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There’s always been a graveyard in our house.
Seven of them. Seven graves lined up in our backyard like a row of crooked teeth.
Other neighbors didn’t have one. My friends at school didn’t either.
It kept away unwelcome guests, which made Mama happy, but it also scared off everyone else.

Now a new grave is being dug on its own. Every day I wake up, and it’s deeper.
No one is digging it, just like last time. This could only mean one thing: a woman will die. But who?

“All the elderly women in the family died already. Who could it be this time?” I overheard Mama whisper to her sister, Aunty Ikram.

My Aunty thinks it’s their diabetic older cousin. I think it’s me.

The graves all belong to the women in Mama’s family: my granny, great-granny, great-aunts, and a distant cousin. The last one was my great-granny. She died at 101 years old. That was two summers ago. I was in fifth grade then. It was the only burial I ever witnessed.

I used to ask Mama how it worked, and she would always say, “The graveyard calls upon them. The grave just appears, and that’s how we know one of us will die.”
I had no clue what she was saying until I saw it happen with my own eyes.

Great-granny’s soon-to-be final resting place deepened before our eyes, day by day. My brother Saeed and I stayed up one night to watch.

“Mouna! It’s happening! Wake up!” Saeed shook me.
I had fallen asleep. “Damn it,” I muttered, stumbling out of bed. But by the time I got there, it was too late.

Saeed said a man had appeared. Hair disheveled, clothes torn, a loose, ragged jelaba hanging to his knees.

“He was a giant,” Saeed said. “Too tall… inhumanly tall. As tall as the window, I swear.”
“Stop it, Saeed. You know I’ll get scared.”
“I’m serious! He didn’t come from the door or the gate. One second the yard was empty, the next he was there.”

“He took a shovel and started digging,” Saeed told Baba and Mama later at breakfast, still pale. “He moved slowly, like he was trapped in a dream, you know, when you try to run but can’t? He didn’t dig too deep. Maybe he got tired. But the grave… it kept deepening.”

Saeed paused, lowering his voice. “I think I gasped. I didn’t scream. You know I’m brave. But he heard me. He looked right at me and grinned. His teeth were decayed and yellow. Rotten.”
He swallowed hard. “And then… he was gone.”

Baba and Mama exchanged an awkward look, then dismissed Saeed’s story.

“It was probably Boghatat, sleep paralysis,” Baba said quickly.

Twelve days later, Great-granny was buried in that same grave.

The graveyard never lies.

The new grave appeared because of me.

I broke a rule.

I knew something terrible would happen. I was waiting for it, dreading it. But I never, not once, imagined a grave would show up for me.

Exactly three months ago, I offended them, the ones we are never supposed to mention. I really did not mean to. That afternoon, I was hunched over math homework I had put off until the very last evening. As I tried to solve some impossible limit equation, I knocked over my glass of atay, piled high with mint the way Baba likes it. The tea soaked straight into my notebook.

I panicked. I shoved the dripping notebook onto the windowsill so it could dry. A sudden gust of wind lifted it and tossed it straight into the graveyard. My bedroom window looks right over the graves, so I heard it hit the dirt before I even saw where it fell.

I could not ask Baba or Mama for help. I would definitely get in trouble for waiting until the last minute again. And Saeed would absolutely tell on me. I had already told on him that same morning for eating all the baghrir before breakfast.

Mama and Aunty Ikram sat me down the day I got my first menstrual cycle. “We don’t enter the graveyard on our periods. NEVER. Once you reach puberty, you can’t wander around like a kid. When you’re bleeding, you stay away. You don’t go in.”

I didn’t know which was worse, learning I was now a “bleeder” or learning that this new rule existed.
“Why?” I asked.
“You’ll invite the uninvited,” Mama said.
That was it. Her explanations were always clipped and abrupt.

So there I was, bleeding, and my entire math assignment was lying on the graveyard dirt. I was stuck between two hells. I knew exactly what my teacher would do if I came without the homework. She would turn me into a donkey, and she would not even need magic to do it. The other punishment, the one that belonged to the unseen, was unknown.

I finally forced myself into the graveyard. I grabbed the notebook, quick and clumsy, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.
Not then.

A few weeks later, I noticed the new grave forming. Maybe it began earlier and we just didn’t see it. But once we did it kept growing deeper by the day.

And now I’m in trouble. Big trouble.

It has become deep enough for me to see the bottom. I am almost certain it matches my height.

That is why Aunty Ikram thinks the grave belongs to their older cousin. She is short. Maybe it could be her. I hope it is not me.

---

I have been sleep-deprived for days.

I lay down next to the grave, just to make sure. Call me crazy if you want. I am desperate. My eyelids are getting heavy, the neighborhood sounds are fading, everything feels far away. My eyes blur. I feel myself slipping.

Then, nothing. Just darkness.

A sudden pressure. Something cold and heavy touches my neck and my chest. It feels like dust and soil at the same time, suffocating. I force my eyes open. The tall man with the rotten teeth is above me. He is shoveling dirt and throwing it on my body. I do not understand why I am lying down. I look around. I am inside the grave. Dirt is all around me, under me, at my sides, and now on top of me. My head is barely above the edge.

He lifts another full shovel of soil and aims it at my face. I scream. I shut my eyes. I don’t want to die. I’m scared. What will happen to me? Where will I go?

A hand pulls the dirt off my face, rough and quick. I spit out soil and cough. My eyes are still closed. Then someone lifts me. The scent is familiar. Baba’s cologne.

Even after I take a hot bath and put on my warmest pajamas, I’m still shivering. I cannot tell if it is from shock, or cold, or if the cold from the grave has somehow seeped into my bones. I tell Mama and Baba everything.

Mama does not look at me. She storms out, muttering something under her breath, “Shniwla lokhra, you mosquito.” I lower my gaze in shame.

Baba was drinking his afternoon atay and heard my scream. He saved me.

I am about to suffocate under the heavy blankets. I am still shivering. Every time I close my eyes, I see the shovel, hear the heavy thud of soil hitting my chest. I cannot sleep. My body aches, but my mind is wide awake, terrified, listening.

I don’t know when I finally fell asleep, or how, but a sharp yank rips the blankets off me. “Time to wake up.”

It’s Mama’s voice, but it’s too close, too sharp. I’m sleep-drowsy, desperate for rest. I stumble out of bed and follow her into the kitchen. She slams a glass of milk and a plate of msemen with honey onto the table. I wonder where everyone is, but then remember my brother and Baba don’t have early shifts or classes today.

I lift the glass to my lips. It is only when I glance down that the world snaps into focus.

Mama’s feet. They are not feet.

They are hooves. Dark, split hooves resting where her slippers should be. She is sitting cross-legged on the chair, shaking her legs, and the hooves. I am fully awake now, my heart a trapped, frantic bird in my chest. I slowly raise my head to look at her face. It is definitely Mama. No, wait…

She looks exactly like her, but her jaw is slightly distorted, the line of her mouth unnatural. There is something fundamentally uneven, a flaw in the copy.

I throw the hot milk straight onto her face. I turn and run. I hear her laughter, a single harsh peal that instantly deepens into a man’s voice, then splits into a chorus of jeering, mocking voices that echo off the tiles.

I rush toward Baba and Mama’s room, but the hallway never ends. It keeps stretching, the floor tiles blurring into an impossible tunnel. I change course, aiming for the front door. I need to get out of this house right now.

I yank the door open and burst outside.

Oh no. I am back in the kitchen.

The Imitator is still sitting there, in the same position, the same smug, distorted look on her face, laughing.

I run again, past her, toward the stah, the roof access. The only other escape. Finally, I reach the landing. I grab the handle and yank the door to the roof open with all my strength.

I am back in the kitchen.

It is Them. The Djnoun. The Uninvited are already here.

The Djnoun have always been the taboo. The unmentionable. Everyone knows they’re tricksters who hate humans. These thoughts race through my mind as I watch the Imitator’s body shift. Mama’s shape melts away and reforms into the tall man. L’hariss. I know him now.

Mama and the aunties talked about him when Great-granny passed. Mama said she saw him more than once. He is the one Saeed saw. The giant with the rotten teeth.

And now I understand. He was never a man. He was one of Them. A Djin.

“Are you ready?” he asks, his voice hoarse and scraping.

“Please… let me go. I’m still young. I want to finish school. I want to be a doctor. Please. Come back when I’m old.”

He laughs, and his body twists into the shape of an old woman. I don’t know her, but she looks a little like Great-granny, a little like Aunty Ikram… and even a little like me.

She speaks in his hoarse voice.

“I made a deal with Them. They gave us this house. Protected our land. Brought wealth. I signed a contract with a Djin. I invited Them here.”

Then her body tightens and she becomes Great-grandma. “And I paid the price. I was the sacrifice.”

She shifts again, now Grandma, her eyes hollow. “And I was next.”

Then Mama, her mouth trembling in a way that isn’t hers. “And I will.”

And then she becomes me. “And I will, now.”

My imitator lunges toward me.

“Why? Why me?” I cry as I run.

“That is what you get for striking a deal with us,” she answers.

I stop running. The imitator stops too. Its smile fades, confused. Behind me, another voice whispers a name. I recognize the voice. 

It is Saeed. He stands at the edge of the eighth grave, gripping a heavy iron shovel. The Djinn’s head snaps toward him, my stolen face contorting in sudden, raw panic.

But then, Saeed’s face begins to change. His youthful skin sags and wrinkles, and a terrible, unnatural grin stretches from ear to ear, exposing a mouthful of yellow, rotting teeth.

“The deal is broken,” Saeed whispers. He steps onto the mound of dirt and drives the iron shovel into the earth, slowly beginning to fill the open grave.

“Saeed!” I cry out, my voice trembling. “What happened to you? Come here! Come inside!”

He pauses, resting his hands on the handle of the shovel, and gives me a slow, playful wink. “How can I? Who will guard the graveyard, Mouna dearest? I am the new L’hariss,” he says, his voice entirely steady.

The next morning, Saeed is nowhere to be found. I rush to his bedroom, but the door opens to a dusty storage room filled with old, forgotten boxes. When I frantically ask Mama and Baba where my brother is, their faces go perfectly blank. They look at me as if I am speaking a foreign language. They don’t know him. It is as if he never existed.

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Chaimae Belahrache is a PhD candidate and a member of the Linguistic, Literary, Cultural, and Interdisciplinary Studies Research Lab (LLCIS) at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tetouan, Morocco. She holds a Master’s degree in English Literature and History of Ideas and a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature. Her academic research focuses on contemporary postcolonial Sephardic women’s writing, with a particular emphasis on North African Jewish literature. She has published three academic articles in Confluence and Taylor & Francis journals. Her short story “Beneath the Silk” is scheduled for publication in The Stand in Autumn 2026, and she previously won first place in an H. G. Wells competition under a pseudonym.