A Short Story

The thing that wakes me is myself. I am confused at first, exhaustion clinging to my eyes like cobwebs in the dew. It takes me a moment, but after rubbing and grinding the sleep away, I decide, that yes, yes, this is me shaking myself awake in the dark.

And that does not seem strange.

My wife snores to my side, unperturbed by the intrusion of my mirrored being standing beside our bed. She’s never obnoxious, even when she grinds and saws away, and for that I am grateful. I shift to better regard my— myself, and my loving wife stirs briefly. Even at her most obnoxious, her sounds are only pleasing, igniting still at this moment some longing fired by the heat beneath her breath.

I wonder what she would say if she were to wake. If this would be normal to her as well, and we would go about our night sleeping peacefully as if nothing had ever been the matter, if, indeed, something was.

My other self, the one who is bathed in a thin splash of shadow, shakes his head no. I sit upright and I feel the twisted expression on my face—this question, why, why would we not continue to exist such as this—as if two of me is the only thing that has ever made sense. Like I was cleaved from WE at some point in my past and our reunion now was more than just these quiet gestures. Surely, the woman with whom I share a bed would see?

I ask my shadow-self, the me that is the other, “ What would you have me do?”

He responds in a language I have never heard and for a moment, I am frightened. The goose prickles warm under the throw of my robe and quietly fade back into the regular skin of a man. My shadow nods to me, yes, this is a normal thought, and I agree.

I am agreeable. That is what my loving bride has said of me—“Oh, Thomas, why must you be so agreeable?”—had those been her words? Generous!

My shadow looks into me when I turn back, because when I turn back, we are face to face. His yellow eyes burn into mine like lanterns, like when I blink, it’s just a facade, a tent flap, kissed by the flame that edges off the dark, and my other half tells me, no.

His lips do not move but I see.

In the spaces between blinking, sometimes between the collapse of a heartbeat, the quick spurt of carrying blood, suddenly fear injects itself into me, its ochre sap blackening at the touch.

The outline of him, it changes, adjust, maybe shifts is the word, and the things cast in eldritch silhouette aren’t things God had ever given breath of life.

Is this how I am in the dark?

This other me, it is standing as tall as it allows itself to stand, and I wish I could do that too. To be how I am naturally cast by the sun, and not limited, stuffed into this mold of flesh and flimsily held together by sharp objects. A cyst with teeth and hair.

My thoughts run dark and my shadow is vibrating, walking backward as I stand. I, him, somehow we back away from my bed, and I wonder why he is staying just out of reach. Lamplight from the street flits elongated blades of static through the Venetian blinds, intersecting my ulterior form like lines of white, drawing crisp blades across his bare chest.

Interrupting him piece by piece.

I reach for my other, and I am asking him where he is going, why he is running, but he doesn’t say. He answers me in riddles, and after asking over, what? Over and over, WHAT, and him saying, “Tower, TOWER,” it’s only after he’s entered the closet walking backward and I have followed him in when I realize. It is when, arms reached for each other, perfect mirrors in the doorway to that black mouth enframed, that separator of veils in the night, that I realize my shadow was not saying tower.

As we spin in the mirror door, me now entering and him now exiting, returning to the placemarker of both our shadows, I understand that he was merely repeating what I had said.

Not Tower but Tahw, as I begged him for an answer, and his answer was his shadowed what? And as he is I or me, as I had done before, he slowly shuts the door to the closet and through the slats in the closet door, I am intersected too, without a mouth to scream.

My shadow walks backward, arm outstretched, and he is whispering, “TAHW, Tahw”, and as he sits on my bed, his wary eyes gleaming toward me in the glint of the streetlamp, my wife begins to stir.