Immortal Stories: Eve Read Online Free PDF Page A

sing-song.  He was treating this like a joke, which seemed an appropriate response under the circumstances.  Most people didn’t take well to the idea that there were other creatures living right next to them that they never saw, or saw but never noticed.
    “Of course.”
    “Okay.  If you say so.”
    “Their existence doesn’t rely upon my testimony, Rick.  They exist independent of my opinion.”
    He smiled.  He had a shy smile.  She enjoyed seeing it.  “But your opinion is adequate on the matter of angels.  And look, now I’m talking like you.”
    “It is, because angels are different.  I can only testify that I’ve never encountered them.  It’s true, this doesn’t negate their existence, but it makes their existence less likely.  However, I have met these other creatures on many occasions.  I don’t suppose they exist.  They simply do exist.”
    “I’ve never seen an angel either, since you’re not one and you were my best candidate.  But since I’ve never seen any of those other things either, it seems like they’re on equal footing.  Why does your not seeing an angel make it so unlikely that they’re real?  Mind you, I’m pretty sure this is the most ridiculous conversation I’ve ever had.  You keep raising the bar.”
    “The reason my opinion is weightier is that I’ve witnessed the entirety of humankind.  If an angel walked the Earth, I expect we’d have met.”
    He laughed.  “And you’ve raised it some more.”
    When he saw she wasn’t laughing, he sobered up. 
    “You’re serious,” he said.
    “I am.  And if your next question is, what could that possibly make me, if I’m not an angel or a god?  The answer is the same as what I said before: many have considered me a god, and probably a few have thought of me as an angel.  I’m neither, if those positions are defined by any kind of supernormal magical power.  True magic of that kind doesn’t exist, but I can do things that may appear magic to someone slightly more tethered to their mortality.  I’m a woman, and that’s all.  What may make me different from the next woman is that it’s possible I’m the very first one.”
    She had no reason to tell him this except that he had asked and she had grown tired of shunting his questions to the side or providing half-answers.  And he was starting to take her seriously.  No more laughter, no smile, nothing visibly indicative of a skepticism she was certain was there. His reaction was that of a person who’d just discovered a companion to be non-threateningly insane.  Again, it was a appropriate response given the circumstance.
    Eve had told many people a version of her life story on a thousand different occasions.  The last time had been some fifteen years prior, to a young girl of whom she was fond.  That girl decided to create something that might have been a religion had it happened a few hundred years earlier, and the consequence of her adoration was that many women in many corners of the world started calling Eve the all-mother .  It was something she became less and less comfortable with over the years, so she stopped supporting the endeavor.  In her last contact with one of the members—not the founder—she asked that the website and the organization beneath it be dismantled. Eve wasn’t remotely competent enough to verify that this had happened.
    “You understand how crazy that sounds?”
    “I can’t help that.  The truth is what it is.”
    “Yeah, all right.”
    He got out of the chair and paced his way to the railing.  He still moved like a coiled animal, even when on his elbows on a wood rail, leaning out over the spit of land beneath them.  There was a sense that if he saw prey he would snag it out of the air.
    “I feel like I should be asking for some kind of proof here,” he said.  “I mean, okay.  You turned up out of nowhere in my coffee shop looking… like you do, and you’re, you know, you’re probably the most beautiful