The Cabinet of Earths Read Online Free PDF

gone.
    â€œIt’s probably something along the lines of autism,” said Maya’s mother. “Though she wasn’t born with it. Anyway, I know you’ll handle things with your usual good sense. And now—”
    She yawned.
    â€œâ€”I’m taking a nap. Go look at your room, James, why don’t you? It’s right down the hall. . . .”
    There was a long moment of silence in that apartment, still so empty and unfamiliar, with the suitcases scattered around like toppled bricks. For the first time, Maya noticed the wall of the living room wasn’t a straight line at all, but a long curve. Even the windows had a curve to them, and through the rippled glass she could see the street winding along and the windows of the building just across the way, with their fancy iron balconies good only for potted plants, not people. And slate-colored roofs with more windows thrusting out from them. All in all, the place looked remarkably like, well, Paris.
    â€œWhere’s my room?” James was asking from farther and farther away. “Here? Is this it? Can I mess it up now?”
    She ran her fingertip along the curving wall, all the way to the fireplace in the corner, where there was a potted plant at one side and a mirror above, tilted just the tiniest bit, so that her own face looked down at her, her eyes darker in the glass than they usually looked, darker and more serious, somehow.
    And then when her finger got as far as the mantelpiece, it tripped. There was the smallest paper corner of something, trapped between the mantel and the wall. You could see that someone had painted over the joint where the mantelpiece met the wall, but not very carefully, and there was a black line of a crack visible now. And that was where her finger had tripped: not on the crack itself, but on a tiny cardboard corner that stuck out from that crack, no farther than a fraction of an inch. An eye might not notice the bump of it, even, but a finger did.
    And her fingers were already working carefully away at that corner in the crack, easing whatever it was out, bit by bit, trying to get just enough cardboard between her index finger and thumb to pull the thing out. Because if she lost hold of it now, she saw, it would fall all the way into the depths of that crack and be gone for good.
    Maya was good at fiddling things out of tight places, though.
    With a slight sigh of paint dust, out it came: a large envelope, quite old, it seemed. With something in it. Several somethings. They poured out easily into her hand: photographs. Black and white, square-shaped, odd. How old they must be , she couldn’t help thinking, these pictures of children in quaint tailored coats and antique sweaters. Walking along sidewalks, looking up into the camera with a smile and a wave: alive, almost .
    Almost alive.
    She was tipping a photograph back and forth in her hand, watching it shimmer.
    A little girl, maybe four years old, with dark ringlets spilling out from under her tam; dark, sparkling eyes. Sparkling. Yes—
    â€œSo what’ve you got there?” said her father. Out of nowhere, almost. Maya jumped.
    â€œBunch of photos,” she said, hugging the envelope closer to her chest. But she held out a hand, to give him a look.
    â€œHnh,” he said, an appreciating sort of sound. “Cute kids. Used to live here, maybe. Nice old prints, too. Different emulsions back then, you know.”
    Then he drifted back out of the room again. Suitcases trumped photographs.
    For a while, however, Maya could not move away from that place or look away from those pictures. They were silvery in a way she had never seen a photograph be silvery before; almost three-dimensional, somehow, when you rocked the shining children in your hand. Not everything in those photos had that magical fullness: The trees, the sidewalks, the cobblestones in the background stayed flat, and even the other figures in the frame, the passersby, the