You Were What You Eat

6. Ye Olde Antiques Shoppe

On the right side of the living room was an archway leading into the kitchen and dining room area. Really, it was just a small kitchen with a counter running along two sides of the room, and just enough space at the near end for Anna to set up a table. It wasn't really a dining room, but Anna liked to think of it as one. And since there was no one to argue with her, she did.

She had wandered slowly around the apartment, refreshing herself on what she had. Her furniture was a strange mix of the relatively new and the very old sitting side-by-side. Her closet was the same way; it was packed with clothing that ranged from things she had bought two weeks ago to things she had gotten almost two centuries ago.

Almost two hundred years ago, the money Anna had taken from her house as she fled her hometown that night had started to run out. She hadn't had much, but she had been very careful with what she did have, knowing that it would have to last her for a long, long time. She had managed to stretch it out for almost seventy-five years this way. But, her family had not been all that wealthy, and she hadn't gotten the lavish amount that an immortal would need to live on.

Fortunately for Anna, just as her funds were starting to run out, she'd hit upon a simple, yet brilliant idea: she would sell antiques. It was really a natural career choice for someone like her, once she'd thought about it. All she would have to do was buy furniture – or anything else she saw fit – keep it, and then sell it years later as she needed.

It turned out that this plan was a little more complicated than she'd originally anticipated. The most difficult part was picking out things, not by how popular they were at the time, but by how popular they were going to be in the future. Fortunately, Anna discovered she had a knack for this kind of thing, and she was almost never wrong. She'd also learned to keep any receipts and certificates of authenticity she may have had, just in case.

As Anna toured her own apartment, her kitchen table was the thing that really caught her eye. It was a deep, dark mahogany table with ornate designs carved beautifully on both the legs and the edges of the tabletop itself. Amazingly, the whole table seemed to be made out of a single piece of wood. Anna had never seen anything like it before, and she knew when she first laid eyes on it all those years ago that she just had to have it. She bought it in 1815, and it was the second-oldest piece of furniture in her apartment, after her bed. It had been an impulse buy that she'd only barely been able to afford, but she knew that one day it would make her a lot of money. And today, it seemed, was that day.

Anna finally set her mug down on the counter before walking back into her bedroom. She sauntered over to the antique dresser and pulled open the bottom drawer. She leafed through stacks of papers for a few minutes, until she found what she was looking for: the manila folder with all of her documentation on the kitchen table, and the one containing the information on the table and chairs set. She laid the folders on the bed and then started to look through the top drawers of the dresser.

The top drawers were where Anna kept all of her old clothes. Most of them were women's clothes dating back almost one hundred and fifty years, but there were also men's and children's clothing there that she'd purchased from time to time. Carefully, she took out an armful of dresses along with two or three men's shirts. She folded them gently into a large cardboard box, filling it to the top. After placing the folders she'd taken out on top of the clothes, Anna then carried the box back to the kitchen and set everything on the corner of the counter.

In a drawer in the kitchen was a Polaroid camera that Anna had bought about thirty years ago. She took several pictures of the table, highlighting the engraving done on it. Then, she walked back into the living room to take photographs of the chairs and table. Once the pictures developed, she tucked each into their respective folders and set the folders back in the box.