Murkstone-Snatchly is the sort of city where the wealthy believe it to be the finest city in all of civilisation, whereas the lives of the less wealthy had all the permanence of a soap bubble in a sword fight. And, at the more soap-bubble end of the social spectrum, Murkstone-Snatchly was home to a man who feared only one thing: _time_.

Not Time with a capital T, the one whose major representative carried a scythe and got invited to every major event whether he liked it or not. No, Algernon Vainwright feared the slow, sneaky, insidious time. The one that crept up on you like a tax collector with a lead-filled sock.

Algernon was, by all accounts, a rather ordinary-looking man. That was until he decided that looking ordinary was the outward indication of his life’s failings. Algernon wanted to be extraordinary, or at the very least, perpetually thirty-nine. And definitely not a day older.

He was an unfortunate sixty-seven.

Now, most people reach sixty-seven and consider that, given a reasonable following wind, they’ve probably managed to snaffle a fair innings. It is undoubtedly an age for taking stock. Citizens at this age might take up gardening or feed birds. Some, or probably most, will tend to speak at great length about joint pain. Algernon, however, wanted nothing to do with any of this ‘giving in’ as he described it; he declared war on entropy. Not that he was entirely sure what entropy is, but someone told him it was a rule and Algernon was not a man for rules. Of any sort. Immutable or otherwise.

His home, located just off Elm Street, between Mrs. Gribble’s pie shop and a rather confused statue of a former ruler, was less a house and more a battleground against the inevitable. Shelves buckled under the weight of lotions, tinctures, serums, charms, talismans, enchanted cucumbers, and one suspiciously large and strangely twitchy jar labelled “Witch Hazel (Do Not Open Without Protective Goggles).”

Algernon tried everything. From the sublime to the ridiculous. Literally anything was worth a try in Algernon’s book.

He bathed in goat’s milk (many goats objected. There was a public enquiry. The goats lost).

He drank potions brewed by a hedge wizard (who was actually just a very smelly drunk man who happened to have chosen to live in a bush).

He paid a vampire to “just nibble a bit, you know, for improved circulation.” Fat lot of good that turned out to be.

He once spent three weeks suspended upside-down chanting anti-wrinkle mantras learned from a monk who later admitted he just made them up for a laugh. It also turned out that the monk was, in fact, a retired driving examiner trying out the job of ‘monk’ as a sort of side hustle. The so-called monk was from somewhere in Wales with the letters in its name in the wrong order and packed with too many ‘d’s - Clywedddd or somewhere.

Algernon read every book on rejuvenation, regeneration, reincarnation, and even rehydration. “You’d be surprised how much better you feel when your kidneys work,” he once remarked while glowing faintly from a potion that turned out to be concentrated carrot juice and something warm, wet and slightly luminous, that the town wise woman referred to as a “mildly ionising essence of radium”.

But nothing worked.

His skin still wrinkled. His knees still clicked. And his hairline had retreated so far it was applying for citizenship in a different time zone. Algernon was exhausted by the shock of being startled by seeing his senior self in mirrors and being unable to identify the curmudgeonly old bastard that was saying back at him.

Then, one day, while arguing with this reflection, which, it seemed, had now begun aging more rapidly out of protest against what it described as a ‘barrage of startled gasps’, Algernon had an idea.

“If aging is the body wearing out,” he muttered, “then I simply need a _new_ body.”

Most people might have left it there. Said “ha ha” and gone back to knitting or gardening or quietly feeding the aforementioned birds. But Algernon Vainwright was not ‘most people’. He was the kind of person who looked at the universe and thought, _I can outsmart you. Especially if I moisturise enough._

He consulted every necromancer, alchemist, and back-alley soul-monger he could find. Most told him to go away, and one tried to sell him a used embalming kit. But finally, in a dark corner of the Shades, he found what he was looking for: a half-blind wizard named **Zebulon Fretch**, who operated out of a cellar that smelled strongly of what might be cabbage but was more likely a mélange of old men’s groinal regions and floppy beetroot.

“I can help,” said Fretch, blinking his one good eye, which had the unsettling habit of occasionally being the _other_ one. “But it’ll cost you. A lot.”

Algernon handed over a bag of gold.

“A lot more than that.”

Algernon handed over a bag of silver.

“And still…”

Algernon handed over a voucher for a tandem parachute jump.

Fretch nodded and then rummaged through a stack of singed manuscripts and pulled out a scroll wrapped in spiderweb and damp.

“_The Ritual of Rehousing,_” he said reverently. “Penned by Erasmus Blight himself, may his atoms rest in chaos. Very advanced. Transfers your soul into a freshly prepared vessel. The universal entropy dodge.”

Algernon’s eyes gleamed. “A younger body?”

“Well,” said Fretch, scratching his head and releasing three small keratin moths, “_a_ body for sure. Freshly made. There may occasionally be some very slight side effects. Nothing fatal, probably. One head. Mostly. Almost certainly, in fact. Probably… I expect.”

Algernon didn’t read the fine print. He never did. Fine print was for people with glasses. In Algernon’s experience, the young are seldom motivated to leverage ophthalmic assistance.

That night, under a full moon and in the kind of raging storm that befitted something of narrative importance, Algernon performed the ritual.

There were flashes. There were bangs. There was chanting. Someone said something that sounded a lot like “Bugger.” And then suddenly, Algernon felt lighter. Energised. Youthful. He felt, not to put too fine a point on it, like a fit and healthy, energetic nineteen-year-old. Better than he remembered feeling when he was nineteen himself.

And that feeling continued… until he looked in the mirror.

He was… a cabbage. To be more specific, he looked a lot like a really, really big, solid, heavy cabbage.

A very _fresh_ cabbage, mind you. Crisp, pale green, radiant with chlorophyll. But still, a cabbage nonetheless.

His soul had been transferred. Successfully. Into a biologically young, agriculturally promising body. With one head. The ritual had worked. The body didn’t wrinkle. The body didn’t age. The body photosynthesised.

Algernon screamed, or tried to, because, of course, cabbages don’t have mouths. At best, they bristle slightly. He flailed his leaves. He rolled dramatically off the table. He attempted to write HELP in dirt with his roots. It was all to no avail.

And the sad truth is that that might have been it for Algernon Vainwright. A life in the vegetable rack, waiting for the bi-annual clear out. A fine brassica by any standard. Perhaps he might receive an occasional visit from his cousins, the mustards. Perhaps an odd social get-together with other like-minded tracheophytes. All of that was to look forward to. That is, had he not been found the next morning by Mrs. Gribble, the cook, housekeeper and pie shop entrepreneur. Unsurprisingly, she mistook him for part of her weekly greengrocery order.

Algernon tried hard not to, but, under Mrs. Gribble’s expert cookery and thrift skills, he became a pie filling (Vegan option). Algernon, his mental horizons closing in around him by the second, tried hard to remain a vegetable, but, let’s face it, your average brassica is not an action hero.

So somewhere, deep in the bubbling depths of a pot in a pie shop kitchen in Murkstone-Snatchly, a single cabbage leaf floats slightly apart from its shredded and softened brethren. It was smoother. Glossier. It was whispering something in the steam:

“I _still_ don’t have wrinkles.”