In The Mirror

by Alejandro Gonzalez
(Philidelphia)

Well, we lived in an old house at Trenton, New Jersey. It dated back to the 1800s. One day, my mother asked her boyfriend to go and look up in the attic. We had moved there a year earlier and could never get into the attic because it was directly above the staircase. She had grown very curious of what could be up there.

So he took the ladder that had been there ever since we've moved into the house and placed it where he could get to the attic. When he was up there, he told my mother and I that he had spotted a very dusty and holey jacket.

He tossed it over back onto the floor and climbed back out. My mother looked at it and exclaimed that it was a jacket from the Philadelphia Army.

She put it into a black bag and then into a closet. In the afternoon my mother was washing dishes in the kitchen and her boyfriend had left to his mother's house to do work.

I was in the living room right on the side of the staircase playing with my hoola hoop and looking into the mirror at the same time.

Out of the blue, I see a transparent-looking man walking down from the staircase and smiling at me as I looked at him. It looked to me like he was wearing the same jacket that my mother's boyfriend had found in the attic.

I didn't bother to look back, but ran to the kitchen to my mom and told her what had happened. When I returned back into the living room, I saw nothing on the staircase, up the staircase, or even in the mirror.