The Outsiders Narrative

It was a warm summer's day, yet the train's window felt like ice on Oliver's cheek. The methodical rumbling of the tracks combined with the insipid rural landscape didn’t help him pass the time. He was headed south to the city of Guthrie, Oklahoma, the epitome of small towns, where Oliver spent the first 17 years of his childhood. He and his three brothers were raised in a feeble excuse of a house just around the corner of the town's local elementary school. He remembered the afternoons spent on the local playground, sun shining down on him and his brothers, baking the layers of dirt and grime on their skin only to have it scrubbed away under the freezing hose water behind their house. Olivers reminiscence was interrupted by the harsh screech of the trains breaks. As the train settled into the station it was as if the current situation had finally occurred to him. He was going to see his father. To any normal person, seeing their own parents wouldn’t be so hard, but seeing as how he hasn’t spoken to his father in 9

Half a dozen ravens perched on a telephone wire crowded as Oliver stepped past them, and he could’ve sworn that it had gotten a few degrees colder. Oliver paused on his trail and turned to his left. He had arrived. Not every lawn in the neighborhood may have been pristine, or even decent, but the yard of his childhood home was almost impossibly horrendous. The grass had grown so high that skittering squirrels were nothing but an occasional rustle in the miniature jungle that was the lawn. The once vivid shrubs that lined the house were nothing but empty skeletons with patchy dresses of rotting leaves. A cracked stone path led to a porch that was stacked with copies of The Guthrie News Reader. Oliver carefully stepped his way up to the faded front door. When his hand reached the doorbell he felt its corroded metal crumble in his fingers. He pounded on the door and waited a few