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Back to the Land, Like It Or Not: Hiram Ennes’ “Our Best Selves”
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Back to the Land, Like It Or Not: Hiram Ennes’ “Our Best Selves”
All this family needs is time, rain, sunlight, and soil…
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on January 14, 2026
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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Hiram Ennes’ “Our Best Selves,” first published in the Fall 2024 issue of Weird Horror and collected in The Best Weird Fiction of the Year Vol 1. Spoilers ahead!
The family—Mum and Dad, Sister and Brother—arrive in a cab at their new home deep in the woods. The house is “a squat trapezium of stone, fissured like the trunk of a tree.” Its “cracked slab of a roof slumps under centuries of vines, piebald with moss.” The furniture inside is carved from the same crumbling stone as the walls. Mum is thrilled with the place. Dad’s smile fades as he takes in the scale of work to be done on this “fixer-upper.”
Sister slips through a wall fissure to join Mum in the garden. Berries, apple trees, and wild tubers already grow there, and Mum is planning vegetable plots. The canopy is thin enough to let in sunlight, but Sister knows that “even the shady bits will be wrapped around [Mum’s] green thumb soon enough.” A sapling with strange undulating leaves grows by the house. Even Mum can’t identify it, but the way it’s greeting Sister clearly marks it as hers.
Nevertheless, Mum and Dad claim the sapling-view bedroom, since Sister and Brother can’t stop squabbling over who gets the bed nearest the young tree. The siblings aren’t their “best selves” when they squabble, and they must always strive to be their best selves.
Before Dad tackles other fixes, he must repair the roof—the rains are coming. Sister and Brother try to gather its missing pieces, but even the smaller ones are too heavy. Sister suggests that giants must have made their home as a doll house. When they return, the family will become their dolls, and they’ll put Brother in a dress and snap off his limbs. Mum yells not to lie to her brother. Liars aren’t being their best selves!
Dad wants Mum to get rid of their cat, which makes her wheeze and break out in hives. He worries enough about her “condition” without the allergy symptoms. Mum refuses, denying allergy and “condition” alike. She wanders her sprouting garden, praying for the rain Dad dreads.
Every woman in the family has a single daughter, through whom its genius for horticulture and herbalism descends unbroken. Mum has passed much of her knowledge on to Sister, but in addition to the sapling, Sister can’t identify the plant that’s begun to crawl onto her bed. Mum can’t come see it, because she’s curled up sick in bed with the cat, bleeding on her blankets. Sister has to make her a tea of leaves and red pills, the one medicine Mum hasn’t weaned herself off. It smells like rot, and Sister’s afraid that she may have to take it someday.
Dad’s problem is how much weight he’s losing in their self-isolation. His skin is sagging scarily! He kills something he identifies as a boar, though it could be something else, and butchers it on the porch. Mum tells him he should wait for the garden to mature and has the kids recite a litany of the only necessities: Time, rain, sunlight, and soil.
The roof’s fixed before the rains, but then collapses again, bit by bit. Summer pollen coats the house outside and in. Mum’s bedridden again. She blames the pollen, Dad the cat. He tells Sister he’d like to go back to town, but she doesn’t miss their old house, the school, the hospital, their car. Mum has decided: One’s best self should need nothing but time, rain, sun and soil. The cat dies. Mum accuses Dad of killing it and tears apart the house looking for a poison she doesn’t find.
Sister’s sapling grows apace. She can hear its roots as they spread to the cat’s grave, then the gardens. Mum calls it a “sentinel.” Post-cat, she’s doing better and has returned to her many chores. One night, as she and Sister are making paper, a massive wedge of roof falls on Brother, breaking his right arm. Against Mum’s protests that she can heal him, and Brother’s pleas that he doesn’t want to leave, Dad carries him outside and starts on foot to the distant hospital. Three days later, they return with just three arms between them. Dad says they never got to town. He had to doctor Brother himself by twisting his right arm off at the shoulder, like a snapped branch. He buried the arm in the woods. Brother confirms Dad’s story, proudly. He’d like to dig up his arm, but Mum says “You should never unearth what you’ve already planted.”
Peace returns. Mum admits the cat was a problem. Sister watches her tree spread its branches over the house and feels its roots growing under the floor. Brother’s remaining arm lengthens to compensate for the lost one, and his stub puts out fresh growth: two stocky new arms.
With autumn comes an amazingly bountiful harvest. The whole family works hard to gather, prepare, and preserve the vegetable wealth. Brother begins to grow another arm from the elbow of one of the two new ones. When the garden is stripped to bare soil, Mum moves from plot to plot, feeding the soil with her blood.
Winter is bliss. Dad’s sagging skin, trimmed from his body and cured, provides tarps and hangings, warm bedding, book covers, even a front door with his navel for a knob. Brother can stretch his long left arm through the house to fetch items or play pranks. Because that arm’s too long to reach his mouth and the others too tangled together, Mum feeds Brother by hand. Sister’s tree spreads branches through her window, curls roots up through the floor. Though it grows less mobile, it seems content to bathe in light filtered through curtains of paternal hide.
Sister mostly sits idle, arms splayed to the lengthening daylight. Weeks pass without the family feeling hunger or boredom. They want for nothing. They need nothing except time, rain, sun and soil.
* * *
What’s Cyclopean: There’s something inherently cyclopean about a marble house fallen in as a “squat trapezium.” Windowsills are trimmed in obsidian.
Weirdbuilding: This is definitely not Lovecraft’s obsession with tainted inheritance, but something about “how to select for traits that help our lineages grow into their best selves” rhymes.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Mom’s conviction that a hospital would “keep” Brother, or “put him down,” and that Dad killed the cat, seems like paranoia. But in this world, perhaps it isn’t.
Buy the Book
The Best Weird Fiction of the Year
curated by Michael Kelly
Buy Book
The Best Weird Fiction of the Year
curated by Michael Kelly
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Ruthanna’s Commentary
There’s something about the more surreal end of weird fiction: the draping clocks and flooded cathedrals of story, where consistency comes from the logic of emotion alone rather than worldbuilding. Hallucinatory, often familial, like the maternally-driven transformations in Jamaica Kinkaid’s “My Mother.”
I appreciate the form, but need to take it in small doses. It makes me queasy, and then I start thinking about my belly, and then Dad’s belly, and then aaaaaaahhhhhhhh.
It took me a while to figure out that “Our Best Selves” would be entirely in this mode; I first wondered whether the family was secretly made of wood or only wanted to be, whether they were contemporary back-to-nature extremists or post-apocalyptic survivors, whether “town” was a true horror or an imagined one. The answers, of course, are “yes.” This is cottagecore “back to the land” romanticism taken to extremes of body horror, and the wonder-and-glory-forever of discarding animalistic imperfection in favor of plantlike virtue.
Mum’s bodily fluids become nourishing, ever-flowing tree sap. Dad’s belly (aaaaaahhhhhh) becomes harvestable, a carry-bag for vegetables and a fibrous harvest for paper-making. Brother’s arm is pruned and branches like a fruit tree.
This is the future that anti-vaxxers want. Though many of them would probably like to keep cars and money, even while “weaning” themselves and their children from modern medicines and schools with pesky (pesty-y?) ideas about reality, and becoming entirely self-sufficient except for tax breaks. “Her best self would never need anything but sun and soil and rain and time,” and in the story’s dream logic that conviction doesn’t kill any humans, though it transforms the cat from a beloved pet to a “pest” earning its demise.
Except that the beds are marked by “slabs like tombstones.” In real-world logic, the family would all be dead of starvation and infection. Of salves for crushed arms. Exposure in the woods, trying desperately to carry a broken child to the land of antibiotics and sterile surgeries. It is as corpses, after all, that we feed ever-growing trees, and need nothing that plants don’t need.
And the house is… what? An abandoned graveyard. A giants’ dollhouse. The ruins of human ambition, the impossibility of building a sidewalk that dandelions won’t crack. The absurdity of self-denial, sleeping on stone beds and boasting about the starry view through the cracks. One of those dubious “experience” lodgings that show up on Airbnb: don’t you want to stay in this tent in a tree, a broken-down bus, a ruin in the woods?
A haunted house. What would someone find now, I wonder, if they came out to claim the fixer-upper? There might not even be bones—just an old garden ready for resurrection. And trees, swift-growing and strange, that the newcomers can call their own.
Anne’s Commentary
Why do I find this story so unnerving? So a nice little family moves off the grid and into the woods to find “their best selves.” It’s a counter-cultural impulse that goes much farther back than “hippies,” “tree-huggers,” and “granola-crunchers.” Industrialization and urbanization were already nerve-chafing to many by the 1800s, giving rise to Transcendentalism in America, the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, and Lebensreform in Germany. Think of Thoreau at Walden Pond, bent on “liv[ing] deep and suck[ing] out all the marrow of life.” He “went to the woods because [he] wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” A return to nature both practical and spiritual, self-reliance, all those high-minded ideals! But unlike Ennes’ family, Thoreau didn’t move into a house with history and in dire need of repairs. He built his own cabin as simply as possible, with largely salvaged and second-hand materials, but the structure only had to last the two years of his “experiment” in roughing it; besides, he was close enough to Concord to make frequent visits for shopping and socializing.
The “Our Best Selves” family (the OBS family, henceforth) are really roughing it. An honest realtor would have described their new house not as a fixer-upper but as a tear-down and start the hell over. It soon becomes clear that Mum’s was the will behind this move. Dad apparently has never seen the house in person before. Maybe Mum hasn’t either. Maybe she saw it online, a For-Sale-As-Is-By-Desperate-Owner. Or maybe no purchase was necessary, because the land and dwelling were a bequest from Mum’s side of the family.
The side where marriages always produce only one daughter, making its family tree “a thin, straight line” down which horticultural and herbalist wisdom streams “unbroken and perfectly linear.” Does this imply that Mum’s green thumb is a magical legacy? That’s my inference, anyhow.
I also infer that Mum’s “condition” is part of her genetic inheritance, linked to her horticultural talent. Her cat allergy is a separate problem, though animal intimacy might be inimical to her essentially vegetal nature, hence the wheezing and hives. The “condition,” which Mum regards not as pathology but (for her) a normal function, causes bleeding, pain, varying levels of prostration. Sister worries that one day she’ll need to take the pill-laced tea Mum takes when bleeding. “One day” could be Sister’s menarche, the start of menstruation that signals reproductive capability, possible fertility.
Diverse cultures have viewed menstrual blood as a powerful potentiator of soil fertility, including the Navajo and Cherokee tribes of North America, the Kogi people of Colombia, and the Beng people of Cote d’Ivoire. In modern Western culture, some practice “earth bleeding” or “menstrual gardening,” in which menstrual blood is returned to the earth, not only to use its nutrients as fertilizer but also to express a connection with natural cycles. Mum subscribes to this practice after the harvest, when she lies bleeding in each emptied plot to replenish the depleted soil. And she grins while doing it and tells the family “We’ve done it, we’ve finally done it.” That is, they’ve successfully completed the first cycle of their new way of living.
The females in the family are fulfilling their genetic/magical destinies. Brother, though male, has a sufficient share of Mum’s genes to regenerate his lost arm as branching limbs, while his remaining arm grows long and limber, like the vines that stubbornly cling to and overrun the house. Dad’s another story. Lacking matrilineal genes, he retains his animal nature and might even be considered the livestock of this “farm.” His contribution to harvest is his actual skin, the excess drooping hide that hangs from his abdomen; scraped free of fat and properly cured, it makes a versatile leather for home furnishing. Could it be that with time, Dad will become more like the oddly hairless and long-necked boar he hunted out in their woods?
The OBS family’s lifestyle change is radical in its isolation and absolute reliance on self and the land. What makes it unnervingly weird for those of us who remain, will we or nil we, members of Kingdom Animalia, is how Kingdom Plantae retakes the stone house in the woods and hybridizes its three susceptible residents.
I’ve developed an enduring notion that the “sapling” with which Sister’s so taken is akin to Dendrocnide moroides, the dreaded gympie-gympie of Australia, which can be considered venomous due to the way its hollow hairs actively inject neurotoxins upon contact. The pain the venom causes is so excruciating that the gympie-gympie is also known as the “suicide plant,” since suicide may well seem a better alternative than suffering a sensation of simultaneous electrocution and burning that could persist for months. Sure, Sister can brush against its “fine green hairs” with impunity, but she’s special, like Mum.
I would so not touch that thing.
Next week, Mar remains unresigned to her apocalyptic destiny in Chapters 26-28 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster.[end-mark]
The post Back to the Land, Like It Or Not: Hiram Ennes’ “Our Best Selves” appeared first on Reactor.
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