Originally published in Spanish in the anthology
Latinoaméricæditada: no disponible en su región (Tríada Ediciones, 2022)
They said afterward that the first fishermen who’d gone down to the beach that morning had found her, but when the people from the village hurried to see what the tide had carried in, no one claimed to be the person who’d discovered her. It was as if the woman’s gigantic body had been there for days already, and the population of Punta de Piedra had only just realized she was there.
In those first moments, the woman was almost completely intact except for her missing head. Although metal and plastic peeked out here and there where her synthetic skin had pulled away, her body still successfully asserted its beauty in the morning light. It was easy to imagine her at the peak of her machine life, with copper-colored hair over her shoulders and the ruby rays of her eyes piercing through the clouds over the hills. That would have been during a bajante, when the waters of the River Plate receded dramatically for a few days before returning to normal.
The night before the villagers discovered the giant woman stranded on the beach, the air was heavy with a coming storm. It’s true that tourists stayed in the village longer, and that the bars closed later. Many said everything seemed different, more vibrant—as if someone had increased the contrast levels of a movie or simulation of the universe so that now it was possible to perceive everything through renewed eyes—but who knows if any one dreamed that night. We can only be sure that none of the first stories about the stranded woman mentioned any dreams. The ones that did appeared much later, after her body began to decay and her internal metallic structures unfurled toward the sky, stretching far beyond any human shape.
No one knows how big she was. There are those who say she was twenty meters long from foot to clavicle, but others say it was forty meters, and still others just twelve or fifteen.
Around midday, the group of boys who had been playing hide-and-seek on her immense thorax started inventing new games that leveraged every possible hiding place. The children found it easy to take advantage of the geometry at the nape of her neck, of her armpits, her pubis, and even her great breasts—which were upright and rigid. These were, however, her body parts of least resistance. One night, someone made off with her nipples and the skin of her breasts, leaving behind their bare metal frames. Perhaps that’s when the sight of the giant woman began to make people uncomfortable.
If on the first days, Punta de Piedra had seemed to party around her body, during the following weeks it became more common for the villagers to make excuses to avoid going down to the beach to see her. Thus, part of the village gathered by the sea only on certain evenings or at night. During these impromptu assemblies where flames and shouts were never absent, the intricate circuitry of her breasts would shimmer in the firelight and few could gaze at them for more than a few moments. Even staring at the massive wound where her head and neck should have been, with its steel cavern and cables, seemed more bearable.
The villagers began making flags, awnings, rugs, and curtains from her skin—changing the face of their village. Little by little, however, they began to grow ashamed of these caramel-colored surfaces. The skin’s satiny texture from the first few days faded with time, and it was difficult to keep it free of insects and larvae. Whenever any piece of synthetic skin was badly folded, it always ended up developing an infestation of mushrooms and bugs in pockets of humidity. Strangest of all, an odd mesh of plants crafted from plastic would grow in these damp pockets.
Only the sun kept some pieces of her skin safe. These were dried until they looked like linen or parchment. Curiously, they were excellent for driving away flies.
As far as we know, the dreams started with the mesh and the bugs.
At recess during the school day, children would recount their visions from the previous night, enthusiastically speaking of common places in their dreaming worlds, as if they were creating a complete dream map of Punta de Piedra that barely differed from the real village.
The village’s adults suffered nightmares and bouts of sleepwalking. They placed a taboo on speaking about the dreams, tolerating stories about the dreams from small children only. Everyone shivered upon discovering the dreams hid some kind of pattern, figures that repeated themselves as if the entire village were somehow a single sleeping being entering ever more realistic and detailed dreams each night.
The insects were always there: they weren’t exactly living creatures, but rather amalgamations of screws, ball bearings, and gears joined into immense machines—great steam-powered vessels that could fly and roam the world, or factories of human bodies transported on a belt until they reached the precise place where their heads were coupled on.
It was a relief when the nocturnal accretions started waning. The villagers could speak freely of their dreams once they no longer held any weight: the strange images blurred into distant memories or trivial desires that merged into a single, vast tale paralleling her body’s steady decay on the beach. (Some of them wrote it down, which is why we know about the dreams today.) It soon became rare to find anyone who could recall the dreams they’d had during the preceding months
Many claimed it wasn’t the first time such an event had occurred right there in Punta de Piedra: discounting the frequent jellyfish infestations, whales, giant squids, octopuses, dolphins, toninas, porpoises, and even a narwhal had been stranded on the beach. (The villagers had reconstructed the narwhal’s skeleton with wire and hung it from the museum ceiling, but it disappeared a few years later—although its horn still adorned the façade of the village church until it collapsed during a fire that only the oldest villagers could remember.)
The giantesses themselves had roamed the Earth thousands of years ago: they’d fought wars against the whales, subdued them, reduced them to barbarism, reigned for centuries, and, ultimately, disappeared. One of the village boys, Federico, discovered an encyclopedia in a basement. The book featured a section dedicated to the accounts of archaeologists and adventurers who’d found remains of giant women all jumbled in the dirt of the countryside. These remnants tended to manifest as great caverns filled with busy tangles of metal, and it was barely possible to tell that they’d once been bone frames. In other cases, the accounts spoke of hidden valleys or dry riverbeds where their debris abounded like fossils: flotsam of self-replicating circuits, and—in the most remote regions—entire arms with open hands and extended fingers, lifted by the residents of those areas as some kind of warning.
It didn’t long for the village children to open up a path into her body. They may have first detached her neck articulation from the great canal of circuits that at some point had connected to her head in order to enter, although they may have preferred other routes. In any case, soon they’d emptied a good part of her interior by excavating rooms and sitting areas for themselves, carrying out cables and metal plates to the village where artisans converted them into adornments and costume jewelry.
The children spent their afternoons playing in her after school, and it was common to see parents standing at the edge of the boardwalk, shouting at them to come back, that it was getting late, that they had to leave because it was time to bathe, eat, and do their homework.
There was talk of a kind of magic or spirit lingering in her remaining circuitry, something that drew the children in like the piper of legend—or like those creatures that would sometimes appear where the village outskirts met the surrounding forests to consume the minds of anyone bold enough to touch them.
Some days, the school emptied and only a handful of confused children remained at their desks—and these weren’t, it was said, the brightest students.
When parents prohibited their offspring from descending to the beach, some of the children organized themselves like they belonged to a republic or a resistance movement. They would spend entire nights in the hollowed out body, illuminated by lanterns and candles. One particularly cold night, the children tried to light a fire, but it spread uncontrollably, burning much of the skin on her abdomen. That was enough to scare them off.
The next morning, the parents established a fence and a system for keeping watch. It didn’t last long, however, because many of the village’s young people and adults still went down to the beach after dusk to hide between the folds of the body and have sex or masturbate. No one wanted to bear witness to that sort of thing, even though the entire village listened to the stories of orgies and wild abandon with great interest.
Over time the children lost interest in her body. Many of them feared the workers from other villages who came to help with the harvest, with wine-making or herding. These transients passed through the region from harvest to harvest as part of their nomadic lifestyle that led them to seek out cheap refuge where they could make camp out of the wind in caverns or among rocks. Some nomads began reclaiming the interior of the body, drunkenly chasing out the children who sought to reoccupy the spaces among the cables and metal pieces.
The village, however, didn’t look down upon these workers because the visitors spent their money on provisions and purchased their food from the local fisherfolk. When some of the nomads who frequented the body lost their ability to speak clearly anymore—or even went crazy—it seemed to the villagers that these foreigners had been summoned as some kind of protective shield so that no one from Punta de Piedra would suffer the same calamity.
One morning, a retinue of men and women dressed in green arrived, carrying machines and instruments. They said they were going to study the remaining pieces of the giant woman’s body, to estimate her age and shed some light on the memories her circuits still contained. The villagers allowed them to do so. Some of the children asked these new visitors what they were looking for, and they responded that they were trying to verify whether her remains corresponded with a head found months earlier by another village along the coast.
That night, the people of Punta de Piedra watched them enter her body.
The next morning, there was no trace of the green retinue, but there were some who claimed that before dawn its members abandoned Punta de Piedra as quickly as they could in large trucks weighed down by the giant woman’s internal organs.
Of all the photographs taken of her body in those days, the most celebrated—and, curiously, the one that came to adorn administrative offices and a school not too far from Punta de Piedra—was of the giant woman’s hipbones and femoral articulations, which someone had assembled into a portal covered by a beard of cables and the last scraps of her synthetic skin. (No one knows how, or even why.)
The children had been playing soccer on the beach, keeping score using that structure as the goal. Others entertained themselves by daring one another to jump across the labia minora and labia majora of the giant vulva (which was still firm in its metal frame like a veil of heavy folds, the vast entrance to a circus tent or, even, a crude torture device).
It’s even possible that, over the course of entire seasons, this structure was transported to the bend in the road that led to Punta de Piedra, planting that immense vulva like a doorway and thus beginning the village’s final transformation. Much later, her humeri were placed in the shape of a cross at the doors to the San Luis landfill, which lay some eighty kilometers from Punta de Piedra. (You can still easily find old, faded photos of them in Sunday markets.)
The trails of the rest of her body parts have been lost, but that hasn’t stopped reports over the years from people purporting to have spotted her kneecaps, a fragment of her femur, or even her sternum—all almost always stuck to the sides of buildings and integrated into construction projects in the same way that one might see whale baleen incorporated into the ceilings of churches, trilobites in the street tiles, or great ammonites in the house façades.
There is no way to know for how long the body remained more or less intact by the seaside. The waves managed to touch her many times. She was a coastal fixture, like the sand or the rocks, and algae and colonies of mollusks multiplied in her joints and articulations.
By that point, her gigantic presence mattered little to the village. She’d been assimilated into the shoreline’s scenery as her presence and memory degraded like an old shipwreck. Nevertheless, there was always someone entering what remained of the rooms and quarters the children had once excavated among her circuits to wrest away pieces of metal or crystal that could be turned into an ornament or amulet.
Some villagers even managed to forget the origins of these adornments, which tourists bought as souvenirs or picturesque gadgets imbued with a weak, ancient magic.
It didn’t take long for pilgrims to appear, or merchants after them who organized devotional excursions. People spoke of a village touched by the last of the giantesses, ancient stories of the metal woman who’d emerged from the waters, still standing, only to collapse on the sands of the beach. (No one denied these stories, because none of the villagers had any direct knowledge of the day her body appeared). Then, as if they’d spent all this time hidden in trunks or closets, her most beautiful and intricate pieces emerged to cover façades, to contribute to altars and grand sculptures.
Punta de Piedra was transfigured: the old fishermen’s houses, the few buildings little higher than two floors, the church, the town hall—all of them were by then unrecognizable. Even the village’s main plaza was covered in figures built with circuits whose numbers defied all explanation. No one understood how there could be so many, but some put forth a simple hypothesis: the parts had replicated themselves according to the fundamental code governing their functions. After all, people knew of similar cases. Thus, it wasn’t strange to imagine how a whole village could be covered by circuitry within a relatively short time—although no one could say precisely how short.
The children who’d once founded their republic inside and atop her body now had their own children and grandchildren. Their parents, who’d once erected that restrictive fence, had already died many years ago. And yet, it was easy to think everything had just happened a summer or two ago—or maybe even easier yet to believe that the giantess’s arrival had occurred ages ago, soon after Punta de Piedra was founded.
Afterward, they said the story of Punta de Piedra wasn’t unique, that there’d been several villages upon whose beaches the giant women had beached—all along the Atlantic coast. It’s possible that these other instances had all ended the same way, with the circuits replicating themselves until they covered everything. They brought neither life nor death, but rather an eternal unlife—an animated death—until the end of it all.
A girl named Valeria began introducing those metal and crystalline parts into her body. Circuits that had been integrated into the giant woman’s equivalent of a heart or an eardrum were instead emplaced in the palms of Valeria’s hands, beneath her tongue, in her bellybutton, her vagina or even her rectum. There, too, they multiplied like the mushrooms and insects had done who knew how many years ago on the giantess’s synthetic skin.
Those first female hybrids, as those like Valeria called themselves, traversed the jeweled streets of Punta de Piedra like living sculptures, lengthening the sensory terminals on their fingertips to briefly melt with others, to feel the brief, illuminating shiver of electricity beneath the tourists’ watchful gazes.
No one knows what happened to the men. Perhaps this had been part of the circuits’ intentions—or, in other words, of their programming: to be assimilated into and transformed in the bodies of Punta de Piedra’s women.
It didn’t take long for everything to melt together: the hybrids, the sculptures, the houses, and the other buildings, too.
It had been a long time since any trees or plants had grown in Punta de Piedra. By then, the village had been taken over by metal and crystal. It glittered in the sun like a unique gem: immense and complex.
The last of the tourists reported that the fusions of Punta de Piedra were intolerable to contemplate: too disturbing, they said, as if the process had been imbued with the fear of something horrible returning that time itself had wanted to forget.
Decades later, Punta de Piedra was a ghost village. The imperial government decreed an exclusion zone around it, claiming there was dangerous radiation—although nobody could ever prove that this was true. Stories from travelers who approached the village’s borders and then found themselves hurled into a deep suicidal despair settled the matter.
Over time, as the Empire declined, vandals, barbarians, and adventurers began to gather, like crusaders joining sacred expeditions into what had once been Punta de Piedra.
One afternoon, after having arrived by sea or by road, and with all conceivable protections, they entered the exclusion zone in immense buses shielded against old radiation that didn’t exist.
Protected by their suits of armor, they descended to explore the village’s deserted streets. Photos of them posing with what remained of some of the sculptures and façades can still be found today if you look hard enough. Over the decades, these pictures have come to be considered bad luck. Staring at the delicate, ominous environment that encloses the explorers, it’s easy to understand why. Perhaps it’s an optical illusion of the village figures invading the visitors, but if you look carefully, every photographed form in the village resembles a recumbent woman, her arms strangely tense and rigid along her body.
Even images taken from airships of what was once Punta de Piedra suggest the contoured body of a woman reclining against the sea. Perhaps most curious of all—or most disturbing—is what lies where her head should be: a region with diffuse borders, spiraling and sparkling.
Author: Ramiro Sanchiz is an Uruguayan writer and translator, author of over twenty novels in Spanish. His stories appear in many publications, including Clarkesworld Magazine and El tercer mundo después del sol. His work can be described as a macro-novel about the multiple alternate lives of a single protagonist, Federico Stahl.
Translator: Monica Louzon (she/her) is a queer USian writer, translator, and editor. Her translations have appeared in Apex Magazine, Cosmorama, Salvage Magazine, and others. This is her first collaboration with Ramiro Sanchiz. To learn more about Monica and her work, please visit https://linktr.ee/molowrites
Translunar Travelers Lounge 