The Matter of the Strangers by Ticklish 2024

The Matter of the Strangers

I was there at the welcome party when Teroyd returned to us from the mainland. Their account was thorough and fresh, and they related it to us all through the celebration and graciously repeated it for weeks afterwards. They held back no detail, no matter how small or shocking.

And of course, soon the whole island was humming with the report. You were just as likely to hear a recount of it at the mealtimes of the Northern families as the Southern ones. But among all the trials and travails of Teroyd’s journey, that one appalling aspect lasted the longest in people’s tellings:

They don’t rake the bark.

Teroyd went to pains to state that they certainly have trees on the mainland - even more varieties than the ones we know, in fact. And the trees did grow near people, it’s just that the people of the mainland - according to Teroyd - never were seen to scour them.

They said that, early on in their travels, when they went to rake the bark, either for dawnrake or everake, that the men of the mainland would make loud banging sounds and chatter excitedly, as if they wanted to startle Teroyd away from the trunks.

On further observation, Teroyd saw that these faint milk men would pass by trees and ignore the bark altogether. On the rare occasions they saw the people touch the trees at all, the soft, limp protuberances on the end of each small manus made no mark. In their long, sad expedition, Teroyd found no sign of intent on any tree. In desperation, they climbed high up in the branches, thinking perhaps they had found a nation of perverts, but even among the leaves, there were no furrows, no cratches, no hashploughs, not even a tipe.

We had thought that the scant few people who washed up here from the mainland had been cruelly banished for their deformities, or had been disfigured in some barbaric punishment, but Teroyd insists there is a deeper horror out there: that for them, there is no digging through the chalky outer layer of a kind tree, no catching of the claw in the soft flesh below, no sharp exhale of scent on the uplift or the sweet tinkle of sloughspecks at their feet. They don’t know the language of the marks and their flat paws smell only of their own dirt. They talk of the stars in terms of the pungent milk they make, they name the world for the lifeless dirt.

How can they express even the barest sign of kinship or intelligence, having never raked the bark? Can they be said to even be truly alive? Surely on the mainland there can be no real people, just mechanisms inhabited by a slow trickle of instinct. They stagger through a world they can not commune with, their minds full of nothing but holes. All meaning seeps out of their brains and trails behind them on the ground they hold so dear.

So fellows, I will cast my vote for extermination. It will be an act of mercy, or gardening.