Bury Your Dead

Novel · 128 pages · Paperback · 2026 · Charco Press · Translated by Padma Viswanathan

Grind them with the animals

An animal depot freezer holding two human corpses fails overnight, and the fix on offer is grinding them in with the animals. Edgar Wilson and the excommunicated priest Tomás take the bodies instead: wrapped in plastic and mothballs, driven across the state in a trunk, backed only by a sergeant's signed note and Edgar's own papers as a dead-animal remover.

Ana Paula Maia's Bury Your Dead hinges on this scene: animal disposal runs clean enough to nearly swallow the human dead when the system meant to protect them fails.

The two corpses almost went into the grinder meant for animals. That gap is the book's real subject: two systems for disposing of the dead, one working, one not. Animal death has a complete circuit. A carcass is picked off the road, driven to the depot, processed into compost or taxidermy, or bartered to a corrupt policeman. A dead mare is claimed by her owner inside a day. Human death has prayers and paperwork, often nothing else: a woman cut down from a hanging tree waits in that same depot freezer for want of a working mortuary van. The dead here divide not into animal and human but into bodies with a route and bodies without one.

Edgar Wilson, the slaughterman of Of Cattle and Men, drives the truck. His licence covers animal carcasses only; the paperwork does more organising than the law behind it: a father kills one of his dogs so the manifest covers his feverish child's ride to a hospital the ambulance never reached. One dog's death buys a child a ride. The novel prices dignity in this currency from then on, and the human dead trade at a discount.

Maia's third disposal novel with Charco Press builds on two enclosures: Of Cattle and Men fixed death at one station of a slaughterhouse line; On Earth As It Is Beneath moved it into a penal colony. Bury Your Dead knocks the walls down: death is scattered along open road, and the question turns from how an institution administers it to who collects what it abandons.

Maia narrates conduct and withholds interiority. Edgar closes the eyes of the animals he collects, believing it puts him one step behind death; the belief is shown, never explained. His counterweight is Tomás, an excommunicated priest who gives last rites to men and animals. Neither is innocent: Edgar has killed, Tomás killed a man on his way to seminary. The pairing does the book's ethical work: rite and labour, done by men with no standing for either. Institutions appear only at the point of failure: a morgue van that will not start, morgues where plastic-wrapped children wait for burial while staff strip the road dead of money and shoes.

The form matches the material. Each episode opens where Edgar finds a body and closes where he places it; the plot in between is logistics. The depot drive resolves the same way: an improvised, illegal burial, a polluted baptism river with limestone tied to the corpses, a grave dug by hand at an abandoned quarry. The burial gets no sign-off, only Tomás's rite. The circuit that failed at the freezer completes itself anyway, off the books.

The weaknesses are lapses of trust. A broken Saint Peter with a snake in its hollow head, a limestone formation lying like a man with folded hands: the emblems restate what the form argued. A scrapyard episode, car stolen and recovered through a corrupt acquaintance, runs on genre machinery the rest of the book does without.

The close is a road blocked by three hundred sheep and their shepherd, struck by lightning. Tomás confirms the man is dead, performs the rite. The cars wait. Edgar and Tomás start moving the carcasses. The scene asks for no verdict. Two men carry the dignity nobody declares, one body at a time, and no institution ever shows up to relieve them.