The rain fell the day they buried Mama's smile. Not the soft, grieving kind—the kind that punches through rooftops and drowns prayers. Ivy watched from the kitchen window as her father's coffin sank into the mud. Mama hadn't moved from the couch in three days. Her hands still clutched the half-knitted scarf Dad would never wear, the needles clicking like a dying clock.
"He's not really gone," Mama whispered that night. Her voice was a cracked jar. "I can feel him. In the walls."
Ivy didn't argue. She'd heard it too—the scrape of footsteps in the attic, the hum of Dad's favorite song drifting up from the basement. But when she'd mentioned it to Mama, her mother had stared through her, eyes glassy as river stones. "Ghosts are just guilt wearing faces," she'd said.
By the fifth night, the smell began. Sweet and rotten, like lilies left too long in a sealed room. It pooled under doors, clung to pillows. Mama stopped eating. Stopped sleeping. She'd wander the halls, trailing her fingers along the wallpaper, leaving streaks of something dark and sticky. "He's hungry," she'd mutter. "All that time underground… he's so hungry."
Ivy found the first tooth in her cereal bowl. Tiny, pearl-white. A child's. She didn't tell Mama.
Then came the dreams. Dad standing at the foot of her bed, his suit bloated with grave water. "Your mother's right," he'd rasp, moss spilling from his lips. "I'm not gone. But I need… help."
The next morning, Mama was gone.
Ivy followed the stains on the floor—black and glistening, leading to the basement. The door was ajar. Cold pooled out, thick as oil.
"Mama?"
The basement light flickered. Mama knelt in the center of the room, Dad's old work shirt in her arms. It writhed. "Shhh," she cooed, rocking it. "Shhh, my love. I'm here."
Something wet plopped onto the concrete. A tooth. Then another.
"Mama, stop—"
Her mother turned. Ivy gagged. Mama's mouth was gone. Not ripped. Not cut. Sealed, lips fused into a smooth, waxy membrane. Her eyes bulged, pleading. She thrust the shirt toward Ivy.
It wasn't empty.
The fabric squirmed, alive, straining against buttons. A small hand slithered free—pale, perfect, fingertips raw from clawing.
"Daddy's home," Mama's voice gurgled from somewhere deep in her chest.
Ivy ran. She didn't pack. Didn't scream. She ran until her lungs burned, until the woods swallowed the house whole.
They found Mama a week later, wandering the highway. Her lips had split open again, stretched into a grin too wide for her face. She carried a bundle of rags, cooing. When the officers tried to take it, she bit through one's finger.
They never found the teeth.
Now, when it rains, Ivy locks her windows. She knows what hunts. Not ghosts. Not guilt.
But the hollow things we feed by remembering.