The Shadow's Embrace Read online

The Shadow’s Embrace

  By James Greensweight

  Copyright 2014 James Greensweight

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  She sat at her mirror, her entire world brought down to no more than the second story bedroom and adjoining bathroom of the old Victorian house that she shared with her daughter’s family. She was separated from the humid Georgia summer that lay beyond her half-drawn curtains as she was separated from all else that was taking place in the world.

  Her great-grandchildren were outside playing somewhere beyond that half opened window. She could only guess that they would be engaged in a game of tag, or some other such activity that would have them running to and fro all over the manicured lawns.

  Birds were singing cheerful songs in praise to the sheer joy of life and the sweet scent of jasmine was being carried faintly to her room from the flowers that would be open to embrace the warm rays of sunlight somewhere below her window.

  Still she sat. She no longer felt a part of that world beyond her walls. Her days of running on the lawns had long passed along with her endurance. The mere act of walking across the room to look out that window often left her to devoid of breath to appreciate what she could see from it.

  As for actually going outside herself, that too was a long lost pleasure. Descending the stairs was a terrifying experience. Every step brought with it exhaustion and fear that the slightest misstep could damage bones that had grow brittle with age.

  Her daughter and her son-in-law had offered to move her bed to a room on the ground floor so that she would not have to navigate those stairs to spend time with the rest of the family. They meant well by the offer, but they just could not understand what moving to another room would mean for her. She could not conceive of leaving the room that had been hers for decades, nor of parting with the memories with which it had become infused.

  In the mirror, she could see the reflection of the room behind her. It was sparsely decorated with very little furniture to speak of, other than the chair on which she sat, the small vanity table before her and the canopy bed in which she had slept alone for far more years than she cared to think of. Each piece of furniture was considered a collectable, but she remembered buying them when they were new.

  The room had not always been so sparse. There was a time that it had been positively vibrant but they had faded with wear and hardship much as she had.

  In the mirror, she could see the lines that time had etched onto her face, especially around the eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Hair that had once been as shiny black as a raven’s wing feathers was now a wispy grey with no hint of the color or fullness it ad in the past. Her eyes, once a blue that she was told sparkled like the Caribbean Sea, had also dulled over time. It was not just the fogginess that was part of her encroaching cataracts; it was more that they had lost the enthusiastic spark of curiosity and adventure they had once carried in youth.

  She studied that image in her mirror for any sign of the girl she had once been, the girl who had followed her love of music to New York, as a teen in the nineteen thirties, with aspirations of stardom. She could not find any trace of that girl and sighed with the realization that the girl she was looking for in her own face had not been there for a long time.

  Time had left its mark on her at every step of the way. Minute traces that were hardly noticed as they occurred but had accumulated into a full transformation of her features.

  Each line on that face in the mirror was a memory. Some marked nights filled with tears and others marked days packed with laughter.

  Something in the mirror caught her eye. The shadows in the room behind her looked a bit off. It was as if the shadows had a barely discernible movement of their own, despite where the light said they should have fallen.

  The optometrist had told her that seeing dark spots was a side effect of her cataracts, something called “floaters”, but she knew that was not what she was seeing now. Floaters were dark spots that occasionally moved across her vision; this was more like tendrils trying to reach out towards her from the shadows in the room.

  The tendrils moved ever so slowly across the floor, like dark slugs that were slowly stretching themselves across the floor in her direction with an almost sentient determination.

  She had no fear of these shadows. She had seen them before many times throughout her long life.

  The first time had been in nineteen twelve. Many people could not remember their youth before about kindergarten age or so, but she remembered this part of the day she was born.

  She had been a premature birth and, from the moment she had taken her first breath, those shadows had reached out in an attempt to consume her.

  The shadows had brushed at the blankets her mother had swaddled her under developed form in.

  For the first weeks of life, she had been set near the fireplace, in the wooden crib that her father had hand crafted for her. Slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, the light and warmth of the fire had pushed the shadows back, until the doctor was finally certain that she was going to survive.

  She did not recall much of what had happened, but the event had been ingrained in her subconscious enough that she had regular nightmares of being helpless in that crib as the shadows were slinking about her.

  The shadows had come again later in her life. It was nineteen twenty eight, but this time they had not come for her.

  She was sixteen, and her mother had caught a fever. Smallpox, the doctor had said.

  She had watched as her mother broke out and as the shadows moved through the over packed hospital hallways, moving from one person to the next until at last they had passed over her mother as she took her last breath.

  After that, she found herself alone in a house with a father that was bereft of ambition in the wake of his loss. He had never been abusive to her in a physical sense, but the way he had shut down had been more painful than any beatings could have been.

  It was three years after her mother passing that she finally decided to leave home. The decision came when she had seen the shadows gathering for the third time in her life. Seeing them pooling at the foot of her father’s porch chair as he drank himself into a stupor night after night on moonshine was more than she could bear.

  Without so much as a good bye, reconciling herself to the idea that her father was too absorbed in his own wallowing grief to notice if she had, she packed a bag and headed for New York, in pursuit of her own dreams.

  At first she had be enraptured by the wide streets and huge buildings. It was 1931 and the Empire States Building had only officially opened a few weeks before her arrival, taking the position of the world’s tallest building away from the Chrysler Building, which had only held the title for just under a year before being dethroned.

  Life was not ready to just set down a smooth path to her dreams. She quickly learned that she was just one among hundreds, if not thousands, of girls who had come to New York in hopes of being discovered.

  Her awe of the city was quickly replaced by desperation as she sought work. She never ended up as bad off as some of the other girls, who took to working the corners to survive, but she certainly was not performing in the concert halls like she had dreamt. Instead, she found herself as the regular singer in a smoke filled speakeasy, entertaining crowds of people who gathered more for the access to illegal alcohol during prohibition than for any appreciation of her musical ability.

  It was there that she met her beloved Jon
athan. He had taken her from that existence and they had been married in nineteen thirty-three, the same year prohibition was repealed.

  Money had been tight at first; having started their life together during what people would come to call the Great Depression. For a while she had even taken work in manufacturing for the war effort, but things improved over time until eventually they were able to afford the house in which she even now sat.

  Eventually the shadows had come for Jonathan as well. It had been in the early seventies and the two of them had been on a long drive when he had dozed off at the wheel. The car went off the road, rolling twice before it came to rest on its roof amid a cloud of churned dirt.

  Unlike the other times, she had seen them, this time the shadows moved with frightening speed. First, they had swarmed over Jonathan as he hung upside down by his seat belt like a pack of piranha, then they had turned towards her with a slower pace, as if they had consumed him in a fit of starvation and now were intent to savor her more slowly.

  Even as blood flowed from a large, jagged cut that ran the length of her right upper arm where the passenger window had shattered, she fought the shadows back with a sheer force of will.

  Willpower alone, however, was not enough and she began to lose ground to the shadows as she gradually slid towards unconsciousness amid the chocking dust and smell of leaking fuel. It was the paramedics’ arrival that beat back the shadows from her with their medical training and equipment, but they had no chance to do the same for her Jonathan. She was told later that his neck had been broken by the impact and he had died instantly.

  After finding out she had lost him, she felt that she would have flung herself headlong into those shadows, if she could find them again.

  She called to them, summoning them with an excess of pills, but again the paramedics had arrived and rushed her to the hospital. The doctors had beaten the shadows back by various means, but it had all been a blur to her, except for the part where they had pumped her stomach and her constant protests against wanting to be saved.

  When she recovered, she was able to look back on her father’s change in demeanor after the death of her mother and for the first time she was able to sympathize and forgive him for his negligence.

  In the thirty some years since her husband had died, she had treasured her time with her children, her grandchildren and, for the past five years, her great grand children when they came to visit as they did today. Yet, all in all, life had lost most of its luster for her.

  She cast one last look in the mirror. This time she took a bit of pride in the lines that crossed her face. Sorrows endured were written there alongside joy unsurpassed. Those lines formed a mosaic of past emotions across her features.

  She may never have sung on Broadway, but she had sung and she had danced, oh how she had danced. She had made her music for sleazy men in speakeasies, but more importantly, she had sung for her husband, and for her three beautiful children.

  She had seen her share of joy alongside the heartache, and she had lived to watch her children find joy in their lives as well. That was enough for her.

  Her liver spotted hand trembled as she pulled herself up on her cane and she could not remember the last time those arthritic and knobby fingers had played a piano. She recalled it had been Christmas, but could not bring to mind how many years ago that had been.

  Slowly she made her way, inch by laborious, shambling inch, towards the bed. Her feet drug across the hardwood floor more than they actually stepped. Her joints protested the effort with a variety of aches and pains.

  At last, she laid herself upon the quilted spread and sank her head back into the depths of the pillow.

  She was ready for the shadows now and they came to her. They came not with a violent hunger, as she had seen before, but with a gentle caress that softly numbed her body from the constant pains that she had come to live with.

  Distantly, she heard her great-grandchildren laughing out on the lawn and her grandson trying to round them up for lunch. His mother, her daughter, would also be out there. No doubt, she would be sitting in the shade with a glass of tea telling her son to just let the kids play a bit longer and that they would eat when they were hungry.

  She had lived a full life, but it was their world now, and she was content to leave it to them with a simple wish that they find all the happiness in it they could.

  With that last thought, the shadows enveloped her in their cool and soothing embrace. All that she was, all that she had ever been, seen or experienced in her long life left her with one final deep breath as those shadows fully covered her.

  Her body alone remained as the shadows pulled away and it would be mourned by a family that could never fully understand the spirit that had resided in it for so long.

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  Thank you for taking the time to read this story. If you enjoyed it, please take a further moment to leave a review at your preferred retailer.

  Sincerely,

  James Greensweight