The Puddle That Watched You

After the rain, a single puddle clung to the curb, a dark coin on the street. It reflected not the sky but a room you could not name, a corridor that smelled faintly of rain and old wallpaper.

I paused, thinking it was simply a trick of light, but the longer I watched, the more the image resembled someone else: a version of me from a long-ago winter when I wore a scarf too large for my neck. The reflection breathed, and the water's surface became a window that would not close.

“Look closer,” it urged without sound, a whisper inside the water that traveled up your sleeves and into your chest.

Here are the things the puddle showed when I dared to linger:

The face in the water aged backward as if time rolled away from me, not toward it.
The street beyond the glass-eaten surface shifted to a hallway with damp wallpaper where footsteps echoed with another heartbeat.
My own hands pressed against the glass would not make contact; instead, the puddle pressed back, a second palm flattening over mine from the deeper side.
In its corners, names—some mine, some not—slipped into view and then vanished as if the water swallowed memory.

That night, when I finally turned away, the reflection did not follow as a ghost would. It lurched forward within the puddle, as if it had learned to step outside the boundary of water. The colored streetlight halos smeared into a halo around the imagined figure, and I heard a soft cough that was not mine.

Morning arrived, muddy and quiet, and the puddle remained, smaller perhaps, but still there, a secret kept on the edge of the sidewalk. It watched because someone has to watch what slips away: the living looking at themselves, and the dead living at the other end of a rain-soaked street.

If you walk past that puddle now, pause a moment. If you look long enough, you may not just see your reflection—you may meet the watcher who learned to survive by watching you watch yourself.