Home eek Home!
As you walk up to the house, you hear the eerie sound of children. They’re all asking, “What’s for dinner?”
With your spine tingling, you enter the house. There’s a small table covered in a thick layer of overdue field trip permission forms. One of them is for a hitchhiking trip to Arizona and it has your forged signature.
Just past the foyer, in the front room, zombie kids with iPads are watching different clips of High School Musical the Musical on YouTube, no headphones.
As you walk through the room, the ground feels squishy, like bloody harvested organs. But it’s discarded wet towels, moldy children’s swimsuits, and a sunscreen bottle that wasn’t opened all summer.
The next room is empty, but five Switch controllers are charging and every light is on, including ten different lamps. None of them are even flickering. The energy bill is going to be enormous.
In the kitchen, you see a big bowl and wonder if it’s full of eyeballs. Instead, it’s vegetables that you somehow cooked, all completely untouched. Next to it is an empty carton of ice cream and twenty Ring Pop wrappers.
Recoiling, you feel the floor moving. When you look down, you see that it’s covered in seeds from the everything bagels your kids always eat without using plates. You instinctively reach for a broom but it’s covered in seeds, too, with muffin shrapnel caked in the broom’s bristles.
Suddenly, a woman comes up behind you. She’s deceptively strong from regular Pilates and looks possessed. She asks you whether or not your kids have started working on their science fair projects. As you begin to back away, she tells you that this year her kid’s project cures cancer. On the table behind you, there’s a potato with a smiley face along with the words “The Science of Happy French Fries,” all in your kid’s handwriting.
Walking down the hall, voices echo, disembodied from another time. You realize it’s teens talking about their “vintage” CD collection. As you adjust the glasses you’re wearing for your old eyes, one of them brings up answering machines but the other teens don’t know what that is.
You tentatively take a step into the first bedroom, which smells like decomposing bodies. The source, however, is open lunch boxes filled with forgotten fruit. Next to one, there’s an expensive trench coat that your daughter had begged you to buy last year. It’s obviously unworn with the tags still on. It was not on sale. On your way out, you notice a dish you asked your kid to wash, sitting dirty on an unmade bed, covered in cockroaches.
In the second bedroom, cobwebs cover unopened math workbooks. Your kid materializes and tells you it doesn’t matter because AI will do math for him. Is he doing a bit or is he serious? You’re disturbed either way. On his door, there’s a “Beware” sign and a brochure that says “College” along with the total cost of tuition at USC. As you begin to leave, you see a picture your son saved of the girl he met hitchhiking in Arizona. You ask him about it, and he explains that they’ve stayed in touch and she’s an influencer who wants to be a tradwife. He hopes to support her. Don’t worry, he tells you, he has a plan which includes puppetry, and writing the next Twilight but with Nazis.
You stifle a scream; it’s time to go home.
But, then, you remember, you’re already there.
Lily Hirsch is the author of Weird Al: Seriously and Taking Funny Music Seriously. Apparently, she likes to explain jokes. Ugh. Find her @lilyehirsch on Instagram or @lilyehirsch.bsky.social.
A Haunted House For Parents was originally published in Slackjaw on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Leave a Reply