BY LUZ ROSALES
It's only once everyone else has died that the girl rises from the dirt. She has been underground for years and has forgotten what it is like to have the sunshine down on her, its rays seeping into her skin. It's too bright for her. She has to cover her eyes.
She does not remember the name or face of the man who put her underground in the first place. All she knows is that he was not a stranger and, like everyone else, he is now dead.
In fact, she remembers almost nothing about her life before the dirt, and there is very little worth remembering about her life in the dirt: darkness, mostly, and insects and worms crawling on her. She welcomed their presence, if only because it meant she was not completely alone. It was a sort of limbo, an existence that could barely be called an existence and occupied that space between life and death. She was awake for every agonizing second of it, unable to move, and had lain forgotten until it was her time to sprout.
There was a town here once, on this flat and arid expanse of land, that she called home. Everyone lived in small cramped houses made of mud and slept on the floor. The houses are gone now, but the people are still here, men and women and children, scattered across the ground as if they had been blown around by the wind. They lay still. At a first glance, they just look like they’re sleeping.
Dirt Girl doesn't recognize any of them.
There are a few teenage girls, around her own age, and she wonders if maybe, before she got put in the dirt, they had been friends. What do you do with a friend, anyway?
She finds an older woman in the shade of the only tree around, limbs spread like a starfish. Something about her makes the girl's chest twist. Is this her mother? She has no idea.
Dirt Girl makes a discovery: the woman's body comes apart. She pries her open, creating a slit from her clavicle to her pelvis, and pulls the edges apart. She is hollow, and the girl lays inside her. Is this what childhood is like, nestled and warm and confined? She wants to be small again. Or, more accurately, she wants to remember what it's like to be small.
The woman who could be her mother is slick on the inside, and there's the scent of rot, getting stronger by the second, but the girl shuts her eyes and sleeps.
***
A memory: the girl falls into a lake. Water fills her lungs. Her chest burns. She is going to die.
But someone grabs her hand and hoists her back up onto the shore, where she collapses and coughs up water.
Her savior is another girl, a year or two older, lean and athletic. She keeps holding onto Dirt Girl's hand, and Dirt Girl doesn't want her to let go.
And then: she jolts awake with the taste of dirt in her mouth, feeling like she is suffocating. The woman's body has sealed itself shut, trapping her inside. It's unbearably hot and moist and she’s stuck, like she’s been slathered in paste and glued to the inside of the woman. She thrashes around until she’s able to reach her hands up and punch through the woman's skin, and she claws her way out, fighting the way she didn't fight when she was underground.
Once she's freed herself, she throws up, but what comes out isn't vomit. It's mud, and then it's some pale liquid she can't identify but that tastes like metal, and at last, she hacks up a worm.
***
Dirt Girl makes a second discovery: she can create life from the dead. She cannot resurrect them, but she pulls and twists them into something else. So far, she can only do animals: a swan, a dog, a bear cub. They don't come out perfectly. The swan has two heads. The dog has too many eyes, clustered like a spider's. The cub cannot walk. It only stares. She loves them nonetheless, her flawed creations.
***
Another memory comes to her when she is petting the bear cub. This one is of the woman she slept in: Dirt Girl is in the corner of a room, back against the wall, and the woman is standing in front of her, pressing a knife to her throat.
Dirt Girl returns to the woman's body. She hasn't figured out what to do with her yet. She has begun to decompose, and there are ants on her.
This is when she discovers she can create plants as well: the woman shrivels, her skin curls up, and she becomes a vine, wrapped around the trunk of the tree, lined with flower buds.
***
Dirt Girl has spent her entire life in this town. This she is sure of. She tries to visualize how big the planet is, how many other people there are out there, and she can't do it. It's too much for her to grasp. She doesn't know if everyone else is dead or if it's just those who lived in this town.
She wonders, too, about that girl in her memory. Is she dead too?
The swan with two heads swims in a small pond, and she watches, and she thinks, and she swears she feels that other girl's hand on her own.
***
Weeks go by.
Dirt Girl does not see any other humans. No one comes here. She lives with the animals she made. A few die, but she just makes them into something else.
She also builds her own house from mud, and it is here that she stays during a rainstorm.
The rain comes down in torrents, pounding on the roof of the house, getting in through some of the cracks.
Dirt Girl huddles in the corner, with the dog in her lap, and a ferret on her shoulders. They tremble and whine. It's cold, so cold, and it's thundering, too, and for a moment she wishes she were underground again, where none of this could reach her.
And she remembers: there had been a storm like this, before she became Dirt Girl. But instead of staying inside her house, she left town and made her way to the lake, where she saw that other girl again, and she can't recall what they did, but she does recall that the other girl, Lake Girl, had said: "I'll stay here and wait for you."
***
In the morning, after the storm passes, Dirt Girl heads to the lake. On the way there, she doesn't run into anyone, but she sees some ducks and a few deer.
The lake is large and deep and has an island in the middle. It's surrounded by towering spruce trees. There is a pier, and sitting on this pier, with her legs dangling over the edge, is a girl. Lake Girl. Older, yes, taller and fuller, but still her. Her straight black hair reaches the small of her back.
They had kissed. Dirt Girl freezes when she remembers that: Lake Girl's soft lips against hers. It was her first kiss, and after it happened she had started crying, not because it was bad, but because it felt good, and she wanted to do it again. And someone had followed after her, and someone had seen, and -- and --
"I've waited so long for you," Lake Girl says, turning to look back at her. She brushes her bangs out of her eyes.
"I'm sorry," Dirt Girl says, and she sits next to her, so close their thighs touch. Any contact between them is electrifying. There’s no reason to feel shame anymore. “Some things came up.”
"It's fine. I'm just glad you're here."
Neither of them remember their own names or who they were before.
"No point trying to remember," Lake Girl says. "Let's focus on the future."
As they find out, almost everyone else in the world is dead. They have only each other. But they won't be entirely alone, surrounded by death. Dirt Girl will drag life out of death.
Luz Rosales is a nonbinary Mexican-American fiction writer and college student from Los Angeles. Their work has appeared in Okay Donkey, Perhappened, Strange Horizons, and Black Telephone Magazine. They can be found on Twitter @TERRORCORES.