My Shadow Crawls

The bus stop lights glared down from overhead, like a teacher suspecting a student of cheating but unable to spot the method. I carried my guitar case by its loose and wobbling handle. It squeaked, long and hard against the bus stops chipped tile walls.

Those black and white tiles made the room feel smaller than it was, claustrophobic despite the wide circles people stepped around me. I didn’t blame them their obvious circumnavigations, my skin; a pale grey, wrapped like tinfoil over a thin frame, quaking fear lurching through my veins, and the unscented smell of looming cataclysm sloughing from the dusky rings around my eyes.

I felt it coming. I didn’t have to use my eyes. I didn’t feel the negative gravity of the thing. I simply pushed my dark sunglasses up the ridge of my nose and felt it.

I held still.

Running was laughably futile. If I couldn’t shake it with three trans-Atlantic flights, a bullet train ride under the English Channel and a cross continental bus ride, than flapping my twiggy legs under my body like some half-pantomimed half-cartoon icon of escape would bare not greater result.

The other bus riders passed by, out of the building, and out into the great wide world of normality that waited for them, leaving me motionless and alone.

My shadow crawls. It’s no bigger than I am, perhaps thinner, elongated, certainly deeper, but not bigger. Size is not required to… do whatever my shadow intends.

The crawling itself was noisy bit of stop motion. As my shadow crawled, across frigid tile and dusty ground, it rasped. Not like the chains of a Christmas Choral ghost, or the rusted hinges of a cemetery gate, but rather like an oily railroad spike across the surface of a bone which has been hollowed of its marrow by jagged toothed rats.

I didn’t have to look. I knew it was crawling.

The sound told me, even before the cold. The temperature drop felt much like a stranger’s uninvited hand, sliding a wet ice cube up my calf, around my knee, and along the inseam of my thigh, undefined intentions mated with unknown motives.

I pushed my dark sunglasses up the bridge of my nose again and listened to the sound of my heels clack against the tiles as I left the bus stop, guitar case in hand.

I play the Apollo Theater tonight. Afterwards, I’ll check into a hotel room, put the needle in my vein, and listen to it crawl to the foot of my bed, then I’ll sleep.