The Oldest

The oldest man in the universe was bored. Which made sense, really: if you've lived for as long as he had, you would probably have run through all the things you could possibly do in a life several times over.

He hired me to read the newspaper to him each morning. "My eyes aren't so good any more," he would have explained, but since he spoke a dialect of Akkadian, I wouldn't have understood him even if his vocal chords had still worked, which they didn't. Since his ears weren't so good any more either, it really didn't matter. Mostly he napped.

I went through the stuff in his house. Junk, mostly: moldy pieces of bread, the odd dusty clay tablet with cuneiform on it, and a shocking number of shoes. I guess he saved his shoes, and since he was so old that he'd probably been around since before shoes had been invented, that had given him plenty of time to collect them.

He tried to pay me in copper ingots, but I wouldn't take money. It was part of my community service for spray-painting things on fences. Mostly stuff like, "Hey, get a load of this fence," or, "I don't respect boundaries." Typical punk stuff.

The police only caught me because I got careless and put my name, address, and Social Security Number on a fence I was particularly proud of. I think it said, "Fences are tools of the state to keep us in our yards." Heady stuff.

Anyway, I guess I got my Social Security Number wrong, so the police wanted me to change it, but I claimed that it would lead to people stealing my identity, and then the detective pumped his fist and said, "Gotcha, scumbag!" like on TV. I was just happy to be part of it. They gave me 15 hours of community service and I had to repaint a few fences. Which is how I wound up reading the newspaper to the oldest man in the universe.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that newspapers didn't exist any more, what with the internet killing print journalism and all, but since he couldn't see or hear me, who was really fooling whom?