THE GIRL OUTSIDE OF TIME
THE GIRL OUTSIDE OF TIME
THE GIRL OUTSIDE OF TIME
THE GIRL OUTSIDE OF TIME

 Ian Goodale

Renée knew who she was before she was born. Her mind was able to perceive multiple points in time simultaneously, allowing her to exist, in some sense, even before her conception. Swimming through the dark ether of pre-existence, she marveled at the wonders of earth like a fish discovering a new coral reef. The planet, utterly alien to her unincarnated mind but familiar to its future state of being, seemed at once quotidian and miraculous. Her sense of self hovered between the numinous and the numb—between an overwhelming wonder and a dull nothingness. She swam slowly through this indeterminate state until, finally, she was born.

Her perception of time did not change after her emergence into the world. Her drifting among the ruins of the past and her dreams of the future continued—the two spectrums of experience like the poles on a globe spinning so fast, blending all of its territories into one mix of indistinguishable color.

Renée’s parents became convinced that something was amiss around her second birthday. She had always seemed a bit dreamy, a child off in her own world, but with the passage of time the isolation only grew, and her parents could no longer chalk it up to mere introversion. Her language acquisition was not exactly delayed, but was extremely irregular—she would sometimes use a word she had learned in her thirties mixed in with the babble of an infant or the silence of her pre-incarnated pseudoexistence. She would, when living in the present, show great interest in her family and other children at the playground, but when swept away into another chronological stage of being her eyes would glaze over and she would be gone, gone into a world no one but her could fathom. They rushed her to their pediatrician, who referred them to a neurologist, who ran a number of tests and concluded that the results were inconclusive. They would just have to wait and see how she turned out.

They were worried, endlessly worried—and then the turn came, and all their anxieties trailed away, like dead little jellyfish off into a vast open graveyard of deep ocean.

There was crimson in the autumn sky. The moon leered down like an oppressive parent, hovering over the earth with a heavy gaze and directionless judgment that seemed as though it might fall on anyone, at random, for any reason at all. There was a convergence in a galaxy immeasurably distant from the family’s, a lining up of stars or planets or some other unknowable coincidence that, although located in a point in space so far from the girl and her kin that no one on earth would have been able to observe it before the sun blazed out finally into nothingness and left behind only a frail, empty blackness in its place. This convergence was nevertheless having a profound effect on her family, and her family alone.

Strange synchronicities began to occur. Her father dreamed of a large stag emerging from the woods behind their home, and two days later saw the exact animal—replete with a very distinct pattern of interlocking crescent moons in its antlers—in the same spot he had dreamed it appearing. Her mother was able to smell things before they occurred, a sort of olfactory clairvoyance—she once sensed that her husband would prepare asparagus for dinner a full week before he had decided to surprise her with her favorite vegetable.

And Renée was suddenly able to better navigate her varied temporal experiences. She could move between them relatively freely, now, without being weighed down by the tiresome burden of being cast hither and thither in time.

She used her newfound ability to try and suss out what was occurring in her home. Her family’s odd experiences were beginning to grow worrying—the innocuous predictions had begun to ripen and bloom into paranoid fantasies of mind control and global domination. Her parents were now convinced that they had somehow uncovered a mysterious intergalactic corporation’s secret plot to rule the universe under a confederation of shell companies. These companies would act the part of independent organizations, creating an illusion of democracy to veil the authoritarian reality of the new cosmic order. This new order had been revealed only to the parents in some sort of glitch in the corporation’s plan—an unhappy accident that resulted not in the fracturing of the evil scheme (for the plot was so thoroughly planned and well-executed that it was virtually impossible to thwart or fail), but only in the impotent suffering of her unhappy progenitors.

They slowly lost their sanity. They viewed their position in the world as so privileged that they believed their child possessed magical powers, that she was a spiritual beacon spawned from their mystically-charged loins. She was the Philosopher’s Stone, they reasoned, a human incarnation of immense power. They thought to harness her innate strength—must harness it, in fact—to promote the healing of the world, a unification of the warring forces that they believed were embattling both their own minds and the collective consciousness of the planet.

They wanted Renée to function as an antenna. To accomplish this, they needed to place her in the middle of a large, open space to ensure her signals could be radiated and absorbed into and from the universe without impediment. They selected a large field filled with wildflowers and anthills—symbols, as they were, of wisdom and strength. And into the wilderness she was sent, alone, to brave the harsh wilds and brace the failing world all on her own.

The day quickly subsided into a slow and laborious evening, like a prolonged exhalation. She began to speak to herself to pass the time and comfort herself in the bleak expanse of the vast night, words without clear meaning tumbling from her mouth in a steady stream of sound.

Then the woods began to speak back. The words were garbled, but for the most part intelligible. Most of the speech calmly told her to leave. Quiet, almost maternal voices asking politely to go home—for it was dark and only getting darker, and the meadow in the forest was no place for a young girl. She explained her situation, the strange ambitions and beliefs of her parents, how she was forced to remain out there in the suburban wilderness—and the trees grew worried for her safety. They asked her if she would be okay with accepting the woods as her guardian. They would protect her, would keep her safe, but doing so might result in things she could not foresee—and her parents’ safety could not be likewise assured. Scared and alone, she nodded, speaking a soft affirmative with a voice narrow and wispy, as some of the threads of cotton from the frayed edges of her t-shirt unraveled in the empty air.

And then the woods went silent. The edges of time began to blur once more, pulling Renée toward the past and the future simultaneously. Suddenly fearful and uncertain, the girl tumbled into panic and ran away as fast as her legs could carry her.

She ran in circles through the darkening woods for an hour or so before she finally found her way out. The sharp slapping of her sneakers against the weedless sidewalk was a welcome disruption of the quiet that had pervaded the woods. She sprinted home, heart pounding a steady beat to guide her back to her parents, thinking only of the warm embrace the familiar would offer her as the stabbing clatter of her footfalls echoed through the neighborhood in reverberating blasts of aural lightning. The comfort of the known would pull her back from the edge of timelessness, away from the maelstrom of the non-chronological and toward the solidity of the present.

The police were arriving at her house just as she turned the corner to her street. The neighbors had called in an urgent request for help. Roots and branches had erupted from the earth and consumed her home. The lights in the house were still on, though were harder to see behind the dense foliage and winding branches. The dim orange of the obscured lights glowed like dying suns, reflecting off the dull, dark brown of the trees. She stood back as the police sauntered slowly up to the house, scratching their heads, trying to figure out what had happened.

Her parents were still in the house, one of her neighbors said. They had heard their screams when the roots first burst from the soil. But nothing except silence had emerged from the building for quite a while. There were no signs of attempted escape.

The girl stood and stared at the remnants of her home, now contorted and transformed by the power of the trees. It resembled an altar of some ancient, inhuman force now—something alien to the human mind, much older than anything except the forest.

She listened intently, hoping to hear her parents’ voices suddenly drift out from the imprisoned house.

But only the distant, steady hum of cicadas found its way into her ears.

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