KEPT

Ray Fletcher’s shovel cut into the earth with a sound like biting into cold bread. Hazeltop Ridge earth—soft, deep, greedy. The kind of dirt that was always hungry. Ray knew how to feed it.

Ray tamped the last mound of earth with the flat of his shovel, the way Agnes Willowcomb always said a grave ought to be finished—“no lumps, no loose corners, no reason for the dead to feel ashamed.”

She’d been ninety-one, small as a child, with bones that felt as fragile as twigs when he’d helped move her from the church to her plot. She’d spent her whole life taking in stray cats, reading folks' fortunes with river stones, and telling anyone who’d listen that the mountain “keeps tally of its own.”

Now she lay under a quilt of red soil and clay. Ray brushed dirt from his gloves; the smell of earth caught in his throat.  Earth clung to the shovel, slick and heavy. He leaned over to clean it off. When he straightened, he saw the mist, coming in fast and thick as milk, crawling out of the trees and swallowing the headstones one by one.

County maintenance: graves, weeds, ruts on the switchback. Ray didn’t mind. The work was quiet, steady, the kind that emptied your head if you let it. Briar Ford wasn’t a place for talkers for the most part. Weather, hunting, maybe gas prices. Everything else got folded up and buried under a layer of polite nothing.

Thirty years digging holes in Briar Ford. He knew these grounds like the back of his hand. Every spring, the stones shifted, as if the earth were stretching. Roots ran deep, thin and wiry, wrapping around bone, holding on like they weren’t ready to let go.

Ray didn’t believe in ghosts. Not monsters, either. He believed in water tables, soil density, and the way folks would blame a ghost before admitting their uncle drank himself off a ladder.

So when the dead started showing up around town, Ray had nothing to say. Not a single word. Not even to himself.

It was October, when the leaves turned the color of dried blood. Ray was driving back from the cemetery, half asleep, when he saw Old Mrs. Weaver standing in her garden.

She’d been dead for nine years. He remembered digging her grave—gray coffin, brass handles, her son sobbing so hard it sounded like someone wringing out a bag of air.

But there she was. Apron. House shoes. Hair pinned neatly.

She wasn’t moving. Just looking at her tomato vines.

Ray slowed the truck, but didn’t get out.

The next day, a dozen people Ray knew he’d buried—absolutely, no question—were scattered around town. Sitting on porches, waiting at kitchen tables, leaning over chicken coops as they’d never left. Like nothing had happened at all.

No rot. No grave dirt. No smell. Not even a whiff of the earth they’d come out of.

Just—paused. Like someone had pressed a button and forgotten to start them up again.

Briar Ford didn’t panic. They just accepted. Ray’s mind started to come apart, thread by thread. He could feel it slipping. Those people—he put them in the ground. On that ridge. In graves. He remembered everyone. He remembered the weight, the sound of dirt hitting wood.

He’s not crazy. He knows what he saw. He knows what he did.

So one night, he took the county truck up the ridge alone. He didn’t bring a flashlight. He didn’t need it with the full moon out. Besides, he could walk Hazeltop in his sleep. Shovel in hand, he approached the nearest headstone.

Eugene Perry. The name was worn but legible in the moonlight.

The shovel bit down. Ray dug until his shoulders screamed. When he hit the coffin lid, his fingers shook against the wood. He pried it open. A musty, earthy scent filled the air.

Eugene had been broad and mean, the kind of man who took up more space in a room than his body should have allowed. When his heart quit, half the town said the reaper had done everyone a favor. But the coffin, the one Ray was certain he put in the ground, didn’t hold Eugene.

It held his shape.

A tangle of roots, tight as braided rope, twisted into the shape of a man. Fingers curled from pale vines. The chest rose and fell in a slow, syrup-thick rhythm, as red sap, the color of dried blood ember, filled the bottom of the coffin.

Ray’s breath hitched. The wrongness of it built in his chest until it cracked out of him—raw and involuntary.

He screamed.

The thing in the coffin reacted.

Its head turned toward the sound— vines creaking, tightening, and sliding under the bark of its skin. Where eyes should’ve been, the dark knots pulled open, revealing a low, volcanic orange glow. Not bright. Not dramatic. Just a steady coal-light, aware and aimed straight at him.

A vine-finger scraped the inside of the coffin as it reached for him.

Ray slammed the lid. Wood met wood with a heavy, final thud, but he could still hear it clawing at the roof of the box—scraping, scratching.

He staggered back, throat burning, lungs refusing to settle. The night around him felt like it had taken notice. Trees angled toward the grave, branches leaning in. The soil under his boots rose and fell in a slow pulse, steady as a sleeping creature that had just rolled over.

He didn’t think. He drove.

The truck fishtailed down the ridge, gravel spitting, brakes howling. By the time he hit town, his hands shook so bad his teeth rattled.

His house waited at the end of a gravel lane behind the post office. The porch light—he was sure he’d left it off—was burning. He opened the door.

Someone was sitting at his kitchen table.

Coffee mug steaming. Chair pulled back, just so, like someone had been waiting a long time. Like they knew he’d come.

It was him.

Same flannel shirt. Same calloused knuckles. Same little crescent scar under the jaw.

He’d given himself that one, shaving drunk in ‘04. He remembered.

The other Ray lifted the coffee mug. Took a sip. Then looked up, slow and calm. Like this was a conversation they’d already had. Maybe more than once.

“You’re home,” the copy said.

Ray didn’t answer.

Didn’t move.

Couldn’t move.

Like his feet had rooted to the floor.

The copy set the mug down. Hands folded. Patient.

“Ground took you three nights ago,” it said. “Heart gave out while you were working. Nobody saw. Took you gently.”

He lifted his hand, slow as if the air had thickened around it.

The skin didn’t stretch the way it should. It tugged. Too tight. Too dry. A surface that wasn’t meant to bend. The color had shifted—sallow, uneven, threaded with dark seams that hadn’t been there that morning.

Then something shifted underneath. A slow, dragging pull from wrist to knuckle, that sounded like cords tightening inside a hollow log. Fibers slid against each other with a burning, gritty friction he could feel in the joints. The sensation crawled up his arm—quiet, deliberate, unmistakably alive. He felt the grind of something threading itself through him, settling into him.

Eating him.

“No,” Ray said. The sound of his own voice was wrong. Hollow, echoing. Like shouting down a well and hearing something else answer back.

The copy nodded. Not kindly. Just acknowledging reality.

Ray looked at his fingers. The tips had darkened, the color sinking in uneven patches. Not bruised—changed. The skin had taken on a bark-like texture, patterned with thin concentric rings that tightened toward each fingertip, like growth lines inside a cut log.

He tried to flex them.

They moved, but not with the soft give of flesh. His joints felt packed, as if something swollen pressed from the inside. No sensation traveled back to him—no nerves, no heat, no familiar ache. Just a dull, dragging weight, as if each finger were carrying its own burden.

His arms hung heavy at his sides. Not muscle-tired, not the stiffness of age. This was different. A waterlogged heaviness, a slow drag through his limbs, like they’d been filled with sap. Every small movement took effort, and every effort felt borrowed.

The copy leaned in so close that Ray could see his own glowing orange eyes reflected in the coffee mug's liquid, its gaze sliding over Ray’s stiffening hands with something like recognition.

“We’re never gone,” it murmured, voice gentle and hollow. “We change. The mountain takes us, keeps us, and shapes us, grows us back into what it needs.”

Its smile didn’t reach its eyes.

A pause. Not silence.

Stillness tightening.

“We grow where we were loved, Ray. Where you loved.”

Ray sucked in air that went nowhere. His chest tried to rise, but his ribs flexed wrong. Bending, not opening. Not bone. Grain.

He lurched backward and slammed into the counter. Something inside him cracked. Sharp, splintering. A dry snap like a branch giving way.

The copy rose. Slow and deliberate. Like a man stepping back into a body he’d forgotten how to pilot.

“You always loved the cemetery,” it said. Head tilting with an almost fond curiosity. “The ground remembers.”

Ray’s vision flickered. The kitchen blurred at the edges. The walls pressed in. Too tight, too warm, full of air his lungs couldn’t use. He tried to swallow, but his throat was dry as dust.

His feet moved without him choosing.

Out the door.

Into the night.

Up the ridge road.

Toward the graves.

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T.C. 11.7.25