The man she buried

“The man she buried is back and knocking.”

No one tells you what to do when that happens.

No one tells you what to wear. What to say.

No one tells you what to do with your hands. Some girls whisper about it in the baths, in the long hours between rituals. That it’s rare. That it’s dangerous. That if you love something too hard, it comes back strange.

Most girls get pigs. Or goats. Hens, sometimes. Nella had a chicken that crowed like a boy. Renna’s sow ate her homework and had to be put down. The familiar choosing ceremony was always a little messy, a little charming.

But she was the first in her class to get a man.

She remembers the way the room stilled when the smoke cleared, and he was kneeling in the center of the circle, naked, not shivering. Mouth sewn shut. Eyes open.

He didn’t blink then, either.

They told her it was impossible. That familiars weren’t human. That the magic doesn’t work that way.

But the ritual had worked.

It always works—if you follow the rules.

And if you break them right.

Now, three winters later, the knock on her door is soft. Not hesitant, not angry. Just… soft.

She doesn’t move at first. The fire has gone out. Her tea is cold.

Time has collapsed inside her. She feels fossilized. Like grief turned her to stone, and only his voice could thaw her.

She stares at the door as if it will vanish.

She used to think of him as a secret. A sacred sin she buried in the soil. Now he is a consequence wrapped in flesh.

He was never supposed to come back.

The door creaks.

It carves itself into my marrow and I feel myself crumble slightly.

She walks barefoot over stone. Dust clings to her hem. She traces the jagged scar the school nurse said would fade. It did not.

Another knock.

When she opens it, the wind does not come in.

He does.

His body is the same—quiet, pale, wrong. Like a thought abandoned mid-sentence.

His mouth is no longer sewn shut.

“Hello,” he says.

She says nothing. Her tongue is thick with the taste of old iron. She tastes ritual. She tastes memory.

He walks inside without asking.

Familiar, she thinks, and then laughs, soundless and bitter.

He had been her familiar. Her chosen. Her consequence.

He sits on the hearth where the fire should be. His hands rest on his knees. He watches her like he knows things about her bones that even she forgot.

“I dreamed of dirt,” he says. “For years. Just dirt.”

She lights the lantern.

The glow stops short of the corners. Shadows stretch like teeth.

“Do you remember?” he asks.

She nods.

His head tilts. “Do you regret it?”

“I don’t know,” she answers.

Which is not a lie.

She still dreams of warmth blooming across her lips. The taste never left.

She still tastes his name on her tongue. Even now.

He looks older now. Not aged — just... worn. Like time tried to stretch itself over him and failed. Like something pretending at humanity.

Outside, the wind picks up, dragging loose leaves across the windows like claws. She does not look away from him.

He does not blink.

They say the familiar chooses you. That’s what the school preaches. That’s what’s written on the pamphlets. Little inked lies wrapped in parchment and hope.

But she remembers the text her grandmother left hidden in the roots of the cellar—stitched pages bound in hair and hide.

“You cannot summon what you have not swallowed. Want carves the path—hunger seals it.”

And she had.

In that hidden hour, wrapped in shadow and silence, she’d done the unthinkable.

She had whispered his name before she ever knew it. She had wanted, and that was enough.

Her familiar had not come to her.

She’d made him.

She had called him not from a bond but from a wound. And he had answered.

“What do you want?” she asks finally.

He smiles. “You.”

She goes very still.

“I want you to finish what you started,” he says. “You brought me back. But only halfway. I still taste of earth. I still wake in the middle of the night, choking on roots.”

She does not speak.

“I want to know why,” he says. “Why me?”

Her voice is barely there. “You were kind.”

A pause.

“You saw me when no one else did.”

He stands slowly. His shadow drapes along the wall like something separate from him.

“Then you buried me.”

“I ate you,” she corrects, quietly. “I buried what was left.”

The silence that follows is almost gentle.

“You wore red,” he says. “That day. It soaked up everything.”

She nods.

“I remember your hands. I remember you humming. You kissed my forehead before—”

“Stop,” she breathes.

His voice softens. “You kissed my forehead before you broke it open.”

She does not cry.

He crosses the room. Kneels before her.

“You called me back,” he whispers. “You called me back because you missed the way I made you feel.”

“No,” she says. Her voice thins. “I called you back because I didn’t want to be the only one who remembered.”

He reaches out, and his fingers are colder than the grave. He cups her face.

“You loved me,” he says.

“I think I did.”

“You devoured me.”

“I know.”

The hunger lives on, she thinks. The ache beneath the ribs. Want doesn’t end when the feast is finished—it echoes.

His thumbs rest just below her eyes. “Then let me do the same.”

She does not pull away.

He presses his forehead to hers, and the room shivers.

“You gave me to the dark,” he says. “And the dark gave me teeth.”

And as his mouth opens

—wide, wider than it

should—she thinks only this:

I am ready.

But he does not bite.

He kisses her forehead.

The fire relights itself.

And the room stays cold.