The man she buried is back and knocking.


Not metaphorically. Not in some poetic, memory-haunted way. No. He is at her front door. Knocking. Three slow, deliberate raps. As though the grave hadn't taken him proper. As though the soil and worms and silence hadn’t swallowed him whole.


Janelle froze in the hallway, her hand still wet from washing the dinner plates. The sound echoed through the house like thunder rolled in from hell. Knock. Knock. Knock.


She dared a peek through the curtain.


He stood there.


Six-foot-two. Same black leather jacket zipped over the ribs she shattered. Same deep scar slicing his left eyebrow—one she never got around to asking about during the three years they were together. The same steel-toed boots she unlaced the night she poisoned him.


His eyes were wrong, though. They weren’t hazel anymore. They were black. Empty. Bottomless.


She had buried him herself. Dug the hole in the woods behind her grandmother’s house on a moonless night. Watched his lips turn blue in the passenger seat. She even cried—at least once. Then she wrapped him in a tarp, said a prayer she didn’t believe in, and covered him with red Georgia clay.


That was two years ago.


And yet…


Knock. Knock. Knock.


Janelle backed away, heart punching her ribs. She told herself it couldn’t be real. Just a guilt-dream. A hallucination. PTSD finally cashing in its chips. But when she blinked again, he was still there. Not moving. Not speaking. Just waiting.


She didn't want to open the door, but she knew—deep in her bones—that he wouldn’t leave.


So she did.


The hinges squealed. Cold air rushed in. He smiled. His teeth were wrong, too. Too white. Too even. Like they’d been remade.


“Miss me?” he rasped.


His voice was gravel and smoke and rot. Familiar and foreign all at once.


“You’re dead,” she whispered.


“I was,” he said. “You made sure of that. But some things… come back.”


She tried to shut the door. He caught it with one hand.


“I clawed through six feet of dirt to see you, Janelle. We’re not finished.”


Terror bloomed in her stomach, spreading like spilled ink.


“What do you want?”


He stepped inside. No permission asked. No welcome needed.


“To return the favor,” he said. “To show you what it feels like… to be buried.”


The lights flickered. The air thickened. And behind him, the night opened wide like a mouth.