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There Were 87 Work-Related Real Estate Deaths in 2019
Corlan McCollum

 You walk into a room, and there’s a pony and a man who’s clearly been 
trampled to death, bled out in the corner. You assume the pony did it, but it’s a 
small room in a regular house, and the door wasn’t blocked, and the pony doesn’t 
look very aggressive or even very big. The dude could’ve gotten out, probably. 
But holy shit, there’s a dead body, and you were just trying to get this house ready 
to show to this young couple looking for a starter home, and they didn’t sign up 
for this! You didn’t sign up for this! So you take the rug out of  the living room 
and roll up the body, and the entire time you’ve got this pony breathing down 
your neck. How did a pony get here? Who even is this guy? So you unroll the rug 
and check his pockets, which are empty, except for a few dog treats. All that for 
nothing. You give the treats to the pony, because you don’t know, maybe they like 
them. It seems like it does. So you roll the body back up, drag it to the backyard, 
and put it in the shed. The pony follows you out, expecting more treats, but not 
being too forward about it. This horse is so chill, you think, there’s no way it 
could’ve killed this dude. You can’t have this pony following you around while you 
try to show the house, though, so you lock it in the shed with the body. Then you 
go and clean up the blood and hoof  prints just in time for the buyers to arrive, 
and the first thing they do is comment on how they’ll have to get a rug for the 
living room. You laugh at that a bit, and they ask you what’s so funny. You don’t 
know, so you tell them that there’s one in the shed, but they’ll have to wait until 
someone comes and changes the lock because the current owners lost the key. So 
you take them around the house, and they think it’s charming. And you come to 
the room that you found the pony in, and there’s nothing special about it, and the 
couple is planning to use it as an office, or a nursery maybe. 
 And then as you’re all walking back into the living room, and they’re all 
excited about buying, you hear a wood door cracking outside and the bray of  an 
unbridled and bloodthirsty pony charging out of  the shed. You run to the back 
door, a sliding glass door that leads out onto the back deck, and you see the rug 
has fallen out of  the shed and unrolled to expose the corpse to the world. And the 
beast is lined up with you, kicking the earth, preparing to charge. So you think 
to yourself, Oh, it was probably the treats, and the pony bursts through the glass and 
rams into you, sending you flying across the room and you break your spine when 
you hit the wall and die instantly.