Nobody knew where he’d came from or how old he was. Some people joked he was a hundred years old but I think it was more like ninety though his features didn’t show it. His face was smooth, like sand with deep grooves cutting it up into sections. He was always sitting in that old wooden rocking chair outside the store in the hot sun, flicking cigarettes into his mouth from a soft pack. The smoke would drift across his skin like a sand storm over a hot desert as he exhaled. He made it seem natural. And the chair was like him; old; decrepit but seemingly unbreakable.
And he laughed annoyingly, usually at his own jokes but sometimes for no reason at all, like he knew something nobody else did. He would make outrageous comments at the young women entering and exiting the store and he somehow got away with it because of his age. He was somebody the people in the town would tolerate because they knew if they got to that age and was as happy as he appeared to be, they would be lucky. But there was also a mystery to the chain-smoking man with the long, white, thin head of hair. People regarded him with a certain reverence, for his quite obvious joy in the simplicity of his life and there was a perception that he knew secrets that he could not share.
Then one day something changed in him. An old yellow New York style taxi cab pulled up outside the store on a Sunday, mid-morning kicking up a cloud of dust from the orange dirt road in the height of summer. A young woman wearing a long red skirt got out. She stepped over to him in black, high-heeled shoes, wilfully unsuited to the terrain. When his blood shot eyes caught sight of her in between puffs of smoke bellowing from his mouth and nostrils, his face winced up so suddenly, trebling the deep, cracked wrinkles on his face and his body tensed up so rigidly he looked like he was on the edge of death. The expression on his face was one of unmistakable fear. The woman approached the old man and leaned in close so her lips, bright red with lipstick were an inch from his face.
Something was said from her to him in that moment. But her lips never opened. Her mouth never mouthed any words. Instead the old man received a message telepathically as only human hybrids could do. A message he received in his mind loud and clear. His eyes opened wide and his mouth dropped opened in astonishment. He seemed to freeze in time and it was the abandoned cigarette that lay burning through the knee patch on his trousers that brought him too, about a minute later. The woman was gone. As was the taxi cab. He had a vague recollection of her leaving. The prints of her high heels lay in the dirt ground. She had been real. It had been real.
Nobody ever saw the man after that day but a lot of people remember how distressed he’d been as he’d staggered off down the street to his home in the swamp.