20 - 500 Word Fiction Challenge

​In a dusty hut far off the highway, he rises from his bed, his bones creaking. With a pair of withered hands, he flicks on the coffee maker and squints at the desert sun streaming through his open windows, a light breeze brushing past the gauzy, billowing curtains. He hums a lost tune, one from his first tutor that still brought a smile to his face. It has been such a long, long time…

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Once, he’d stood on a stairwell, his lunch clutched in his little hands. He’d read his first book not long after and shared his first kiss under the apple tree by his school at fifteen. It was all years ago now. Lives ago.

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He lifts his coffee to his lips with the same muscles that held lances and swords. The same lips that spoke the words of the greats with ruffs and doths and thous. He reaches for the wind that rustled his hair when he first set out across the Atlantic to discover what lay beyond. When the sand of the saltiest sea seeped between his toes. When a flag being placed on the moon glistened on the television.

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And now his time approaches once again.

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He rubs at the wrinkles, the completeness that comes with reaching a conclusion. It had been good though, a lovely life really, filled with people and places and love and loss.

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With the comfort of his cane, he shuffles across the room to the pantry, unlocking the door to reveal rows of shelves crowded with empty glass jars, some still with their original labels reading “strawberry jam” or “pickled beets”. He chuckles at the thought of them being filled with such menial things.

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But at the end of the second shelf there sits one mason jar, its interior swirling with an iridescent, shimmering smoke. It cowers away from the man as he ravenously grabs the jar.

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“46” reads his homemade label on the lid.

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“I guess it’ll do,” he mumbles to himself in disappointment.

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Regardless, he twists open the jar and gazes down at the tantalizing substance. It squirms around the vessel, desperately searching for an escape, but the man only smiles and raises it to his nose.

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With one deep breath, he inhales the essence, forcing it through his lungs. It curls around his heart, his veins, his bones, filling the gaps and rejuvenating what had been lost to age. He reshelves the jar with smoother, stronger fingers and runs his hands through his dark hair now only peppered with gray. But being forty-six again will only last so long.

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One empty jar labelled “20” catches his eye. There’s a twenty-year-old janitor in the town not far from here; he shouldn’t be hard to find.

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“I wonder if anyone will even notice once he’s gone,” the man whispers to the jar.