Invisible Traces · A Horror Story No. 9
What the Earth Refuses
Alex Moonn
The earth has a longer memory than any courthouse.
Corumbataí Valley, Brazil, 1844. Benedito Eulálio Pinheiro Mourão inherited the farm, the enslaved workers and the certainty that nothing he did would ever cost him. One March afternoon he has Rufino killed, the cook whose dignity he never managed to break. They bury him in the field behind the barn, without a priest, without a cross. That night the dogs bark until dawn, facing inward. Weeks later, the skin on Benedito's hands begins to dry like old leather. The Brazilian legend of the Corpo-Seco, told by the man who carries it in his own skin.
English edition, available on Amazon.
Read an excerpt
I begin to write on a morning when I found soil inside the house.
Not on the porch. Inside. On the threshold of my bedroom. A small pile, the width of a palm, with the exact color and texture of the field behind the barn. No footprints, no trace of how it got there. Leonarda, who swept the floor the previous evening, said she had seen nothing when she left. The enslaved workers slept in the barracks, and none of them would have had reason to enter the main bedroom in the middle of the night.
I stared at the soil for a stretch of time I could not measure. The smell coming from it was the same smell that comes from me.
The earth was not visiting me. It was recognizing me.
English edition, available on Amazon.
