THE 21ST CENTURY SHADOW

STEPHANIE M. WYTOVICH

I was just a boy, an orphan, and there used to be an old woman who lived at the end of my street, who never left her house, who never spoke, who just sat on her porch in her rocking chair, sipping whiskey out of a coffee cup while she hacked and spit in the flower pots on the steps. She wore her gray hair in knots and her nails grew sharp, curved like silver fish hooks, and when she laughed, the air turned salty, cold like a brisk ocean spray. And I don’t know what made me talk to her, curiosity, maybe fear, but I think it was the screaming, the screaming that leaked out her basement window, the pleading that lured me to her house. I stopped at the bottom of her porch, my sneakers worn and covered in mud, and I asked her if she needed help, if something was wrong, and she smiled and she smiled, and then she reached into a plastic bucket and pulled out a handful of shells, told me I could hear my mother’s voice inside, that the dead lived in the echoes, that they were the voices of the sea.

And I prayed that I would hear her,
prayed that she was there,
but all I heard was the old woman laughing,
laughing as the air grew cold
as the world around me turned black.

And it was the ocean that woke me, that reached out and shook me with frigid hands that waved back and forth beckoning me as they cleaned the blood off my hands, but the red kept coming, kept rolling down my neck and there were two slits, two rigid cuts underneath my ears and all I wanted was water, the salt and the sand, but the woman dug shells into my ears, glued starfish to my legs and they itched and they hurt as they dug beneath my skin, as they became new flesh to my soon-to-corpse, and I screamed but the woman ignored me. She chanted words I couldn’t understand, words that weren’t even real, words that sounded like gibberish, like the fairytale language that mother used to read, that she’d cry out in her sleep when it started to rain. But then I didn’t hear anything. I was floating, floating out to sea, and it seemed like years until I heard the voice, the voice within the shells that wasn’t my dead mother’s but something different, something else, and it pulled me under, tugged me down into the blue. These Gods called me son, and they told me I would be the shadow, the shadow that would cross towns, that would steal children so they could rebuild, so they could resurrect, and they gave me new life, for I was their sweet baby boy.

So when I woke up in this town,
in this century that was not mine,
I smiled at the strange faces with my barbed teeth,
and my coral skin, and I walked until I found her,
drinking her coffee, drinking her whiskey
and I knew I was ready to collect, ready to plunder, for I spoke
her language now and it was my turn to deliver a corpse.