01/15/2022
You cannot explain to yourself why you chose this place of all places. You tell yourself that it was really about the project, something to keep yourself busy. You were always good with your friends, good with planning. There were dozens of rooms, dozens of spaces to renovate and turn into a home. You realized early in the project that even your best attempt at home making would be a horrifying parody, a space misused and distorted in awful ways. But by then, it was too late. You were committed to this stupid idea both in man hours wasted and the practical concerns of the apocalypse.
The last corridor out fell two winters ago. You were lucky you got all the supplies you needed in before this town was cut off. Luckily there are still a few people left in radio range. You laugh with them about how gruesome your school house is, you're practically daring the Little Ones to come.
Your friends on the radio contact you less and less frequently these days. A man with a deep voice that you know only as Carl told you that most of them don't even try to live above ground anymore. "That's so much space to defend on your own, how do you do it?" You joke that it keeps you busy. You joke that there are ghosts here, ghosts of happy times, of a promise of a future that never was.
Luckily though, the Little Ones have stayed away so far. This was a place for them, back before the Changes. Before the news was filled day and night about missing children, about hospitals filled with bodies, about desperate-looking scientists on TV trying their best to explain the unexplainable. The children stopped being children a long time ago, they're still small, but they're nothing you'd want to get close to. They have many more arms, many more mouths, and they're always hungry. Promises of cures turned to bunk. It did not take much for the governments and business powers of the world to fall, nobody believed in them even before the Changes.
The Little Ones get close at night, laughing right outside the walls, right outside the windows. You never do know why they don't come in. Maybe some residual memory of this place, maybe it reminds them of what they were before. Maybe they're still in there, somehow.
But they never come in. They leave you to your work, your building. Your pointless labor. It would be so easy if they just ended it. You're so tired. So ready for this to be over. But they keep laughing. You keep working. Day after day, still alive.
Still here, in your dream home that you built with honest labor with your two worn hands.
Original Article: https://defector.com/zillow-elementary-school-home-ew