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HE’S SLEEPING IN HIS chair in front of the TV, mouth open, skin moon-luminous, jaw chiseled from calcite, hair tousling soft over golden cheeks. He’s everything she thought she wanted once, a man with molecules fashioned from moonbeams. There was a time when his lack of shadow didn’t bother her at all; she didn’t care that where he walked, no shaded-self followed.
Now she resents his absolute light. Without his dark, his gleam blinds her. He does everything for her: brushes her hair, brings her tea, hides the newspaper so she doesn’t get distressed, runs her herbal baths, anoints her feet with oil, and feeds her cakes as she lies away the days on the sofa. But she’s forgetting how to move, how to live, and now she’s had enough. ‘You can be too perfect,’ she thinks as she heads to the kitchen to bake him a cake of her own.
She turns the oven on and gathers the flour, the eggs, and the butter into a bowl, then heads out into the dark night with a Tupperware container. She plucks a night lizard from the wall of the herb garden, a leaf from the darkest azalea tree, a moth that fizzes in the lamplight outside the front door, and, for good measure, a large cockroach that scuttles not quite fast enough across the peeling stucco of the front wall.
Inside, she takes the lizard and slowly peels the skin from its body, apologizing to the tiny creature as she goes, for she is no monster. She places the silvery scales into the flour mix and stirs well; takes the azalea leaf and crinkles it into the mix; takes the moth and flakes in its dusty wings; then takes the cockroach and rips its tiny legs off one by one, letting them fall like tiny soldiers into the bowl.
She finds her husband’s muffin tins, fills them with her crepuscular mix, then puts them in the oven to bake. When they’re done, she brings one to him in his chair, softly waking him with a kiss on one flawless cheek. He smiles broadly at his wife, amber eyes wide as if surprised to see her on her feet, takes the cake from her and eats it with gusto, washing it down with sweet mint tea.
He doesn’t even complain about the chewy bits.
In bed that night she waits to see what will happen. He’s sleeping again, his skin aglow. She doesn’t know what she expected, but nothing has changed. After a few hours, she’s so exhausted that she counts his long, beautiful eyelashes instead of sheep, and, in moments, she’s out like a light.
The next morning, she wakes to find him suffused in an even more dazzling light, as if tiny fireflies had taken up residency inside each perfect pore overnight. His light is even more pronounced against the black of the sheet. But... hold on. Their sheets are white, the woman realizes with a start. She sits up and is horrified to find the darkness is spilling from her. Her own shadow is growing, groaning, is doubling, tripling in size before her eyes, gathering speed as it creeps out of the bed and towards the window. She screams out as she’s dragged from her bed by its dreadful fingers and regrets leaving the window open as the shadow pulls her writhing frame out of the window and onto the hard earth below. Meanwhile, he sleeps on, dreaming golden dreams, smiling his golden smile.
Lucy Palmer is an English writer and poet living in California. Her poetry has appeared in By&By Poetry, The Pickled Body, Unbroken, and others. Her flash fiction has appeared in The Radvocate and is forthcoming in the Cherry Tree Journal. She was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2017.