Death and Liquidity Under the New Moon

It’s our fourth July bringing you four great, free, Sunday Morning short stories! Yes: a whole month of free goodness from The Sunday Morning Transport — by Vajra Chandrasekera, John Wiswell, Fawaz Al-Matrouk, and Izzy Wasserstein. We hope you love these and all our stories as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.

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In July’s first, free to read and share, story, Vajra Chandrasekera takes us into battle with a very unusual sort of soldier. ~ Julian and Fran, July 6, 2025

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Death and Liquidity Under the New Moon

by Vajra Chandrasekera

The mortars come in waves, but the gunfire is constant, like the rain. Amo thinks he’s been dead a couple of weeks. His watch survived the explosion that stopped his heart, but he hasn’t remembered to wind it, and like him, it has drifted out of touch. On the battlefields of this foreign country, the sky is ever clouded and prone to miserable, drippy rains. Smoke from fires and explosions darkens the air further. He can tell night from day, but he can never tell the position of the sun or the moon in the sky.

His squadmates, all hunkered down against enemy fire, are making complicated hand gestures that he can’t quite parse. It’s not because death has brought him any new illiteracies. It’s because his squad is all foreigners here, each one a mercenary deserter from a different military, speaking different languages and trained in different codes, able to communicate with each other only in a pidgin of what the local commanding officers speak.

He wonders what the squad is saying. They’re probably not talking to him right now. He’s the only one of them that’s dead. He’s special now. He’s finally the hero he always wanted to be. He’s the hard man, the big gun, the bread-winner and life-taker. In exchange he has to suffer through some incomprehension, both in language and of his ontological status. He is on standby position, his body stiff and still—he let it go dead again, he admits ruefully to himself, even though he meant not to this time—and his thoughts racing.

It bothers him that he doesn’t know the phase of the moon anymore. Back home he always knew it at any given time: every week there were little rituals that grounded the whole household against the waxings and wanings, the full and the halves, and most of all, the new, when they used to raise the fresh dead. Here everything feels unmoored and profane. Today could be a full moon for all he knows. Back home, his sisters will be trudging penitently uphill with alms to the village temple, complaining to each other back when they had servants or brothers to do this sort of thing. The thought almost makes him smile.

He makes a practice of not smiling when his body has stilled and gone this quiet, because he’s learned that it makes too much noise when he does—the creaking of his leathery skin, the grinding of his jawbone in its sockets. It frightens his squadmates, makes his commanding officer angry, and worst of all, it all makes him think too much about his own insides. The last time he thought about his insides at length, he had a panic attack. A dead body, thrashing in the mud for hours. He’s lucky his commanding officer didn’t have him put down. Maybe they tried and it didn’t work. Eventually he exhausted himself and simply lay there. His squadmates didn’t try to rouse him. Perhaps they thought he had finally died. But then his commanding officer called to him and told him to get up and fight again, so he got up and fought again.

There are some echoes to these memories. Perhaps these things have happened more than once. He feels like he’s died so many times that he shouldn’t even remember the first time. But no, he does remember. He fell on his back. A rock jabbing painfully into his side. A rare opening in the clouds above. He saw the new moon, and in his mind, remembering the raisings of his parents and grandparents, he said the traditional words that called the dead, even as he died. And then he got up again.

Of course they kept him on the front lines after his death. Dead or undead, he’s more effective than ever, the officer told him. They would work him to his maximum potential. There might even be a year-end bonus in it for you, Underlieutenant Amoghi, the officer confided, which you foreign mercenaries usually don’t get. Amo said yes then. At the time his tongue was still soft and wet.

He might have haggled more, but he couldn’t speak the language well enough and anyway his heart was calm as the slow hearts of the freshly called dead always are, and he only wanted to be of use. In the old days, back home on the island, this was the auspicious time when the head of the house would tell the new dead what their forever tasks would be: Were they to work in the house, or in the fields, or be hired out to some outside agency? In this foreign country, they knew nothing about such traditions. But they assumed, in the way of any military, that he would take orders, and so he did.

What are his squadmates saying with their hand signals? He squints, but even his vision has softened and dulled in the stillness of encroaching rigor. He’s coagulating just standing here. He’s impatient. Are they advancing or are they preparing for the enemy to advance? He made more of an effort to learn the new codes when he was alive. Now it doesn’t matter anyway. One of them comes and tells him what to do, as they always do. The squad adapted to his strengths as they did to his weaknesses. He’s hopeless at long range, so they don’t give him guns anymore. His fine motor control is not very good even at his most liquid. He doesn’t need it anymore. Instead of shooting, he just walks up to the enemy and stabs them with his bayonet fist. These days, they simply have him wait until there is a close-quarters situation they can aim him at. He’s very good at those. There’s a lot of that kind of fighting here, so he rarely has to wait long.

Oh, he’s being prodded impatiently. He nods in the direction of the prodding squadmate and tries to follow the direction of the pointing finger. That way. Without a language or workable signal code in common, they are often reduced to pointing and grunting. He peers. His dead eyes are nearly useless: he allowed himself to be too still for too long. It’s difficult to get any part of his body to cooperate once it’s been at rest for a while. Sometimes he remembers to fidget and dance and roll his eyes when he’s waiting, to maintain his liquidity, but most often he forgets and sits quietly and gets stiff as the rigor takes him, and has to suffer through the pains of starting again. He lumbers into movement and everything inside him makes a grinding, tearing noise. Everything that constitutes him hurts.

He sees now why he’s been called up. An enemy squad is attempting to cross the square again.

Most of the buildings that once lined the square have long since collapsed into impassable mountains of rubble, enough of which has spilled into the square itself that there is no clear line of sight from one side to the other. It’s a maze of concrete and rebar, of brick and stone from the fallen ancient monuments that had once graced the square back when it had been a place for families and tourists to sit and eat ice cream, for bands to play gigs, for plays and shows in the warm season. They were shown some motivational videos of that sort of thing in orientation. It all looked fake, of course, the excreta of an AI fed some summery keywords. This is what you fight for, men! Dead-eyed skinny white girls in short skirts and too many legs. The extra leg is liberal democracy, he said once in that garage turned auditorium, except he said it in his own language and no one understood. A bunch of dark-skinned foreigners watching the videos with tired eyes, being preached to about the nebulous human right to beaches and ice cream. The right to concerts and cocktails and fireworks for someone else.

The orientation videos made no mention of the money and offers of eventual citizenship in a wealthy country that had drawn all these mercenaries from across the world. The agency that had brought him here had shown him offers from the other side of this war too. Amo had picked the best-paid offer that was put in front of him. All he wants is to send enough money home that his sisters don’t have to work anymore. He’s the eldest male: it shames him that they have to work salaried jobs. He should be able to provide for his sisters and his little brother. If the other side had offered more money, he’d be across the square right now, attempting to break through the enemy lines. But they had not, and here he is.

Amo doesn’t try to move any faster than his painful body allows. It will loosen up and liquefy soon. He’s heard the others say that he doesn’t feel pain anymore, that’s why he’s such an effective close-quarters combatant. He does feel the pain, though. It’s just that pain doesn’t signal danger anymore. It’s only sensation, and all sensation is a gift. It’s pleasurable to be embodied, to be taken that way. The tearing of bullets is enough of a rush to make him moan. This used to embarrass him until he realized that on the outside, his moans were only guttural noises rattling out of his dry throat and didn’t betray his secret pleasure in violation. The metal slugs thrust into him, fill him up, nestle inside him, give him weight, ground him.

He’s up close now, where he is invincible. His bayonet fist stabs efficiently. He watches it with fascination. He can get easily distracted in a fight, but it doesn’t matter: the part of him that fights is the obedient part, and the rest of him is just watching and daydreaming. The bayonet fist is a little unwieldy, to be honest. He doesn’t remember when he lost his hand. At some point he had just noticed that his forearm ended in a stump. He doesn’t remember when he had the idea for the knife, either. Perhaps it wasn’t him that had the idea. Perhaps someone else on his squad thought of it. But it’s a good idea. One of their standard-issue combat knives, which they don’t usually bother mounting on their rifles but use for their secondary purposes as bottle openers and screwdrivers, is mounted on the stub of his radius, with several leather belts borrowed from the dead wrapped tightly around both forearm bones and the hilt. It handles well enough, but it does wobble a little if he hits bone when he stabs someone. The blade is the same length as his erect cock used to be; now what hangs between his desiccated thighs is just a little shriveled nub of meat, but the blade stayed hard and it makes its own holes. But he hates it when the tip strikes bone and the blade shivers. It’s an unpleasant sensation, all shaky and unstable. He tries to stab people in their softest parts for this reason. Oh, all the enemies are dead. He’s being recalled.

He trots back to his lines. He’s much faster once he’s loosened up and liquid, all limbered up, and he’s noticed that this makes him more frightening to his own squadmates. He tries to smile reassuringly at them on these return runs, when his face is far more responsive, but that only seems to make it worse. He must look worse than he feels. He’s gathered that no one else here has a tradition of undead labor in their home country.

He’s tried to talk to them about it. It didn’t work because he can’t really talk anymore, certainly not at length, and anyway he doesn’t speak the soldiers’ pidgin well, but he has tried to explain that where he comes from, back on the island, it’s perfectly normal to raise your dead and put them to work in the fields, if you had fields to work and recent dead to raise.

His family had been rich, once: he remembers as a boy watching his parents raise the revenants of his grandparents to join their own ancestors and set them to work—he remembers working with his sisters and brother to raise their parents in turn, years later. But that generation of revenants was the last on the island. Something about pollution or climate change, they said, when all the dead began to disintegrate. Their parents fell apart so quickly, and all the older ancestors followed in short order. It was a national labor crisis, and soon, they discovered, a national security crisis.

It turned out revenants were much used in war, too. He had never paid much attention in school. In history class they had learned much about kings and presidents and all the great wars and battles, and very little about whether any of the soldiers who fought in them were alive at first. But when all the dead died for good, there were urgent calls for army recruitment, because the island’s war needed warm bodies if it couldn’t get cold ones.

So he signed up, because he was the eldest and the household was falling into poverty from having lost all its dead labor. The military seemed like a suitably honorable job for formerly landed gentry. At the time, he thought to have an officer’s rank and a spiffy uniform and crisp salutes from his men. But he performed poorly in training, he never climbed in rank, his uniform never lay as spiffily as he imagined, the salutes were always accompanied by such contempt in the eyes of his men, especially after the rumors spread of his failed pass at one of the prettier ones, and worse of all, the pay was so shit that his sisters had to find jobs too. He burned with the humiliation of being the lowest-paid despite being the eldest and nominal paterfamilias.

When the foreign manpower agencies came sniffing around for soldiers willing to desert the island’s army and travel abroad illegally to fight in wild and foreign fields for what were, thanks to desperation and exchange rates, immense sums of money, he jumped at the chance. He told his sisters with some degree of regained pride that he would send money home. He must remember to keep doing that now. He needs to make sure they’re still paying him even though he’s dead. He keeps forgetting. Back in the old days, of course, the whole point of dead labor had been that you did not have to pay them. But surely these foreigners wouldn’t know the tradition. To them he is unique, a useful freak of nature.

Another sortie from the enemy. He waits until he’s called and, still liquid from last time, scuttles forward as soon as he’s allowed. When he’s limber, when he’s quick like this, everything happens in the world at the same frenetic pace of his thoughts. There’s no time for daydreaming. It feels like the world’s come into alignment again. It’s almost like being alive. It’s like wearing magic boots that cross leagues in every step—he’s suddenly face-to-face with an enemy soldier, whose eyes widen with surprise only in the very moment that Amo presses his bayonet deep into the man’s throat. The tip of his ulna touches skin like a kiss and, suddenly shy, he pulls out and moves on. He doesn’t feel his bayonet fist is stable enough for slashing attacks, so it is only ever stabbing. He gets up close, moaning from the bullets pushing into him, and thrusts once, only once, into each man. The belly, up into the lungs or heart. The throat. Down from the shoulder into the neck. His favorite is the rare stab into the mouth, angled upward into the brain. He has to be so careful with that, because if he gets too excited and goes too deep, the tip hits the inside of the skull and scrapes unpleasantly. And he can only do it when someone opens their mouth wide enough at the right angle. Oh, it’s such a perfect constellation of pleasures. He gets close and tries for it as often as he can. He gets up close and squeezes a soldier’s balls with his dead hand—the man screams, and it’s perfect. Just a little upthrust, holding himself back, so perfectly in control, just enough to pierce the brain stem. And he’s gone, spinning away with a speed he was never capable of in life. Always leave them wanting more. He’s being recalled again. Already? He takes a step, seemingly just one step, and he’s behind his own lines again, returning to his standby position, his grin wide and friendly even if no one wants to meet it.

He traces the groove of the fuller in his bayonet with his other hand, scooping out with his thumb the matter that had gathered in it. He fidgets and dances in place. He rolls his eyes in their sockets. This time he’ll remember to keep himself loose and liquid, far from death’s rigor, for when he’s called upon again. This time he’ll remember to go ask the officer whether his paychecks are still being deposited. This time he’ll remember to write home.

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Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Vajra Chandrasekera is from Colombo, Sri Lanka. His novels The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall have between them won Nebula, Ignyte, Locus, Crawford, and Otherwise Awards; been selected as New York Times Notable Books of 2023 and 2024; and been nominated for the Le Guin Prize for Fiction and the Hugo, among others. He is one of the 2025–2026 Fellows of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

“Death and Liquidity Under the New Moon,” © Vajra Chandrasekera, 2025.

The Sunday Morning Transport: Selected Stories 2022 is now available at Weightless Books!