The prophet Childrey Merry places hot coals inside his eyes and sees for the first time, a deep sensation that reaches through his toes and takes root in the grainy soil. He welcomes fevers, the purification and lust and vision, that drench his skin and coat his tongue in soft white foam.

 

Trees grow in the walls, sprouting from the trash in the alleys like rats. All over the world even men are becoming trees, this infestation showing no sign of stopping.

 

Long streets of burnt pockets make up the dirty market town. Trees infest dead wood houses, crawling around on the floor. Men can become trees. One day Childrey turns into a tree for the sin of seeing.

 

His hands and feet grow hard and knotted, the texture turns rough, and dirt and moss appear in the creases that once were spaces between fingers. These fingers are long, brittle, curling in on themselves. Feet and legs become heavy and hard to move. Brown in color. Dark, rigid. Extremities contort, roots grow in place of bones, intricate water systems curl in gentle tendrils.  What shows is decay.

 

Decaying bark’s stink plants the wife of Childrey in a separate bed. She refuses to touch him in his awful state and he misses the comfort of her eyes sitting on top of his. The villagers know he is cursed. He must have done evil to warrant such strangeness and they guess at this evil in the taverns and market streets. This change in form can only yield a change in function, in fiction, and when the walls come down we are free but in this freedom all is falling around us, all the birds on the roof fall into our hair with cats and leaves from the rain gutter and rain falls too, and the rivers and streams and hordes of bees and cattle swarm about, their fingernails aglow.

 

Childrey tries to hack off his palms. This does not work. He then attempts to sheer off the outside of his hands—his true fingers must be somewhere underneath; he can feel them. But the knife yields a dark sap, a fetid smell. He only manages to peel up a small corner of handbark, but even from this wound sap and amber pus oozes. The babies of the village curse in strange tongues and every virgin's hair falls out. The sun gleams on these pale bald heads. He hears screaming, and then realizes that this hoarse animal noise is coming from him.

 

He falls asleep in his bed. The village boys have piled moist soil from the garden on the sheets, but the cool loam feels good on his tired barkback and so he leaves it be. His middle grows rounder, more trunklike, and his pewter belt buckle falls to the ground. In the morning Childrey awakes alone. The villagers believe a spirit inhabits him and takes its own form from within his body. While he sleeps they pack up their belongings and abandon him. His wife leaves too, with their young son. Childrey cries, sobbing deeply, and his inhalations wind in his deep insides and click like chimes from deep in his stomach. He is alone in the forest, surrounded by trees.

 

He wails for his lost wife and son. Childrey doesn’t want to be alone. Suddenly, slow murmuring around him, the vague whispers of the trees, turns to singing, and he realizes that the grove, every plant, is humming, the subtle rise of which builds to a low, droning chant. He joins in. He chants with the forest every morning, and he is content. He grows to be an ancient tree, with serpentine roots and friendly fingers of vine caressing his body. Time passes, and he learns to slow the sap of his thoughts and movements. One winter he meets a medusa tree, with snakes winding in her leaves and through her nostrils. The next day she explodes, something to do with tree sap expansion, but this does not make sense to Childrey. Flowers open and rot away to notes of music playing like slow honey through the air. Colors deepen and appear more wondrous than before. He sees with tree eyes, which are not eyes at all, and hears with tree ears, which are not ears at all. His mouths are all over his body, every toe consuming. The earth morphs to his new sense of vision and he sees through every branch and every root as his real eyes cloud over, harden, and fall out. His village forgets him, but some years he smells his wife or child’s scent on the breeze as it winds through the forest.