I wasn't looking for trouble, honestly. I'm not that kind of girl. If you ask any of my teachers, I'm always the student who arrives before the gong sounds across the valley, and I'm always the one who has all her books and never fails to listen. It's not because I'm trying to be good to please anyone. I have just always loved learning and couldn't see the point of mischief if it getting in the way of discovery.
I know witnesses describe me as aloof and intolerant of my classmates, but that's only because I see them as mosquitoes or march flies. Honestly, the noise they make! The pointlessness of their gossip! Their concern with small things, like who snogged Jez at the Harvest Ball. I know, I know. I'm being intolerant again. But that does not make me a murderer.
This winter past we were learning about shadows. Whilst the other students giggled in that first lesson, making shapes with their hands to cast odd animals on the wall, one with a protruding member with a barbed end they attributed to the headmaster's dongle - oh come on, I'm allowed to joke, aren't I? It's a ludicrous situation! - I sat straight as pine tree competing for sunlight and waited for the material that would set the pace of my days until exams in the Spring. The theme set the material for each subject area. Literature made me impatient - we studied snippets and sonnets, passages and poems, of love and life and death that brought the shadow world into light, so to speak. 'Life is but a walking shadow', Shakespeare wrote 'a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.' Such pompous explorations into the regrets of despots and sighings of the lovelorn were a waste of time, although granted, I understand what it means to have my fretful hour on the stage now. Physics was boring too, even if it made sense, with it's unambiguous definitions: the umbra was the darkest region of shadow, penumbra the partial shadow. I liked to think of the people of old cowering in the shadows of an eclipse, unable to understand that this was not magic at all. Like watching my classmates struggle with their sums, I delighted in thoughts of brave men cowering in the shadows, unable to wield swords against what they believed was supernatural. Ignorance of others made me feel better about my life, I can admit here to you, dear ladies and gents in charge of my life. But it didn't make me a bad person. Not the bad person people would like to paint me. No - don't silence me. I have a right to defend my own character, just as I will tell this story how I choose.
The relationship with my parents, you ask? My mother was cast in darkness, as if the ball of sunlight she used to carry in her chest had been snuffed out when my sister died at my father's hand three years hence. No one could quite point the finger at him, but we knew. The bruises around her neck were his work, not the seaweed wrapped around her fragile frame where they found her body in the bay. We couldn't get past the frantic tracks left by her boots scuffed on the coastal path, and his big hoofprints coming up behind, and the boots missing from the porch. My father was a powerful man, and no one would accuse him, let alone bring him to justice. I was a good girl, and never feared his wrath. I just sat straight as the pines and he never messed with me. My mother stopped standing up for anything after her daughter died. She never danced again. It was easy to see why - my father cast a dark shadow. But as my mother used to tutor us, if you kept your face to the sunshine, you couldn't see the darkness. A shame she only saw her first born as this brightness. Why you all failed to see him as the murderer was beyond us both. Powerful men have their ways of staying in the light, I suppose.
You don't believe me about the book, I know. But I insist it was real. I was looking for something about shadows that would be interesting, you see. Worthy. Useful. It took til the end of the week to discover where the real lessons in shadows would come from that semester. Not in Religion and Philosophy (God is DEAD! screamed Nietzshe - and yet his shadow still looms!) and not in Tolkien: ('in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.') nor in Greek myth and Erebus, the personification of deep and dark shadows, or the shades of the underworlds, nor in the dark photography rooms where we captured photographs of light and dark in subjects as banal as one's dinner or as obvious as the shadow cast from the oak tree in the courtyard of the school. No, dear jury, the real lesson came from a book in the library, a forlorn journal forgotten about, ironically enough, in the shadows of book stacks and dust.
A book that I stole, though I am a good girl. I know that the court uses this fact to defame my character: that I was a person that would steal books, almost worse than being aloof and intolerant. Nevermind the men that wrapped girls necks in seaweed and left them to float in the water. I was a book thief. But what about my father, the daughter rapist, the one who - oh, I know, he is not hear to defend myself. Forgive me for being angry and trying to deflect blame to where it is truly due.
This small and unassuming book was one of magic, not a book I would ordinarily read, for magic was the realm of the ignorant and needy, the ones who believed in the devil whilst I did not even believe in God, not even Nietzche's dead one. But when I curiously opened the pages, the drawing in the third chapter looked so like my father that I had to stop a while and read some more, and thus was late for class, and thus was ordered to detention, and thus was home to see my father raise his fist to my mother for the third time this week, and whose shadows could not protect her.
That night, under candlelight, after dressing my mother's bruises with salve and calming her with tea, I read a little more. The instructions were simple - one only needed candlelight and something sharp. It was how I came by a pair of scissors, loaned from the sewing room at school. No - loaned. I intended to return them. Am I really on trial for thieving scissors and books? I would argue they were my only real crimes, but I'm forced to tell a story to defend myself. Shall we go on? I know you are already impatient to hang
The following evening, I was home early, tending dinner and lighting candles, and muttering a mantra under my breath, or perhaps a spell. I do not remember the words now - they are in the book, which you say you cannot find. No one but my mother was there to hear them, and my father, who was soon to be dead. Once his shadow was cast upon the floor and lengthening across the floor, it was easy to reach out and snip. His shadow fell away from him like an old scab falls from a wounded knee. Within minutes, he had picked up the blades of the snips and drew them across his own throat. I did not kill my father. I must insist yet again. I only severed that dark, dark shadow that bled from him like fingers of black mould.
There is something I will accept responsibility for, however. It is a mystery to me how I, such a good student, had failed to finish the chapter which instructed the process of removing a body's shadow, and then went on to warn that by doing so, the shadowless victim would use the blade himself, rendered unable to live with only one half. In removing my father's shadow, I had not restored him to the light, but delivered him to death. But I did not raise the scissors to his neck. That was his hands, just like his hands killed my sister.
Today I look across the courtroom and smile at my mother's light, without his shadow swamping her or his fists to beat her. Do I regret snipping my father's shadow? I do not. So sentence me to the shades if you like, but know that I am a good girl, as I have said all along.
This was written in response to The Ink Well's prompt of the week, 'Shadows'. I hope you enjoyed it. Images all from Unsplash.
