Immortal Stories: Eve Read Free

was beyond understanding.
    “Oh, yes?  From where?”
    “Are you from around here?” she asked.  “You look as if you’re about to go do something athletic.”
    “Oh I am, but no, no I wasn’t.  I was gonna take a walk maybe, but I dress like this.  A lot.  In the summer, you know.  It’s warm out.”
    “Yes I know.”  She was wearing a skirt and sandals, with a simple peasant blouse and an undershirt.  It was clothing she found assembled on a store mannequin, and took the combination to be a contemporary representation of appropriate attire.
    Clothing was one of the reasons she hated stepping out of the veil.  It wasn’t so much that society largely frowned upon nudity—although this too was a convention she barely understood—it was the degree of complication implicit in clothing choice.  She didn’t dislike clothes.  She wore them quite often.  But the difference between period-appropriate clothing and outrageously incorrect clothing could be as tiny as a scarf or a brooch.  In certain eras, to fit in she had to learn how to master five or six layers for the honor of sweltering in the midday sun.  It often simply wasn’t worth it.
    She was thankful that those days had mostly passed, and modern people dressed in ways that were slightly more rational.  It meant she could wear nothing but a skirt and a thin top, and Rick could dress in less clothing than a Greek on his way to the baths, and neither would be accosted.
    “But yeah,” he said.  “I live around the corner.  Where’d you say you were from?”
    “I didn’t say.”
    “You have a really interesting accent, it’s hard to place.”
    “It would be, for your ears.  Where I’m from no longer exists.”
    He nodded slowly.  “So, ah, war refugee?”
    She smiled.  “That’s a good way of putting it, yes.”
    “Eastern Europe, maybe?”
    She was much, much older than Europe.  For the first third of her life Europe was uninhabited, and partly uninhabitable because of glaciers.  She decided not to share this.
    “Africa, actually.”
    His eyebrows went up.  “Africa?”
    “Originally, yes.”
    “South Africa?”
    “Continentally, somewhere in the middle.  But it was a long time ago.”
    “So…look I don’t want to offend you, but you’re maybe the whitest person I’ve ever seen.”
    “I suppose I am.” 
    She had been living on the other side of the veil for a long time, and that contributed to the pallor of her skin, but she didn’t tell him that.  Her skin and hair color could change at her whim, given time.  It tended to default to the shade of the creatures around her.
    “That just doesn’t scream Africa to me,” he said.  “Sorry, again, I don’t want to offend you.”
    “What you say is not offensive.  As I said, this was a long time ago.”
    Race was something that had been invented when she wasn’t paying attention.  It was created to justify violence, and like so many other justifications, Eve had trouble believing it still existed.  But again, this wasn’t the world she wanted, it was the world she was left with.
    The idea that someone who looked as she looked could come from mid-continental Africa was clearly jarring, and as much as she wished to address that point—it was more accurate to say that the people from Africa came from her , for instance, than to say that she came from there—she recognized the subject as something on which it was unsafe to dwell.
    “Right,” he said.  “So what happened to them?”
    “Who?”
    “Your… people, I guess.  Your village or city, or…”
    “My people were all killed.  All the men, that is to say.  We lost a war.”
    “That’s awful!  Did I read about it?”
    “No, as I said—”
    “—it was a long time ago, yeah.  So, I’m from around here.”
    “You’ve said so.”
    “Yeah I mean, I’m American. No war stories for me.”
    “There have been a lot of American wars.”
    “Oh sure, just none involving me.”
    She considered