Word Count: 493
He became her shadow, replacing the one she had grown up with and known all her life.
She hadn’t an inkling that the switch had been made, he was so well-versed in her ways. The attitude of suggestion, the stance of confidence, the clinging close to her step. She should have, but then, we often lose our sense of wonder of self, of discovery, of turning fingers into ducks on a wall. So much we take for granted may be lost in an instant.
The shadow was clearly in love with her, had watched and followed her from a distance for a long time. Hopping around corners, silently mimicking her style. He’d adjusted to fit into her footprints and practice her stride. He was a half-shade taller than she but he learned to work with the lighting. And he grew his own dark hair long.
Love makes one patient and impatient both. On a dark street one night he followed her into a theater. While she watched the movie, laughing and crying and oblivious to what was going on right behind her, he wrested her shadow away and flew up to the mezzanine, knocking it silly and leaving it for dead under the third row. With almost too much excitement, so much that he tripped in the aisle, he slid beneath her seat on the floor, his black heart pounding. The movie ended. The credits rolled by. The lights came on and then, without knowing what she was doing, she took him home.
It took a while to put it all together, to see the little changes and interlink them into an image that suggested something not normal was going on. There was a drag at her heels when she left the apartment. She scratched her head as her shadow bounded in front of her up the stairs coming home. The hall lights were tricky, the steps pleating the shadow into plateaus. She told herself that it simply was natural and she’d never noticed before.
There was no question though, that this was an odd and unwelcome alliance when one night, while she sipped a glass of Merlot and forked cubes of extra sharp cheddar in a mood of reflection, the shadow took on a life of its own.
She had just broken up with a long distance lover, or rather, he’d broken up with her. The phone lay on the floor where she’d dropped it, dropped it to keep from throwing it in her confused and utter despair. The wine slowly mellowed her anger, softened and slowed her thoughts to a place of reason and realization. As the evening painted the room in dark shadows and her mood into the dim color of sadness, she flicked on a small light. And looked at the floor in shock and surprise.
For as she sat huddled and empty on the couch sipping wine and sorrowing over lost love, her shadow was dancing! Dancing!
