The man she buried is back and knocking. 

Knock, knock, knock.

His face, hidden by his rain soaked hair, filled the doorbell camera’s screen.

Knock, knock, knock.

Fear gripped her heart, every knock a tightening squeeze. 

Knock, knock, knock.

Rain hit the roof with a force, muffling the world around them. It created a bubble around the man on the porch and the woman hiding inside. He milled about, waiting for her to answer the door. Knock, knock, knocking mud off his boots, he peered through the sidelights. 

If she didn’t move, if she held her breath, if she closed her eyes, he would go. He would leave, and her life could continue. She could will him out of existence again. That part of her life was over, he was a skeleton buried deep in her closet. She had a new life, new home, she had buried him and his lies far behind her. 

He turned his back, his footsteps lost in the thunder that rumbled in the distance. 

She waited. She listened. She dared to breathe again. She cried. 

The empty screens on her security app only gave so much comfort as her mind raced trying to figure out how he had come here. Every sound from the storm kept her awake. Was that rustling the sound of leaves blowing in the storm or footsteps creeping behind her new life. The wind cried, thunder growled and the branches cast twisted shadows in the lighting flashes. She gasped and sat straight up in her bed as the flash outside her windows knocked the power out. 

Had she actually seen something out there, in between the twisted shadows and lighting flashes? The darkness somehow grew more tense and took on a deepness that was typically reserved for caves. Or for a grave. Now, as she sat in the dark, waiting for the hum of the electricity to return, she thought back to those times of being startled by his face. His eyes always locked on hers for a minute before surveying her body. He looked hungrily at her body, like he wanted to absorb her whole. 

There was a knock, knock, knocking coming from outside. She wondered briefly if it was her imagination, or a branch being shoved around by the storm. He wouldn’t still be out there. He would be stupid to stay outside in this storm, wouldn’t he? But where else would he go, back to the shallow hole she buried him in?

Her eyes searched the dark room, looking for a sign that she was being paranoid. She was safe now, from him. She had moved away from everything that had put them together in the first place. Moving boxes created dark shapes around her, some of them oddly humanoid in their dark hulking piles. Did they form a protective wall to hide her or a cage for the man watching her to trap her in. Her eyes found the full length mirror hunched in the corner. She stifled a scream in her throat, as she saw his face in another flash of lighting. 

The man, once a boy, had followed her everywhere. The first time they saw each other, they had been in a department store. She had been clothes shopping with her mother, browsing and digging through the racks. Her mother had been desperate to find something flattering, feminine but respectable for her to wear at the school’s choir after party. Her mother had been holding various dresses and skirts up to the girl for what felt like hours at this point.  

Wandering around the store, half-heartedly looking through stacks of jeans and leggings, she saw him out of the corner of her eye. 

About ten feet away, in front of a mirror in the boy’s department, he stood watching. Eyes locked on hers. He looked alarmingly like her, same oval face, same warm brown eyes. The hair was a little different, more of a pixie cut compared to her shoulder blade length. Shyly, he smiled and raised a hand in an attempted wave just as she raised her own to do the same. 

Their moment was cut short, her mother had surprised her and had dragged her towards the changing rooms to try on yet another dress. When she turned to look back at the boy, all she saw was her and her mother’s reflection across the store.

A few months would go by before they saw each other again, this time at school. As she was changing for gym class, something behind her caught her eye. As she looked up, there he was, looming behind her. She whipped around, ready to confront him for following her into the locker room but he was gone the moment she took her eyes off the mirror. 

Was he a ghost? A bad dream? Some freaky stalker who she had never actually met but imprinted on her like a weird duckling? 

Who was the guy in the mirror? 

Everyday she would see him, lurking where her reflection should be. 

She wanted to get to the bottom of this, to  bury whatever hatchet he had with her. They were together just once, and it was a mistake.

They stood in front of the mirror, hands ran over the body in the mirror. Breasts were hidden under those hands, making them disappear from sight. She wore his shorts. The face in the mirror smiled,  shyly, like it had that first time in the store. 

And just like that first time, her mother ripped them apart. Knocking three times, but never waiting for a response, her mother walked into her room. As she gazed at the half dressed teen, an attempted binder now on their chest, hair tied up short, the happy glow quickly being replaced by fear’s shadow, she became furious at her daughter’s attempt to look like a boy. 

The tie was ripped out of her hair too quickly, and a knot of hair was ripped out. The shorts too, had been attempted to pull from her body, tripping her and making her tumble to the ground with a horrible ripping sound that echoed into their soul. 

As their mother yelled, kicked and beat them, the boy had to be buried, deep into a dark corner of their mind. They would stay buried as a dark shame, a secret that could never come into the light. Being buried alive was the only way to survive.

So why, after years of keeping him buried, was he back to haunt her. 

Knock, knock, knock. 

They had accepted their fate, that it was a phase or social media or whatever needed to be said to dismiss him. They buried him, the Truth, deep inside as a means to survive. 

Knock, knock, knock. 

Turning towards the mirror again, a shape emerged from it. 

Knock, knock, knock. 

He was knocking, their eyes meeting across the darkness. 

She crawled tentatively towards the mirror. The storm had started to grow still. 

Their hands reflected back at each other reaching towards each other, tears ran down both of their faces. 

Knock, knock, knock.

The reflection was waiting for an answer. 

As the power hummed back on, he whispered to the truth reflecting back at him.

“Come in.”