The humans don’t see us, so they don’t think we exist. If they did, maybe they’d stop killing each other. Maybe they’d kill each other more. Hard to tell, because that’s how it always is with humans.
When a human dies, they probably go to heaven, or to hell, or to another world. Before they do that, though, they’re still humans. Dead humans, with consciousnesses trapped in electrical impulses still think they’re alive.
I feed on those consciousnesses. I stick my hand past the corporeal flesh, into the nerves, and I wrap the flying charges against my finger. I pull them out—rip them out if I have to—and I lay them on whatever flat surface is nearest to me.
I place a broad, calloused, numbed forearm onto the fibre that was once a human’s consciousness. Then, I pick the thoughts and memories sticking to the charges. They pile up into a small mound (although for some, smaller humans, there is not much of that).
Once the consciousness is tripped clean of anything that resembles a thought or memory, I roll up what remains, and place it back into the human’s body. Then, the human is dead, as in body, so in spirit.
Brine is like me. I met her so long ago, before we thought humans would ever end up doing the things they do now.
She was starving. I had to force so many memories down her throat. Her body was like a bundle of antlers, and I nursed her until she could walk again.
“I don’t want to look at any more dead people,” she said. “They are grotesque. Disgusting. The things those people can do to each other… each time, I think they have reached the ends of their imaginations, and they still go further.”
I held her cheek and rubbed a finger under her eye. “You have to eat.”
“Or what? Will I die?” She pushed my hand away.
“I don’t want to find out,” I said.
Brine stopped searching battlefields and waiting by the gallows, even if I pleaded with her to come. “You’re the only other I’ve found in this entire existence like me,” I said to her. She left.
Meanwhile, the humans killed each other. Some of them killed themselves. I held my nose and I wiped the blood off on flesh. I kept listening to the humans as they talked, as their grand, death-fearing imaginations came up with gods and heavens and hells.
I started believing them, too. Maybe I really was some kind of horrific thing, far beyond even a demon. These poor humans were to go to heaven or hell, depending on what they’d done in life, and I was making sure they met their gods as clean slates, without a memory, without a sin, without a good dead. Just like babies, confused and innocent and curious.
Brine returned to me, a few thousand years later, when the humans were now building the Pyramids, hoping to reach gods themselves.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” I said. “I guess you have a stomach for the dead after all.”
She shook her head. “They don’t always die violently,” she said. “They also die in peace. It’s harder to find those, but I’ve been doing just that. There’s no blood, then. No bloating, no dismemberment, no gore. They lie so peacefully, like they’re asleep. Sometimes, even the other humans don’t notice that they’re dead.”
Deaths like that were so uncommon in those days, I’d never considered looking for them.
“You’ll take care of yourself, yeah?” I asked. “Just eat. I don’t care what kind of dead you eat, but eat.”
“You know what I think?” She crossed her legs and held her knee. “I think that one day, the humans will become immortal. Maybe it will be a god, maybe it will be their own ingenuity. But one day, they’ll stop dying.”
She looked at me, then. “They’ll stop killing each other, too.”
“You think we can die,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said. “I wonder who will eat us.”
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