A take in which a hillbilly discovers the afterlife via outhouse

  A Man and His Trees

  Jeb squats in red dust under a sky so hard and blue it looks painted on. His knees pop like firecrackers. He's fifty-three, built like a fence post, and his back ain't been right since the Transfer. That's what the company called it. Transfer. Like he'd volunteered.

  He presses two fingers into the soil, warm, dry, wrong-textured, like ground glass mixed with sand, and hums a half-remembered tune his grandmother used to sing while canning tomatoes. It ain't magic words. Just a work habit that seems to help.

  The ground clicks.

  A thin sprout pushes up through his fingers, bright as broken bottle glass, singing a single high note that makes his teeth ache. It grows fast, too fast, unfolding like a fern made of crystal and light, already two inches tall and climbing.

  Jeb spits into the dirt, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and says the only prayer he knows: "Please don't blow up."

  The sprout doesn't blow up. It just keeps singing, joined by a thousand other crystal trees spread across the valley in perfect geometric rows that make Jeb's eyes hurt if he looks at them too long. The whole orchard hums like a power line, and the air tastes metallic. Like lightning and something else he can't name.

  Earth 22 is quiet in a way that feels watched.

  The horizon is too clean. Too straight. Like someone drew it with a ruler.

  Moonshine on a New World

  Jeb's official title is Curator, which sounds fancy but pays the same as a groundskeeper. His job: water the crystal trees, make sure they don't die, file reports nobody reads. The company manual runs three hundred pages and uses words like "cultivation protocols" and "specimen maintenance," but what it boils down to is this: keep the trees alive, don't ask questions, collect your paycheck.

  He treats it like a homestead job.

  The orchard stretches for miles, maybe a thousand acres, maybe more, he ain't measured, rows and rows of crystal trees that ring when the wind hits them. They ain't like Earth trees. No leaves, no bark, just smooth translucent trunks that grow in spirals, branches that fork at perfect angles, and a faint internal light that pulses like a heartbeat.

  Jeb learned one thing real quick: if you tap the trunk with a knife, they bleed.

  Clear sap, thick as honey, that catches the light and throws rainbows. It ferments in about three days if you leave it in a jar, and what comes out will strip paint off a ship hull and make a grown man see God. Or at least think real hard about Him.

  Jeb calls it Starshine.

  He's got a lean-to made of scrap metal and polymer sheeting, a fire pit, and a water reclaimer that sounds like a dying cat. What he wants is a proper cabin. Four walls, a roof that don't leak, and an outhouse so he don't have to squat behind rocks like an animal.

  He ain't trying to get rich. He's trying to get comfortable.

  And how's a man supposed to get a wife without a proper outhouse? That's just basic civilization.

  Lumber Is Lumber

  On day forty-seven, Jeb decides crystal wood is, fundamentally, wood.

  He picks a young tree at the edge of the orchard, no thicker than his wrist, barely ten feet tall, and takes an axe to it. The company didn't say he couldn't. The manual's got a whole section on "unauthorized specimen removal," but it's all about selling them, not using them. Jeb ain't selling nothing.

  The axe bites in.

  The tree doesn't chop so much as crack, splitting along internal fracture lines with a sound like breaking glass. The whole trunk shudders and releases a high, brittle note that stings Jeb's teeth and makes his eyes water.

  Three more swings and the tree topples.

  When it hits the ground, the whole orchard answers, a faint sympathetic chime that rolls across the valley like distant thunder, then fades to silence.

  Jeb stands there, axe in hand, sweating in the weird metallic air.

  "Huh," he says. "That's neat."

  He drags the trunk back to his lean-to, already planning. Four walls. A door. Maybe even a window if he's got enough material. The tree's light, surprisingly, hollow in places, with a honeycomb internal structure that's stronger than it looks.

  That night, the wind shifts. The orchard gets quieter. Not silent, but muted, like it's holding its breath.

  The Watchers Come Down the Ridge

  They show up at dusk three days later.

  Jeb's sawing his crystal trunk into planks, slow work, the saw keeps binding on internal structures, when he hears footsteps. Multiple sets. Heavy.

  He looks up and there they are: six figures coming down the ridge at the far end of the orchard, moving in a loose line like hunters who ain't in a hurry.

  They ain't human.

  Tall, seven, maybe eight feet, built like stretched-out people, all limbs and joints that bend wrong. Skin like wet gelatin, translucent enough that Jeb can see darker shapes moving underneath. Wide hips, narrow shoulders, long fingers that end in something between nails and thorns.

  But they're dressed like hillbillies.

  Overalls. Straw hats. Tool belts made of woven fiber and bone. One of them's got what looks like a banjo slung across its back, except it's got too many strings and the body's made from a hollowed-out crystal that catches the last sunlight and throws it around like broken glass.

  They don't arrive like soldiers. They arrive like neighbors coming to complain about your dog.

  The one in front, female, oldest-looking, with a face like a dried apple crossed with a jellyfish, stops ten feet from Jeb's lean-to and squints at his half-built wall.

  "Boy," she says, voice like gravel in a blender. "You done cut one."

  Jeb sets down his saw, wipes crystal dust off his hands, and tries to look friendly. "Afternoon, ma'am. Didn't realize there was folks out here."

  "We ain't folks," she says. "We're Watchers. And this here's our orchard."

  Jeb nods, still trying to be polite. "Company told me this was Earth 22. Said I was supposed to maintain the specimens."

  "Specimens," the old one repeats, and spits. The spit sizzles when it hits the ground. "Y'all call 'em that. We call 'em kin."

  Behind her, the other five shift, hands drifting toward tools that might be weapons.

  Church Talk, But Mean

  The old one, she says her name's Aunt Brine, though Jeb suspects that ain't quite right, just the closest human sounds can get, steps closer and examines his wall planks with a critical eye.

  "This here's Uncle Polk you cut down," she says, tapping a plank with one long finger. "Good tree. Sang bass in the chorus. Died quiet, which is what we all want."

  Jeb blinks. "Ma'am, I apologize, but I didn't know—"

  "Course you didn't. You're human. Y'all got the manners of a kicked mule." She spits again. "But you're here now, so we gotta come to an understanding."

  The negotiation that follows is pure hick diplomacy. Lots of spitting. Lots of insults disguised as kindness. The big one—Cletch, built like a barn with arms—keeps patting a six-foot stick he calls a "peace stick" that looks about as peaceful as a land mine.

  The skinny one, Lulabelle, all elbows and gossip, keeps asking Jeb about his outhouse plans with an intensity that makes him uncomfortable.

  "You fixin' to build one?" she asks for the third time.

  "Well, yeah. Man needs a place to—"

  "Where?"

  Jeb points toward the center of the orchard. "Figured there. Level ground, good drainage—"

  All six Watchers go still.

  Aunt Brine says, real slow, "Boy. You fixin' to shit in the middle of the family plot?"

  Jeb looks at the orchard. At the crystal trees standing in their perfect rows, humming their weird harmonics. "This is a graveyard?"

  "Graveyard, nursery, memory hall. All of it." Aunt Brine crosses her arms. "Trees ain't trees, boy. They're us. When we pass, we go into the ground, and up we come. Singing."

  Jeb processes this. "So... these are dead people?"

  "Dead ain't the right word. Recorded. The trees remember everything. Voice, mind, all of it. Long as the orchard stands, we don't really die."

  Jeb looks at his wall planks and feels a little sick.

  The Sap Tax

  The agreement they reach is simple: Jeb can stay. He can build his cabin. But he's gotta respect the orchard, and that means tribute.

  "You got Starshine," Aunt Brine says, and Jeb's stomach drops because he thought his still was hidden.

  "How'd you—"

  "Boy, we can smell that from three ridges over. You think you're the first human tried to make liquor out of tree blood?"

  Jeb's moonshiner instincts kick in, deny, deflect, hide the good stuff, but he's outnumbered and Cletch is still patting that peace stick.

  "Alright," he says. "How much you want?"

  "Half."

  "That's robbery!"

  "That's our kin you're bleeding, boy. Be grateful we're lettin' you keep any."

  So Jeb hands over half his Starshine, and the Watchers crack it open right there, passing jars around like they're at a family reunion.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  They get drunk fast.

  Drunk and rowdy, singing songs in their own language that sound like wind chimes falling down stairs. Lulabelle starts crying about somebody named Merle who "sang real pretty before the rot took him." Cletch tries to teach Jeb a dance that involves stomping in patterns that make the ground ring.

  None of them seem to realize the Starshine is made from the trees.

  None of them make the connection that they're drinking their dead relatives.

  The Farmer's Daughter

  Two weeks later, Lulabelle shows up alone.

  Jeb's hammering crystal planks together, they don't nail easy, you gotta drill pilot holes first, when she just appears at the edge of his work site, watching with those big wet eyes that don't blink right.

  "Hey, Jeb."

  "Ma'am." He tips his hat, keeps working.

  "Can I touch your arm?"

  Jeb stops hammering. "Pardon?"

  "Your arms. They're so... short. Compact. How do you reach things?"

  This starts happening regular. Lulabelle drops by every few days, asks weird questions, stands too close. Wants to know about human hair. About fingernails. About whether his bones are solid all the way through.

  It ain't sexual, exactly. More like she's never seen a dog before and thinks it might do a trick.

  Then one day she asks, "What's kissing?"

  Jeb, who ain't the smartest man but knows a trap when he sees one, tries to explain it in clinical terms. Mouth to mouth. Expression of affection. Cultural practice.

  "Show me," she says.

  And Jeb, because he's been alone on Earth 22 for three months and she's looking at him with those big weird eyes and he's only human, leans in and gives her a peck on what he thinks is her mouth.

  Lulabelle recoils like he slapped her.

  "You—you locked your orifice to mine!"

  "That's... that's what a kiss is?"

  "That's obscene! That's—" She makes a sound like a garbage disposal eating a fork. "That's assault!"

  By the time Aunt Brine and the others show up, Lulabelle's worked herself into hysterics, Jeb's trying to apologize, and Cletch is warming up his peace stick.

  "Defiled her!" Lulabelle wails. "Put his mouth-hole on mine!"

  Aunt Brine looks at Jeb like he's something she scraped off her shoe. "Boy, is that true?"

  "It was just a kiss! She asked me to!"

  "Asking don't make it right! You can't just go pressin' holes together like that! What kind of perverted—"

  Jeb, desperate, falls back on the only solution he can think of: "I'll marry her!"

  Dead silence.

  Then Cletch picks up his peace stick.

  "Boy," Aunt Brine says, real quiet, "are you tryin' to make things worse?"

  Turns out "marriage" in their culture is what you do to prisoners. Permanent bonding. Property transfer. Slavery with paperwork.

  It takes Jeb two hours of groveling, a full jar of Starshine, and a promise to build Lulabelle a "apology structure" before they agree not to beat him to death.

  Lulabelle won't look at him for a month.

  The Outhouse Offense

  Jeb builds his outhouse right where he planned: smack in the middle of the orchard, on level ground with good drainage.

  The Watchers watch him do it. They don't say nothing, just stand at the ridge line like a jury, silent and judging.

  When he's done, four walls, a roof, a crescent moon carved in the door because he's got standards, Aunt Brine walks down and examines it.

  "You really did it," she says.

  "Yes ma'am. Man needs his facilities."

  "In the middle of the family plot."

  "I dug a proper pit. It's sanitary."

  She just shakes her head. "You're dumber than a box of hammers, boy. But you're consistent."

  First time Jeb uses it, nothing weird happens. It's just an outhouse. Smells like an outhouse. Does what an outhouse does.

  Second time, he notices the trees nearby are humming different. Louder. More complex harmonics that make his back teeth vibrate.

  Third time, he sees the light.

  Not outside light. Inside light. The crystal trees all around his outhouse are glowing brighter, pulsing in patterns that look almost like language, and there's a sound, not the usual wind-chime hum but something deeper, rhythmic, like breathing.

  He's sitting there, pants around his ankles, when the voice starts.

  Not out loud. In his head.

  —soil composition optimal for third-generation bloom cycle integration of phosphates suggests—

  Jeb nearly falls off the seat.

  "Hello?"

  —presence detected non-standard chemistry fascinating are you the new—

  The voice cuts off. Then another one starts, older-sounding, female, speaking words Jeb don't understand but somehow feels in his bones. Then another. And another.

  He's hearing the trees. Or what's in the trees. Or what used to be in the ground before it became trees.

  He's hearing the dead.

  And they're hearing him.

  Jeb finishes his business in a hurry, yanks up his pants, and staggers out of the outhouse into bright daylight that feels too normal, too solid.

  He stands there, breathing hard, staring at the outhouse.

  Then he goes back inside and tries again.

  The Trees Are Listening

  Over the next week, Jeb figures it out.

  The outhouse is a telephone booth to the afterlife.

  Not all the time. Only when he's sitting down, relaxed, doing his business. Something about the combination, his waste seeping into the soil, the crystal roots underneath, the proximity, the quiet concentration, creates a connection. The trees pick up his thoughts. His emotions. And they talk back.

  It ain't pleasant conversation. Most of the voices are fragments, echoes, memories stuck on repeat. But some of them are coherent. Some of them remember being alive.

  One night he gets drunk on Starshine and staggers out to the outhouse around midnight. Sits down. Waits.

  The voices come fast, overlapping, until one pushes through:

  You are not kin.

  "No ma'am. I'm human."

  Why are you here?

  "Company sent me. Said I was supposed to maintain the trees."

  We are not trees. We are the Recorded. Every voice, every thought, every moment—stored in crystalline structure. Perfect memory. Perfect preservation.

  "So... you're ghosts?"

  We are not gone. We are translated. This is the Song—our afterlife, our eternity. As long as the orchard stands, we sing.

  Jeb sits in the dark, pants around his ankles, talking to a dead alien through a toilet seat.

  "Is it... good? Being a tree?"

  It is eternal. It is communion. It is everything we were, preserved forever. What more could we want?

  Jeb don't got an answer for that.

  Harvest Season

  Jeb finishes his cabin on day ninety-three.

  Four walls of crystal planks, a door that swings smooth, a window that catches the light and throws rainbows across the floor. He's proud of it. First real thing he's built since Earth.

  That night, he sleeps inside for the first time.

  The cabin hums.

  Soft at first, barely audible, but it grows. The crystal planks resonate with the orchard, picking up the Song and amplifying it. The nails he drove into the wood chime in harmony. The whole structure becomes a tuning fork.

  Jeb lies on his cot, listening to the walls sing, and feels knowledge seeping into his skull like water through sand.

  He learns about the Watchers' history. About the wars they fought three thousand years ago. About the plague that killed half their population and how they discovered that the dead could be preserved in crystal, grown back as trees, kept singing forever.

  He learns about the soil composition needed for optimal growth. About the harmonic frequencies that encourage new sprouts. About the way grief tastes when it's filtered through crystal and time.

  He don't sleep. Can't sleep. The Song's too loud, too insistent, filling his head with voices that ain't his.

  Around three in the morning, something answers from outside.

  Not the orchard. Something else. Something far away.

  A deep, slow crystal groan that makes the cabin walls shiver and the air turn thick. Every tree in the orchard goes silent at once, like somebody cut a wire.

  Jeb sits up, heart pounding.

  The Watchers appear at his door five minutes later, moving fast, carrying weapons that glow with internal light.

  Aunt Brine don't knock. Just yanks the door open and glares at him.

  "Boy," she says, "you done called the Collectors."

  Hick War in a Glass Forest

  The Collectors ain't creatures, exactly.

  They're a phenomenon. A pressure. A wrongness in the air that makes Jeb's eyes water and his teeth ache.

  The light bends around them—or through them, Jeb can't tell. The orchard's harmonics flatten, compressed, like somebody's pressing all the music into a smaller and smaller space.

  "What are they?" Jeb asks.

  "Harvesters," Aunt Brine says, loading something that looks like a crossbow made of bone and light. "They come when the Song gets loud enough. Take samples. Sometimes take whole orchards."

  "Samples of what?"

  "Us, boy. The Recorded. They collect memories like you collect stamps."

  The Watchers spread out, moving into defensive positions around the orchard. Cletch's got his peace stick. Lulabelle's got two knives that hum when she moves. The others got weapons Jeb ain't got names for.

  "What do I do?" Jeb asks.

  "Don't die," Aunt Brine says, and runs toward the ridge.

  The fight that follows is messy, chaotic, more yelling than tactics. The Watchers know this ground, know the trees, but the Collectors—whatever they are—move wrong, appear in places they shouldn't be, phase through solid matter like it's suggestions.

  Jeb realizes two things:

  One: The Collectors ain't interested in the trees. They're circling his cabin. Drawn to it. To the resonance.

  Two: He's an idiot who built a beacon in the middle of a graveyard.

  "They want the cabin!" he shouts, but nobody's listening. Cletch is fighting something invisible. Lulabelle's bleeding from a cut that appeared on her arm with no visible cause.

  Jeb runs back inside his cabin.

  The walls are screaming now, harmonics gone wild, the Song reaching frequencies that make his vision blur. He can feel the Collectors pressing in, trying to take it, harvest it, add it to whatever collection they keep.

  He ain't smart. Never claimed to be.

  But he knows one thing: Starshine burns.

  Jeb grabs his still, forty pounds of copper tubing and crystal-sap residue, and drags it into the cabin's center. Smashes the collection jar, floods the crystal floor with raw Starshine, soaks the walls, the door, every surface.

  The cabin's resonance changes immediately. The Song gets sharper, wilder, feedback building on itself.

  Jeb strikes a match.

  "Sorry, Uncle Polk," he says, and drops it.

  The Starshine don't burn like normal alcohol. It burns like concentrated starlight, crystal-clean and bright enough to leave afterimages. The whole cabin ignites in a pillar of white fire that sings, actually sings, one massive sustained note that makes the ground shake.

  The Collectors recoil.

  Not from the heat. From the sound. That note is poison to them, discord in whatever frequency they operate on. They fold away, bending back into whatever space they came from, retreating fast.

  Jeb staggers out of the burning cabin and collapses in the red dust.

  The Watchers stand in a loose circle, staring at him.

  Aunt Brine walks over, looks at the burning cabin, then at Jeb.

  "You're still stupid, boy," she says. "But you ain't useless."

  A Cabin Ain't a Home

  Dawn comes with Jeb sitting in the ashes of his cabin, covered in soot, everything he built reduced to glittering rubble.

  The Watchers patch up their wounded, count their dead, two trees damaged, one sapling cracked clean through and eventually drift back to wherever they live when they ain't watching the orchard.

  Aunt Brine stays.

  "Still got your outhouse," she says.

  Jeb looks at it. Standing there untouched, crescent moon cheerful in the morning light.

  "Yeah."

  "You know what it does, don't you?"

  "I got an idea."

  Aunt Brine squats down next to him, joints creaking. "Three thousand years we been growing the Recorded. Three thousand years trying to hear them clear. And you—" she spits "—you build a shithouse and crack it open like it's nothing."

  "Didn't mean to."

  "Course you didn't. You're dumb as a post." She pokes him in the ribs. "But it works. The communion. Whatever you're doing in there it creates a bridge."

  "To the dead."

  "To the Recorded. Our afterlife." She stands up, bones popping. "I'm gonna try it."

  "Ma'am?"

  "Your outhouse, boy. I'm gonna use it."

  Aunt Brine walks to the outhouse, opens the door, and goes inside.

  Jeb waits.

  An hour later she comes out.

  Her face, what passes for a face, is doing something Jeb ain't seen before. Trembling. Wet. She's crying, he realizes. Alien tears running down translucent cheeks.

  "I talked to my mother," she whispers. "She's been gone two hundred years, but I heard her. Clear as anything."

  "That's... that's good?"

  "I had to defecate first. Took a while. But once I did—" She makes a sound between a laugh and a sob. "She was there. Waiting. Singing."

  Aunt Brine looks at Jeb like she's seeing him for the first time.

  "You built a temple, boy. You just built it stupid."

  Earth 22 Ain't Finished With Him

  Three days later, Jeb plants a new crystal sprout where his cabin used to stand.

  Press two fingers in the soil. Hum the tune. Wait for the click.

  The sprout rises, bright as broken glass, singing its newborn note.

  But this time, there's something different.

  A faint shape forming inside the crystal grain. Features. A face trying to resolve itself in the transparent structure.

  His face.

  The orchard learned him. Recorded him. Every thought he had in that cabin, every word he spoke in the outhouse, every moment he spent among the trees—stored, preserved, beginning to grow back.

  Aunt Brine watches the sprout with him, silent.

  Finally she says: "Boy... it done took a likin' to you. That ain't good."

  Jeb stares at his own face forming in crystal.

  "Yeah," he says. "I figured."

  * * *

  This is how communion with the Recorded was first discovered.

  Not by scientists. Not by priests. By a human hillbilly named Jebediah Rook who just wanted a decent place to shit.

  The mechanism is now well-understood: crystal tree root systems interact with specific organic compounds in waste, creating a resonant bridge to the memory patterns stored in the crystalline matrix. The position, seated, relaxed, vulnerable, creates the necessary mental state for reception. The Starshine, fermented tree sap consumed prior to communion, acts as both catalyst and amplifier.

  Within two years, the Watchers built seventeen Communion Houses across Earth 22, all based on Jeb's original design. The practice spread to other Watcher colonies. The dead were no longer distant music but conversation partners, available to anyone willing to sit still and wait.

  Jeb himself refused payment. Said he was just doing his job as Curator. Kept tending the orchard, kept making Starshine, kept using his original outhouse even after they offered to build him a proper temple.

  "This one works fine," he said.

  On Earth 22, the orchard still stands. Jeb's outhouse is maintained as a historical site, though it remains fully functional. Pilgrims come from across three star systems to sit where he sat, speak to their own dead, and leave offerings of fermented sap.

  The sprout with Jeb's face has grown into a mature tree now, singing bass in the chorus. Sometimes, if you listen close during the right season, you can hear him complaining about property maintenance and asking if anybody's checked the still lately.

  The Watchers call him "Stupid-Smart Jeb" in their language, which translates roughly to "the fool who sees sideways."

  It's the highest compliment they got.

  — END —

  EXHIBIT NOTES

  Location: Earth 22, Crystal Orchard preserve

  Curator: Jebediah "Jeb" Rook (human, expired, currently Recorded)

  Primary Discovery: Inter-species communion via sanitation infrastructure

  Status: Active exhibit, pilgrimage site, historical monument

  Feeding Schedule: Starshine offerings accepted daily

  Warning: PLEASE DO NOT FEED the Curator directly. He's a tree now. (See Appendix F: Feeding Events)