text: Wrote this one a little while ago but never really shared it with anyone, criticism welcome The old man died in the house he had built. Every floorboard, every door and window, was his. And he had built it well; it was a good house. Of course he had built it well, he had done it for her. Sure, sometimes he’d have to climb the roof to fix a leak, or crawl underneath to attend to the plumbing. But it was a sturdy house, with foundations built to last. She lived with him in the house at first, and for years they were happy. They never had children, but he didn’t need them. He had her, and he had their house. When she died, he had only the house. He lived alone in the house for a long time. They grew older, and sadder, together. He put up hedges and fences, and they retreated from the world. On his weekly trips to town the people would whisper and pretend not to stare. The older folks remembered when she had lived with him. He would smile, and talk, and share the joys of his life with his neighbors. The children of course never knew him as a happy man. They all said if he caught you within his fences at night he would kill you and eat you, or leave you to rot in one of the many empty rooms in the creepy old building. He would hear the whispers, but he didn’t care. He had his house. He didn’t need people. But as years passed both his house and his body began to fall apart. At a certain age, he could no longer take care of the house, and there was no one to take care of him. The old man died in the house he had built. But he never really left it. It took two weeks for anyone to check on the old man, two weeks for anyone to find his body. He had no next of kin, and the bank took control of the house. They tried to sell it, but once word spread that the old man had died there in the kitchen, no one wanted to buy. The house sat, unused and empty for years. That was fine with him. His body had built the house. It had died there. It had started its long, slow decay there on the kitchen floor. When they finally took his body away, some of him stayed put. The old man wasn’t going to let death separate him from the building that had been his whole life. He could still wander from room to room. He could still peer angrily from the window whenever someone walked by. He could no longer repair the house, but he no longer cared if the roof leaked when it rained. In many ways, the first years of his death were much like the last years of his life, hiding unseen and growing more and more bitter as time passed. The young man looked up at the house he had bought, his eyes full of hope and excitement. He saw his future in that house, a piece of land he could call his own. The young woman with him looked up at the house as well. She was as excited as her husband to start their new lives in a new town, but noticed the house was somewhat worse off than they had been led to believe. It would require a lot of work before they could really call it their home. The little girl spoke first. “Is it haunted? It looks haunted.” "No, it’s not haunted,” her father laughed. He had heard what happened to the previous owner, of course. But that was years ago, and ghosts weren’t real. Still, he and his wife had decided not to tell their daughter about the old man’s death in the house that she would grow up in. It looked spooky enough as it is, no need to add scary stories to the mix. “I don’t like it. Why couldn’t we stay at our old house?” The woman answered this time. “Honey we talked about this. Just give this place a chance, you’ll grow to love it.” The old man glared at them from the front window, invisible to the family but enraged by their presence. How dare they? This house had been his since before either of the parents had been born. He had built it from nothing, and now he was as much a part of it as any brick or beam of wood. These people had no right to intrude on his seclusion. “Ok, say hello to our new home!” the man said as he unlocked the door and let his family inside. They were relieved to find that the interior was in better shape than the outside was. It needed work, and a good cleaning, but it was livable. “Why don’t you go pick out a room, then we’ll start moving all our stuff in.” The old man watched as over the next few days the intruders made themselves at home. The husband and wife had the nerve to claim his bedroom as their own, while the little girl set out to explore all the rooms and corridors, every discovery a fresh violation. When they stripped the paint from the walls he felt himself stripped, exposed and raw for the world to see. When they shattered the front windows he felt his own eyes gauged and blinded, and the new panes they put in were shiny glass eyes, beautiful but sightless for the old man, for they were not his. The pain was worse than anything his body had felt when it was alive. Slowly they picked and chiseled away at him, as less and less of what he had built remained. But the foundations of the house were still sturdy, and they could not destroy the old man completely. The bones of his creation were kept intact, and so he lingered, forced to endure as his sanctuary was defiled. As long as a part of his house remained, buried under their sacrilegious renovations, he would linger as well, as unseen and unmoving as the stone foundation itself. He hated watching the family. But he was unable to leave, and they were unwilling to, and in time he learned to coexist. The young woman reminded him of the young woman he had once loved. Not in appearance, they looked nothing alike. But in other ways. In the way she kept a row of flowers in the planter he had built by the kitchen window. In the way she greeted her husband with a kiss every day when he came home. In the way she teased him about all the work he was putting into the old fixer-upper. It was clear that the house was the young man’s passion; that he believed he was creating something real, a future for his family here in the old house he had found. His wife and young child had come along on his adventure, trusting in the vision of the future that the young man saw so clearly And the child. Even when the old man had lived there with his wife, and he shared so much of his life with the house that he and it had become one, it had never felt as alive as when the child ran through its halls. The house was far too big for two people, it always had been. It never felt empty to the old man before, but now it felt full. Before the family moved in, the old man had forgotten what a child’s laughter sounded like. In the last decades of his life, children fell silent as the old man approached, or ran in terror if he caught them near his property. After his death he heard no laughter at all, only increasing frustration in the voices of realtors as they failed to sell his home. He had enjoyed hearing the anger in the realtors’ voices, and most of all he enjoyed the silence once they had left. But now there was noise, and there was laughter, and there was life. What started as agonizing racket grew softer to the old man as time passed. He began to take comfort in their routine. He enjoyed the bustle in the morning as all three prepared for their day. He enjoyed when the woman would come home in the afternoon, with the little girl in tow, and he would listen as she told her mom about her day. He would watch as the man came home a few hours later, and the family would sit down to dinner together. He would listen as the man read to the little girl each night in the room that, the old man had to admit, was better off with her in it. As he watched their routine, he was present for their milestones as well. He was there when they rushed home one Saturday, the little girl’s arm in a cast and worry etched on her parents’ faces. He waited anxiously with the parents on the night of the girl’s first sleepover, missing the story that would not be read that night. And he shared in their joy, when the family left the house and returned two days later as a family of four, and a little boy moved into the nursery they had set up in a room the old man had once built. He stopped thinking of them as the family, and thought of them as his family. For too long the old house had been his hideout, now it was a home again. As he watched them grow, he was reminded why he had built it all those years ago. This was its purpose, to shelter, provide, and protect. For the first time since his wife died, he felt proud of what he had built. The fire started slowly, as fires often do. The basement hadn’t been changed much since the old man had built it, and the wires in the walls were old and frayed. A spark ignited in the wall, smoldering at first but steadily spreading. When the insulation caught the basement erupted, kindling at the base of a wooden structure. The first floor was engulfed in a heartbeat, and the family awoke to smoke and fire, and a blaring alarm sounding a warning that had come too late. The old man had seen the first spark, but he had no voice to shout, no hands to shake his family awake. He could watch though, as the woman ran to the nursery and the man gathered his daughter from her room. He followed them as they rushed downstairs, and felt their fear as they found their way blocked by an inferno that had once been their home. When the fire department arrived the house that had been the old man’s tomb was now a pyre, a towering blaze that could not be put out, only contained and prevented from spreading. When the fire burned out, little was left besides the scorched remains of the house and the family that had lived in it. Splintered wood littered the property. Charred toys and furniture, empty, blackened flowerpots. Rubble and ashy chaos where there had once been a home. But underneath it all, the stone foundations remained, burnt but unbroken. The bones of his creation were kept intact, so the old man lingered, and once again was alone.