The Immortal
Benjamin got out of bed and looked at his digital clock to see it was seven o’clock in the morning. He took a shower, got dressed for work, ate breakfast and walked with his mountain bike to the stairs of his building to go to work. The In and Out was a thrift store in Blue Spruce that sold used merchandise. Benjamin was in the picking area to pick up donations from customers and picked up some boxes of toys.
He was sixteen years old, but was sixteen for five-hundred years. He was an immortal that lived with other immortals in a secret society called The Corpus Secret Society of Immortals. They lived in peace among the humans and their only interests was to have love, harmony and creativity.
The union of immortals carried a magical box called “The Heart That Moves Stones”, which allowed them to stay young forever and that was how Benjamin stayed sixteen for so long. Benjamin thought about how he was to bring a human girl into the society of immortals as he peddled up the hill of Coulee Street.
All the immortals were in unions and marriages that lasted forever, but Benjamin was told by the council and leading member of the Corpus to choose a human girl from the human world. Find a human girl who wanted to live forever and live her dream without stagnation.
Benjamin had sixteen children all together from two previous marriages that ended in accidental deaths from the humans. His children had moved on with their lives to bigger and better things, which left Benjamin soul searching.
He didn’t want to look for a union with a human girl because most of the human girls were ignorant, deceitful, naïve and did what they were told by other humans. Reluctantly, Ben agreed and The Corpus arranged to have his birth certificate, social security and driver license changed to make the transition easier from rich and powerful to poor and ordinary. All the information registered him as being thirty years old, but he looked young enough to pass as a twenty year old.
“You have to be convincing and she has to understand that age is just a number,” was what his mentor told him.
Benjamin arrived at his job and after punching in he set up his position. There was one girl that he felt an attraction to and her name was Alley Silverman. She was cute with long blonde hair that was dyed from her dark brown hair. She worked with two other women Sue and Annette on the sort table. They were older women that looked like they could have been Ally’s mom. Ben laughed at Alley’s jokes because they were funny and listened to her talk about Butty Bars and she would call him a fat ass when he would talk about them. They would sit and talk about the day and time would go by fast.
“Hey Alley,” smiled Ben as he walked in from the picking area.
“Hey Ben-ja-min, are you sculpting any new statues?” she joked.
Ben and Alley got into conversation about his hobby of sculpting statues for a living that he wanted to turn into a business. Alley, deep in her heart wanted to be an actress or a comedian and Benjamin could see her fulfilling such a dream.
Ben smiled at her, “actually I have. I stepped on a scale that I got in the picking area and I weigh two-hundred pounds, can you believe it?”
“You’re such a fat ass,” said Alley.
“No I’m not,” replied Benjamin as he looked at the clock and saw that it was time for his break. “Well, got to go.”
“Yeah, eat some more of those Butty Bars,” she said. “Hey wait a minute!” she yelled for him to stay.
Benjamin stopped and saw her pull out a purple ski snow suit. It looked like something that a girl would wear and it had a gold symbol of a lion on both of the shoulders, near the back.
Ally started laughing when she showed it to her girlfriends, “you should wear this while you’re riding your bike.”
“No I don’t think so,” he answered and left.
The immortal walked to the break room, but on his way he ran into Maggie who was a young and attractive girl with hair that was dyed different colors. She looked like a treasure troll and he smiled at her.
Maggie smiled back, “hi how are you doing?”
“Great, how are you.”
“Oh, I’m trying to figure out what college to go to. My mother wants me to get into nursing at the university.”
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“I want to make my mom happy and get a good job, but there’s a five year waiting period.”
“If you could live forever it wouldn’t seem like something that would take a good chunk of your life away.”
“Yeah right,” she laughed. “Why would I want to live forever? What sort of fairy tale are you living?” she asked and left.
“I’m living the fairy tale, I am immortal,” he whispered and watched her walk away.
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