Eyes in the Fishbowl Read Online Free

fountain and statues. The building covered an entire block and I used to think there wasn’t anything in the world, worth having, that you couldn’t buy there. After I’d been around for a while and looked at everything, I think that impressed me even more than the building itself—how many things you could buy there. Just about anything you could possibly want from diamond rings to motorcycles. Everybody who saw it for the first time was kind of overwhelmed, so you can imagine what it did for a kid who’d never had anything that cost more than five bucks—except for operations. As a matter of fact, I even used to dream about it.
    It wasn’t a dream, exactly. That is, I wasn’t exactly asleep. It was that half-awake kind of dream—awake enough to start it on purpose, but near enough asleep not to know where it’s going. It usually started out about how eight-year-old Dion James, shoeshine boy, had inherited the fabulous Alcott-Simpson department store from some kind old gentleman. Sometimes I thought it all out, how I’d done this old gentleman a favor, like pushing him out from in front of a bus, so he put it all down in his will about the whole store and everything in it going to me when he died. In my dream I never operated the store. I mean, I never sold anything. I just owned it and sort of lived in it. Sometimes, I brought in all my special friends and gave them stuff, like a new seven-foot Steinway grand for my father; but other times I was just there in the store all by myself, looking around and playing with the toys and stuff like that.
    Of course, that was all in the past. I’d pretty much outgrown the daydreams along with scrapbooks. But I couldn’t help being interested in the article that Madame Stregovitch had been saving for me. It really belonged in my scrapbook—it was so—kind of typical of Alcott-Simpson’s. It was a feature article on some special luxury gifts that the store had been selling for the Christmas season.
    The article started off humorously about how Alcott-Simpson’s had opened a special department for people who wanted to buy a gift for the “Friend Who Has Everything” or even for the “Friend You Want to Flatter by Pretending to Think He Has Everything.” There was a list of very expensive, very kookie gifts, and colored photographs of a few of the most spectacular. There were things like a diamond studded thimble, a solid gold toothbrush and a silver-mink bathmat. The last page had a big picture of the craziest of all, a mink-lined fishbowl.
    That’s what they called it, but of course, it wasn’t meant for real fish. Some little golden fish and some imitation water plants were imbedded right in the glass walls of the bowl, and because the glass was thick and wavy, they were supposed to seem to be moving. You couldn’t tell it from the outside at all; but if you looked in the top, you could see that the inside of the bowl really was lined with fur. The blurb under the picture called it a conversation piece and said that it cost seventy-five dollars.
    I was starting to cut out the picture and thinking you’d have to be pretty desperate for something to talk about to buy a thing like that, when suddenly I saw this weird thing. Right in the center of the fishbowl there was a pair of eyes. The eyes were shadowy—but clear enough so I knew I couldn’t be imagining them. I stared for a minute, and the eyes seemed to stare right back, vague and dim and sad-looking. And then suddenly I realized what I was seeing. The eyes were part of something on the other side of the paper.
    I turned the page over and, sure enough, right on the back was a picture of a girl with great big eyes and stringy dark hair. When I had started to cut out the picture, I’d held it up so that the light from my lamp was right behind it and it made the eyes seem to come right through. I’d just had time to notice that it was a part of an article about some foreign country, when I heard Phil yelling