"Joshua, come and say goodbye to Mrs. Marmeyer." Our neighbor was moving away. Her and Mr. Marmeyer divorced.
Mrs. Marmeyer got me into reading. I'd broken my leg and was glumly watching friends play in the street.
"You look bored." Mrs. Marmeyer had been mowing her lawn. "You need something to read."
"I'd rather be playing."
"Reading is playing," she tapped her forehead, "for the mind." And so she brought me books. I started the first one to keep her off my back. Plus it was thin and had a bright cartoonish cover. And that was me hooked on Terry Pratchett.
From his Discworld books, I went to Earthsea, Orthe, Pern, and a host of other strange worlds by other authors. Then she brought me comics.
"They're not comics, they're graphic novels. Like you've been reading, but using pictures as well, instead of thousands of words."
My favorite character was Death from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. She reminded me of one of my older sister's friends, hip and goth with an alluring air which had my developing sexuality pinging.
Mrs. Marmeyer moved away. But books stayed with me. That summer of reading sent me down the route of journalism.
And journalism sent me, thirty-five years later, to Syria. After seven weeks in Aleppo, there were stories I couldn't write with the constant whoosh of rockets and rattle of gunfire. I decamped to Beirut, appreciating the irony of escaping the civil war to a place which still showed the bullets holes of its own.
I shacked up in the Ras Beirut area and wrote, fueled on coffee and soup. After eight days I sent everything to my editor and went to the Kayan bar for long, complicated, drinks, and human contact.
We ended back at her place, in a nicer part of town than mine. In the early hours, I watched her sleeping and shifted long strands of her hair, tucking it behind her ear, revealing a scar I recognized.
While sympathizing about my broken leg Mrs. Marmeyer had turned her head and showed a scar from her childhood. It was the same scar, not similar, the same. An identical scar on a woman who thirty-five years ago had been the same age she was now.
I got out of bed and walked to the window, looking over a city which had seen its fair share of impossible things. I poured water and sat in a chair watching her sleep on.
Urban myths are fascinating and I'd come across several about people who constantly move to hide the fact they don't age.
She blinked awake. "Hey. You not sleepy."
"Too wired." It was true. "We never got round to proper introductions earlier. I'm Dan Ellerson. Though you might remember me as Joshua." She frowned. I suppose, she had just woken up. "I called you Mrs. Marmeyer. You did tell me to call you Ruth, but mom would have spanked me if I did."
Now she was awake, sitting against the headboard with the sheet drawn up to cover her nakedness.
"It is you, isn't it?" I asked.
"How did you know?"
"Only when I saw the scar behind your ear a few minutes ago."
She touched it and nodded. "Well, this is awkward."
"Awkward? Thirty-five years ago you were older than my parents."
"How are your folks?"
"Divorced. Retired. Old, like people in their seventies, are old. What about you?"
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know. Morning after small talk is tough. But what do you say to the woman who helped you love reading, and thirty-five years later reminded you that being human can be wonderful?"
"What about thank you?" She said.
"Thank you." I drank more water. "How old are you?"
I expected her to demure, instead she said, "Four hundred and thirty-six."
I did the math. "Sixteen eighty-two? Where?"
"A small village in Spain, long since disappeared."
"But how?"
She shrugged. "Luck, fate, capricious gods? You remember what Death said to the dead attorney in The Sandman book?"
"'You get what everyone gets, a lifetime.'"
"Well, mine's longer than most. What now? Am I to be the subject of an article? No one will believe it."
I thought of her moving constantly to avoid questions. I thought of where I'd been for the last two months, and of the war-torn history of Europe she'd lived through. I thought of trying to sell my editor on a story about a four-hundred-year-old woman.
I stood and moved back to the bed. "We may have different lifetimes, but we've both here now."
Story by stuartcturnbull, picture from Unsplash by Aladdin Hammami