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eBook Category: Dark Fantasy
eBook Description: Possessing longevity and eternal youth would be wonderful, but only if the rest of the people you love have the same ability. But what if that weren't the case? What if you had to watch everyone around you grow old and die, while you stayed forever the same? This one came in a flash while visiting a much-older friend who had been sent to a nursing home in his final illness. After visiting him, and seeing him lying there unresponsive and obviously in pain, I went home and wrote this...

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Asimov's, 1988
Fictionwise Release Date: April 2005

6 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [188 KB], eReader (PDB) [26 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [12 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [12 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [74 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [84 KB], hiebook (KML) [39 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [39 KB], iSilo (PDB) [10 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [13 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [41 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [21 KB]
Words: 3765
Reading time: 10-15 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

The room was dark, and soft with wet noise.

There were two beds, each bearing an ancient, shriveled man; dreary palanquins carrying phlegm-rattled breaths and a rasp of snoring. Elisa almost turned and left, then. She steeled herself with a visible straightening of shoulders that might have made her laugh, seeing it done by someone else. She moved toward the window, shuttered against a dull sun. A torn blind let in a wedge of dawn--it flared against whitened hair and the starched and uncomfortable-looking pillow of the nearest man.

She'd not imagined that Tom would look this way. Her memory had halted his aging, left him a permanent fifty-one. She hated seeing what he'd become, the husk of her remembrance. It made her stomach sour.

He wasn't asleep. His rheumy eyes stared blindly, flecked with moist reflections, laced with blood. A trail of spittle ran down one corner of the slack mouth, the chest staggered up with slow breathing, the exhalation loud with congestion that made her want to clear her own throat in sympathy. Elisa grimaced, her resolution wavering. Then she leaned forward, thinking suddenly that the bed resembled nothing so much as a large crib. Her movement stirred dead air: she caught a whiff of stale urine and sour breath. She stood and retreated a step, hugging herself.