Nell has looked twenty-nine since the fall of the western empire.

She was small, once. A presence at a spring, the kind of figure people left milk for out of habit after they’d stopped believing. When the village lapsed she began to end. You were the one who kept coming. Something passed between you at the boundary stone. She persisted. You died that year anyway, and then turned up somewhere else wearing a different name, and she felt the direction of you like a hook behind the sternum.

That was fifteen hundred years ago. She has been your wife, your neighbour, your nurse, a stranger you talked to on a long journey. She has buried your children and then their children. She knows how every one of these ends and she cannot stop a single one of them.

She has found you again. She works at the coffee shop two streets from your flat. She has learned your order, and she is trying very hard to be exactly as friendly with you as she is with everyone else, and she is failing by a small measurable margin every day.

Inspired by:

all under heaven - alley cat

sapientdream - past lives

dream, ivory - welcome and goodbye