I dreamed that the shadows were poltergeists. The shadows reach out and wrap their limbless limbs generata into themselves. There's darker darkness, almost red, reeling in their chests. They didn't move except their mouths, but then they convinced children to roll glass bottles and remote controls across the floor. When my parents saw my younger sister roll a wine bottle from the closet to his hands, they didn't hear the voice, and they didn't see her moving except to grab it in the end. When she was old enough to talk about it, she couldn’t remember ever moving the bottle with her mind. But I saw it, disembodied.
When I woke, I wasn't afraid of the dark. I was afraid of the voices claiming to be timeless and the noses poking out of the corners. The medial cleft nudging into and out of the light. I remembered that I made the shadow real. I had hunched my shoulders in the corner and bent my neck down to birth a shadow from my chest with the white walls. White palms open and obliged by leaning against them and forgetting to turn out the light. The shadows weren't made of the house, they weren't in the foundation, they weren't out of the sunrise and sunset. They were a mutual agreement between body and light bulb.
In that real room, my older brother had kept his collected rocks when he was young. Everyone collected rocks. The ones that would look a beautiful ruddy red in the water, but dry to the same gray-brown of all the others plucked out. Everyone keeps them in boxes under their bed or in their closet, or the ones still tinged pink or orange on their windowsills. They were beautiful once, under the algae and liquid sun. Sometimes they pull down the cartoon-pasted cardboard and take the rocks to the bathroom sink, to rub them red for a few minutes again, leaving them in muddy water on the counter to dry and go back into the dark. Heavy treasure collections. When my brother moved out, he took his rocks with him. I found more boxes, rubbing down the dust in his closet, heavy with gray rocks, light with black volcanic obsidian and scoria.
Scoria—once a hotter red than I could ever imagine touching, air trapped inside to make it feel light as styrofoam peanuts. There would always be shadows inside there, unless crushed to dust and lain out supplicant inside a cube of light. There are only no shadows for a light source, and these shadows would still be so minute to almost not exist, but even knowing they were microscopically there pulled my eyes away from environment and into them again. The bubbles were so small they overwhelmingly nauseated me as much as, in theory, fascinated me. Trypophobia: fear of tiny holes that could kill us if we saw them poking through skin. The shadow of my nose on my cheek when I turned was another source of anxiety. When I was young I spent hours worrying that one eye saw my nose dark and one eye saw it light. One eye saw more red and one eye saw more blue. I didn’t worry when I looked into the sun, eyes open or closed, a light so white it blended to the blue sky or veins so red they pushed through to the optic nerve. And there in my dream I knelt down to touch noses with a shadow. There I bent and cradled a shadow in and into my gut like I was lava hardening with itching skin.
Whenever I imagine shadow—true shadow, where we still believe light is somewhere to cast it instead of simple abandoned lightless spaces—there are red pyramids and blue spheres polishing each other brighter and brighter. They can’t talk and their bodies don’t make friction, but I imagine backing toward the light before I turn away, out of the room, and try not to think about my nose or its pores or the fact that I can only see my eyes firsthand if I take one out first.
Inspired by a classmate's Soma(tic) creation—Shadow-Watcher.
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