Worldbuilder

I knew a man, once.
He had no name, only the name we gave him.
Worldbuilder.

I would often wonder if he had a name, or even a parent, as I watched him make his slow way down the street through our insulated little town every day. The same path, never looking up, only looking weary. No one knew where he came from, or where he went. Yet we all knew what he was.
Worldbuilder.
He had never bothered anyone, never even spoken. I suspected, secretly, that if he ever did speak, his voice would be as rusty as the old gate down the back of Nan’s farm. To our little town, he was just another part of the scenery; a phenomenon so ancient it didn’t need explaining. Nan said he’d been walking ever since she could remember, and ever since her Nan could remember. We all just assumed he’d been there forever, just like the sun. He never changed either, though often as I watched him walk, I’d think that maybe his back was a little more hunched today than it had been last month, or the month before. When I tried to tell someone, they dismissed my observation. Everyone knew the Worldbuilder never changed.
But times changed for our town, if slowly, and new people started drifting into our little town, and they didn’t know the Worldbuilder. They soon learned as the town dredged up all it knew about him. They asked why he was always walking. It was like trying to explain why the sun crossed the sky each day. No one knew, it simply was.

In ill-lit, small rooms under houses, whispers began, escaping from hushed lips into the stale air. Questions. Insinuations. Demands for answers. Accusations.
As the whispers grew stronger, they escaped, like thieves in the night, spreading like wildfire. They slid under doors and into the ears of sensible people, common people. People who had never needed to question why the sun moved across the sky, or why the Worldbuilder walked through the town.
Why did he walk?
Where was he going?
What did he do when they weren’t watching?
Building worlds- the people answered triumphantly.
Our world?
Well yes, all worlds.
If he could create our world, couldn’t he destroy it?
How did they know he wouldn’t try?
He was dangerous.
He couldn’t be trusted.

And as these whispers became words spoken in daylight, the looks began. Suspicious looks. Mothers called their children away from the road as he walked past. Men sneered.
He didn’t notice for a long time, head down as he walked his same, worn path. Then, one day, someone spat on that path in front of him. It was impossible not to see the globule of saliva sinking into the dirt in front of him. He looked up, slowly. The men steeled themselves for his wrath, fathering together, ready to martyr themselves and thus prove their cause.
I remember his face so clearly. He was confused at first, his eyebrows drawing together in a frown, his head tilting. He watched their defiant, proud faces, and slowly, like dawn across the sky, the realisation spread across his features. Then the tiny muscles around his eyes contracted, his forehead wrinkled and his mouth turned down in the most heart-wrenching expression of hurt I have ever seen. I will never forget his eyes, which I saw for the first time were the clearest blue as they burned themselves into the back of my skull with the tears that pricked them. A little life seemed to leave him, in that moment, departing from his features like air escaping a deflating balloon. He became ever more hunched.

Something happened to time, then. I blinked, and he was gone. People were cheering, congratulating the men for their act of bravery.
I fled.
I left the town down the road the man had walked every day of my life that no one had ever followed. I search and I searched until I found.
“Mister!” I called to his retreating back. “Hey Mister!”
He turned, more slowly than ever, and looked at me, his eyes no less piercing than before. Suddenly, I didn’t know what to say. Words fled me. “Are you going to keep building worlds?” I blurted out.
He raised his eyebrows, his features disbelieving. “Apparently, my trade is not so well received by your people,” he said.
His voice was not rusty, as I’d thought. It was musical. It was all of nature singing at once. The words he spoke sounded foreign to my ears, they were so changed, so beautiful.
“I- I would like…” I wasn’t sure how to express myself. The words from my own mouth sounded dull, flat, unworthy of the air. “A world,” I finished lamely. “If… if that’s okay.”
His head angled ever so slightly. “You would like me to build you a world?” he asked carefully, seeming to taste every world thoroughly before letting them escape into the world. His voice was just as magical as the first time he’d spoken. Some terrified part of me had thought, in that brief interlude, that perhaps his voice had been the product of a dream.
“Yes… yes please,” I answered.
“It will take me one year, exactly,” he announced, and a little life seemed to flow back into his features.
“Okay.”
“I will not return to your town until it is finished.”
“Okay.”
“Look for me.”
“Okay.”
He turned, and just like that, he left. I watched him go until he’d disappeared into the brightness of the setting sun Then I went home, to watch, and wait.

True to his word, he did not return for one year. Every day I ran to the street to look for him, but he did not appear until 365 notches could be found on the wall above my bed. After exactly one year had passed, he appeared.
He walked up to me. “I have your world,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Treat it carefully,” he warned me.
“Okay.”
He untucked the book from his arm and handed it to me, before disappearing for the last time.
I opened the leatherbound cover and sniffed the vellum pages. I turned to the first page, and began to read.
“I knew a man, once…