Do you ever read a piece and think, that sounds a lot like my childhood? Granted, I would be outside sledding down hills in winter, building snowmen and snow forts—unlike the narrator—but I also spent a fair amount of time indoors, nose buried in a book.
Scherfling does an excellent job setting the scene: a boy with his feet resting on a radiator, lost in stories that carry him far away—the San Francisco Bay instead of the Lake Erie shoreline. The sense of transport feels immediate and familiar, but what lingers is how real those imagined places become. The boy may see his own life as mundane, but he reshapes what he knows into something larger—imagining himself in those distant settings, drinking pop while the adults drink cheap beer and whiskey, filling in the gaps with details from his own world. Even the differences matter: where his Ohio fog arrives all at once, in San Francisco it rolls in slow and theatrical.
And anyone who has spent time in a library knows another detail he captures perfectly: the scent. That musty paper smell. Old leather. Dust. It doesn’t take much description to bring it all back.
By the end, the piece opens outward in a quiet, surprising way. The boy isn’t just imagining other lives—he begins to wonder if someone, somewhere, might be imagining his. It’s a small turn, but a powerful one, reminding us how easily we become part of someone else’s imagined world, just as vividly as they become part of ours.
Read the story in iExile, a journal coming back after a long hiatus.
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