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What the mother described as a qualitative change in the child’s shadow manifested as an absence of shadow. She’d never had a shadow. Not from her view. It triggered the coalescence of that unnamable fear which always commanded too great a portion of her consciousness.
For others never seemed to notice, and at first even she didn’t. But what she did notice was its negative, and that perhaps amounted to the same. She noticed only an abundance of shadow at the distance of a radius measured by some hermetic algorithm at work upon her own body.
Shadows defiled her consciousness, and consciousness threw all shadow into relief. But the effect was more than a simple bijection. Her space played prism to the surrounding shadows. It diffracted dark as matter did light, sifted its bands through an aperture, and discharged its changing frequencies in a loose analogue of colour.
At four years old, she’d first noticed this lurid tangle about her legs. She had experienced the spectrum not with her eyes but her feet. She’d first felt the centres of her soles like twin stars at the pivot of a pattern, first sobbed with pain that shot upward from those points through her legs. Growing pains, they had said: the doctors, her grandmother. The result was that her grandmother had massaged her legs with a fire cream that had silenced all future complaints, despite the pain’s periodic recurrence.
Soon she began discovering things about the pain and the patterns. Its tapestry reflected only the shadows' ends and edges, but she learned to read those marks—to extrapolate full meanings—even before learning to read books. She began to understand how fixed objects around her caught light and threw their shadows into her path and that their patterns were constant. But the pain… that was variable, its patterns inconsistent.
The pain read wrong. It was the shadow of a shadow that had no shadow in the real world. Like her. That it had no shadow because it had no being would, of course, have been an erroneous conclusion and one she’d have been too young to make. Indeed, over time, she came to understand the pain, dissipating its sensation while embracing its information.
But at four years old, the pain was real.
