... thus passes the glory of the world or, perhaps, the one who has lived in it for a long time.

Another in a series of 365-word tales.

oOo

The craggy, sagging face was improbably ancient. Big nosed, white bearded, small-eyed, creased, wrinkled; and yet it wore an expression as strong as a diamond bit. The red-rimmed blue eyes in that old face looked deeply into the raging fresh face of the other and softened.

I know, said the old face soundlessly, I know what you are thinking. I know it because, once upon a long time ago, I was you looking at someone very like me. I was young too, full of the vitality and vim that floods your veins, and the old decrepit one was nothing to me. A hinderance. Something that got in the way. Irrelevant and unwanted.

The lines around the rheumy old eyes crinkled into a gentle smile. The beard parted a little, the lips showing the hidden smile and an acceptance of what was to be. The taut snarling anger in the face before him concerned him not.

And now you come for me, the eyes laughed, just as I came for the one long before. Fear not -- I will take the indignity and the pain, the thought that everything I dreamed for in my life has been for naught, and that the end of days held for me nothing other than you, young one. One made of brightness, that has not yet learned to dread the long, dark, sleepless nights. One that sinks into soft pillows as the fretting old pace the floor.

He reached out to the young face, his fingers spasming from the palsy, trembling from the effort. He reached out slowly. He reached out, hoping to touch something that was lost to him many years since. He reached out until his fingers brushed against the other's cheek.

Make it quick, the old eyes pleaded; quick, quiet and clean. Take me from my rotting shell and throw me back into the stars to lick my wounds, where I'll gather strength and dream of life past and life to come; and when I am reborn: mewling, bloody, cast from between legs onto the soft ground; where I will rise and -- one day -- look into your old eyes then ... I will not recall this memory.



oOo