SHORT STORY ANTHOLOGIES | THE SHADOW

Every silhouette perceived by my eyes counts, it is not drunkenness that captivates a man but the figures, which little by little become a necessity for the poverty of a noble soul, and when it falls before these forces, it wanders along a path of peace, which it abandons according to the aspects perceived, for it is these that direct our interests to a philosophy of solitude, marinated by ideas that converge to a peaceful world. That is where I want to go, where all the figures gather and then escape to spread the word of their world, the one I would like to touch.

It was a night when I was in sinister solitude, where silence replaced the lights and reigned with masterful crown. I drank a glass of gin while I was solvent of all noise and rapacious in the face of any storm. The ethylic reactions of my drink had no effect on me, for they were only stupefying companions that accompanied me to receive my new visitors.

They were dressed in black and had no defined shape, and thanks to this, they could adopt any form they wanted. They came from a secularized space, through alternate silences to an unimaginable life. They came only at night, for darkness was their conduit, and all their paths, from the most recondite to the most notorious, belonged to the passages of their realm.

That night they came to visit me, with a stealth that characterized them. They took the walls and the doors of my room, also the books and the columns on the sides. They reached my chair through my body, and then settled on the wall in front of me. One of them took the form of a board, the other of a woman in a fetal position, showing an apparent sadness.

I raised my head for an instant; I did not mind that they were strangers, for I had long awaited them in my abode, to share the secrets of their hidden world and their affability. The tablet-shaped shadow stood erect, exhibited blue eyes like two magnificent sapphires, and then bestowed upon me images that at first I could not understand, but I did.

He showed me the image of my wife, she was just a silhouette, moving from side to side. It was dark, with no defining details, but I knew perfectly well that it was her, for her incomparable grace overflowed everywhere.

I stared at those details and appropriated them as if they were my own, and before reaching a climactic conclusion, I stood up shouting my wife's name, and the shadow, which wandered stopped, and dropped a smile that caused me much terror. After that I knew no more, the last thing I remember is that I was being dragged, by a longing and seductive past, which took the image of my beloved.