I sit and read.
I am compelled by the idea that these gardens were created as unwitting burial grounds by their future occupants. Urban environments often pave over the regenerative cycles of soil and decay, and it feels equally haunting and comforting to think that seemingly aesthetic choices about gardening may disguise a sub-intellectual anticipation of oncoming disease and collapse. One of my favorite ideas is that we must sometimes believe the wrong thing in order to get to the right place. We must do something for the wrong reasons in order to lay the foundations for the future, even if that future includes our corpses rather than our living selves. (Annotation by Sophie Strand, Guest Editor)
This is a striking equation, as it also forces us to think about the sheer mass of our population. How can we take responsibility for our very matter and how it lives past our individual lives? What does it mean to re-enter the recycling of materials that underpins the dynamic homeostasis of the biosphere? The balancing of seven people against 9 billion corpses echoes what many ecologically sober people are struggling with currently: how do we move huge populations that care little for halting our extractive and unsustainable culture? How do small groups of people affect massive change in the face of this urgency? (Annotation by Sophie Strand, Guest Editor)
The question of decomposing human corpses evolves into the bigger question of “decomposing modernity” and the city itself. I am reminded of Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us, which investigates how long it would take for cities and infrastructure to crumble in our absence. Here, though, I am compelled by the desire to “stay” with the problem and not totally disappear humans from their responsibility to the earth they have paved over. What does it mean to decompose a city? A culture? (Annotation by Sophie Strand, Guest Editor)
Bringing Sci-Fi Down to Earth…
Tractor Beam is a soil-based Sci-Fi publication that explores speculative ideas around farming, food, earth sciences, and beyond, imagining a positive future here on Earth (in the earth). Our goal is to connect people to regenerative agriculture and soil health in a meaningful way. We call it “soilpunk.”
Great story. Good to see terramation pop up again 😊