In a city far from where anything recent mattered—one of those places where the buildings stood older than memory and most streets hadn't changed in a hundred years—a man stood quietly at the front door of a public library.
It was evening, just after the last orange light had faded from the sky, and the streets outside were empty.
The man didn't speak. He didn't glance around. He simply reached out, as he had done every day for three decades, and locked the heavy wooden doors.
Thirty years.
That's how long he'd worked there.
The records said so.
The staff calendar had his name on every yearly list, every event poster, every birthday card pinned to the back room corkboard.
But no one noticed he hadn't changed in all that time.
Not a wrinkle.
Not a grey hair.
He looked the same now as he did on his first day.
Most people didn't think twice about it. They just assumed he aged well, or maybe figured he was the son of someone who looked just like him.
