What Burns Beneath the House

They said the house was haunted, but it wasn’t. The real horror was never the blood on the walls — it was the way love sat quietly and made you pick which vein to open.

Jude lived there. She fixed up the porch with borrowed tools, dug the fire pit herself, patched the roof with sheets of tin she stole off a rusted trailer. She kept her boots by the door and her shotgun above it. Her truck was older than sin and louder than judgment.

And then there was Maribel.

Maribel, all sugar pink and lip gloss. All soft laughter and cracked nail polish and that sweet scent of sadness she wore like perfume. She’d been homecoming queen once, before her daddy found out about the letters under her bed and beat her so bad she couldn’t smile right for weeks. Jude found her the next day, on the side of the road, lip bloodied, eyes full of static. Took her in, no questions.

They made it work. As much as two girls could in a town like that.

Jude knew how to hold a grudge. She wore rage like armor. Had a scar above her eyebrow from fighting three boys behind a gas station when they called Maribel a slur. Maribel just cried in the truck and waited.

“You always cry,” Jude muttered later, wrapping Maribel’s ankle with a dish towel where she'd twisted it running. “Even when it’s me bleeding.”

“I cry ‘cause I know you won’t,” Maribel said, not unkindly.

Something changed in the air that summer. Crops failed. Roads cracked. The church down the hill burned one night, and nobody bothered to put it out. Men started whispering about old blood, debts unpaid, something stirring out in the woods. Jude called it bullshit — the kind of backwoods paranoia men liked to dress in scripture and gasoline.

But Maribel started dreaming.

She’d wake up gasping, clawing at the sheets, muttering about a thing with no face and the voice of her mother. Said the walls pulsed at night. Said the house wasn’t clean, no matter how she scrubbed it.

And one morning she just stood there in the kitchen, frying eggs barefoot, and said, “It wants me.”

Jude laughed, but the back of her neck prickled.

Then animals started dying. Strays on the porch, piled like offerings. Black oil under the floorboards. Maribel wouldn’t eat. Jude wouldn’t sleep.

They fought. Over nothing. Over everything.

“You wanted something easy,” Jude snarled once, shaking, “but I ain’t never been that.”

“No,” Maribel whispered. “But I loved you anyway.”

Jude thought it would be her. The one to gut whatever came, to put her body in the breach like always. She’d always been the fighter. The one to take a punch. The one to choose.

But when the thing finally came — all shadow and scream, bones in its belly that sounded like rattlesnake prayer — it wasn’t Jude who stood in the doorway.

It was Maribel.

Lip gloss on. Cheerleader smile, cracked just a little. And that terrible calm. That quiet knowing.

She kissed Jude once, soft and warm. “It don’t want rage,” she said. “It wants grief.”

And then she walked barefoot into the mouth of it.

The house doesn’t creak anymore.

Jude still sleeps on one side of the bed.

And sometimes, when it rains, she swears she hears eggs frying.