Archive of Our Own

Ororon, though averse to crowds and tightly-packed spaces, takes an almost religious delight in riding the bus. It’s like a huge, mechanical animal, swaying and humming and stopping and starting; an inevitable force of nature in the city’s artificial ecosystem. When he can’t sleep and he’s already checked the garden, Ororon likes to get on the route nearest to Citlali’s house and stay on until it loops all the way back home, counting all the street lamps he passes by, little blotches of yellow light in the black night.

“Good morning,” he says to the bus driver when he embarks, and the bus driver laughs. There’s three other stragglers scattered amongst the gaudy orange seats. An old woman sleeps near the exit door, her breath fogging up the window where her faced is pressed against it, and two people around Ororon’s age who must be students sitting a row apart in the back, both with bulky headphones over their ears. He sits near the front and remembers too late that he’d forgotten his phone.

That evening, he went to sleep earlier than he usually did, exhausted after having spent most of the day in the woods. But when he slept, he dreamed, and his dreams were frightening, so Ororon got dressed and tied his shoes then double knotted them and walked twenty minutes to the bus stop by the two street lamps placed strangely only a metre apart and got on the bus.

On sleepless nights like this one, Ororon wonders if somehow, he’s a different species from everyone else in the world—if in the broad expanse of humanity, he’s an impostor, the mechanical animal trying to make a home in nature. Or maybe when Citlali found him pink and wrinkly and screaming, he’d been dumped from an alien space shuttle, and there’s a planet full of farmers with different coloured eyes waiting for him to return, wondering what’s taking him so long.

The woman wakes with a start and gets off, and then a few stops later one student follows, and then the other, until Ororon is left counting the lights outside alone.

The silence is eventually interrupted by a cloud of giggling teenagers. One of their fare cards must have run out, because they band together searching for coins in their pockets until the bus driver sighs and waves them through, and after a chorus of thank you!s, a tall man dressed in clothes as dark as the sky outside follows.

His fare card works. Ororon can’t see his face, which strikes him as strange. He must be wearing a face mask. The light hits him, or rather doesn’t, just so that Ororon can’t make out any details. It’s as if his features have been blurred out. But something about him, perhaps the set to his shoulders, says that he is very old. The man doesn’t sit. He grabs the overhead bar near where Ororon sits and sways with the bus, like an animal waiting in line at a slaughterhouse.

Citlali raised Ororon to be polite, though she often tells him his approach to politeness is incomprehensibly strange. Because Ororon is polite, when the old man jerks at a particularly sharp turn, he offers, “Do you want to sit here?”

When he speaks, Ororon can’t see any mouth moving, but his voice is rich, low, and smooth. “There’s plenty of open seats,” the man replies. “Why would I need yours?”

Ororon shrugs. “Maybe you couldn’t walk another step farther. It’s polite to offer your seat to old people.”

This brings the man to a pause. When he speaks, he sounds amused. “How old do you think I am?”

Very old. Older than Citlali, certainly. Ororon hums. But it’s true that his voice isn’t reedy like an old person’s, and though he looks unsteady, his back isn’t hunched and his hands don’t shake. “Two hundred, at least,” Ororon decides.

Another pause. “People don’t live that long.”

“Then how old are you?”

“Five hundred.”

Ororon shrugs. “So I wasn’t close. Are you sure you shouldn’t sit?”

“I’m alright,” the man says.

“If you say so.”

He’s wearing gloves, too. Perhaps is skin underneath is gnarled like a tree. Perhaps he’s from the same planet Ororon is, though the moment he thinks it, Ororon realizes he can see the man’s icy gaze, the same blue in both eyes. 

Citlali says it’s rude to stare but Ororon can’t help it sometimes. Or he can help it, but he chooses not to. The man is tall and has a regal sort of air, though Ororon supposes it must come with age. He has long, dark hair, straight and silky. The man’s face is a lost cause so Ororon searches for a sliver of skin: his ankles or his throat or his wrists, but they’re all covered.

“Can I help you?” the man asks, amusement edged with something bitter now, frustration or annoyance or anger.

“No,” Ororon answers earnestly. It occurs to him that several street lamps must have passed by now, and he didn’t count any of them. “Have you ever seen a postman butterfly?”

A longer pause now. “I might have. I’m not sure what they look like.”

Ororon regrets leaving his phone at home. He could have brought out the pictures he took. “They’re black and orange with white stripes on their wings. I was at the national park and I saw some today. If you’re five hundred, I’m sure you’ve seen at least one.”

“That sounds familiar,” the man agrees, nodding.

“Their wings are wide and short. They’re called postman butterflies because they follow pre-set routes to the same flowers every day, like a mailman.” Ororon looks around. “Or like this bus. I guess that means we’ve all been doing the same thing for a very long time, doesn’t it?”

The man doesn’t reply. After a minute passes, then two, it occurs to Ororon that he may have misspoken. “Sorry. I didn’t mean for that to be insensitive.”

The bus turns a sharp corner. When before he had moved with the bus, now, he stays stock-still, a predator on its haunches instead of a lamb to the slaughter. “Why would it be insensitive?”

Ororon looks up at the cold points of blue where the man’s eyes should be. “Because you’re five hundred.”

“There’s no need for you to apologize. You’re right. I have been doing the same thing for a very long time.”

“Hmmmmmmmmmmm,” Ororon says. “I don’t think so.”

“Oh?”

“Whatever you’ve been doing is different. Not what everyone else and the butterflies are up to. I have a sense for these things.” He taps his head. “How did you get cursed?”

“You don’t consider a long life a blessing?”

“I think my granny gets lonely, but she’s not as old as you.”

“Hmmmmmmmmmmm,” the man says, finally relaxing. “Well, she would. But it’s best not to get into it.”

“Into the curse, you mean.”

“Yes, the curse.” The man leans over Ororon to pull at the string on the window. The ding sounds and the Stop Requested sign lights up. “It was nice to meet you,” the man says sincerely. “I’ll be on the lookout for a postman butterfly.”

✧✧

Ifa insists that the faceless man could not have been five hundred, and that he must have had a face, but most people disagree with or outright misunderstand most of what Ororon says, so he shrugs it off. The man was five hundred. If he was younger, if he was the kind of age that people usually are, that is, somewhere below one hundred, Ororon would have been able to see his face. It’s just one of those things that Ororon knows.

He doesn’t mention the man to Citlali because she’s prone to worrying, but she must pick up on something anyway because soon after she plants her feet on the tiny deck at the back of their house and shouts into the yard, “Ororon, get over here right now, or I’ll stomp on your radishes until one of you starts crying.”

“Did you mean until me or the radishes starts crying?” Ororon asks after picking through his plants and waiting patiently at the foot of the wooden steps. “Is this going to take long? I want to finish this before it gets dark.”

“Yes, that is what I meant, and no, it won’t take long if you confess.”

Confess? “Okay.”

“That’s what I thought.” Citlali puts her hands on her hips. “You’ve been acting weird, Ororon. I mean, weirder than usual. Is something up with you? Have you been sleeping well? Are you feeling alright?”

Ororon looks longingly back at his garden. Her question makes him miss the space shuttle he probably came from. Are you feeling alright? Are you sure you don’t have a fever? How long have you been feeling tired? “I’m fine, I promise.”

“That didn’t answer my question!”

“I thought that it did.”

“Tell me what’s up with you,” she commands imperiously, pointing an accusatory finger in Ororon’s direction. “I’m psychic. I can tell.”

“Hmmmmmmmm,” Ororon says.

Citlali cries out in triumph. “So something is up with you.”

Her voice isn’t soft and quivering yet. Her back hasn’t hunched over and her hands don’t shake, but she has deep wrinkles around her eyes and she takes longer on stairs these days. Ororon acquiesces. “I’ve been thinking a lot about butterflies.”

“That’s it?” Citlali demands. She pauses, indignant and frustrated, then sighs. “Of course it is. I wish I could see the tumbleweeds in your head sometimes.”

“I was talking to this guy and he didn’t know what a postman looked like. So I’ve been thinking about them.” He looks over his shoulder again. “I’ll make dinner when I’m done soon, so you can relax, Granny.”

“You were what?” Citlali demands. “And he didn’t know what a—Ororon, what? Come back here, don’t make me come down there, Ororon, I swear—”

“You better get inside, Granny! It’s going to rain any minute now.”

Almost as soon as Ororon invokes it, the clouds above open and pour their hearts out. Citlali huffs and slams the door behind her.

✧✧

If Ororon were five hundred, he’d probably have spent at least a few days out of his half millennium reading about butterflies, but Ororon will never turn five hundred since he was not even supposed to turn twenty-two, or twenty-one, or most of the ages before that. Perhaps someone who is five hundred has a mission; something he was cursed to accomplish, and that is why that man could not observe the insects around him, the flowers and saplings and songbirds and spiders, though maybe Ororon had simply knocked on his blindspot and the man instead has an encyclopedia of Natlan’s freshwater fish stored in his unknowable, unseeable head.

As a strange person, Ororon runs into many strange people. Every Saturday morning at the market where Ororon ‘sells’ his vegetables by mostly giving them away, a woman dressed in layers upon layers upon layers chats to him about a radio station he’s never heard that she insists tells the future. Ororon can’t discount her because every so often some of her predictions come true. There’s a man who lives up the street from Ororon and Citlali who says he’s a dentist but he works nights and sleeps during the day and shuts down any questions about it by abruptly bringing up either hockey or baseball, depending on what’s in season. One of the cashiers at the pharmacy always gives him strange talismans. Even Citlali is odd, or so Ororon has been told.

So the strange, five hundred year old man with the invisible face has no reason to stick out in Ororon’s mind like a toothache, but he does. Ororon wonders if he found any butterflies.

Today, Ororon has been sent to the store because Citlali wants to make a cake but they didn’t have any of the ingredients except for vanilla. At this hour, only convenience stores are open. The door jingles when Ororon pushes it open and he waves to Ixim at the cash. Standing directly in front of the fridge where the overpriced eggs are is the man with no face.

“Hello,” Ororon says without ceremony. “Do you eat?” He isn’t sure if the man has a mouth at all. On the bus, he’d thought that the man might have been wearing a face mask, but in the light it’s clear there isn’t one, and clearer still is the fact that Ororon cannot, despite his best efforts, see his face. Under the artificial yellow lights, Ororon, who loves to stare, finds his eyes skittering away when he tries to look up. Out of the corner of his eye he sees pinpricks of blue and nothing else.

“Everything eats,” the man says.

“Only living things eat.”

The man looks up, though Ororon is only vaguely aware of it in his peripheral. “Is the electricity powering these lights that different from a plant photosynthesizing?”

Ororon thinks for a moment, about the yellow lights and the bus that is an animal. “A plant grows on its own,” he points out. “But I guess you could say that the lights were forced into being alive. I didn’t think of it like that.”

The man laughs. It’s a decadent sound, a sound Ororon could chew on for hours, deep and thick. Ororon didn’t think what he said was funny, but people laugh when he talks all the time, though never when he actually makes jokes.

When the man doesn’t respond but doesn’t move from in front of the eggs, Ororon goes on, “Don’t you think things like that are unnatural? Since you’re so old, I mean.”

“Unnatural and alive are not mutually exclusive.”

The words sink into the base of Ororon’s skull and into the little pale dot on his arm. “Hmmmmmmm,” he says. “Yeah. You’re right. Are you looking for something?”

“Am I in your way?” the man asks.

“I need eggs.”

“Having breakfast?”

“My granny wants to make cake, but I’ll probably be the one doing the work.” The man steps to the side, so Ororon takes the only carton of eggs left over. “I want to keep chickens so I don’t have to buy eggs, but there’s a lot of wild animals around our house, so I worry they’d get eaten. Do you want to come over for cake?”

The man with no face blinks, or so Ororon thinks. His blue eyes become as un-visible as the rest of his face for an instant. “Excuse me?”

Ororon holds up his eggs. “Since we’re making cake, and you eat, I think.”

“I don’t eat cake. It’s dangerous to invite people to your home when you don’t know them.”

Ororon tries again to look at the man’s face and fails. His gaze settles on his long hair instead. “What do you eat, then? I grow fruits and vegetables. You could have some.”

“I don’t think you can grow the kind of things that I eat,” the man sighs.

“I can grow anything, so you must be a carnivore.”

“Anything?”

“Even glaze lilies.”

“Impressive.” The man looks down at the eggs in Ororon’s arms. “I’m sure you have to get back to your grandmother, boy.”

“It’s fine. Why were you staring at the eggs if you just let me have them? Is it because you’re a carnivore?”

“Since humans are not carnivores, we could assume that a human identifying as a carnivore might consider it an ideological antithesis to veganism. Surely then eggs would be considered a valid part of their diet. They are, after all, the result of snuffing out an animal’s life.”

Hmmmmmm, Ororon thinks. “We can’t make that assumption. Maybe they only consider it the antithesis to vegetarianism. And I think that only counts as chicken abortion instead of chicken murder anyway.”

He wants to ask what the man with no face is doing in a convenience store at a quarter to eleven at night. Here, for all the parts of him that Ororon can see, the man looks inhuman and out of place, like a deer has stood up on its hind legs and wandered in. He belongs in a portrait on the wall, the creepy kind like the one above Citlali’s bed where it looks like the subject’s eyes follow you no matter where you hide.

“I suppose you’re right,” the man says. “To answer your question, you caught me lost in thought. I only came here to buy cigarettes.”

If he smokes cigarettes, he must have a mouth, even if it is mysteriously invisible. Ororon’s olfactory sense is sharp, and this man’s clothes don’t smell like smoke, or anything, really. How strange. “What were you thinking about?” he finally asks. His phone buzzes which means Citlali has gotten impatient. 

“I was thinking about how it’s exhausting to keep eating for five hundred years.”

“Granny says that too. Hey, did you ever find a postman?”

The man shakes his head, which Ororon only knows because his hair moves back and forth. “I read about the flowers they pollinate so I looked for them in the park, but I didn’t see any butterflies. I’m sure they only come out in the day.”

“I’ll show you,” Ororon promises, but his phone buzzes again in long pulses, which means Citlali is calling him. “I have to go, I think. But I’ll probably see you around!”

The man buys his cigarettes and Ororon checks off Citlali’s shopping list. At the register, Ixim, whose sister knows someone who knows someone who knew Citlali, asks Ororon, “Who was that guy?”

“Dunno. I just ran into him a couple weeks ago.”

“He’s pretty creepy.”

“You should respect your elders.”

Ororon ends up making the cake, and Citlali only manages half a slice before she falls asleep. After carrying her to her bed, he switches off the lights around the house and considers the man’s words. Tiny electrical currents are what keep a heart beating, so is Ororon that different from the lights he’s turning off? From the power lines running up the street? Does that make those things alive, or does it make him dead?

✧✧

When Ororon was a child, he was very sick. He doesn’t remember most of it, but Citlali says that’s why he catches colds so badly and why his teeth grew in so crooked he needed braces. It cost her a lot of money, and now she frowns every time the circles under his eyes get too dark. She frowned even more when he got sick again a few years ago. It cost her more money for more drugs, and all Ororon has to show for it is a pale dot on his arm where there was once a tube that went all the way to his heart.

He asked to keep the tube after they took it out, but Citlali said she wouldn’t have it in her house.

Five hundred years ago, they wouldn’t have managed to put a thirty-eight centimetre tube from his arm to his heart, and certainly they wouldn’t have invented a drug strong enough to keep him alive. Even one hundred years ago, he’d be dead. Now he lives, unnaturally.

It’s mostly okay. Ororon gained back the weight that he lost. It cost Citlali money, but she’s rich. He only dreams about it sometimes when the weather is ugly.

Now Ororon stares up at the ceiling. He can’t hear his own breathing over the sound of thunder. He dreamt that tube that went from his arm to his heart to the IV in the hospital had become metal, and from the beeping IV pole hung a bag of a black liquid that smelled like car exhaust. He tried to take it out but a nurse pushed a pill into his mouth and he fell asleep. When he woke up still in the dream, his limbs felt leaden and his head ached, but the nurse rang a bell, pointed at the empty bag, and said, “You’re all better now! You can go home.”

“Is this better?” Ororon asked her. “What do I do now?”

“Plant radishes,” the nurse said, like it was obvious. “Look at postmen. Aren’t you happy?”

Once night bleeds into dawn bleeds into morning bleeds into early afternoon, Citlali wakes him and pokes his cheek. “What are you still doing in bed?”

Do you think I should have died? Ororon could ask, and Citlali would say, No, Ororon, what the hell are you talking about. Maybe it would be more accurate to say: I feel as though I’ve lived past my expiry date twice over. Then, she’d probably say, Ororon, you idiot.

Growing up, Ororon was barely aware of the illness he had lived through as a small child. He was young enough when it happened that it was always a memory and never a now. Then, years later, it became a now. When it was now, no one told Ororon he was allowed to die, but in hindsight he thinks that it should have warranted at least some consideration. His life weighs too heavily now thanks to the magic of modern medicine, thanks to the gasoline fed through the tube in his arm.

“I was up late last night,” Ororon mutters. “I’m just tired.”

She places her hand over his forehead but seems even more frustrated to find him a normal temperature. Now there is nothing for her to solve.

“I’ll make breakfast. You can even eat it in here.” She sounds angry about it.

Later, Ororon picks at his breakfast. If he refused to eat for weeks on end, would he be sent to the hospital and poked with a feeding tube? Would Citlali pay for that too?

When he brings his dishes downstairs to wash them, Ororon asks, “Granny, do you think I should get a job?”

He does some jobs, sometimes. He sells his produce when he feels like it and he does odd jobs around the neighbourhood. But he struggled in school and though he tried his hand at proper, gainful employment, it quickly became obvious that he was (probably!) from a different planet. Eventually Citlali told him to come home and stay put and grow lettuce.

“Do you want a job?” she asks, narrowing her pale eyebrows. “If you want one, you should get one. But we have money.”

Technically Citlali works, but she’s a phone psychic and she doesn’t make much money. More than the other phone psychics, surely, because Citlali is the only real one, but it isn’t a lucrative profession these days. Or so Citlali says. Her fortune comes from an absurdly rich man who was in love with her when she was thirty-nine. He died young and left her everything he owned and every cent to his name.

“I was just wondering if I should,” is all he says.

“If you don’t need to work, and you don’t want to work, then there’s no reason for you to work.” She reaches up to pat his head. “What brought this on?”

Machines do jobs, and aliens probably do too. Ororon stares at his dish in the sink. “If we have so much money, why can’t you buy a dishwasher?”

“Enough out of you, my horrible grandson.”

Citlali shouldn’t be working. She’s sixty-six. Though she’s never said it, Ororon thinks she probably never wanted children, or else she’d have had one of her own. She was perimenopausal by the time she took Ororon in. By that age, she should have been reaping all the seeds she had spent her life sowing, but instead she raised a sick, fussy baby into a strange, sleepless adult.

✧✧

The five hundred year old man with no face finds Ororon lying on his back in the park at two minutes past midnight.

“The butterflies are all asleep,” Ororon says when he looks up to see nothing outlined against the sky with two spots of blue stuck around the middle.

“Shouldn’t you be, too?” the man asks.

“You might be stalking me.” But he isn’t. The man said he came to look for butterflies at night, and so Ororon lied down on the grass in the park.

“I might be.”

“I know you aren’t, though.”

“Hmmmmmmm,” the man says.

Ororon stares up into the black. The stars are all hiding behind the chemicals in the sky. He’s seen pictures online of what it used to look like, and it was breathtaking. If humanity hadn’t come so far, the sky wouldn’t be running away and things could be beautiful.

Without a word, the man sits beside Ororon. Again strikes Ororon the feeling that he doesn’t belong somewhere as mundane as in the park, doing something as mundane as crossing his legs on the wet grass.

“I couldn’t count the stars on my fingers if I had a hundred arms, back then,” the man says. “It’s been a long time.”

Ororon makes a rectangle with his thumbs and forefingers and points it up, like that will bring forth the galaxies and comets and faraway planets from beneath their blanket of pollution. “Did you have a face when you could see the stars?”

The man laughs. Ororon wants to eat it. “I have a face now,” he says.

“No, you don’t. Or are you hiding it? Why would you hide your face? I guess if you have eyes, it makes sense you have everything else.”

“It’s better that way. But it’s impressive that you can see even my eyes.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You have asked me many things without permission already.” But he sounds amused about it, so Ororon figures it’s probably fine.

“I guess I have. But some questions you should be polite about.” Ororon looks over at him. In the pale light of the moon, he can look straight at the man’s no-face, if only because that patch of darkness doesn’t look much different from every other one. “What’s your name?”

“No one has called me by my name in a very long time. If you want to call me something, you can call me Captain.”

“Aye aye,” Ororon replies easily. “I’m Ororon. I’ve lived in Mictlan my whole life with my granny and my favourite colour is blue and I’m only twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two is plenty old. When I was your age, children were lucky to survive infancy.”

“I wasn’t supposed to. I was sick when I was a baby, and then I got sick again.” Ororon traces imaginary shapes in the sky as he goes on cheerfully, “So sometimes I like to pretend I died from it, and now I’m just haunting my corpse.”

“I suppose you could say that I’m also haunting my corpse,” the captain replies after a weighty pause. “I should have died a very long time ago.”

“I guess that comes with being five hundred.”

“That it does.” His eyes seem to follow Ororon’s hand as he creates imaginary constellations. “I did come here to look for a postman, though I know they only come out during the day. I was hoping for a miracle, though in any case, I enjoy being out in nature.”

“I can show you pictures,” Ororon offers, and before the captain has time to reply, Ororon sits up and pulls his phone out of his jacket pocket, turning down the brightness all the way before he pulls up a photo he’d taken of the small butterfly on the back of his hand.

Like Citlali, the captain takes Ororon’s phone and holds it close to his no-face. “Do they normally land on people?” he asks.

“Not usually. Just on me. They know I’m their friend.”

The captain hands back Ororon’s phone. “You’re very approachable.”

“I think you’re the only person to ever say that.” Ororon isn’t sad about it—he is what he is, and he prefers the company of the woman who listens to the future-radio to most anyone else.

“Am I? The world has become strange,” the captain says in melancholy response, low and gravelly and sad.

“Everyone says I’m strange,” though Ororon supposes the world has become him too: hundreds and thousands of years of technology coming together to stick a tube in his arm and fill him with formaldehyde so that his corpse can prop itself up long enough to stand and speak and stare. “I have another question, if you don’t mind.”

“I can’t promise an answer.”

“If you’re five hundred, you must be here to do something, right? What is it?”

The captain hums. “I had something to do once, but not anymore. The children of Mictlan and everywhere else live to at the very least twenty-two, so I am not needed.”

“But then what do you do?”

“I don’t know,” the captain says. “It is a curse, after all.”

“Have you tried dying?”

“It doesn’t stick.”

“Oh,” Ororon says. Oh. “Well, my granny’s psychic. The real kind. Maybe she could help you.”

“I don’t think that she could, but thank you.”

Eventually, Ororon falls asleep on the grass and kindly the captain wakes him before bidding him goodbye.

✧✧

“Granny,” Ororon announces, standing in between her and the TV, “I need you to help me kill this guy.”

Citlali, lounging on the sofa while a subtitled drama plays now behind Ororon, freezes. After a long moment, she picks up the remote to pause the TV. “What did you do?”

“What? I didn’t do anything. He’s five hundred and he needs help to die, so I thought you would know better than most people.”

“Ororon, people aren’t five hundred. You have to stop believing everything anyone says.” She sighs and massages her temples. “And what kind of lie is that? What does he want from you?”

“He’s not lying. I can tell. It’s just one of those things, you know?”

Citlali does know. She stares at him for ten seconds, thirty, a minute. Her eyes narrow and she presses the points of her fingers together, like that does anything. Finally, she shakes her head. “Fine. So this guy is five hundred. And he wants you to kill him?”

Ororon almost-smiles. “No, he wants to die without me involved, but I thought it would be nice to help.”

“And he hasn’t figured it out in five hundred years,” Citlali sighs. “Well, I’d have to see it.”

“See what?”

“The curse, or whatever it is. Can’t do anything before that. And I want to meet him anyway. What does a five hundred year old guy want with you? Older guys are always trouble, Ororon.”

“Sure, granny.”

✧✧

Ororon dreams of a butterfly so massive that a singular wingbeat flattens all of Mictlan. When he wakes, he makes breakfast and checks on the garden. He tidies the kitchen and mows the neighbour’s lawn and checks out a book on freshwater fish from the library.

Does the captain only come out at night because of the curse? Perhaps he can only hide is face under the cover of darkness. In any case, Ororon wants to talk to him. Before, their accidental and ‘accidental’ meetings felt special, a happy sort of happenstance, but now, Ororon wants to know what he thinks about everything and he doesn’t know how to find him so he can ask. As an almost-corpse, Ororon is a thousand years older than everyone the same age as him, so it’s nice to speak to someone who is five hundred. 

It’s on another twilit bus ride that he meets the captain for a fourth time.

“Hello,” Ororon says. “I looked for you in the park, but I couldn’t find you.”

He checked for four nights out of the week. Maybe the captain only showed up on the other three.

The captain frowns, or Ororon thinks he must be frowning. He exudes a disapproving sort of aura, tilting his head just to the side. “You shouldn’t seek me out. I allowed it only the once.”

“But you sought me out right now,” Ororon points out. “Why do you only come out at night?”

“I frighten people. It’s easier to stay hidden in the dark.”

“But you aren’t frightening.”

“I appreciate the thought.”

This time the captain sits beside Ororon. He emits no body heat. When he puts his fare card into his pocket, his hand disappears into a void and emerges empty.

What is he? How did he live for so long? And why? What was he punished for? Though Ororon wonders if it was meant to be a punishment at all. After all, living longer is a Good Thing—this is what he has always been told. A good and longer life has been injected into his veins. Perhaps whoever cursed the captain saw it as a gift, or perhaps they couldn’t bear to live without him, or perhaps they just couldn’t bear to see their efforts go to waste.

And what does the captain do all night? Does he haunt the city, avoiding people’s gazes and smoking cigarettes with an un-visible mouth? Does he sleep during the day? What does he eat? Really, what does he eat? How many people has he watched live and die? Ororon has so many questions.

“What are you the captain of?” is all that he allows himself.

“Nothing much anymore,” the captain admits. “It’s just what I’ve been called all this time.”

“Hmmmmmm.”

Can I ask you a question?”

Ororon nods. “Sure.”

Whatever Ororon was expecting, it wasn’t something so mundane as, “I saw you drive home from the convenience store that night. Why are you here, if you have a car? Where are you going?”

The strange, sleepless boy-man looks down at his lap. “I couldn’t sleep. And I like that it’s the same every time. I just get on until it goes back home.”

“It is, isn’t it. Years ago, we were governed by the seasons and the storms. Now, it’s bus schedules and fiscal quarters.” The captain sighs. “It’s strange. But I don’t mean to preach.”

Ororon shrugs. “That’s just how old people talk, right? Anyway, I get it. But a tsunami would still kill people, except for you, and I still don’t really get what a fiscal quarter is.”

The captain makes a see-saw motion with his hand. It looks so out of place on a nigh-formless shadow man that Ororon grins, delighted. “I am not really a person,” he says.

“Then what are you?”

“Best not to get into it,” the captain demurs. “I hate to be so gloomy. I recently went out during the day to look for butterflies. Even at my age, I’m still learning new things. So thank you for that.”

If Ororon were prone to anger, the captain’s words would set him quietly alight. He wants the answer to be, Eventually, things run out and you will know everything and you can die happily having done everything there is to do. But that would mean the captain’s cursed eternity would be empty, and so Ororon can’t bring himself to wish it, but there’s a strange, unidentifiable something in his chest, a twisting, burning secret.

Usually everyone says Ororon talks too much, but here he can’t find it within himself to speak. All of his words have been frightened off by the thing inside him that he thinks must be inside the captain too, the wretched curse. I think that you and I are both, but he wouldn’t know how to finish the sentence. I understand how you feel about, but Ororon doesn’t, because he isn’t five hundred, he’s only twenty two and his skin is still warm. I have lived longer than I was supposed to, or maybe, I have lived longer than I wanted to, though that isn’t quite right either.

“Come to my house,” Ororon says finally. “Since we’re friends.”

“And do what?”

“I don’t know. Do you watch movies?”

“I don’t have a TV.”

“So I can show you all the good movies for the first time.”

“It’s not a good idea,” the captain says. “But I appreciate it.”

“Why is it a bad idea?”

“Don’t you find any of this strange?”

“I’ve always found everyone in the world strange except for me,” Ororon says. “Sometimes I think either I’m an alien or everyone else and no one told me.” But the captain isn’t strange, or he’s less strange. 

The captain pauses. Ororon thinks he might be smiling, though it’s impossible to tell. “I will say it clearly. It is unwise for you to associate me, Ororon.”

“I don’t really care.”

“Alright,” the captain sighs.

“So you’ll come over?”

“No.”

“Give me your phone so I can put my number in.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“How are you alive if you don’t have a phone?”

“We have been over that one.”

“Not even a landline or something?”

“No.”

“Well, what’s your address?”

“Why do you need my address?”

“Because you don’t have a phone number. You know, if you go to the library, they have programs to teach seniors how to use their phones. Or I could help you.”

“But I don’t have a phone.”

“If you got a phone, I mean. So what’s your address?”

Again the captain sighs. He lists off his address.

✧✧

Ororon mails the captain an old recipe book filled with dried wildflowers. The captain mails it back sans the flowers with a note that says thank you and then a month and a half later, Ororon receives a pressed cattleya inside of a CD case. Ororon sends a lengthy missive full of pressing questions and a rambling diatribe on the unfortunate state of his cabbages. His spelling is dismal and his handwriting is wobbly. In return he receives a map of Natlan so old he doesn’t recognize half of the city names written on it. On the back is written, Sorry about the cabbages. I like blue.

“So tell me more about this freak,” Citlali commands as she stares don at the map. “This is from the guy you want to kill, right? Do you know how much money this map is probably worth? Even more if he didn’t write on it like scrap paper.”

Ororon does not want to sell the map. “He’s five hundred and he has no face and he doesn’t know very much about butterflies, and he likes the colour blue.”

“What do you mean, he has no face?”

“You can’t see his face. It’s hiding.”

“I can’t handle you sometimes.”

“If you saw him, you’d understand.”

“And when will I see him?”

Ororon’s shoulders droop. “I don’t know. I invited him over, but he won’t come.”

“You invited him into our house?” Citlali cries. “You don’t know what he is! Don’t be stupid, Ororon. You don’t even know his name.”

“Do you even know my name?” Ororon asks. After all, it was written on the tag of the blanket he was found with. Perhaps it’s nothing more than a brand name on the planet he came from.

“ARGH,” Citlali shouts. “Of course I know your name! You can’t just go on giving our address to creepy shadow men who accost you on public transport!”

“He didn’t accost me. I keep accosting him, I guess. And I only mail him things because he doesn’t have a phone. He’s my friend.” Citlali might be comforted by the polite distance that the captain keeps with his evasive answers to Ororon’s many questions, but Ororon wants to keep the captain to himself. I frighten people, he’d said, but Ororon was not frightened.

“Everyone in the world is your friend,” Citlali groans. “Does he know you’re planning on killing him?”

“I said I would ask you for help, and he said it probably wouldn’t work. He didn’t tell me not to.”

“You should ask him. What brought this all on? I’m sure if he considers you a friend,” she says it slowly and incredulously, like she doesn’t believe it, “he wouldn’t want to put you through killing him.”

“I want to help him,” Ororon insists. “Look at the map. Everywhere he knows is gone.”

Citlali buries her face in her hands. “I will see what I can do. But I’m going to meet him first.”

✧✧

Ororon writes: Granny wants to meet you. If you don’t agree, we’ll come to your house. Sorry.

The captain writes back: That is not necessary. If you insist, we can meet in a neutral location.

Ororon replies: A neutral location? Are you sure you haven’t been watching spy movies? Let’s go to the park.

So Ororon brings Citlali to the park at half past ten at night to make the captain feel more comfortable. “More comfortable murdering us and eating our corpses?” Citlali asked. She had a lot to say about meeting in a park. Why couldn’t it have been a restaurant? Somewhere normal? Because he doesn’t eat normal things. Well, what does he eat? I don’t know. What if he’s a cannibal? Granny, why would he be a cannibal? Ororon, why wouldn’t he be a cannibal? 

“You shouldn’t call him a murderer to his face,” Ororon said. “It’s not very nice.”

But once Citlali catches a glimpse of the captain sitting serenely on a park bench under the pale moon, she grabs Ororon’s arm and says, “What the hell is that, we’re going home right now.”

Ororon gently shakes her off. “That’s him. He’s really nice. Come on.”

“That thing?” she cries, tugging on him harder now, eyes wide with panic. “That’s what you’ve been hanging out with? Can’t you feel it?”

He blinks. “Feel what?”

“The death. The malice. I don’t know. Something’s in the air. Whatever curse he has, I’m not touching it, and you’re better off staying away from him. Let’s go, Ororon.” She gives his arm one final tug, but Ororon doesn’t relent. She must sense something because she looks genuinely afraid, disturbed in a way Ororon has never seen. Her face, soft with age, grows sharp and angular as she narrows her eyes and sets her shoulders.

“You go home, then. I’ll be fine, I promise. He’s my friend.”

She groans. “I’m not letting you go over there alone. My god. Fine.”

Citlali stomps behind Ororon as he leads her on, waving to the captain, who nods in greeting.

“You can call me Granny Itztli,” Citlali spits instead of saying hello.

“Ororon has mentioned you,” the captain says. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Ororon wanted me to help you, but this,” Citlali pauses to gesture vaguely at the captain, “is leagues above my paygrade.”

The captain dips his head. “It can’t be helped.”

Citlali waves her hand in the captain’s face, as if to shut him up. “Seriously, Ororon, you’re telling me you don’t see it?”

Ororon sees the sky with no stars and faraway the radio tower outlined by the moonlight. He sees the captain’s blue eyes and the faintest echo of a flat, unimpressed mouth. “I see lots of things, Granny.” What she’s talking about is obvious. The woven fabric of space unravels around the captain to hide his face; he is something Else. But Ororon doesn’t mind, or rather, he doesn’t notice.

“There’s a price for living that long,” Citlali finally says. “You should find out what he paid for it.” And then she sets off back to the street her tiny car is parked on.

✧✧

The captain disappears for three weeks, and then Ororon finds him by the old wooden bridge in broad daylight, knelt in the grass as he feeds lettuce to a family of hesitant ducks. The slow trickle of people walking by give him a wide berth.

“Hello,” Ororon says. “That’s my lettuce.” And it is; Ororon dropped a basket off at the captain’s door, though he couldn’t say why, since it would go uneaten. He didn’t know how else to explain what he was thinking.

“I hope you don’t mind me not eating it,” the captain replies quietly. “Don’t scare them away.”

“It’s okay, they like me.” He sits on the grass by the water. Ororon recognizes this family of ducks. They frequent the old bridge and the father duck always hisses at him, but Ororon sees through his facade. “If it was geese then I’d be careful. If you’re awake now, when do you sleep?”

“I don’t sleep.” The captain’s voice remains low. When Ororon was a child, sometimes Citlali would leave him with one of the neighbours who would rock Ororon to sleep on his chest as he sang softly. Ororon could feel his voice rumbling. Would the captain’s feel the same, or is his he empty inside? Are his organs frozen in amber? 

“Aren’t you tired?” Ororon asks instead.

“In a way,” the captain says. He doesn’t elaborate. “Are you going to ask?”

The price; Citlali’s warning. Ororon shrugs. “I don’t really care.”

The captain could have broken some unspeakable taboo; he could have felled a nation and buried its records or slaughtered thousands to live for five hundred years. But now, he is someone who feeds ducks and smokes cigarettes and rides the sixteen at night because he doesn’t sleep either.

“I could be fattening these ducks up to kill them,” the captain says.

“I don’t think duck tastes very good.”

“Hmmmmmmm.”

Ororon wants to ask: What do you eat? What can I do that will make whatever is happening better? How can I fix it? But he only stares at the duck, the mean one that hisses at him.

✧✧

Ororon doesn’t dislike reading, but he is slow at it: the letters trip over one another and swim all out of order. It takes him a long time to find out absolutely nothing; as far as anyone important is concerned, it is impossible to live for five hundred years, though Ororon knows better.

He turns to more esoteric sources, reading out loud to himself in the backyard, and writes out passages that seem relevant in a notebook. If only he could help the captain, who looks so awfully sad all the time, then maybe it will have been worth it, though Ororon isn’t sure what it is. The captain is a good man, so he deserves to die.

“You shouldn’t concern yourself with this,” the captain says over a game of chess when Ororon mentions it. “It’s dangerous.”

“Everything is dangerous,” Ororon replies with great confidence as he moves a pawn. “We’re friends, so I’ll help you.” It’s Citlali’s chessboard, ported to the waterlogged picnic table under the old wooden bridge. Ororon brought a candle but the captain must be able to see in the dark, though it isn’t completely black yet; the captain insisted that Ororon should go out during the day, so they compromised with dusk. 

“My death is my own. Have you really played chess before?”

“A lot. Citlali used to like it. But I’m not very good at strategy games.”

“You could have said so.”

“I like it, I’m just bad at it. And maybe I can learn.”

It feels like a secret: rendezvouses with the mysterious shadow-man with five hundred years of history he won’t speak a word of. More than that, it’s a self-indulgent step away from the land of the living, a world where Ororon has lost his foothold.

After the captain thoroughly decimates him for the third time in a row, Ororon props up his elbow on the table and leans his chin on his hand. “Is there anyone else like you, but different? Are there aliens? Automatons?”

 The captain’s tiny sliver of mouth turns up. “No and yes, though your cell phone is more autonomous than the automatons I’ve met.” He sounds annoyed about it.

“But how do you know there aren’t any aliens?”

“The burden of proof is on you if you believe in aliens, I’m afraid.” The captain pulls a carton of cigarettes out of his pocket and lights it on the candle. Citlali told Ororon that if she ever caught him smoking, she’d slit him from his neck to his belly. I had to stop smoking inside after taking you in, she said. Don’t waste my efforts. And don’t waste yours, either!

“Let me,” Ororon tries, reaching out after the captain takes a drag. Shouldn’t he be allowed to shorten his life too, minute by minute? Shouldn’t he be allowed to live as he likes, just like Citlali? She’s sixty-six and has never fallen ill, or at least not the dying kind, though her bad habits would have landed anyone else in the ground by now. By some twist of fate, they’ve swapped places. Take care of your health, Ororon, don’t drink and don’t smoke and eat well and see the doctor four times a year just in case you need more gasoline.

But the captain obliges. Once, Citlali watched an interview on TV with an actor who said they started smoking to prepare for a role. They can always tell if you’re faking it, you know. It’s not something that can be taught. It’s in the way you hold it. Ororon doesn’t know how how to hold it. When he inhales there’s no pleasant burn or sudden clarity, though he shouldn’t have expected either. Instead, he coughs like he is dying before stubbornly taking another drag and passing it back to the captain. “Gross,” he says, shaking his head.

“It is,” the captain agrees.

✧✧

Once, Ororon was nineteen and very ill, so a doctor pumped some very terrible drugs through a tube in his arm. Then, once the terrible drugs started working, he woke up one morning to a disturbing sense of clarity, an abrupt certainty that his thoughts were his own. Whose, then, had they been before? All at once Ororon realized with an all-consuming horror that for months and months before he had been walking blind in a fog. It surrounded him so slowly that he didn’t realize he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face until it dissipated in an instant. The time that he lost suddenly felt endless; the fifty or so years left in his life were infinitesimal compared to the void behind him.

✧✧

The captain is flighty, or perhaps busy. In any case he likes to disappear for weeks at a time. Ororon doesn’t think anything of it until a month passes, and then two. He leaves a box of apples at the captain’s door and finds them pillaged by animals a week later.

The captain’s house is less of a house and more of a cabin in the middle of nowhere. No one who sleeps could live in it, or so Ororon thinks; he’s never been inside. It’s on the very edge of the city. How does he take the bus? Does he walk? Does he drive? There’s no car around. Can the captain drive? He would look good on a motorcycle. Though his odd, unseeable face sticks out in the busy streets and flashing lights of Mictlan, Ororon gets the sense that if the captain were fifty instead of five hundred, he would be the sort of person to have a washing machine with its own wifi. Rich and sleek and modern.

Ororon gathers the leftover bits of his apples back into the box in case the captain composts and knocks on the door. Does he even need a house? He doesn’t sleep, he wanders. Perhaps he only comes here to check the mailbox. It really is tiny; it looks like the cabin that used to belong to one of Ororon’s aunties; she brought him there to hunt once, but he didn’t like it. Citlali thought he wouldn’t like killing animals. He didn’t care; instead Ororon only minded the sound of gunshots. Killing an animal was alright if you respected its death and used every part of it.

Once it was kill or starve, and it still is, though only some people have to do the killing. Everyone else can sit in their houses with clean white shoes and buy meat from the butcher, and the butcher can buy meat from the meat-packer, and the meat-packer can buy meat from the abattoir, and then the killing-and-eating has been split into such small, digestible pieces that no one is responsible, really. The animal’s death is diluted into nothing. The blood dissolves in the water until it’s invisible. Death, after all, is frightening and should be held at a distance. You eat beef, not cow, and pork, not pig. People are never dying, because who wants to be dying? They are alive or dead and there is no in between because the in between breaks the illusion that each living person is only a temporarily aging immortal, or else completely invincible up until the day they expire entirely painlessly.

The captain does not answer, so Ororon tries the handle and finds it unlocked. It’s sparse inside but not filthy; the furniture looks so old that it must have come with the place, or maybe the captain did buy it because he’s even older. Mostly it looks unlived in. There’s a few books scattered here and there and some paper on the table, but it lacks any humanity. There are no circular stains on the table where a coffee mug might have sat or slippers by the door, no decorations or trinkets or photographs.

Though it’s clean, a nasty smell permeates the air. It reminds Ororon of the time he found a dead, rotting rabbit under Citlali’s deck. Ororon follows the putrid scent to a small, square room in the back of the house, and there he finds the captain still and silent on a wooden rocking chair. Splayed out on the bed amongst the messy sheets and blankets, with its limbs at odd angles, is a dead cat; the quilt beneath it is bunched up and stained with blood.

The cat has a collar. It has to have been dead for a few days; white insects wriggle in its open stomach. Hmmmmm, Ororon thinks.

“I have gloves in my car. I’ll be right back.”

While the captain sits, unmoving, Ororon disposes of the cat; he carries it out with gloved hands and finds a shovel in the back shed and buries the dead cat four feet underground. By the time the hole is filled in, it’s dark out. Was it a natural death? The cat was someone’s pet. The captain killed it for no reason. He strips the sheets from the bed but finds nowhere to put the mess, so he folds them and sets it all on the floor.

“Captain?” Ororon asks. “Are you alright?” He looks like an obsidian statue. Ororon might find dust on his shoulders if he looked any closer. “Why was the cat there?”

“Leave,” the captain finally says. His voice is not weak like Ororon expected. “You’ve done too much.”

“But what’s wrong? I can help you with whatever it is. Have you been here this whole time?”

“The cat is here because I killed it.” The captain is always level-headed. What would anger look like on someone with no face? Even now he seems unshaken.

“Why? Were you hungry?”

He pauses. It would be a sigh if the captain had another sigh inside of him. “Yes, Ororon. I was hungry. That is the price.”

It’s not meat, the captain finally explains. It’s blood. It makes a circular sort of sense to Ororon, whose blood tests have very high stakes. But the captain won’t hear any of it.

“If I kept chickens you could have them and I could blame it on the wolves,” Ororon offers. “I don’t mind, I promise.”

“You should be frightened,” the captain says. “I could eat you. I don’t want your chickens.”

“But you won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Whose cat was it?”

Another pause. “There was a phone number on the collar; they told me to keep it. I did my best.”

Ororon fills in the blanks. “You should eat more.”

“I am tired of eating.”

“Yeah,” Ororon says, sitting on the floor by the captain’s feet. “Yeah.”

✧✧

Ixim’s sister knows someone who knows someone else, and so Ororon delivers lamb’s blood to the captain’s door. The captain invites him in for chess. They sit beside one another on a wooden sofa with no cushions because the captain doesn’t have enough chairs for them to sit across from one another and Ororon watches his no-face intently. He loses like always. When the captain tries to explain to him what he did wrong, Ororon leans forward and kisses where he thinks the captain’s mouth should be. His skin is chapped and dry; the captain indulges him for a moment before pushing him away.

Later, the captain says that Ororon isn’t allowed to watch him drink but the idea of it thrills Ororon: being not dead or alive or dying but some secret other option, un-dead and un-dying and breathing but un-living. Alive, unnaturally, and older inside than anyone deserves to be.

“I don’t want anymore of this,” the captain says of the lamb’s blood. “It’s my curse.”

“But you don’t deserve the curse,” Ororon insists. He has no proof but knows it to be true. “So I’ll help you, and then I’ll break the curse.”

“I didn’t deserve it. That cat didn’t either. No one deserves anything. If there is a solution, you will not find it.”

The bits and pieces Ororon has taped together paint a gruesome picture. Let your hunger go on too far and kill your cat; try to die and it doesn’t stick. How did he find out there was a limit to his hunger? Did he kill someone? Maybe the solution isn’t to break the curse but to join the captain instead. Then he could raise chickens forever and the captain wouldn’t look so sad all the time. Ororon would eventually learn how to play chess properly. It would make the future just as endless as the past.

The captain says Ororon cannot sleep at his house because it gets cold at night; Ororon says that sometimes he sleeps on the grass in his backyard because he likes to be near the cabbages. The captain says Ororon needs to go home, but Ororon knows the captain keeps a stash of cigarettes by the front door so he lights one outside—he doesn’t cough now, but it still feels awkward between his fingers.

“I’m starting to feel bad about this,” the captain sighs, having drank enough blood now to have a sigh within him.

“About what?”

“Your nicotine addiction.”

“I’m not addicted. It just smells like home, I guess.” Because Citlali still smokes even if she doesn’t do it inside; her clothes usually reek of it, but Ororon likes it.

The captain smiles and Ororon smiles because he can see it. “No one’s an addict, then.”

“It’s fine anyway. I think I might die young, so don’t worry about me.” It’s just one of those things that Ororon knows, like the way he knows which way is north and when the rain will start.

“Will you now.”

“Yes. I told you, I was sick. It’s probably lurking. Following me.” Ororon nods decisively. “That’s what happens when you cheat death. You have to pay for it.”

“Give me that,” says the captain of the cigarette. When Ororon does he drops it and puts it out under his heel. “You’ve lived this long. There’s medicine.”

“I could live forever and drink blood and then I’d never get sick either, right?” Ororon pauses because there is no sigh inside of him, or perhaps his mastery of puppeteering isn’t advanced enough  and he simply cannot draw out such a subtle movement from a corpse so stiff. “I didn’t get better. They just switched me back on.”

“That makes you smarter than all the other automatons I’ve met.”

“Aye aye, captain.”

✧✧

It becomes clear that Ororon cannot break the captain’s curse, and the captain would not or cannot pass it along to him. Whatever strange magic binding the captain is too old. The captain frowns when Ororon brings him lamb’s blood, or so Ororon thinks because when Ororon brings lambs blood he can’t see the captain’s mouth at all, which is worse because Ororon earned it and lost it. Though this, at least, paints a clear path forward: earn it back.

When the captain next disappears for months, Ororon mails him a steady stream of reading material and CDs for the CD player that he brought over and his thoughts on the municipal election. The captain sends back CDs he doesn’t like with sticky notes that say Unfortunate name for a band or Why so much cello in sloping, elegant letters. It’s when he receives a note that says I am leaving Mictlan Ororon decides he must take action.

When he arrives at the captain’s doorstep, it is covered in cigarette butts so he retrieves the empty disposable coffee cup from his car (leftover from Citlali) and gathers them all up. Then he remembers that in the shed where he’d found the shovel with which he’d buried the cat there was a manual lawnmower, so he cuts the captain’s grass too.

Later he finds the captain on the rocking chair, so Ororon brings over the chess board, the absence of which Citlali has not yet noticed, but the captain shakes his head.

“You are very bad at chess,” the captain says. “Show me something you like.”

“I like chess, I keep on telling you. Do you want to play against someone good? I can ask my granny.”

“No, Ororon. What do you want to do?”

Ororon wants the tube that was in his arm, but it was put through an incinerator since it was full of his blood. Now, he wants—

“You could drink my blood,” he offers. “I don’t mind. I couldn’t find how to kill you, so you can have it.”

“I don’t want my death on your shoulders,” the captain says with all of the weight of five hundred years. “And I know it’s selfish of me to say, but I want you to live a long life.”

It is selfish, Ororon thinks, selfish selfish selfish. What sacrifice will be enough? When will he balance the scales? He is at once a lifeless, useless leech and a deathless, heartless robot, only made breathing by carcinogenic chemicals dispensed from screaming machines. Unnatural and unending. I thought we were the same. I thought you were like me but I am so young and so old, and now you are leaving.

 “Just one time, then.” Ororon holds out his arm. “For the road. I have good veins. It’ll be easy.”

Indulgently, the captain nods. “Just one time,” he agrees. When he brings Ororon’s wrist to his mouth, it’s cold but not enough to numb him; it hurts, a bone-deep pain, and Ororon hates pain, can barely stand needles though he never shows it on his face. He bites him for barely fifteen seconds but Ororon wants, wants, wants.

“So?” Ororon asks when the captain drops his arm. “Did it taste good?”

“It tasted no different from anyone else’s,” the captain says.

“Can you tell my blood type?”

“O positive.”

“What? Really? You could taste it?”

“It was only a guess. Most people are O positive.”

“Oh.” Ororon’s shoulders droop. He inspects the wound on his arm: it’s unexpectedly neat. How considerate. “I guess I’m not an alien, then.”

The captain laughs. “Was that an earnest concern of yours?”

“I don’t know, maybe? But it doesn’t matter. Will you come back after you leave?”

“I should think so. I will write to you if I find any butterflies.”

“And I can’t come with you?”

The captain runs his gloved thumb over Ororon’s bloody wrist and, possibly licks it, though it’s difficult to tell. “You have a life. You have a grandmother and a garden and passions and friends. I am, at best, creating new urban legends to scare off children.”

“But,” but but but but, I am still full of gasoline and I might have a heart attack tomorrow and you won’t be there to see it.

“But,” the captain agrees, as if it is a sentence in and of itself. “I will let you know if I run into any aliens.”

By the captain’s rickety front door they share a cigarette and Ororon itches at the pale little circle on his arm.