The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes."
― Elie Wiesel, Night
I own nothing but my own ideas
The ash from the Sim becomes an urn, dust welded to bone. Another grave to be waits, this one a child. You have no heart, just a hollow feeling in what passes for bones in you. You hate seeing dead children. But you are in no mood to allow negotiations. If they win, there will be no mercy of the fire. They might be starved. Drowned. Burned in a different fire. This house is one of death.
This Sims home is full of graves. Each with trees and flowers, ghosts haunting their nights. You've been here before. You know all the graves. You made them. The kids who played tag, trapped in a room. The man who burned in the same one. The maid who burned cleaning the ashes from his fire.
She still works, paid even less, as the ability to walk through walls makes her work pass even faster. She can no longer hold her children, but she can feed them.
Many moments of tragedy have been witnessed by these walls. Hundreds. Small tradegies, moments of Sim stupidity. Brave ones, reckless ones and ignorant ones alike. These walls are haunted.
This house is a monument to its past. Filled with old paintings, old furniture, and graves.
Once these walls held people who loved each other. Who were family in not just name but deed. Who tried their best at their lives, who saved each other from death, with bargain, and got true life. Who tried their best, eager and earnest, but who were not enough. Didn't know how to be adult sim. Didn't know how to be adults, despite becoming them.
Their children still ended up in military school. They didn't get their highest level of promotion. Not all the skills. Not all the friends. The house sold. The children never returned.
Once this house belonged to working sims. Cogs caught in the capitalist machine. They spend all their time trying to balance their mood, to spend it on the acquisition of skills. Their daughter does well in school, and goes off to better education. She never returns. They never notice. They crash on the floor muscles aching. They pee on the floor in their rush to get to work. They are hungry and miserable in their quest to get a promotion. Their house always has flies, and water on its floors, every surface covered in garbage. They don't learn for pleasure, but desperation to fill. Their talks are forced, the pizza flows freely, as they try to socialize. They died as they lived, ever ignoring their limits.
Once lived a couple who found a way around that. They seemed in no need of a job, no need to eat, and in no want of a maid. They did what they liked, with seemingly no goal in sight, and became more skilled and less in love. A stranger comes, and sweeps her off her feet. She's very skilled and rarely home.
He doesn't notice, for he is trying work, trying friends, putting his pleasure earned skills to use. The stranger proposes, and proposes again. Finally the stranger gets it right, and she is swept off her feet. They will move from house to house,and eventually a mansion. Their children will be straight A's, and leave home never to come back. She never even says goodbye to her husband when she leaves. He was at work. That's where her new spouse will be too, now that he has wooed her. Now that they have children.
Her husband remarries. They adopt a baby, after a lot of Woohoo. They successfully raise a baby into a child. That child burns. No one can decide whose fault it was. One starves inside, while the other dives from a board into a table made of glass.
A thousand little tragedies.
The next were killers, who made their targets trust them, before killing them. And when they ran out of victims, became one themselves
A long history of horror.
All the graves are set with a tree and flowers.
Trapping them here. Preventing them from moving on. Their wails fill the halls at night, a mirror to the Sims who cry at the graves in the day. This fire is not the first neighborhood party massacre. It will not be the last.
More Sims will move into those empty houses one day, and the cycle will repeat.
The family who live here cry at the new graves,before abruptly going to swim. You could hate them for their seeming callousness, and for a short intense moment, you do. But you know better. Their lives are run by a being who does not see them as beings, but pawns. Who lives in their heads most of the time, and controls their lives. What subjects they learn. Who they fall for. When they sleep. When they die. Personality means little in the face of such control.
One day their names will mark the gravestones too .
Perhaps they cry because they know it too.
Will their child live far away, safe in school?
Or will they never leave at all,haunting their home, forever a child.
You finish the last urn, the ash of the wood left scattered on the floor. The maid will clean it tomorrow, but tonight she haunts. You leave, knowing that you will see this house again.
It is only a matter of when.