In the old stories, there were people called the center-born, who did not experience time as a line. Every moment they had ever known and every moment they would come to know was the same distance from wherever they stood. They could count. They could tell you that a thing had happened sixty years before, because they had learned to count and to convert. But they could not feel it as far away. Their losses were present. Their anticipations were present. The same weight, always, for as long as they lived.
The village learned to ask them certain questions and not others. You could ask what something had been like. You could ask whether they remembered. You could not ask whether something had begun to feel far away, or whether a grief was easing. They would look at you carefully and give an accurate answer with a small delay, because they were translating from one interior to something the question could hold.
When a center-born person grieved, they grieved completely for as long as they lived. Nothing receded. The death of a parent thirty years past was as present as the meal on the table. The village found this strange, then ordinary, then occasionally useful. The center-born kept the old losses alive in a way that the linearly-moving did not. They became keepers of what could not be put away.
Children sometimes asked: what is it like to have no direction? Some center-born said it was like being the axle of the wheel while everyone else rode the rim. Some said nothing. One, who had lived long enough to have tried many explanations, said: I cannot tell you. I have only ever stood here. I would need to stand where you are standing to compare, and I cannot do that. The child nodded, not understanding, and went back to running.
When the center-born died, the village did not know where to put them in the row of graves. The old graves were at the far end. The recent ones were near the gate. The center-born had lived at every distance simultaneously, and so there was no correct place for them on the line. Eventually the village stopped trying. They set the stones in the middle of the field, at no particular distance from anything. The stones are still there. People pass them on the way to market, and sometimes look back, and cannot say exactly how long ago.