Just something I wrote up for review and critiquing, ignore if you don't want to read it. Short story idea I had while driving today, just threw together a hyper-rough-draft tonight. The parenthesis'd passages I'm going to go back over and expand on and just generally clean the whole thing up but here's what I have so far:

I didn’t know what to expect. I couldn’t believe it had come to this, but I had high hopes for what would transpire this evening. The preparations for the night had all been made, the candles were lit, the pungent smell of cooked meat hung in the air and everything was laid out as perfectly as I could manage. I held my wife close, took in her familiar scent, but despite everything I did this would be the last time I ever held her.
Three years ago, we had a blessed life. That is to say, our parents hated our respective choices for a spouse, we lived in a rundown apartment and scraped by day to day but we had each so we were left wanting for nothing. (We had met as college as juniors, in the same (XXXX) class, and married not long after graduation. She took a job as a secretary in a childrens' hospital and I worked as a writer, putting my dream of the great American mystery novel to the side in favor of whatever paying freelance work I could find.) We lived as best we could on what little came in, but we made it work as best we could, supporting each other.
And then she was hit by a bus.
She was announced dead at the scene, I identified her and then I don’t remember much for the next month. In mourning, I was not capable of a coherent thought. I saw my friends and family come and go to give their condolences and support but I do not clearly recall any of it. The depression only got worse until I forced myself back to work to at the very least help get my mind off it. I had taken an offer to write some short stories for a horror anthology, and in doing research for it I stumbled across a book on the subject of resurrection folklore. I cannot imagine how foolish it seems to you, but in my depression and desperation I latched onto the idea.
I read every word in the book and, as you may imagine absolutely nothing came from it. It was a collection of old wives’ tales, myths and legends without a basis in reality among them. A sane man would have given up the idea as folly (rather, a sane man most likely would not have pursued it to begin with…) but within my the spark had caught, and I did not discount this tome as the only source for such information. It became my obsession.
I consulted many more books and tracked down as many “experts” on the subject as I could. There was little substance, but for every fifty failures I found pieces of a trail that may lead to truth. I began spending what money I had left to travel and research. What else in life did I have to spend it on? Piece by piece, from the forgotten shadows of the world I gathered the information I needed from all sources. Religion, alchemy, witchcraft, remnants of powers so ancient they had been lost from mankind’s memory, all had answers for me. I formulated my plan, and found what it would take to bring my wife back. Most of the ingredients were actually common enough, but the hardest was the most dreadful: I found no way around it, every plan of action that promised to work for me required a human sacrifice.
(I am not a particularly fit man, nor a trained kidnapper. However, I found my intended victim in a despairingly young woman living on the street. In bad health and not at peak physical condition herself, I overpowered her and brought he back to the hovel I had been squatting in as I prepared.) (I prepared the scene for the ritual as I understood it, candles lit, markings on the ground recreated from ancient texts and a large fire-pit. I cut similar markings into the girl as the texts instructed me, and, bound, set her over the fire. In a moment of remorse or possibly simply one of lucidity I saw the evil I had become to complete my goal. However, at this point such remorse served no purpose, I could save this girl’s life no more than my own soul, and steeled my resolve to see this ritual followed through.)
As the girl writhed in pain, I gathered one final ingredient: my wife’s corpse, recently interred from her grave.* I briefly held her to me, oblivious to the stench of the grave radiating off her. I separated myself from her and placed her in the marked spot for the ritual. The preparations for the night had all been made, the candles were lit, the pungent smell of cooked meat hung in the air and everything was laid out as perfectly as I could manage. I said the words I had learned, performed the motions and made the arcane marks. There was a moment after I finished where time stretched infinitely out, the seconds never ending and in this space I was sure nothing would happen and it was all folly after all. Some deep-buried part of me even prayed this was the case. But slowly, singular changes almost imperceptible, my wife seemed to… inflate, for lack of a better term. Mass returned to her rotting flesh, color returned to her grey skin. Soon I was no longer sitting before a corpse but rather a woman who may well have been asleep, perfectly healthy except for the lack of breathing. And then even that changed, her breast rising slightly as life returned to the body. To my wife. My wife was back!
I was shocked, ecstatic it worked, completely beyond words as her eyes opened and looked to me. Eyes full of… confusion? No, anger? Without hesitation, she sprang up and struck me with her hand.
“Idiot! Stupid idiot!” She started before a sob choked her words. “I know everything! Everything you did! And you know nothing! Heaven! You pulled me out of Heaven! And you could have joined me if you had just let go! Now I’m some… unholy abomination, and you… you’re something worse. For only a handful of years on this plane? You damned both of us for that?” She collapsed, sobbing once more.
I didn’t say anything more. How could I defend myself from this? I grabbed my knife from the sacrifice. I walked over, placed my hand on her should and jammed the knife in the back of her head. She fell, lifeless as she had been moments ago. I next took the knife to my own wrists and throat as best I could manage. I did not fear what damnation I had created for myself, it was not divine judgment I feared but that of my wife. I hoped eternity would be enough time for earn her forgiveness. I had no idea what waited for us now because of my actions, but it didn’t matter, because we would be facing it together.

(*Note: Have the sacrifice originally hired to help dig up the grave, then once the task is done he knocks her out, maybe…)

Admission: Before anyone says anything, I know, very derivative of: Lovecraft, Supernatural, FMA and any number of other sources you can throw at me. Hopefully I can fix that too.