Excerpt from "The Man From Empire"

By Dan Melson on August 6, 2017 6:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The microwave dinged. I was being pulled in too many ways too fast. I didn't trust myself to speak, so I simply opened the door and handed him one of them. Beef and cheese enchilada with rice and beans. I had machaca burrito with the same sides.

Soon as I started eating, I realized I was ravenously hungry. It hadn't just been ten hours since I ate, I realized that ScOsh had used my own energy to fix all the little things wrong with me. Among those had been the blood sugar drop that signals hunger most of the time, but once food started going in, it was hard to stop. Soon as I finished the dinner, I grabbed bread and sandwich stuffings from the fridge, and started putting them together. PB&J, turkey, ham and cheese, another PB&J. I kept building them and handing him every other one until I'd had four. He'd had the same, and we'd finished the bread. I was torn between thinking I'd gain ten pounds and that I would be doomed to keep eating forever hungry and getting thinner like the guy in some myth I'd heard once.

"Just a one-time thing, Graciela"

"You can call me Grace," I said, "Everybody does. Well, at least everyone who's not close family"

"Just a one-time thing, Grace," he repeated, "Your body will replace the energy I used, then go back to normal, although it will want more for a while. You were about forty, I've moved you back to a thirty year old body"

As I said, I'm 28. You tell a woman she was an old hag and you've helped her by moving he back to two years older than she is and see what happens.

ScOsh sensed my anger, and said, "We consider thirty to be the first flush of physical maturity. It's also the age at which we expect our children to have become adults for most purposes. Maybe our years are shorter than yours." As I said earlier, he told me the next day that the years he talked about were 255 Earth days, almost exactly. The decimal conversion he told me was 0.698. So normal people where he came from "only" lived about 630 to 1250 Earth years, and he was "only" a little over fifteen thousand Earth years old. Give or take. It didn't make much difference to resentment and anger I felt, but at least I was an insanely healthy 21 year old now, not the forty year old hag I'd been imagining (who was really the same 28 I was)

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