I Dream of Disney (Volume II)

18 - Life Can Be A Scream [Z-O-M-B-I-E-S Bucky x Reader] Part I

Part I - You Put The 'Eerie' in 'Cheery'

Moving is always complicated. Packing away your entire life into these stocky, unsteady brown boxes, taping up the memories and binding them in scotch tape, and then following the process of the veritable Tetris game of loading said boxes into moving trucks. It's never easy and, despite my Mom's plight to think of car games for us to play, it's hardly ever fun.

Seabrook. Population 9 416 (plus four). Located in a bay, as the name would suggest, to give it the quaint, small-town atmosphere of everyone knowing everything about you: from your age and maiden name right down to the cause of why your flowers weren't blooming as expected. A great place to grow begonias: a bad place to grow secrets.

I wasn't used to living in a small town, but this one seemed especially picky. Out of all the old things I'd packed from my old life in the city (which, like in Star Wars, seemed to be a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...), many of the boxes contained something new. Seabrook's residents seemed to wear colours only pastel or pale, in a thin range of pink, blue and beige. And, as the car wound down the streets, finding the identical house that would be my own, I noticed that people seemed to be everywhere. They were sitting in lawn chairs or making symmetrical splashes in the swimming pool. To truly sum up the extent of how "small town" this place was, there were garden gnomes. Garden gnomes.

"Eew," My little brother, Randall, grimaces. "Are those real?"

I roll my shoulder, giving the little men one last glance, and sigh.

"Real as in flesh-and-blood," I questioned, "Or real as in not-a-figment-of-my-imagination? Because, either way, I wish they were un-real."

"Come on," Mom chides from the driver seat, "They're cute."

My brother and I exchange a glance. He sticks his tongue out in a gesture of disgust. Is she serious right now? Like a game of expression tennis, I toss back a sharp brow-raise. Amirite?

"I can see you two in my rearview mirror," Mom chirps. "Don't think I can't."

We both look at each other again. Both of us are tempted to pull an eye-roll, but the rearview mirror is dangerous. Just one eye-roll and Medusa-Mom will zap us into stone. And then put us in the garden as 21st-century garden gnomes.

"Cute," Randall says.

I concur, "Positively adorable."

Medusa-Mom nods in contentment. She then turns up the radio, blasting an account of something boring and far away on the news, and leaves us to our banishment in the back seat. We don't mind.

It isn't ten minutes later that she's found the house.

The houses are weird. I come to terms with this as soon as we pull up to a two-storey house that boasts neat, green rectangles of yard and pearly white roses growing in the smaller rectangles of moist soil. The windows are all perfectly measured to be the same sizes as the others on the street, with each design element at the perfect angle to the next and at a perfectly straight line. The bricks are all dark black, with panels of bright yellow. Tulips, bright and yellow as nature could make it, were growing upwards with the accuracy and precision of rulers.

Randall scoots forward in his chair. He gets so close to the window that his breath mists it up and he has to hastily wipe it away with the corner of his hoodie (pastel blue, as Seabrook would have it).

"Are we in the Matrix?" Randall whispers.

"I would say yes," I replied. "But this place doesn't seem that interesting."