It Wears Me Out

The man she buried is back and knocking.

Not metaphorically. Not in a dream. Not in that cryptic, spiritual way the grief counselors always talk about. No, he is physically standing on my porch. Knocking. Three times. Slow, patient. Just like before.

It’s 2:03 AM. I know because I haven’t slept in 41 hours and the red digital clock next to my bed keeps reminding me. I’m in my dead husband’s old flannel shirt, the one they handed back to me from the coroner’s office, crusted with something they didn’t bother to clean.

He knocks again.

My legs move on their own. It’s like I’m sleepwalking, except I’m hyper-aware of the cold floor beneath my feet, the slight throb in my right temple, the way the hallway light flickers even though I just replaced the bulb yesterday. Everything is wrong. Wrong in that way where it all still functions—but not the way it should.

I peek through the peephole.

He’s standing there.

Jacob.

Same tousled brown hair. Same leather jacket with the ripped sleeve from that night in Michigan. Same scar under his lip that he always joked made him look like a movie villain. But his eyes—those aren’t his. They’re too still. Too knowing.

I don’t open the door.

"You forgot to say goodbye," he says. I hear it clear as day, through the door, as if there’s no wood between us.

I buried him nine months ago. A car crash. Closed casket. They said his body was barely intact. I didn’t ask for details.

“You’re not him.”

I don’t know who I’m talking to. Him? Myself? God?

The knocking stops. But he doesn’t leave.

I stumble backward, gasping like I’ve just breached water. I reach for my phone. Dead. Of course. I try the landline. Static.

Something creaks behind me.

No.

I run. Upstairs. Into the bedroom. Lock the door. Like that ever helps in stories like these. But this isn’t a story, right? This is real. This is real because I still smell the gasoline from that fire I tried to start last month. Because I still have his voicemail saved, even though I never listen to it.

Because I killed him.

I didn’t bury a body. I buried a secret.

And secrets rot.

There’s scratching now. Not from the door. From inside the room. The closet.

“No,” I whisper. “You’re dead.”

The closet door creaks open slowly. I don’t look. I won’t look.

But something breathes. Not heavily. Deliberately. Like it wants me to know it’s there.

“I did what I had to,” I say, backing up until my spine hits the cold glass of the window.

The voice comes again. Not from the closet. From everywhere.

“You always said I talked too much. So I learned to listen.”

I open my eyes. He’s standing inches from me. No blood. No gore. No cinematic horror. Just Jacob, clean and real, the way he looked the morning before everything went wrong. The morning I decided I couldn’t live in the same world as him anymore.

“You don’t belong here,” I whisper.

He doesn’t blink. “Neither do you.”

He takes my hand. I don’t pull away.

Because deep down, I’ve been waiting. Not for him. But for this moment. The reckoning.

“I didn’t mean to kill you,” I say.

“I know.”

“I meant to kill what you were turning me into.”

He smiles. Not with his mouth—with his eyes. But they’re still too still. Too quiet. Jacob always felt. Even when he was angry. Even when he held me down. Even when he made me believe I was the reason we lost the baby.

“You buried me,” he says. “But not deep enough.”

I blink—and he’s gone.

The next morning, my front door is wide open. My footprints lead out. Out, and then back in. But there’s another set now. Bigger. Heavier.

I shower in scalding water. Scrub until my skin peels. I don’t want to feel clean. I want to feel new. But I don’t.

That night, I dream of the forest.

Not the one near our house. The forest. The one from that night. The one where I dug through frozen soil with shaking hands, whispering prayers to gods I never believed in.

In the dream, the ground shifts.

A hand bursts out. Not reaching. Just pointing.

I wake up screaming.

There’s mud under my nails.

I dig through old boxes. His things. The ones I swore I burned. His watch, still ticking. His journal, still damp. Every page smells like iron and gasoline.

I read his last entry. My handwriting, not his.

"She’ll lie about everything. She’ll say I was the monster. She’ll say she didn’t mean to."

I don’t remember writing it. But I know I did.

The days blend. I stop eating. I talk to him like he’s still here. Sometimes, I hear him answer. I convince myself it’s guilt. PTSD. A dissociative state brought on by unresolved trauma. I google the symptoms. All of them match.

I go back to the grave.

It’s empty.

No shovel marks. No broken earth. Just gone.

And on the headstone: a note. Written in my handwriting.

"Do it right this time."

I check the medicine cabinet. Count the pills. Swallow the number that feels right.

That night, I leave the door open.

He comes.

I don’t run. I don’t scream.

Because now, I see the truth.

He isn’t real.

I am Jacob.

I always was.

The voice that knocked, the one that whispered from the closet, the one that haunted every inch of this house—it wasn’t him coming back.

It was me waking up.

The night he died, I split. The guilt, the rage, the denial—it broke me. Split me down the center like a log in fire. One part kept walking, pretending, healing. The other? It stayed in that soil.

But now I’m whole again.

I bury the flannel.

I burn the voicemail.

I light a candle. Just one. Just enough to see his shadow sitting in the corner of the room.

And for the first time in nine months, I sleep.

Really sleep.

No shaking. No voices. No knocks. Just the quiet weight of him beside me.

My last breath tastes like rainwater and earth.

Sleep, forever.

I’ll be with him.

Sara

@SaraJhz

Netherlands

Sara has not written a story.