Shadow Ties

Based on a writing prompt: A woman watches her shadow in the early morning. It leaves her and walks out the bedroom door, she follows.

Roma’s day started the same way, every day. Her roosters would squawk and scream until she went out to their coop to throw them some feed. However, this day was different. She arose from her sleep as she always does but this time it was without the sound of the roosters screeching. She lifted her head from her pillow just as the light began to peek out from behind her curtains. 

It was then she saw what terrified her and left her in a paralytic state. Her shadow, the same shadow that’s been bound to her every day, the same one that she couldn’t outrun as a child, separated from her and began heading toward the bedroom door, standing upright and three-dimensional. After her brief moment of paralysis, she cautiously got up and slowly followed.

The shadow made its way through the door and turned down Roma’s hall towards her living room. It was silent, and weightless. Not a single footprint was left on the floor, nor a creak from the wood beneath its feet.

Roma allowed a second to pass or so to muster up the courage to continue following and to peer around the corner. Did it know she was following? What were its intentions? Is it safe?

As she poked her head out and around her bedroom doorway she watched as it continued down the hall and approached an oblong, oval shaped portal. A massive swirling blackness mixed with purple tendrils bursting from its edges. Her horror was only trumped by her intrigue, she had to watch.

It was just before the shadow stepped into the portal that it turned towards Roma. It had no eyes, no face at all but somehow, she knew she was making eye contact with it. It remained completely silent as it stepped through the portal, vanishing to wherever it went. The portal remained open...

Roma couldn’t help but press forward, getting closer to the dark ring. As she drew nearer, she could hear a faint whirring noise emanating from it. The sound welcomed her and almost begged for her to follow suit in traversing the threshold.

Without knowing what could be awaiting her on the other side, if anything at all, she was apprehensive. Roma put a hand closer to the anomaly, nothing changed. No tendrils grabbing at her violently, no vacuum effect and getting sucked in. Nothing at all. Just the peaceful whir persisted.

Roma remembered her childhood in this moment, and how her father threw her in the river because she was too afraid to learn to swim. She remembered feeling scared and flailing but also recalled how quickly she figured it out. She thought about how she used to stick one foot in the water and never go in because it was “too cold.” Those feelings were always there until the day her father threw her in.

She then came back to the present and was intent on implementing what she learned as a young girl.

Without further delay she jumped into the portal. There was no theatrics, no noises, no feelings. Roma just appeared on the other side in a strange new world as if nothing happened.

This world looked exactly like her’s, but no one was human, everyone was one of these shadow people.

Before too long, Roma noticed she could now hear them, their movements, the cluttered sounds of conversations they were holding.

She then realized she recognized her own shadow that had just seconds before entered the portal before her. Roma approached it for a conversation. A conversation she would not know how to handle, yet she did so regardless.

“What is this place? Who are you?” Roma insisted on getting answers to questions she didn’t even know the deeper meaning to.

After staring at Roma for a moment, it replied.

“We are born in tandem

Born as two

For each one of us

Are one of you”

This was all she got as an answer, a poem.

“Why did you leave me?” She prodded.

“We are bound by your actions

The things that you do

You can never retract them

But we cannot choose”

Another poem fell from the mouthless face of her own shadow. A poem she knew nothing of what it meant.

She pleaded for the shadow to speak in a way she would understand. It proceeded with more of the same prose.

“As the light shines in your land

So ties the link

We are brought back to mirror

No time to think

We build no bonds in our world

For they risk devastation

Your plans always unfurl

Witness this demonstration”

As her shadow finished its last stanza, Roma’s eyes glossed over and she couldn’t see anything but what the will of her shadow was imposing on her. She watched replays of humans committing heinous acts to each other, homicide, rape, assault. These among various other images of violence pelted Roma’s brain like hail, as soon as one ended another played.

It only stopped once she realized what her shadow meant by being bound by her actions. Roma committed no such crimes against her own kind but now understood. Everything her kind do back home is mirrored by their shadows and they must adhere to those actions. Regardless of whether or not remorse is felt, these shadows have to enact that violence side by side with their human counterparts against one of their own kind that they may not even know.

Why would they build bonds, relationships if this is all that may happen?

Roma’s shadow then gestured to the portal as if to usher her back to her own world. With a newfound introspect, Roma turned and headed back to her homeland. She stepped to the portal once more, greeted with that same mystical and soothing sound. With one foot in, she turned back to her shadow once more, and completed her journey. 

The portal closed behind her.

Author's Note

This was supposed to be a "5-minute" prompt but I took a little longer on it due to how much fun I was having with it. Not overly concerned with the grammatical errors.