Happily Ever Afterlife

She's dead. She's here. She's wearing the dress he buried her in, and it still fits perfectly.

Blonde hair catches morning light like spun gold. Blue eyes, glacier-cold. That silk dress, Christ, that dress, pours down her body like expensive champagne, pooling at her feet in a puddle of shimmer. Her lips: exit-wound red. Her skin: mortician's masterpiece. Everything about her screams wrong in frequencies only dogs and guilty men can hear.

"You didn't call," Janine says.

The mug drops.

Crack.

Coffee splashes across linoleum, lukewarm baptism for his bare feet. Charlie doesn't move. Can't. His dead wife tilts her head, that gesture, that specific thirty-degree angle that used to mean come here or forgive me or let's fuck until we forget why we're fighting.

Now it means nothing. Everything.

"Still mad?" Her voice tastes like vanilla extract.

Mad. The word bounces around his skull like a .22 caliber mistake. He's not mad she's here, impossible and luminous on his shit linoleum. He's mad because the last words he spat at her, right before her Porsche painted itself across that bridge abutment, were fuck you.

"Janine." His throat feels lined with sandpaper. "You can't just—"

"What? Come back?"

She smiles. The kind of smile that makes men sign prenups they haven't read.

"Surprise, babe. Death's negotiable."

His hands shake. Pathetic, treacherous things. He shoves them deep into yesterday's jeans. What's the protocol here? Hey honey, how's the afterlife treating you? Did you bring souvenirs?

She moves now. Drifts. Fingers trailing across his disaster of a life: unwashed plates, scattered mail, pizza boxes stacked like cardboard tombstones. Those fingers once traced his spine in the dark, wrote promises on his skin that neither of them kept.

"You haven't changed anything." Disappointment drips from her tongue like honey. "I expected... I don't know. Progress?"

Progress. The word lodges between his ribs.

"Why are you here, Janine?"

The smile flickers. Just a beat. A glitch in her perfect performance. Her eyes darken, pupils dilating until the blue drowns in black.

"I wanted to see you."

"No." Charlie's spine finds the counter. "What do you really want?"

Her laugh rolls through the kitchen, dark velvet over broken glass. That sound used to own him. Used to make him stupid. Now it sounds like what it always was: a recording played backward, all the meaning reversed.

"Charlie, Charlie, Charlie."

She's there. Instantly. No movement, just sudden proximity. Her palms press against his chest, fingers cold through cotton. Dead fingers. Porcelain fingers. Fingers that shouldn't exist.

"What do you think I want?"

His brain runs scenarios like a slot machine: revenge—ding, closure—ding, murder—ding, forgiveness—

Then it hits.

Ca-ching.

"Oh, shit."

Her smile spreads slow as spilled wine. "There's my smart boy."

He searches those eyes, eyes he once dove into like a suicide, eyes that promised forever and delivered six months. But these aren't her eyes. Too bright. Too hungry. Like something wearing her face badly, seams showing.

"You're not her."

"No." Her breath touches his ear, moth-wing soft. "But I remember being her."

The chair crashes behind him. She looms, luminous, wrong, a memory that learned to walk. His guilt made flesh. His regret in silk.

"What are you?"

"I'm your wife." Her voice strokes his face like fingers. "The way you loved her. The way you hated her. Every poisoned kiss. Every gorgeous lie. Every promise you broke and kept breaking, even after I was gone."

Her hand finds his throat. Not squeezing. Just resting there, cold as February, gentle as frostbite.

"You made me, Charlie. Fed me. Kept me breathing in that haunted head of yours."

She leans close. Her perfume, jasmine and formaldehyde, fills his lungs.

"I'm your Happily Ever After."

Charlie shoves. Scrambles. Coffee-slick tiles betray him, send him sprawling. She follows, heels clicking a countdown: tick, tick, tick.

"You constructed me from grief and guilt and all those nights you fucked my memory instead of moving on." Almost tender, the way she says it. Almost loving. "Bodies aren't people, baby. Memories are."

He presses his shoulders against cheap cabinets. "You're just in my head."

"Oh, honey." That laugh again, crystalline and cracked. "You wish."

Her nails trace his jawline, sharp enough to draw truth if not blood. But when he glances at the chrome toaster's reflection, he sees himself alone. Pressed against nothing. Clutching air. His own fingers leaving bruises on his throat.

She catches him looking. Winks.

"Oops. You caught me."

"Jesus Christ—"

"Wrong deity." She taps his temple, patronizing rhythm. "I'm more local management."

The knife block gleams. Three feet. Maybe four. She watches him calculate distance, smiling like a dealer who knows the deck.

He lunges. Grabs steel. Solid. Real. The only honest thing in this kitchen.

"You can't stab a memory, Charlie."

He swings anyway. Wild. Desperate. The blade finds only drywall, buries itself to the handle.

Silence.

She's gone. Just coffee cooling. Just his breathing, ragged and alone.

The front door opens.

"Charlie?"

He turns. Sarah stands in the doorway. His second wife, his second chance, his promise to do better, holding grocery bags that suddenly weigh everything. Her eyes catalog the scene: knife in wall, coffee like blood spatter, his throat bruised by his own hands.

"Are you alright?"

The question floats between them, fragile as blown glass.

"You didn't..." His voice cracks. "You didn't see her?"

"Who?" Confusion. Concern. That specific combination that means are you having an episode?

"Charlie, it's just us."

Behind Sarah's shoulder, impossible and inevitable, Janine smiles. Her lips shape words without sound:

Now we're all here.

Sarah steps forward, bags rustling. "Charlie? Talk to me."

But he's watching Janine's fingers trail along Sarah's shoulder, leaving no mark, casting no shadow. Just tracing. Planning.

Measuring.

The kitchen feels smaller. The walls lean in, interested. Outside, morning traffic continues its mindless rhythm, unaware that in this particular suburban box, reality just filed for divorce.

"I'm fine," Charlie lies, the words automatic as breathing.

Janine's smile widens. She mouths: Liar.

Sarah sets down the groceries. Eggs. Milk. Bread. The artifacts of a normal life. A life where dead wives stay dead and guilt doesn't wear silk dresses.

"You're bleeding," Sarah says.

Charlie looks down. His palms are cut—when did that happen?—blood mixing with coffee on the floor. A Jackson Pollock of bad decisions.

"It's nothing."

But Janine is already moving, circling Sarah like a shark that doesn't need water. Studying her. Learning her.

Measuring her for something.

"Charlie." Sarah's voice carries that tone, the one that means I'm trying here and don't shut me out and please don't be like this again.

He wants to warn her. Wants to scream: Run. Get out. Don't let her learn your shape.

Instead, he says, "I dropped a mug."

The lie tastes like copper pennies.

Janine applauds. Silent. Mocking. Then she leans close to Sarah's ear, so close her lips almost touch skin, and whispers something Charlie can't hear.

Sarah shivers. Touches her neck. Confused.

"Is it cold in here?"

The dead woman in Charlie's kitchen looks better than she did alive.

And she's just getting started.