Felix had been a humble man. He’d been a hired worker, paid day-to-day to do whatever menial labor anyone cared to pay him to do. In his life he’d done everything from laying bricks to picking grapes to once attending a wedding so the groom could boast about how many people had been at his wedding. If someone was willing to pay him, he’d been willing to do it. It hadn’t been an exciting life, but a content one.
He’d died at the age of twenty-three, never having married, never having had children, and never having accomplished anything of note. It didn’t bother him. The place in the afterlife for those known by few and remembered by none was comfortable. He didn’t like the grand palaces of the well-known or the luxurious estates of the well-remembered. His small one-room house was his, his herb garden in the back was tidy, and the food that appeared on his simple wooden table each day was enough to fill his stomach.
One day he was sweeping his marbled floor (something he only needed to do because it brought him a small measure of pride to clean his house himself) when his neighbor Linus appeared at the window.
“Felix! Random question that has nothing to do with anything: would you say I’m your best friend?”
Felix opened the door and swept the dust onto his welcome mat, where it magically vanished. “If you insisted.”
“Great!” Linus watched him put the broom away. “Let me guess what you did today, and then you guess what I did today, ok?”
“Sure. Come in, have a seat,” Felix told his apparent best friend.
“Thanks! I’ll guess you spent the morning doing plant things in your garden, had lunch from…” Linus took a deep sniff of the air, “Jamaica, then got all your fresh and dried herbs ready for market tomorrow. Oh, and you swept your floor.”
“Spot-on,” Felix said, making Linus laugh.
“If humans are creatures of habit, Felix, you’re the most human out of all of us,” he said. “Your turn, guess what I did.”
“I don’t know, you went to a pub and bet on how many people would die from lightning strikes this month?”
“Nah, I did that yesterday. Today I woke up-“
“No, really?”
“-and had breakfast while looking over the names of the newly remembered. When I got to the bottom there was a new category; newly known. And in that category was one name. Yours.”
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Felix nearly dropped the cup of coffee he was bringing to Linus. “Mine? No, not mine. There are lots of Felix’s out there…”
“That’s what I thought, but it had your picture next to it! So I went to the city and asked around, and it is you,” Linus said. “Apparently someone living has finally invented time travel. She went back in time and met you.”
Felix sat down heavily. “Me?”
“Yep! It looks like she’s putting together a documentary called ‘A Day in the Life of a Roman Peasant’. In exchange for following you around all day with an iPhone she gave you four pounds of salt in a burlap sack.”
Felix remembered that day. A few thousand years had faded the memory, but he remembered her. He’d been sixteen. A strange woman in odd clothes, speaking broken Latin, had appeared and given him four pounds of salt in return for letting her follow him around holding up a metal plate. Four pounds of salt was nothing to sniff at, so he’d allowed her to follow him as he spent the day tending to figs.
“You know what this means, right?” Linus asked, grinning.
“No, what?”
“You’re about to be famous! She’s going to show that documentary to the world! Your face will be on the news, on the internet! I bet you’ll get a few memes, even! Millions of people will remember you! This little hovel of yours is about to turn into a mansion!”
Felix turned pale. “But- but I-“
“But don’t worry! I, as your best friend, will take care of all the paparazzi on this side of things. I’ll make sure no one bothers you. In exchange for, maybe, getting a room in your new fancy house? You know it’s going to be furnished with the best stuff. There are mattresses that feel like sleeping on air now, and shag carpets are making a comeback in some areas. I always liked those things.”
Felix looked at him seriously. “Linus. As my best friend. Can we switch places?”
“Ooh, aah, I don’t know, it’d be complicated. It hasn’t been done before. Both people’d have to really want to change, the two people would have to know each other really well, and the motives would have to be pure and good and all that jazz…”
“Shame I don’t know anyone really well who wants to be famous,” Felix said sarcastically.
“Also we’d both have to fill out these forms, which I happen to have with me,” Linus said, grinning as he pulled two pieces of paper out of thin air.
Felix sighed. He’d planned to spend the evening perfecting a herb blend which he would trade for a herb blend from a woman who’d died in India seven hundred years ago. But, he supposed, if he didn’t spend the evening convincing the higher powers to let Linus take his place he might never get the opportunity to perfect a herb blend ever again.
“For the herb blends,” he muttered, taking the paper from Linus.
Linus laughed. “Don’t know what that means, but sure! For the herb blends!”