Day 74 - Shadow Story

Shadow Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Tabi hated the woods.  She had always hated the dark and the shadows that it brought.  Some people were jealous that her family owned such a large estate and that she had her own forest playground.  Tabi was not a fan.  The woods were too close and they carried with them an inherent creepiness.  Especially in the fall when the leaves were all gone.  The branches, so thin and wiry, cast misshapen and broken shadows every which way.  She knew they were just shadows just as she knew the tree was just a tree, just as she knew the branches were just barren reminders that winter was coming and everything around them was dying or dead. 

Still, knowing what she knew, Tabitha continued hating the woods.  She hated the woods as a little girl, she hated the woods as a young woman and now as a young adult, she continued to hate the woods.  She did not admit it, but too many times she had fantasized about setting fire to those woods and burning them to the ground.  She didn’t expect parents or friends or family or the waiting psychiatrists would understand such instincts.  So she kept that particular thought process to herself.

Shadows are often considered scary, even though everyone knows they are just the area of darkness an object casts.  Blocked light is not intrinsically a scary thing.  But that emptiness of the unknown that it symbolizes, that is a very scary thing.  With one sense compromised a person should become more alert, more sensitive to the world around them.  But for some?  For some the anxiety and fear grows and blocks out what natural compensations otherwise would occur.  Irrational as it was, a heightened paranoia is just the thing a person might need in a fight-or-flight situation when deadly predators might be lurking around every shadow cast corner.  When the shadows are from simple trees, despite there being no need for it, instincts can still overcome evolution and fear can overtake reason.

Tabi did not consider herself a fearful or paranoid individual.   She just did not like those woods or the shadows they created. She felt they were always looking at her.  She didn’t know what they wanted or what they intended to do.  That worried her.  Try as she might, she could not shake that feeling.

Swaying branches meant the shapes were constantly moving and changing.  It would take a keen eye to notice and make out a form in the sea of movement.  Most people don’t watch the shifting of shadow shapes closely enough to notice a thing like that.  It was a silhouette, there between the tips of the trees.  The shadows of the woods mostly hid it, but if a person were watching closely, they could make out the figure as it moved along the path, jumping between trees.  A silhouetted figure, watched beneath the pale moonlight.

During blue moons there were locals that would swear they heard whispers in the wind.  A local farmer had once admitted, albeit drunkenly, that he saw a shadow of a man that would walk across his field some nights.  These were considered urban legends and fairy tales or attributed to people’s common paranoia of the dark.

Tabi always felt as if there were someone watching and listening when she was little, and still today as she was older.  It never spoke to her, it never contacted her, and it never made itself clear.  If there really were a shadow of a silhouette, Tabi certainly had no evidence of it to show herself or anyone else.

Tabi told herself if there really were something there, a spirit or otherwise, it would contact her in some fashion.  Ghosts were supposed to have unfinished business, or at least that was the agreed upon hypothesis of most fiction she had read.  If it were a ghost it would try to finish its business or it would reach out to her to get her to do something.  If it were something wicked and evil, it would do something wicked or evil.  Casting shadows and lurking about making people slightly uncomfortable in the dark was hardly wicked or evil.

Tabi didn’t understand that making her think about its intent was a form of communication or that causing unrest and anxiety in someone’s daily life was a form of wickedness.

There was a shadow in the woods in a silhouetted shape of a person.  The shadow existed and watched and listened but was rarely seen.

A whisper of the past.

A whisper of that which never was and never would be.

A whisper of that which was not there but all that could have been.

And slowly Tabi was being driven insane.