Eric Fuchs

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

01/01/2022

Four is merely two twos. We live in square homes, and live lives of binary. Up down, left right, it’s limiting. In the triangular home, we can open ourselves up to a new reality. We can live in threes.

You can be at the nexus here. You look out one window and see day, you look out another window and see night. You look out the third window, and see everything else the rectangular universe has hidden away. All the possibilities, the spaces between. Where you are neither alive or dead. Neither good or evil. There is so much more that could be.

For a moment then, you look out, and see that even a closed polygonal shape is a limit. You don’t need it. The lines of your walls can intersect. The triangle becomes a nonagon, then a 27-gon. So many more windows. You can tear open more betweens, betweens between the betweens, go further and further. You find an infinite star-shaped pattern, cross and re-crossing itself, repeating over and over, the figure never closing, open passing back and forth, tearing open more and more realities.

You see it all in those windows. An uncountable infinity of spaces and lights and lives, all staring back, wondering as you do, who let them into their homes.

Original Article: https://defector.com/triangle-house-connecticut

12/18/2021

This is the kind of place where you can be a man’s man, out on the frontier, more connected to the spirit of the land. At first as you sit on your acres, living your rustic dreams, the sport of the land might come at you as a small whisper. A tiny reassuring breath of air that you think you’ve imagined. It’s reassuring at first. Warming.

Then as you grow closer to it, you get a familiarity. It was a stranger at first, now it is a constant companion. You now head full words, sentences. You can hear the land’s pleas, it’s desperate, even pathetic begging for help. You are one with plains, a real classic cowboy, and at night, you get no sleep for the voice of the Earth howls in agony nonstop. Every night, a single unrelenting scream, the sublime, beautiful land that you own screams like a frightened dying animal stuck in a trap. And there is nothing you can do to help.

Original Article: https://defector.com/zillow-montana-rich-bad-ranch

For the past year or so I've been posting short horror stories based on the houses featured in Kelsey McKinney's Defector column, Zillowing Out. They've gotten remarkably good responses, especially for things written usually in about 90 minutes.

I haven't really found a good use for Cohost yet, but maybe there can be one now, I'm gonna post them all here so that people can find them more easily than digging through the comments section of a paywalled website.

First one came out in December 2021. I got a response saying "Gosh, that's beautiful. I would like it if you would tell us a ghost story every week, please...." and I ended up doing mostly exactly that. These started as a paragraph, many are thousands of words long now.

Text:

I want to be a kindly old grandfather in this house and bake cookies for a whole kindergarten class of small children who I am not related to and whose origins are never explained. They never get older, they have no names, they just appear every afternoon around 2:45, rushing in through the living in a thunderous herd of tiny feet, eat my freshly baked chocolate chip desserts, and then after they all smile at me, they walk out the door and all at once fade away into dust, which I spend the rest of the afternoon sweeping up.

Original article: https://defector.com/zillowing-out-samford-ny-i-want