They were all dead now, these “monsters”. All except herself. She stared at the empty space that should have held her own picture, thinking back to the time they first discovered her superpower. She was called the ugly duckling, the unpretty one who instead seemed to be cut from the cloth of the ordinaries all around them, the mundane, the *muggles* to borrow a phrase from another supernatural mythology. Must have been blinded Uncle Sam on a town bender, they figured. But as they aged, she didn’t. They then traced the genes back to Great Great Great Aunt Selma on the father’s side, who was from a long line of immortals. Then they traced the whereabouts of Selma herself, living under a new guise in Cheeseburger, Wisconsin down near the city dump or city hall take your pick. “Of course she has powers,” Selma replied in a middle-aged voice about Sally’s seeming normalcy, at least judged by the outer world that we, us non-monsters, live in. “Why would she be staying with you otherwise, humm? Uncle Sam has nothing to do with this; she’s actually the oldest of all of us.” She addressed each of her visitors individually: “Great great grandson, great great great niece and nephew(-in-law), great great great *great* grandson. Meet your ancestor with a family name so long that it would take the rest of the day to pronounce. I’d suggest you just keep calling her Sally, then, but respect the hell out of her from now on and look to her for sage advice instead of just ridiculing her looks.”
Even Selma is dead now, since the great majority of so called immortals are actually quite mortal and only live to be a couple of hundred years old at the most. Sally is a little different, since both her mother and father were pure bred. But one day, still a long way down the road, it will catch up with her.
She had to say goodbye to each one, watching them fall like dominoes in time’s passage.
—–
Jeffrie’s note came under the door. Without opening it, Sally remembers how she was slipped under the door, as it were, of her own great x 2,375 niece and nephew(-in-law)’s gothic Mockingbird Lane abode by parents long in hiding themselves. Marge and General Johnston I think they’re calling each other these days. She’ll have to look them up sometime. “Uncle Sam’s kid, yeah,” she presented herself at the threshold, luggage just behind. Stooping down in the present, she picked up the note and read.
Sunklands 