Zsolt Zsemba
Patrick W. MarshFrom the Greenland Diaries: Happy Little Trees
“I really didn’t think I’d be using it for this,” Debbie mumbled to a few squirrels crossing the trees to her right. “This is not what I had in mind. Not at all. I guess none of us did, did we? Who could have thought this much has changed in less than two years.”
She stopped and dipped her brush in a can of odorless paint thinner at her feet. It caught a bit of afternoon sun as it gleamed between the sharp stalks of overgrown grass. She beat the brush on the wooden legs of her easel, just like Bob Ross used to do. She tried to laugh thinking of his videos.
She wondered if she would ever watch them again. Power had not been restored, and she had a VHS tape of a few of the episodes. She had noticed them while hiding in her basement beneath the stairs when the Drum first started. They would shake beneath the old tube television her son Tyler had left there from the 90’s. He had been out in California when the Drum started. She doubted she would ever see him again.
Her husband, Tim, had died the first night. Debbie had happened to be downstairs grabbing some chicken breasts to defrost when she heard them arrive. Her instincts fired and she hid quickly and silently. It was like a dormant portion of her brain switched on. The reptilian lobe took control and hid her like she was nothing more than a frightened insect.
It had worked; she had survived.
Now, at present, she was in her backyard. The same backyard of oak trees and white fencing that kept her kids from escaping when they were toddlers. The same backyard her husband had tried to play catch with their son despite him having no interest in sports or athletics. Despite the rampant greenery, and the destruction, she could still see shadows in her memories of these moments. They were her only escape from all the heartbreak and weirdness that had appeared with these actual, living shadows.
One of these very monsters was in her backyard.
Debbie had gone to college for visual art. She then met Tim, who had just returned from Vietnam. They got married, had kids, and her artistic endeavors had firmly gone into purgatory. She always made a little time each week to watch Bob Ross on PBS to keep her skills honed. She loved landscape painting with both oils and acrylics. She loved him, too. She made plenty of mistakes following his tutorials, but he always made her feel like she was supposed to make mistakes. It gave her a sense of confidence, and eventually she was painting without him and to the quality she was creating back when she graduated.
Then the Drum arrived, and everything changed.
Debbie laughed. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Of all the things to be painting. She couldn’t abandon this emotion. This weirdness. What would Bob Ross say? He was the embodiment of wholesomeness to so many. His ability to communicate positivity in the face of failure and difficulty was unmatched.
What would he say about the Unnamed?
They were beyond anything that his canvas could capture, emulate, or portray, but here Debbie was, using it to paint one in her backyard. Since the destruction of the Drum, survivors had moved through the wasteland and said the Unnamed should no longer be hunting humans like they did before. With the Drum gone they would have a new role in our world, but nobody knew what or how.
When Debbie first noticed it, mixed in with the edge of the trees that led to the forest she’d lived next to for thirty years, she immediately wanted to hide. However, it stopped, and just floated on the edge of the trees, like it didn’t know where to go. After watching it standing amongst the bark, branches, and billowing leaves, Debbie got an interesting idea. She had been staring at her art supplies and canvases for months. They were just sitting there. Her digital camera and phone had long died. She needed to capture it, to pull into her own voice.
To make it hers.
After all, despite the nights of pure violence, the Unnamed was magnificent in all terms of the word.
It was ten feet tall, wide, and curled over itself like a frozen wave of fluctuating darkness and bone. Its hooks of golden claws were dug into the earth, with flowers sprouting around their impressions and edges. Birds were sitting and chirping along the golden horns and spikes sprouting from their back and hood. Even the shifting shadow beneath that midnight fabric seemed to glow in the sunlight. Below that was its chest of amber ribs, which reflected sunspots of daylight. Occasionally it shifted, but mostly it was just a violent cloud sitting still. A tempest tethered. A sleeping maelstrom of claws and bones. A thunderstorm lost and confused without its demon thunder to call home.
“You’re a good subject; you stay awfully still” Debbie would occasionally mumble from across her yard. She had set up her easel on the back of her brown deck. She had to chisel away at some of the plants that had choked the wooden planks with a spade. Eventually she got it to sit evenly.
“Do you understand what I’m doing?”
The Unnamed would never reply. Debbie was getting low on food. She had heard other survivors were beginning to leave the neighborhood to look for more supplies. Lines of resources were trying to be established, but people still did not trust traveling around the Unnamed, or the Reanimated. She sighed as she labored with the paints. Most of them had been salvageable but there were a few colors that she had to use sparingly. Sadly, green was one of them.
“You’ll always be remembered,” she said, adding the trees and wildlife behind its grizzly shape.
“Nobody will remember me.”
If you want to learn more about the Greenland Diaries series, you can get the Kindle version of the first book for a dollar right here, or read the first ten days for free.
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