The carcass fell without warning.

A series of frenzied thunderstorms had unfurled abruptly across the sky one morning, followed by blunt stabs of tortured lightning; but there was no true hint of what was to come. The skies had suddenly cleared, and then it had simply tumbled down. Momentous, enormous; the body plummeted, and when it came to rest, the best part of a country was crushed overnight. Civilization as it was, was scattered and derailed by a single, inconceivable death.

There was the fall, and afterwards life was shaped by those who survived, who endured as best they could.

The only way they could.

⁂

Gad lived near the left hand. He and the others of his group had been living off it for as long as he could remember. The flesh was tough and unpleasant, but it kept them all going. The sun passed through the splayed fingers, sliced shards of light that allowed for few crops to grow. Nearby, blood had seeped from the body, and it was slowly killing the land.

Rumours had spread to them that there was better meat at the ribs, but no one ventured that far west. The ribs were lived on by a sharp-toothed tribe of nomads. They ate what they could of whoever they met.

Life was simple under the hand. There were children who came from other settlements, and Gad’s father tried to teach them of life before the fall. Before the spoiled soil, the rotting winds. They listened, but they never really understood. Each night, Gad’s father would direct questions and insults to the sunset. Sometimes Gad tried to work out what the old man was talking about. There were other people, apparently, across the water. Why had they not come? Why had they not helped?

Gad never offered answers. He knew the questions were not meant to be answered.

When a fever took his father, Gad buried him before anyone could eat him. This was not for the best of the group, but he did it anyway.

⁂

His feet dangling in the lake of blood, Gad watched members of his group as they worked to cut bone from the hand. They inspected pieces, hoping they could make tools, maybe weapons. He remembered the bone knife his father made him, it had been the palest white. Often he'd caught his father glancing at it with the strangest of expressions, fascination and horror, all mixed up.

Just a knife, though.

They got the bone from the flesh, then used the bone to get more flesh. There had been days when his father wouldn’t eat, as if this simple cycle of events had to be unpicked by him. He’d go off and sit by himself, mouthing words no one could hear.

Gad looked to the old black oak, wilting sickly by the lake. He half expected his father to be sitting there, munching disconsolately on some leaves.

There was a breeze, the tree and its shadow leaned, flinching from the body.

Gad turned his wet feet to the sun, wondered if his father had buried his own knife, and why.

⁂

One day he woke up and the hand was gone, severed, dragged away.

He looked for his friends, but they had all been slain. Deep grooves in the soil said the killers had gone north, skull-wards. He didn’t know what else to do, so Gad packed for a one-way trip and followed.

Not far out he met an old man sitting on a rock. “God eating is good eating,” he greeted him.

The old man shrugged, then spat out some teeth. “Depends.”

“Where you hail from?” Gad asked, looking down at the teeth, nudging them with his dirty boot.

“Used to be an eyeball kid.”

Gad swore. “Really? I only ever heard tales.”

“We got through the eye, kept on going, swear we did. Got to the brain!”

“And?”

The old man licked his lips. “Like nothing. . . Nothing you ever imagined.”

They stood in silence then, each knowing they were beyond words.

“Is there anything left?” Gad asked eventually.

The old man winced. “Maybe, maybe not. All I know, you eat too much, and the body don’t take to it.” 

“What do you mean?”

The old man clutched his stomach. “Don’t ask me, boy. Good eatin’ to you.”

“Good eatin’ as it comes.” Gad walked on. He looked back a couple of times, and the old man was still sitting on the rock. Waiting, perhaps. To die, perhaps.

Gad continued, thinking of what he knew of the land, and wondering how much was a lie. They said the children of the scalp had braided the body’s hair into nests. That the men of the foot had cut away its nails and trimmed them into fearsome swords. That the woman of the phallus were vegetarians through choice. They said the chest had caved in; that there were those who had dug down to the heart and that the sight of it had turned them mad. It was black, they said, and could still be heard beating in their dreams. They said the blood of the body had run into the rivers, polluting them all; that the fish were mad and all the sailors lost.

Gad didn’t know what he’d do when he caught up with the hand. It was too much meat for one man, and the flesh had never been to his liking anyway. It was all he knew, though, that tough taste, meat dipped in blood gravy over a crackling fire. He didn’t know to want for anything else.

⁂

After seven days he came to the side of the head. Momentous and strange, the ear was revealed before him. A large group lived here, and the hand-draggers had moved around them, it was this that had helped Gad to catch them up. He walked into the camp of the ear eaters, and sat awhile, watching them at work. They had erected wooden scaffolding around the ear, and a group of elders stood on a board, shouting wise questions into the cavern before them.

A young girl sat by him. “One day his lips will part, and he will speak an answer. One day we will ask the right question, and he will talk and tell us what to do.”

Gad was aghast. “You ain’t been eating the ear?” he asked.

The girl shook her head, fiercely. “No, that’s a bad thing.”

“What do you eat?”

She smiled. “Each other, silly.”

Gad looked back at the ear, which rose up before him into the sky. The people lived in the shade beneath the lobe and had made hammocks out of hair plucked from the body’s scalp. “Who lives on the face?” he asked.

The girl’s face grew dark with hatred. “The face eaters are bad men.”

“The eyeball kids?” he hazarded, remembering the old man.

The girl shrugged. “The left eye’s gone, but there’s people up the nose where people are not meant to be.”

Gad thought for a moment. “What about the mouth?”

“We guard the mouth. Each night they come, trying to creep inside, but we catch them, then we throw them in.”

“Inside the mouth?” Gad imagined the pile of bodies lying at the back of the throat. The girl nodded. “Good eatin’,” he muttered.

The little girl smiled pleasantly. “Good eatin’.”

⁂

Gad followed the trail around the scalp. The body’s hair was long and fell away like a thick and frozen waterfall. Gad picked his way carefully through it. Over time the hair had become entwined in some trees, and slowly an unnatural forest had developed. Gad paused to study it. At points he could no longer tell what was from the world and what was from the body. Oddly, there still appeared to be dim fruits and berries hanging from the tangled branches. Everything would merge, his father had said that once. Seeing this meshing of life and death reminded him of the old man's thoughts.

In the trees he heard people talking and kept himself out of sight.

This land had been lush, once. His father had told him of rolling green hills, springs, animals that were kept for food and more.

The wind changed, and Gad quickly brought a rag to his mouth. The rot was rolling in. Some days the stench abated; you could almost forget it was there. But it was as normal to him as the sun and the moon. He remembered some strangers who’d come to look at the body, years before. As terrible a sight as it had been, it was the rot that turned them away. He wondered where they had come from, and where they had gone? He tried to imagine a place beyond the body but could not. Out there was madness, death. Mountains that were not made from flesh, but rock and dirt. He shuddered.

When he crossed the tide of hair, Gad found the trail made by the left hand, and continued his pursuit.

Eventually he turned the corner of the shoulder, then stopped and stared. Before him the right side of the body lay like a bruised mountain range. This side was more damaged than he knew, and there were valleys of bone far in the distance. The ribs peaked like terrible monuments, the sun glinting off their serrated edges. The smell here was different, and he realised that the people here had gone into the carcass. They had burrowed inside, making their lives in whatever shelter it offered.

They were more organised, this side. This would not be easy.

⁂

When night came, Gad crouched under the right ear, and studied it. There were no orators here; no questions, no need. The few people in the ear ignored him, they were huddled around a small fire, and the smell of crisp flesh was sweet and strange.

This side of the body had more shade, Gad learned to use it wisely. He walked through day and night. Then one dawn, as the sun rose, he realised he was at the elbow. It was crooked outward in a V-shape. Behind the wall of meat this made, Gad heard sounds: activity, industry. Some had made a life in the hollow beyond. The sounds were pleasant, and Gad sat in the shade, listening. They were in their own little world. Maybe they had dug into the side. Were they rib settlers? One day a tunnel would go through the body and connect the sides. What would happen then? A short conflict or a bitter war? He could see two tribes fighting, and the whole chest caving down on top of them. Maybe they’d get lost inside, take a wrong turn somewhere. Gad tried to imagine where they’d end up, then balked at some of the answers.

He slept most of the next day. When he woke, he walked over to the body and broke his fast as he always had. Why does it never spoil? he wondered. He remembered his father saying some had thought it was a gift, when the body came down. People were starving, he’d said, so he fell, and gave the only thing he could.

Gad didn’t know if he believed that, though. The old man had lived by a lot of crazy stories. He’d repeated them over and over, like a mantra. Listening over the years, Gad had noticed the stories changing, words being dropped, meanings being altered. One day he’d watched the old man try and carve his words into rock, to make them last. Gad had laughed at the efforts, and his father had been mad then. It had been important to him, and he knew the words were slipping away.

Words did what they did.

But if it wasn’t meat, what did it matter?

This made him think of the hand. It had fed his father, had fed him. He would make its thieves understand this, make them realise what they had done.

⁂

He followed the trail of the hand to its end and found that the left hand had been brought to the right. The two giant fists had been bound together, like a large cradle. Gad and his group had steadily worked down to the bone on two fingers; he saw the right hand was almost skeletal. There was a group around it, kneeling, moaning.

Gad watched, waited.

He picked out the leaders, and then waited for dark to come. When the group stopped kneeling, they danced, when they stopped dancing, they tailed off in pairs and slept. One seemed to be their elder. His woman was the youngest, and his place was closest to the fire. They’d cut away strips of rough flesh and made an offering to him. He’d taken them and hoarded them inside a ragged cloak.

Him, Gad thought, he is the one to kill.

He kept his eyes on the elder, watched as he lay down, wrapped around his meat and his woman, and picked his way towards him in the moonlight.

There was a rock, a heavy rock.

Gad took the rock to the elder, and caved him in. Then he ran into the night, the dancing flames at his back. The woman cried out, but it was too late.

He wondered if they’d eat the old man; he wasn’t good for anything else now.

The night closed in around him, and he ran hard. He did not stop till the sun found him. Then he wandered tiredly until he found a stream. It looked clear enough, so he tried it. The water was different this side, he’d noticed; it tasted coppery.

Gad drank his fill, then sat on a rock and thought about his future.

Once a girl had come past them, in the old group, and she’d sat for a while at their fire. She’d bartered herself for some meat, and the group had welcomed her. She’d talked about the toes. How huge the feet were, how they pointed nobly towards the sky. Then she’d talked about footprints in the clouds, crazy talk. But they’d listened.

“They’re dreamers,” the old man had said, watching her as she’d slept by the fire.

The next morning she’d left them, going skull-wards. She was doing the halo—going all around the body. Some had come by them over the years, doing that circuit, but less and less. Gad had asked her why she did it. She’d told him it was how she paid her respects. Curious girl.

She’d been pretty. Had long hair that wound round her neck like a scarf. His father had called her eyes blue like a stream in winter, whatever that meant.

She’d listened when you talked, in a way that seemed different. Some people filled your mouth with words that seemed worth saying.  

When Gad got up and continued walking with a vague interest in seeing the toes, he realised he was doing the halo. The thought didn’t please him; he didn’t want to just end up back at the hand—or the wrist, as it was now. Why didn’t he just go? Go away.

He stopped and turned the idea over in his mind; it was an odd thought, and he knew he would not—could not—leave.

No one left the body.

Gad abandoned these thoughts and simply walked on.

⁂

On his way past the knee, he met some children. They were chasing each other with whips made of hair, laughing and screaming. Gad watched them, then turned to their parents, who lived under the knee in a gap made by the crooked position of the leg. They looked back at him.

He wanted to belong but not where others belonged. That struck him as meaningful, and so he went on.

⁂

Gad watched the leg curve up at the knee and followed it as it curved back down. By the next week he finally came to the feet.

It was night. He had seen them looming ahead throughout the day, like bruised hills made of sunset. Gad had always wondered if the body was exactly like a normal man’s. As he’d done the halo, he’d studied parts of the giant as he saw them and compared them to himself. It was strange to realise the vast body was just like his.

The way was lit by a series of torches impaled in the ground. Ahead, the toes were bathed in moonlight, the nails shining like watchful eyes. There were people here, dancing, praising. He watched as they persisted in some strange ritual, where they tried to climb the foot, and reach the tallest nail’s tip. Each time the climber would fall, most often caught by a group gathered below them.

These people had a song, a dance, a calling. He liked them.

A small boy noticed Gad and came over to him. “Where you from?”

“Hand, left side.”

“Good eating?”

“All good,” Gad said, irritated by the question. He nodded at the toe climbers. “What are they doing?”

The boy beamed at him. “Touch the sky.”

Gad looked up, “That’s the sky.”

“Not no more.”

Gad thought about that, as the boy ran over to his friends. He sat and waited for the sun to rise. When it did, the light struck the toenails, and beams shone off them with wild stabs. Boys and men rushed to stand in the sunbeams wherever they could, while women sat and smiled.

After a while, Gad approached a group and sat to tell his story. “Don’t want to do the halo,” he said, “just want to stop.”

One of the women came over to him, asked him how much he ate and what work he was good for.

He thought, then nodded up at the nails. “I can climb, and I can fall.”

The answer pleased them, and they welcomed him.

⁂

That summer Gad helped them carve and cook. He watched over children while they played, he heard new stories about the body, and passed on his father’s as best he could.

Time unfolded in the crook of the shadow. Crooked time. The shadow bent, the shadow swayed, it meant time passed.

Then, at the end of crooked-summer, the strangers came.

Appearing without warning, they stopped a fair distance from the body where they stared at it as if uncertain. Their clothes were unusual, made from bright smooth fabrics. They seemed stunned when they saw all the people and talked among themselves, while looking at them uneasily. Eventually one of them stepped forward; she wore white clothes that seemed to have never known dirt. Before she spoke, she passed a strange device over the air between herself and whomever she spoke to. Strangers were all but unseen at the body, and were treated with suspicion, often violence. The people of the toes were generally disinterested, however. It was Gad who responded to the woman’s questions.

He told them how many they were, and where they lived, he told them what they ate. The woman listened and looked horrified. “You eat the meat? From the body?”

Gad nodded. “Good meat.”

The woman hurried over to the others, and they talked in a huddle. After a while she came back. “We want to help you,” she said. “Do you understand?”

Gad shrugged. “Help how?”

“What you’re doing. . . What you’re eating, it’s not right.”

The woman waited for him to respond, but he simply stared at her. She looked up to the body, her face creasing in thought. “We never knew people were living here, never thought. . .” She looked back to Gad. “You don’t have to stay here. None of you. It might be. . . difficult, but you could come with us, if you’d like?”

“Leave?” Gad frowned. Perhaps the strangers were dangerous.

“This place. . .it isn’t healthy.”

Gad relaxed, he understood her now. “We made a life. Father told me. We made a life and made it out of death. That’s good. That’s smart.”

“But—you don’t have to stay here just because your parents did. Do you want to raise children here?”

Some of the children were swinging in the thick hairs that curled over the side of the foot, they whooped as they swung from strand to strand. They’d started to braid plaits for them to have adventures in. The woman heard them playing and looked startled.

“I don’t understand. . .” she muttered. “How can you bask in all this. . . death?”

“Not death,” Gad said, getting irritated now. “Life.”

“But you can just leave.”

The words were important to her, so he tried to understand them. Leave, and go? Go where? Were there other bodies that gave as much as this?

He knew there was nothing out there, he had faith that the body gave them all they’d ever need. He told her all this, and her face creased as she listened, trying to comprehend.

“Are there bodies?” he asked.

“What, like this?” She glanced up at the body. “No, there’s nothing like this. Not anywhere.”

Then there was nowhere else worth knowing. This was the meat of the world; the taste was all there had ever been. This was the shadow of the land; these were the smells and sounds of existence. The rumbling of the body soothed them at night, the hollows gave them shelter.

One of the men from the new group approached the woman and showed her a box that was making odd sounds. “Cellular regeneration?” she asked.

Pale, he just nodded.

“How long?”

Looking agitated, he could only shrug. The woman looked again at the body, then back to Gad. “Are there people living all over the body?”

“All good eating.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand. Are there people all over—”

“All over, inside, outside. People of the head, people of the foot. People from the right hand who stole the left, I followed them, but I didn’t make no fight, just made them realise what they’d taken. There’s plenty. There’s always plenty.”

“Always. . .? Would you continue to eat even if it was. . . alive?” Her voice was soft; it seemed sympathetic, yet her eyes had a horror to them he couldn’t remember having seen before.

“The body is life.”

His answer seemed to trouble her, but she didn’t say anymore. She nodded, then slowly walked away, indicating for the others who’d come with her to pack up and head out.

Gad watched them until they were gone, then he shrugged and went back to the people of the foot.

The strangers hadn’t even stopped to eat.

⁂

That night Gad could not sleep easy. His father had come back in his dreams; he was looking down at Gad and rubbing his belly. Was he hungry, or was he full?

Gad asked but received no answer.

His father then leaned down close to him and brought his hands together in a loud clap.

Startled, Gad awoke.

There was movement in the night. He tensed, uncertain at first as to what was happening, but then he understood.

Others.

He shuffled to his knees, and crawled over to the children who slept near to him. He nudged them awake and put a hand across their mouths when they tried to ask him questions.

Across the camp, throats were already being cut.

It wasn’t long before a startled scream escaped and woke the rest, and then everything became noise and confusion. A wild figure lurched out of the night towards Gad, so he threw a rock, caving the man’s skull in. He approached his body, and realised he was from another tribe. For a moment he thought the woman in white had returned, but it was not so.

These were the people of the face. They were skinny and ill-looking, but they fought with a fervour that was unpredictable and unnerving.

Why had they come so far just to kill?

Gad herded some of the children and took them deeper into the night. Away from the screams and the violence, away, even, from the body.

He sat with them, his back to a cool rock, as he listened to the now distant cries and tried to pick out voices he knew. The struggle, as he heard it, seemed as one-sided as it was brutal.

Had they come for the meat? But there was meat for all. Had they come from spite, angry that others ate the meat at all?

It made no sense to Gad.

He shook his head. There was food for all, there always was. They would have shared, if asked. A girl was crying, so Gad scooped her up and rocked her; it was something he’d seen the women do. The other children watched him. They were indistinct figures in the dark, just layers of shadow. He could sense their fear.

He didn’t know what to do, so he gestured for the children to crouch, hide, and wait.

⁂

When the sun rose, one of the boys tugged at Gad’s hair to wake him. He looked up and blinked at the light.

“The men gone,” the boy said.

Slowly, they returned to what was left of the camp. Bodies were scattered everywhere. Most of the women were missing. A chunk of the foot had been crudely cut away; the gleam of bone beneath must have frightened the others away. The body was everything they knew; sometimes the skeleton revealed was more than the mind could manage.

One of the girls had put her hand in Gad’s. Her wide eyes studied the scene, before they turned to look up at him. “Why?” she asked.

He shrugged. “We different.”

“So?”

He shrugged again; it was all he had for her. All the tribes were in the thrall of the same thing, yet what should have brought them together had never done so. It was a strange thing, but Gad realised the truth of it. It was the way of people.

“We shared,” one of the boys wailed. “We always shared!”

And there were those who always took. Gad had come to believe the body was a strange sort of gift, something that had been provided to help the people, as his father had believed before him. There were others that always saw the meat as a prize. It had to be taken, owned. It was worth killing for to a certain mind.

Gad sighed. “We got to walk,” he announced. “We got to walk the halo. Find new people.”

The children were frightened, he saw them back away, shaking their heads.

“Some share,” he said, “some take. We find people who share, and we share with them. They’ll be good.”

The girl’s hand was tight around his. “What if they think we’re different?”

“We’ll be good. We’ll join them, prove that different is good too.” He squeezed her hand as he tried to reassure her. But he knew some of the tribes of the body were crazy. They each thought the part they had was sacred, or the most sacred, and they’d kill their way through anyone who said different. 

Gad stared up at the body. At the many bite marks and places where meat had been cut away; he tried to fully understand the madness that drove some of the tribes. . .

In the end he knew thinking about it wouldn’t make it any clearer.

“Come on,” he said. “We got to walk. Got to find new meat. Carry what you can, leave what you can’t.”

The children scattered. He waited for them to get their things together, and once they’d all collected what they needed, Gad led them on, to do the halo once more.