Free The Architecture of Fear by Kathryn Cramer, Peter D. Pautz (Eds.)

about him at first, but someone else, a stranger. The kind of man she had always wanted to meet and never had, and yet in her dream she had felt closer to him than she had ever felt to Robbie or to anyone else. Almost like a brother, if she'd had a brother she loved the way she loved Liz, the way Isobel must have loved her brother. Yet when she tried to recapture his face, remember anything about him, it was all gone, and there was only the fading memory of how she'd felt, the certainty that she'd touched something precious, irreplaceable, only to lose it again.
    She toweled herself off in front of the narrow mirror, dried her hair. The air was chilly and even though the dusty bulb over the sink was tiny and dim, no bigger than one of the little bulbs around electric make-up mirrors and not nearly so bright, there was still something paradoxically harsh about its light that made her look ugly, almost deformed, when she studied herself in the mirror. Yet she'd always known she was conventionally pretty, and even if she wasn't striking enough to ever be really beautiful, she'd still never needed to worry about being unattractive.
    It had to be the cheap mirror, not the light. Some sort of warped plastic with flaws in it that distorted the way she really looked. Like those fun-house mirrors that made you look like a dwarf or as if you weighed two hundred pounds.
    She felt better when she left the bathroom and put on one of the new cotton nightshirts her mother had bought her. The light switch was by the ladder. She turned the light off, then climbed up to the loft and crawled in between the clean, slightly rough sheets, so sleepy she almost forgot to pull the guard rail shut behind her.
    The nook seemed warmer than the rest of the apartment, the faint odor of the foam rubber mattress, impregnated with memories of all the people who must have slept on it, somehow only part of that comforting warmth. Tracy lay there a moment, content and at peace, staring up at the arch of the ceiling with its Star-of-David constellation of tiny bull's-eye windows just above her, like portholes opening on the sky. Through the glass she could see the stars; and on her bed the faint gleams where the mirrors sewn into the fabric around her caught the starlight and threw it back.
    She reached up and touched a finger to the cool glass of one of the tiny windows, traced a circle around its inside edge. Everything I need is right here, she realized, not even surprised, just before she fell asleep.
    ***
    Tracy was awakened the next morning by crisp sunlight shining on her face, winking off the little plastic mirrors on the nook's walls. Propping herself up on her elbow, she looked down at the apartment. The sunlight streaming in through the stained glass threw pools of shifting color on the furniture and floor, and she could see that she must have done a better job of straightening up the night before than her exhaustion had allowed her to realize. Or perhaps the apartment's unusual shape had confused her. But now, looking down on it from the nook and seeing how it widened out below her to the stained-glass window's bright colors at the far end, she could see how the way the apartment was set up made sense, despite the clutter—like the house itself, which she'd assumed would be so ugly when she was outside the gate, but which had turned out to be totally different once she got inside.
    She sensed the future opening out in front of her, unpredictable and exciting, full of rooms that didn't all have to be just rectangular boxes but could be any shape at all, full of things she couldn't imagine yet and wouldn't recognize for what they were until they happened.
    As she was getting dressed she saw the unfinished letter to Robbie on the table. She reread the first few lines, then crumpled it up and threw it away. Everything she'd had to say about how terrifying Paris was with the riots and so forth seemed silly, childish. She'd write him another letter some