Title: Something in the Garden
You know those picture-perfect Saturday mornings that everyone posts on social media?
Sunlight streaming through kitchen windows, the smell of fresh coffee, maybe a dog rolling around in the yard?
Yeah. Ours started like that.
But it didn’t stay that way.
I had just poured my second cup of coffee when I noticed the lawnmower still silent. That was odd—Benedict had been talking all week about how the lawn was “getting out of control.” I slid the back door open and stepped out, the morning air warm and still, birds trilling their usual gossip.
There he was—standing completely still by the fence, mower untouched, his shoulders slack, as if someone had pressed pause on him.
“Benedict?” I called. No answer. He didn’t even flinch.
I walked closer, slippers whispering against the dewy grass. “The lawn isn’t going to mow itself, you know.”
Still nothing. I was half a second away from a full eye-roll when I saw where he was looking. Not at the grass. Not at the sky. Across the fence. At her.
Angela.
Our brand-new neighbor.
She’d moved in a week ago, barely a wave, barely a word. Something about her had rubbed me the wrong way from the start. Maybe it was her silence. Or the way she never opened her curtains, except at night. Or maybe it was just the way Benedict looked at her—like a man watching a slow-motion car crash he couldn’t look away from.
She was in her backyard now, kneeling by the flower bed. Except there were no flowers. Just dirt. And what she was doing to that dirt—
I stopped cold.
She was burying something.
No, not something. Something.
It was long. Wrapped tightly in blue tarp. Bound with rope.
My stomach turned.
“Benedict,” I whispered. “Are you seeing this?”
He didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. His grip on the fence had turned his knuckles white.
“She’s burying something,” I said, voice thin and sharp. “That’s not a garden hose.”
“Maybe it’s… just trash?” he offered weakly.
“Trash wrapped like a mummy?” I hissed. “No. No way. We’re calling the police.”
That finally pulled him out of his trance. “April, you don’t know what it is.”
“Neither do you,” I snapped, already pulling my phone from my robe pocket. “That’s the point.”
As I dialed, Angela looked up.
And locked eyes with me.
She froze. Her face, beautiful and pale, flushed with something between fear and fury. Then, like a switch had flipped, she started shoveling dirt faster, her hands moving frantically.
I ducked behind the fence, heart hammering. The dispatcher picked up.
“Yes, hello? There’s a woman… next door… she’s burying something. I think—it might be a body.”
The police arrived ten minutes later, but it felt like ten hours. By the time they pulled up, Angela was sitting calmly on her porch, her hair pulled into a loose braid, sipping tea like she hadn’t just been playing grave-digger in her backyard.
“Back inside,” an officer told me gently. “Let us handle it.”
I hovered near the window, Benedict beside me, both of us peeking through the curtains like nosy neighbors in a true crime podcast.
Angela didn’t resist. She even offered them gloves. Led them to the flower bed. Watched them dig. And dig. And then stop.
They pulled the tarp up gently.
For a moment, everything felt surreal—time stretching thin and taut. And then they unwrapped it.
A figure. Pale. Full-sized. Still.
I choked on a gasp. My hand flew to my mouth.
But as the tarp unfurled fully, I realized something was… off.
The “body” had seams. A texture like silicone. Its eyelashes didn’t flutter in the wind. And its hands—positioned stiffly—weren’t just lifeless. They weren’t alive to begin with.
It was a mannequin.
No—more than a mannequin. A sculpture. Hyper-realistic. Hauntingly detailed.
Angela let out a nervous breath.
“I’m an artist,” she said quietly. “I make life-size installations. This one wasn’t working, so I was… retiring it.”
The cops exchanged looks. One of them asked to see her workspace. She nodded and led them inside.
Twenty minutes later, they returned. No handcuffs. No accusations. Just a shrug.
“She’s telling the truth,” one officer told me. “Studio’s full of them. Like a wax museum on caffeine.”
I wanted the ground to swallow me.
“I—I’m so sorry,” I stammered. “It looked… we thought…”
Angela gave a small, tired smile. “It’s okay. Honestly? I probably would’ve done the same.”
Benedict muttered, “You still could’ve knocked instead of calling 911 like a CSI extra.”
I glared at him.
The officers left. Angela went back inside. The neighborhood exhaled.
But as I stood there, feeling a cocktail of embarrassment and relief, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d only seen the tip of the iceberg.
Because when the officers lifted that tarp, I saw something else. Just for a second.
Another tarp. At the back of her yard.
Half-buried.
Still untouched.
“Not helping, Benedict,” I muttered under my breath, nudging him with my elbow.
Angela exhaled slowly, brushing soil off her palms. A small, tired smile touched her lips. “It’s okay. I get it. Just… maybe next time, a knock before the full SWAT treatment?”
“Yeah,” I said, my face flushing with residual embarrassment. “Lesson learned. Sometimes the imagination fills in too many blanks.”
Angela gave a short laugh—half genuine, half exhausted. “No hard feelings. Honestly, it’s kind of funny now… in a weird, completely surreal way.”
We all chuckled, the kind of laughter that comes only after tension breaks and your brain tries to rebalance. The officers gave a few final notes, their boots crunching away down the path as the last squad car rolled out of the cul-de-sac.
Angela looked at me for a long second, then offered her hand. “Let’s hit reset. Be good neighbors. No tarp-based emergencies next time.”
“Absolutely,” I said, gripping her hand. Hers was cool, firm, and steady. “I’d like that.”
Benedict, ever the opportunist, gave a dramatic sigh. “Well, I guess now I actually have to mow the lawn. I miss when the biggest Saturday surprise was a weed patch.”
He waved, ambled off, and finally pulled the starter cord. The mower’s low growl filled the air, like the universe pressing play again after a strange intermission.
Angela turned and headed back toward her porch. I watched her walk—tall, composed, a little unreadable. Somewhere between misunderstood and deliberately enigmatic.
The normalcy felt tentative, like a painting that hadn’t quite dried yet.
I headed inside. My son, Liam, stood in the doorway, eyes wide as dinner plates.
“Mom? Did the police think you were a criminal?”
I paused, then smiled. “No, sweetheart. Just a big misunderstanding. Want pancakes?”
He nodded cautiously, still watching the street. “But that lady next door was burying a person, right?”
I stirred the batter a bit slower. “No, sweetie. Just a sculpture. She’s an artist.”
“Oh.” He didn’t sound convinced. “It looked real.”
I didn’t answer right away.
The batter sizzled in the pan, the smell of butter and vanilla wafting through the kitchen. The mower’s hum buzzed in the background, and everything felt back to normal.
Almost.
Angela hadn’t lied, technically. Her studio was real. The sculptures were real. But something still gnawed at the edge of my thoughts. The panic in her face when she saw us. The second tarp near the tree line I thought I saw earlier—still half-buried.
Maybe it was my imagination.
Maybe.
Still, I made a mental note to bake something for her next week. A peace offering. A reason to step inside her house, just once.
As the sun climbed higher and Liam poured syrup onto his plate, I glanced out the window again.
Angela was watering the flower bed.
Her eyes flicked up and met mine for just a second.
Then she smiled.
That Saturday didn’t end with a dramatic twist or some dark suburban secret fully revealed. It ended with pancakes. A handshake. A hum of a mower. And a little seed of doubt.
Sometimes the scariest stories aren’t the ones with monsters or murder—they’re the ones that sit quietly, right next door, and make you wonder: what if?
So, here’s to curiosity tempered with caution. To strange mornings. And to neighbors you think you know.
Even when you’re not quite sure you ever will.