Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories Read Online Free Page A

people inside the building when it was reflected, weren’t they reflected as well? Eli bending over the table, screwing in a lens, the man passing him the screwdriver, all the lamps on, then off, the office chair still indented where Eli had sat. When someone moved, does something inside the puddle move? No, of course not, but yes, something inside moved.
    While I had been playing, Eli had been leaning against the wall, watching me. We didn’t say anything then, but after that he sought me out. He must have been looking for someone to tell his secret to, though when he finally told me, he only told part of it. We were following the road that led to Beals. It was early winter and cold. We walked with our hands in our pockets, his nylon coat swishing. He described the floor plan of the apartment, and I didn’t pay much attention until his voice changed. The attic, he said, was reached by a ladder in his closet. It had been empty when they moved in, and Gretchen stuffed it with all the knickknacks she couldn’t throw away—felting projects, macramé baskets for hanging plants, rainbow stickers with “Jesus” written on them.
    He’d go up when his mother and sister were out. That fall, around the time I had moved to town, he found a half-height door hidden behind moving boxes. The door didn’t have a knob or latch. He opened it by prying with a butter knife—marks on the wood showed how someone had done this before. He found a crawl space inside, and said that it was empty except for a painting leaning against the wall. He pulled out the painting and brought it to the window. It was old, he said, folk art style, but not country, not kitschy. He tried to talk about the painting—a boy with a bird, he said—but digressed into German expressionism, its influence on film, the use of dark, foreboding buildings, the tropes of monsters.
    We passed clusters of mobile homes, taking in the flamingos and lawn chairs, the unlit Christmas lights from the year before wrapped along the metal stair railings, the turf carpets lining the stairs. I let him talk on about monsters. With Eli, I had learned to wait, to learn in bits and string them together later. He said that there was something wrong with the painting. That he’d looked at it until he couldn’t hold still anymore, then put it back, scraping his arm against a nail, knocking boxes over, burrowing through until he got to a shoebox of old photographs.
    When his mother knocked on the door, the photographs were all over his bed. She wore her work clothes, and wiped stains from her apron with a facecloth. She used her leg to brace the apron while she scrubbed. She said, There’s peas and carrots on the stove, and pizza from last night. Will you make sure to eat something? Then she picked up a picture of the four of them at the commune. In it, she wore a lilac-colored skirt and a loose blouse. Her hair was in a bun, with strands falling around her face. She was holding Paige on her hip. Look at how beautiful you were, she said, look at that.
    When she left, he picked up the photograph. It was the one he had been looking for.
    When he was ready, he took me up to the attic and balanced the painting on a box below the window. It showed a little boy in green: green pants, a green shirt, a yellow bird on an out-stretched finger. It was painted crudely, two-dimensionally; the background looked like it radiated from the boy. He stared straight ahead, and his eyes looked old, much older than they should have looked at that age.
    Eli slid his photograph from the folder. In it, he stood separate from his family. He was six years old. He wore green pants and a green jacket. His ears stuck out from his head.
    They were nearly the same boy—not exactly, not aligned feature by feature, but almost. I held a finger to the photograph as if I could touch his cheek.
    It’s possible, he said, while sprawled on his bed afterward, that someone just painted it to look like me. Some freak at the