For a fleeting moment, he saw her, and then there was just the mist that rose from the Nile and hovered over the calm surface of the water. She had disappeared. Just like that. Was she a wisp of memory rolled so thin by time that it had transformed into a shimmering film of nothingness? Or was she someone his tired imagination had conjured?
“No, she wasn’t a figment of your imagination,” said the old man who had once been a priest of Amun.
“A memory then?” he asked, anxious that the man might confirm it.
“No. She was something else,” replied his old hunchback companion whose eyes were nearly hidden under the lose folds of his lids, and who appeared to be as ancient as the necropolis at Saqqara.
“Then who?”
“She was a woman,” he answered.
“A real woman?” he queried, confused. “Where did she go?”
“She didn’t go anywhere,” replied the old man. “She is still there, on the bank of Nile.”
“But then, why can’t I see her anymore? Does she still live?”
The old man chortled. “Oh, she is. But you can’t, because you don’t.”
Image Attribution: Alfred Augustus Glendening, Jr. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Yonder Worlds 