What Did My Nonhuman Husband Do to My Corpse?

Blurb saved on 2026-02-25

Expected to start posting around December

[In progress... 10,000 words drafted] (I'll fill this in after I finish the mold story)

Quiet, rational, unflappable researcher x possessive nonhuman who seems gentle on the surface

Blurb:

Shi Yu first thought something was wrong a month after surviving the explosion at the research institute.

Every morning she woke up feeling as though her body had been smashed apart and put back together. The pain went all the way to the bone.

A battery of tests came to nothing. Her husband grew more and more worried, and his care for her became increasingly attentive.

Shi Yu didn't want to look into it any further. She just wanted to live peacefully with her husband, and besides, she still had an extraterrestrial life-form project to oversee.

But just as she decided to give up and make do, the pain miraculously disappeared.

Then something even stranger happened.

Sometimes she felt something moving beneath her skin. It flowed like water, so lightly it felt like tentacles stroking her bones. Sometimes she also had strange dreams.

The strangest thing was her husband.

Not in some clichéd way. Her husband was too perfect to be real: blond hair, blue eyes, tall with long legs, flawless at his work as a forensic pathologist, and just the right temperature when he held her every night.

But his memory was getting worse. He couldn't remember what he'd eaten yesterday, and had completely forgotten the movie they'd watched last week.

His gaze lingered on her for longer and longer, too. Sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night to find him staring at her, his green eyes glowing eerily in the darkness.

"Aren't you going to sleep?" she asked.

"I did," he said.

As if.

At first she wanted to ask him about it, but eventually she stopped.

He made her breakfast every morning, after all. He held her in his arms every night. Even if he looked at her as though she were something that could disappear at any moment.

She thought, whatever.

Let him have his secrets.

*

Li Xin was almost beginning to forget what his home looked like.

His memories were disappearing bit by bit. The purple sky, the ones of his kind who looked much like him, the spaceship that had brought him here: they were all receding and fading, turning into incomprehensible images in her dreams.

He had no regrets.

Because he'd traded those memories for her life.

On the last day of every month, she would fall fast asleep after drinking the water in that cup. Then he would take out a scalpel, cut open her skin, remove the failing tissue in her body that belonged to him, and replace it with new tissue.

Every piece of tissue held fragments of his memories.

With every replacement, he lost another part of himself.

At first, they were unimportant things: a passerby's face, the weather on a certain day, a meaningless conversation.

Then he lost things that mattered: the warmth of his home, the songs of his people, who he had once been.

After that came the memories of her.

Li Xin found it harder and harder to make the incision.

It wasn't because he feared pain. He didn't know what pain was.

It was because he found himself growing afraid.

He had calculated that at this rate, one day he would forget her.

And on that day, she would die.

Because he would forget why he needed to replace her tissue.

So he stared at her every night.

He watched her desperately.

Her eyelashes, the curve of her lips, the gentle rise and fall of her chest as she slept: he etched every detail into the memories that were disappearing.

Even if he forgot tomorrow, seeing her one more time tonight was a gain.

Reader's Guide:

1. Nonhuman, faux science fiction. The male lead is a naturally occurring shell that imitates humans, not a human being used as a disguise.

2. Set in a fictional future with no connection to reality. This isn't a space opera; human technology is similar to what we have today.

3. Mutual salvation, happy ending. Slightly gloomy, but no forced possession. A tender, science-fiction romance, around 200,000-250,000 words.

Theme: Love helps humans fight against forgetting.