They Return

SEPTEMBER 2025, SHORT STORY, 2600 WORDS

Finger by finger, my father’s hand sprouts like fungus from the cold hard ground. Loamy, cinereal, it grows into an arm. A shoulder follows, the begrimed crater of an ear, a pair of closed eyes—rotting body pulled towards a starless sky by the powers of some wicked theology. As soon as the head is out, he opens both eyes: iniquitous dreamer of the dark, powdered earth clinging onto his eyelashes. He gives me the stare I haven’t had to suffer for a full year. His throat is still full of dirt. Thankfully, it will be a while before he speaks.

I am tempted to tell him all I want to say now, while he’s still without words. Instead, I clench my jaw till it hurts. “Are you done?” I say. “We’re all waiting for you. Dinner’s going cold.”

Naturally, he takes his sweet time to come out, aware of my stare, our stares. Me, warm and fleshy, lantern-bearer to the flock of grizzly aunts and grandfathers—they, standing full of mud, mossy heads softly sunk and silent behind me. Twelve is the number: that’s how many can be seated. That’s how many shall remember with us tonight. My father is the last one to come out. In the distance, I see more lanterns, other groups of grey, muddy people heading home.

“Come on,” I say before he’s out completely and lead the procession with fists that shatter, eyes that sting.

In our village, the dead come to dine on the eve of the New Year. They rise from their graves, sit at the table to break bread with the living, then sleep in their homes. Before sunrise they head back into their earthly slumber and wait till next time.

When they all have washed the dirt off by the well, they float silently to the house. Tatters and shrouds are left in a heap by the door, crisp collars and velvet vests replace them. They are all allowed to dress in their Sunday best, to comb and plait their hair. The process makes them somewhat human again. Their faces animate, the skeletons visible under thin remains begin to fade, replaced by the illusion of lips, cheeks, and eyeballs. They start looking more like the people in our memories.

At the table, they pick up spoons with long-nailed fingers. They suck soup loudly while bits of their own rotting flesh drop in their bowls, staining our best tablecloth. They begin to speak, to catch up with the world that has gone on without them. To crack jokes, old and new. They set the tone—there are more dead than living seated here, after all. We mimic them in their strange, hypnagogic quality: here but not here, unlubricated joints moving oddly, eyes unblinking, voices that are still below the earth. We dine, submerged.

At the head of the table, my father; one hand touching his moustache, the other fiddling with the komboloyi mother has carefully placed by his plate. Mother sits beside him, serves him the best part of the roast, does not speak. She replicates the past perfectly, as if she’s held onto it in a jar of formaldehyde, waiting for this very day to recreate our dinners when he was still alive, to present him with this perverse Last Supper. Patriarchally resplendent, father savors his moment back home—more than the food he has a chance to taste again, more than the opportunity to see the stars, to converse with his kin. For a moment, he seems more alive than ever.

When he finally speaks, he says, “Where’s my son?”

“Gone,” I say, because I know mother won’t reply. “He left, after what you told him last year. And now he’s dead. Drowned, somewhere at sea.”

“Oh no. He can’t come back,” Grandma Violetta says. She’s talking about getting buried in the dirt in our village. It’s what makes our people come back, but we don’t really know if that’s true. People from afar have tried burying their own here, and nothing happened. Or, hoping to see again someone they cherished, they took some of the dirt to put in the graves of their loved ones elsewhere, but no one ever returned.

“What did he say last year?” Grandpa Simos asks. He was always hard of hearing, missing memories even on the evenings of his return. His cheeks had drooped with age while he was still alive. Now he seems as if he is struggling with gravity itself, pulled even more downward, his mouth always long and open, his unblinking eyes drawn so low their crackled whites popped.

“Oh, stop. Here, have some pie,” says Auntie Pousia, quick to diffuse any tension, like she always used to. My mother’s favorite sister, my favorite aunt too. Gone too young, while we were still children. I always wondered what it would be like if she were still here. She quickly puts pie on everyone’s plates, unprompted. Food had always been her panacea of choice.

Father’s face is still for a moment, a cold, hard battleground. The news of his son’s death must surely rattle him. “Good,” he says, not a shadow in his voice. Then he turns to me: “Why aren’t you married?”

My plate is full of food and my appetite is gone. All I want is to poke his eyes out, cut his tongue, so he can’t look at me or talk to me whenever he returns. I want him to be dead and stay dead inside his grave, like everyone else’s dead do.

But I stop; I freeze. There’s a knock on the door. There’s a knock and I know it’s him.

Encrusted in silt and seaweed. Eyelids sewn shut by a growth of miniature barnacles. Mother helps me wipe him clean of the mud, and it takes a long time to shave off the molluscs clinging hard onto his eyelashes. He finally opens his eyes in the unblinking way of the dead, revealing a set of nacreous pupils. He sees us, sees me, but I don’t see him. I see someone with opals for eyes, someone in a shape I used to know.

“What happened to you? How did you come back?” asks Auntie Pousia.

“I can’t remember.”

He can’t remember anything, not even us. He says he just walked here, drawn by something he couldn’t explain.

“Never seen one return from a shipwreck,” Grandma Violetta says. “Where were you going to, anyway? On that ship.”

Somewhere he could be himself, I think, a place where people wouldn’t try to stone him for being who he is. But has anyone ever left the Valley? Has anyone ever sailed beyond the coast without the cruel Zarghána eating him alive?

“Sit him at the table,” Grandpa Simos says. “There’s too much food!”

Father hasn’t spoken a word. He only watches his son as he takes his place beside us—a thirteenth dead at the table for twelve. His dead son with no memories, not even on this day when the dead return and they remember, just like the living do.

Father cuts through his roast—back and forth, little obstinate saw—and takes another bite.

I thought I wanted to see him. I thought all I wanted, on the cursed night I have to tolerate my father again, was to at least see my dead brother. But it could never happen, because no one who dies elsewhere has ever returned. And now he’s here and I don’t know what to do with his lack of memories, his vacant eyes. I wanted to see him, but only in a certain way.

I wasn’t ready for this. Our dinners with our ancestors have spoiled us. We haven’t truly understood what death’s like. It is not rotting bits of an uncle’s nose dropping in his soup. It is not parting and meeting only once a year. Now I can feel it: it’s glassy, rocky. Utterly shattering. The emptiness of a hunger without the hope at the heart of yearning.

“We should bury him here, tonight. This way he’ll return next year. We’re so lucky he came back,” Grandma Violetta says, smiles her kind smile. She is the oldest one now; her head is almost a grotesque skull with very little skin left on it. She has seen many returns and has been to as many, so she must be right. Next year, if my brother returns with them, she won’t. The twelfth seat will be reserved for him. She smiles her chilling smile, knowing this well. She is ready and happy to stay in the earth forever. She is too old, too dead, and family dinners are too exhausting.

Mother is quiet. She wipes her tears, grateful to the Cruel Saints for sparing her some of their cruelty through this gift. At the eikonostasi, she lights a candle to the little icon of the Bone Eater, the Cruel Saint that flies with eagle wings over the dead and rips their chests with her talons. The painting is small and full of stains, but one can see her, the mouth of her behaloed human head full of blood as she feeds on some soul—the goddess of the Only Certainty. Mother mutters a prayer.

My hands itch and burn as I watch her. Why can’t she see him? Why is she grateful for the return of her dead, who can’t remember, for someone returned to us completely and utterly dead? And that brute of a father, isn’t he sad, at all?

At the sight of my brother, any anger I might have left melts into something I can’t describe. I put my face in my hands and weep.

“Sister.” A hand on my shoulder. For a while, he says nothing more.

Dying is forgetting.

After welcoming the New Year, everyone has gone to bed. The room is full of bodies, warm mixed with cold. In their eternal sleep, the dead forget. But once a year they can sleep in their house. Once a year the house returns memories to them.

I am holding my brother in my arms—he doesn’t seem to want to sleep. Maybe he doesn’t know how. I tell him stories and he listens, though I’m not sure he understands. I say nothing for a while. Maybe this way he will go to sleep.

“Tell me the story of father and myself.”

I want to keep quiet. I can’t, not at this request. So I speak.

Of all the times this boy was put through the sadistic haze of manhood: the beatings at every sign of tears; our mother’s terrified look when she found him wearing one of her dresses; the skinning of his pet rabbit by his own hand—part of his training in the family profession of butcher; the threat of death when he was found with his best friend in the old mill.

He listens quietly and, after a while, he speaks. “I went away. I went to that other place. I got lost on my way home.”

“You survived the sea and you were coming back to us? I’m so sorry. I thought you’d never return. I thought—you’d be better off over there. What was it like, the Other Place?”

“Cruel,” he says. “A different kind of cruelty.”

“Is this why you tried to return?”

“I can’t remember. I think I lost my memories before I died. That place took them. Exile always takes something away from you.”

I have nothing to say to this, so I wipe my tears again. His nacreous eyes are still open, empty, dry. There is something else we haven’t spoken of.

“I left you when you needed me,” he says. He remembers. Somehow, he remembers. Maybe not the specifics: how I was about to be married off when he stormed out, leaving me alone. Certainly not what happened afterwards, after he was gone, when father died suddenly, and I offended no one’s honor when I called off a wedding.

“Hush. It doesn’t matter. He’s gone now. I am not afraid.”

“Sing,” he says. Somewhere, in there, I know he remembers or he wouldn’t ask me this. I always sang when there was a storm and we were both afraid. When the gendarmerie raided the villages in the Valley, terrorizing everyone. When father was in one of those moods.

So I sing. Before dawn starts breaking, when all the aunties and great-aunties begin to wake, my brother sleeps for a few minutes.

I hope that something was returned to him.

They are all standing, waiting for me to lead the way again. I have to hurry, because too much daylight confuses and disorients them. They stop walking, they wander, they get lost—they’re creatures of eternal darkness, after all. My mother stays behind—she is off to summon a priest, to say passing rites over my brother’s grave. I take the shovel with me and I have to hurry. I have to put my brother in the ground: the earth and the moss to envelop him in their embrace till the day comes when he returns, when he remembers.

When we’re back at the graveyard, the dead kiss each other twice and head to their underground beds. I look for a spot to start digging but can’t find any.

“Don’t.” It’s my father. My wrist is trapped in his bony clutch.

I pull my arm back so quickly I can hear a breaking sound—it’s not my arm but his hand, frail osseous remains that crack. I look at the man that terrorized us for years and he is but a dead body, a thin skeleton about to go back underground. He’s been gone for a year, but did he ever leave, really? I see him every day in my mother’s fearful eyes, obedient to an invisible him even in his absence.

I can finally feel something breaking inside me as well. “You don’t want him to return, do you?” I say. “You want him lost, to wander outside, to never return. Never remember. I won’t let you.”

My brother stands close by, unblinking, empty.

“It’s late,” father says. “You don’t have time. I’ll take him with me.”

“Now you’re taking him with you?” I scream. “Remember when you drove him away and he died?”

They are both staring at me. For a few moments, they look terribly alike: in the place where we all go, difference flattens into humus perforated by the eternal, torpid movement of worms. They are both already forgetting, their forever sleep claiming them. Before I can act, he catches my brother’s hand and the mouth of the earth opens, swallowing them feet first. As they sink deeper and deeper into the ground, father pulls him close till their foreheads touch. He closes his eyes, all memories forgotten, again a creature of dust. My brother—my brother keeps them open, two opals swallowed by the land. He turns slightly and sees me, sees past me. Two pearls, pink and radiant in the warm dawn light, are the last thing I remember before the earth’s crust shuts behind them.

Alone, shovel in my hands, I start walking home. Every footstep hurts, as if the earth responds, the earth with all its dead in it.

Dying is forgetting. It’s becoming one with the earth. Unless the earth spits you back every once in a while, with an urgent plea to remember. Again and again, because you don’t know yet what it is you have to remember. Because the living can’t let go of their dead: to them, dying is remembering.

I have so many words in me I’ve yet to tell them both.

And I have a year to try not to forget them.

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Behind the Scenes with Eleanna Castroianni

-What was the initial inspiration for this story, and were there significant changes from that inspiration through edits and revisions?

E.C. More than 15 years ago I almost died. Leading up to that incident, I had a year full of odd dreams, some protective, as if something was watching over me, while others were chilling nightmares I still remember vividly. That year my grandmother died and I kept having nightmares featuring her as well. A few days after my accident, I had a dream that turned out to be the last one in this series of warnings, so to speak: all the dead members of my family and all the living sat at the same table for dinner. After we were finished, the dead went one way, the living the other – and I followed the group of the living. For the time being.

This has been one of the most mystical experiences of my life and it somehow found its way into this story – I didn’t even do it consciously and I realise I have a similar scene in another story that will come out later this year! The story as you see it was written in one sitting, but I later took my time to tweak the language and play with themes. I love short stories for this reason, I can quickly find the plot/characterization (at least, I can now, after years of experience!) and then I just relax and toy with it.

-How does this story fit into your body of work – is it similar in ways to what you usually write or is it very different?

E.C. This is part of a larger set of shorts with a loose folk horror vibe that all take place in an imaginary place in Greece, which I call Messará Valley. It is a place where time has no meaning, because both the past and the future are hauntings: for example, the horrors of the Greek Civil War blend with environmental collapse and give birth to new elder gods, such the Cruel Saints (referenced here) and creatures like the Greek folklore-inspired Zarghána (also referenced in this story and the main theme of a story published in Uncanny last year). All the stories are connected by themes I am always grappling with: 20th century Greek history (this one touches on themes of immigration and diaspora), as well as family and community. Family is the one thing we can’t escape – I will never stop writing about it. Plus, I already mentioned it features a creepy family dinner – I am not a foodie, but food is part of my culture and it usually shows up as a social event (social event usually meaning “time to air all our grudges with passive-aggressive jabs at each other”).

–How would you describe the heart of this story?

E.C. It’s family – not the found one, unfortunately, but the one we’re born into. Far from a glorification of family, it is a reflection on the intricate bonds and obligations it puts upon us. Filial piety is strong in some cultures (including mine) and dealing with all the difficult stuff becomes more complex, nuanced, and full of contradictive emotion, exactly because family is not supposed to be a place of emotion/love but it is primarily a place of duty. Family as bonds, both in the sense of links but also in the sense of chains.

And death – I’m fascinated by death as a concept in our lives, because in a sense it is just physical absence. Someone can be completely absent from your life physically, but still determine every moment of your being, your every decision – almost what our parents’ upbringing can do to us, right? Bonds. Death or absence is but a detail in this case. That person’s with you all the time. The ghosts are real.

Fantasy -Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about you, your work, or this piece?

E.C. Just that there are more stories set in this world/with this vibe (two more have been published!) but that you can also find stories from me in the entire spectrum of SFFH. My most recurrent theme is settings from recent Greek history, something that started as a grudge, because no one knows about the various shades of intergenerational trauma that affect us deeply (I didn’t know either before I started researching all of this). I invite you to forget a bit about seeking Greek myth retellings by Greek authors. If you are interested in uplifting what we do, seek instead the stories about Greece as it affects us, the more current stuff. And thank you for reading!