A Year with The Outsider

FIRE

The blaze roared and popped and Jonny stepped into it.

Before Jonny’s skin could blister the infection took hold.  Blood pumped through his body to keep him from passing out.  The pain of the black marks moving over his entire body replaced that of the fire.  Once the roots had spread enough so that his entire skin was a crisscrossed network of lines, a feeling of energy and potential superseded the ache of the illness.  He opened his eyes, which he could not remember closing, and took in the sharpened sights the yard and Sparks and the fire.  The roots grew out from his body now, trailing a few inches off his skin before becoming smoke in the air.  He flashed a grin at Sparks as the flames licked his cheek.  

Screaming from up the hill assailed Jonny’s heightened hearing, the voice of the new girl in his homeroom.

Going Outside

Accessing The Outsider was easier than ever before.  Jonny figured it was the time of year.  The sun would go down in about an hour and a half, and not much light reached the sporting goods store parking lot.  Jonny closed his eyes and remembered the time at summer camp when a bee had landed on his finger while he stood next to the pool.  He kept his body still, watching the bee crawl over his cuticle and down toward the middle finger joint and hoping as hard as he could that it would fly away without stinging him.  He figured he must have looked funny, doing his best marble statue impression with his elbow bent and his finger pointing at the sky with a bee crawling over it, because one of the other boys started laughing.  This other boy, husky and sporting a crewcut, got around in front of Jonny and gave him a toothy smile and a great shove to the chest.  Jonny went into the pool flailing his arms.  Jonny recalled with perfect clarity the pain of the bee’s stinger piercing the skin between his fingers and the laughter from all the surrounding kids which began before he even hit the water.  Jonny focused on the moment he broke the pool’s surface.  A perfect moment of rage.

The Very Beginning

The trees had learned to speak English, but not very well.  The problem was scale.  A tree could learn at the same relative rate as a person, but just as they grew and lived and died on a massive timeline, so too did they gain new skills.  Jonny had ended up hauling a battery-operated speaker system up the mountain and playing language tutorial CD’s and later on novels read aloud, all at fast-forward.  The idea had been to get past the trees’ inbuilt perceptual slowness, and it had worked just well enough for hauling crates of CD’s and D-cells up the mountain to not to be a total waste of time.

The upside was that he only had to teach one tree because of their predilection for filling each other in on everything as it happened.  At the edge of the bare granite mountaintop, really an even shorter offshoot of the Berkshires, on which The Outsider had been born stood the oldest tree in the forest.  It was an oak, and it would outlive the much younger upstart maples, spruces, birches, and pines despite its already tremendous age.  Thus if it could learn English with its gigantic timescale even by tree standards, any tree could.  Its root system reached halfway down the mountain, the better to extract nutrients from topsoil rather than trying to grow through the solid rock disk to which the ancient mountain had eroded.  It had an unsplit trunk rising straight into the sky, but was not intimidatingly tall.  The longest-lived trees, after all, are some of the smallest.  It had breadth however, as the mountaintop lacked the crowded canopy of the valley below.