LA EPOPEYA DE AMIGO MAN (FAN FICTION NOT AFFILIATED WITH CITY OF EL PASO).

I.
He came up the Camino Real in 1776, with the spice and the silver, on the road that made a city out of a river crossing.

He was a sailor. He traded jewelry and spices. On the long Pacific legs he made the food — fish pressed and salted to survive a crossing, the kind built to last a voyage.

He could not go home. His country had closed itself and made leaving a crime. There is no record of him on any manifest. There never was.

II.
Something came out of the water on the last crossing.

It took the man beside him. It only touched him.

That is why he has not aged a day in two hundred and fifty years, and why he has spent every one of them smiling.

III.
El Paso means the pass. It is a place people go through.

He stopped. He learned the language, then the next one. He stood on corners and waved at children who grew old while he did not. In 1976 somebody put him on a poster and the city decided he was theirs.

They were right. They were just early by two hundred years.

IV.
The water gave the other man back.

It gave him a new form, a new name, and one unfinished question:

why you and not me?