A guy buys some kickass mirror cleaner and likes the way it improves his, and his gf’s, reflection. So he starts putting mirrors up all over the place.

(from Best American Short Stories 2012)

The product was called Miracle Polish. It cleaned mirrors with one easy flick of the wrist. He seemed surprised, even suspicious, when I said I’d take one, as if he had wandered the earth for years with the same case filled to bursting with unsold bottles. I tried not to imagine what would drive a man to go from house to house in a neighborhood like this one, with porches and old maples and kids playing basketball in driveways, a neighborhood where Girl Scouts sold you cookies and the woman across the street asked you to contribute to the leukemia drive, but no strangers with broken-down shoes and desperate eyes came tramping from door to door lugging heavy cases full of brown bottles called Miracle Polish.

Steven Millhauser is some kind of genius. This story coulda been written a hundred years ago, and it’ll probably still work a hundred years from now. It’s just a simple, smart, straight-forward story. You should read it. And you can. By the way, Fail Better wrote a lot more about this story. You should go there, too.

(Recommended musical accompaniment: Scott Churchman.)