The Last of His Kind
I don’t know the man down the street. We sometimes see him on his front porch as we race down the street on our bikes, or staring through his window as we walk with Nan to school in the mornings. Mom says he’s been there as long as we have on Johnson Street, but I feel like he was here before it was even Johnson Street.
Whenever I look at him, he looks like he’s seen everything, like he’s lived more than 100 lives. It’s like he was alive even when his house wasn’t built. I never see anyone else with him, but I feel like he has a big family. I just don’t know if they live with him. Maybe they’re from one of those other lives, like how you stay connected to things or people through that red string thingy Mrs. Mitchell was telling us about. I bet if you went inside his house, it’s covered in red. In a good way.
The man down the street never smiles. Not really. When Nan sees him watering his plants outside, she’ll greet him and he’ll wave, but it’s forced, like when you gotta give auntie a big kiss even though you know you’ll get lipstick all over you. I wonder when he last smiled and meant it. Maybe it was with his friends from his old street.
My friends were talking about him today. They were even making fun of him for just sitting outside and not doing anything all day. He was an alien to him, but I think he’s just misunderstood. Like someone from another country that’s really nice if you just give them a chance, kinda thing.
I went and talked to him today. I don’t know what I expected, and Mom always said, never talk to strangers. But the man down the street never felt like a stranger. So I said hi. He said hi back. I asked him what he was doing today, and he said he was focused on just living every day. That he never knew which was his last, so he lived them all the exact same way: the best he could.
I went to leave, but it always felt kinda weird to call him just “the man down the street” so as I was at his gate, I shouted “what’s your name?” He just smiled and turned back into his house. And then, if by magic, it made sense. He looks just like us, and can act like us too. But when you ask him his name, he does not know, for it has been too long since anyone has introduced him by name.
Inspired by a friend’s homework assignment, you take a date, look what happened in history for it, and then use a fact from that to write a flash fiction. That’s how the story of Ishi morphed into that.