830 Years
The boy stood in the bathroom, peering into the mirror above the sink at his reflection. With wide, blue eyes, he analysed his appearance carefully. High cheekbones. Short hair, thick and dark. Smooth, youthful skin. Full lips. And brighter eyes than he’d had in a long time. Breaking his gaze, he opened the wicker drawer next to the sink and took out the only contents: a thick sheaf of ordinary photographs.
He’d started taking them ever since he realised it was happening. One every month, which meant there must be about 400 photos in that drawer. As the boy looked through them, putting each to the back after he’d studied it, it was like going forward in time. Each photo was of the boy, a normal, expressionless portrait shot of his head and shoulders, but as he flicked past each photo, something was different about him. His face was gradually becoming more wrinkled and gaunt, his skin papery and thin. His hair was getting longer, fading to a translucent grey, a matching beard forming too, and slowly, both grew down and out of the picture. And his eyes, though still blue, seemed to get darker, deader, as the skin grew wrinkled and slack around them.
He skipped back through the photos in reverse order, the order in which they were taken, causing the man in the pictures to grow younger and younger, until he was almost identical to the boy holding the photos. Holding them in a tight grip, hating every photo in the stack, the boy opened the wicker drawer again and pushed the photos back inside.
Reverse aging. Since 1989.
He looked back up, meeting his own satisfied gaze in the mirror, and picked up the old Polaroid sitting on the sink. Grinning, he turned it on and pointed it upon his own face. And with one last click and flash, the final photo was taken. The only one in which the subject was smiling.
It was finished. The whole, weird process.
Adding the photo to the pile in the drawer, he turned off the camera, and went downstairs. He picked up a piece of red fabric, slipping it into his pocket and opened the door into the cold, December morning, smiling for the first time in 830 years.
~
“And then...!” Arthur spluttered, holding up a hand to the crowd, “no, no wait, let me finish!”
There was an awed hush.
“H-he genuinely asked me... ‘What religion actually is the Pope?’!”
The crowd burst into raucous laughter. Arthur joined in with them, his handsome, chiselled face the picture of mirth as he shook his head in disbelief, pushing his fingers into his tear-ducts.
“Hey! Hey, Arthur!” A ginger-haired boy on his left punched him playfully in the arm. Arthur turned to look at him, still grinning, as the group was quiet once more. “...Did you know the answer?”
Everyone immediately fell about again, the dining hall filled with the shouts of laughter.
“Alright, Martin, I’m not that brainless.” The boy raised his eyebrows at the crowd.
He was sitting lazily cross-legged in the middle of one of the uncomfortable, circular tables you always get in school canteens (you know, the ones with the little hard stools attached, which fold outwards). This school did not have a uniform, and so he was wearing skinos (skinny chinos, duh) and a tight football shirt which outlined his pecs, defined from regular sports-playing. Six of his friends sat on the stools, and the rest of them either leaned around the edge of the table or stood nearby, eager to join in the talking and laughing. Arthur’s table was in the middle of the room, and there were four other tables in the dining hall, one in each corner. These were the ones belonging to the few that had formed their own little groups; the maths nerds, the anime-obsessed girls, people like that.
