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Shaded Love

By James Maddox

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I felt nauseated. I wasn’t sure what to do, but that morning I woke up and found that my right index finger was black and nearly translucent, while the shadow on my bed sheets had flesh added to its corresponding hand. I calculated the chances that my shadow had a mind of its own, and that it was envious of my skin. Or maybe my body was confused about which part of it is supposed to be substantial and which part of it was supposed to be shadow.

I held out the shadowy index finger and put it to the sheets. Jarring as it looked, the thing could still feel, still touch, only its appearance had been altered. This problem had been popping up around the world. For a while now, nearly a decade, it was common occurrence to be sitting in the subway near shade skins, or shadies, or whatever you wanted to call it, but that still hadn’t prepared me for the shock of becoming one. The truth hit hard: Now I was counted among those that had shadows where their normal appendages and parts should be, and vice versa.

You’d see news stories of the shadies pop up every once in a while, but the sensation of it disappeared years ago, and now it was regarded with the same amount of disgust that a cold sore might generate, which wasn’t much at all.

No one ever got down to the bottom of things. And I guessed that the health hazards our government’s scientists couldn’t explain got tossed under a nearby rug, because after a week of looking to get myself back to normal, I had come up with nothing more than “Deal with it as best you can” solutions.

There were creams next to the medicated skin lotions that claimed to help. There were paints that did well to cover up the dark limbs, but that could only last for so long. The risk of the shadow spreading was high. I once saw a man with half his face missing. Through one side of his head, I saw the buildings behind him. On the sidewalk, the missing flesh looked up as it skidded on the pavement. I couldn’t go through life like that, I thought to myself at the time.

“It’s kind of neat,” said Roger, holding my hand in his over the small table, peering at it like an inspector. All he needed was a magnifying glass. “I mean, it’s just a finger.”

Roger and I always found each other at the local coffee shop. Not being bar people, we elected the Night Sky Café as our official dive, but I certainly could have gone for a drink that night. A strong one. A shot of whiskey followed by a shot of Jager; maybe that would do the trick after a few repetitions.

It’s just a finger. Jesus.

If you asked me, I’d tell you that Roger had “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” playing in his head at any given moment. He had a kind word to say for every situation. The team that dropped the bomb at Hiroshima and then Nagasaki would have been glad to have him in attendance to put their minds at ease.

“But it’s weird,” I said. “I keep looking down at the table and seeing my finger on the surface, my real finger. I mean, why haven’t businesses started installing ground lights that cast our shadows on the ceilings? This shit’s unnerving.”

“But it’s not life threatening.” I could have punched him. “Besides, look around. Two out of three people have the same thing going on. It’s just something that happens nowadays.”

“It hasn’t happened to you,” I said.

“Give it time.” He sucked down what was left of a white mocha latte, the straw noisily slurping up the last drops.

The checkout counter was cluttered with knick knacks that had little to do with coffee. Little bears with swirled embroideries on their stomachs stared up at me as I went to pay, then, as I dropped my cash onto the counter’s surface, I noticed an eyeball looking up at me. My hands shot up to my face immediately, I leaned over to look in the glass case set up next to the register where all the cakes and confectionaries were held. In the reflection of the glass everything looked in place.

“Sorry,” a voice said from across the counter. “That’s mine.”

I looked back and saw that the woman taking my money was wearing sunglasses. She tugged them low onto her nose and let me get a look at what was behind them, which was nothing; a black hole where her left eye should have been.

“I keep telling them that they need to change the lighting in here, but nobody listens.”

“I was just saying the exact same thing.” I brightened. Her name tag read Stephanie. “When did the shade get you?”

“About a month ago.” I let her see my finger. “Lucky,” she said. “You got off easy.”

And so friendships were made.

I didn’t have an answer as to why I hadn’t noticed Stephanie before that night, but after our initial meeting, our conversations grew longer and more complex. Sometimes we would bump into each other on the sidewalks and have more to say than your usual small talk. More often than not, those chance meetings ended with me following her to wherever she was going. To the library. To the bookstore. The girl loved reading, which worked out fine by me.

When I asked her out to dinner, it didn’t come off as me asking her out on a date, which I had hoped it would, but rather it was just another place for us to accompany each other. Or maybe we were going out already. Nothing seemed official. It just felt like I met up with an old friend I hadn’t seen in a very long time, and now we were picking up where we left off.

She kissed me first. I slept over at her apartment first. She bought me my first copy of Susan Sontag’s Death Kit. I was the first to cook breakfast for the two of us. She was the first to point out that she always beat me at card games.

The shades eventually took more of her cheek, and after that she didn’t like to be captured in photographs, since her sunglasses—not even the big ones—did little to cover up the missing sections of her face. Still, we were happy, and I figured out ways to aim a ray of light on her and fit the missing pieces back if only for a little while.

My patch of shadow never spread any further than my finger, and though Stephanie never said she resented me for it, I felt bad whenever the finger was noticed. Maybe I resented myself a bit. The same words were in my head constantly: It’s just a finger.

Two years passed, and Roger called me early one morning and told me to turn the on television to the news.

An Asian man in a neutral toned suite and a red tie was speaking to a tight cluster of microphones: “…And we know that people have been suffering, emotionally, with this affliction so it adds to the discovery that much more. To know that we can help them is a great gift.”

The superimposed banner set up by the news station said that they had cured the shades, and that treatments would be available to the general public within the next six months. I was paralyzed by the news, the telephone remained pinned between my shoulder and cheek, Roger was asking if I was watching, I couldn’t answer, but when Stephanie walked into the room to ask what was going on, when she saw the news story and understood what it was saying, her arms wrapped tightly around me and I was able to breathe and think again.

It was a Japanese medical company that had discovered the treatment, and half of Japan had already demanded and received the medication. Each of them fully recovered, everything where it was supposed to be, skin with skin, shadow with shadow. It was starting too look like the shades would be one of those things kids learned about in history classes, like the black plague or disco dance offs, but then the medication started producing effects that the scientists in their limited study spans hadn’t had time to record.

Several cases emerged in the following months, each showing the same conclusions: The medication was only a temporary fix, and when the shades returned it took twice what it had taken to begin with. For those who experienced a continual loss of skin, the process was sped up at a doubled rate. And once you were gone, once there was nothing for the medication to use as a starting point to work with, it was all over.

Stephanie cried into her pillow for a long while after the news broke. We had been foolish to place all our hopes into one pile, maybe, but could you blame us?

The first woman to lose every piece of herself to the shades was a Japanese woman named Mayu Yoshimoto, but there were many to follow her. One by one, group by group, half the population of an entire country turned into shadows while their shadows gave the appearance of flesh, and there wasn’t a thing anyone could do about it.

The people that were able to get their hands on the formula of the medication produced it here and sold it illegally to people who were desperate enough to take the risk. In a lot of cases, minute doses could be used to reclaim a person’s appearance for a few hours without any harm being done to the user, but it was a gamble. People that had a reaction to the drug reacted quickly, and got the full range of consequences.

About a year and a half after the new cure had tanked, Stephanie didn’t have the right part of her jaw. She quit her job at the Night Sky Café and stuck mainly to our apartment.

“I want to try the repair,” she told me over dinner. “A friend of mine says she knows a guy that could get it.”

I set my fork down and ran a hand through my hair. She had been hinting at this for weeks now. Finally, it was coming out.

“I’ll only use it on special occasions. I promise.”

“You know what it can do if your body mixes with it badly.”

“Does it matter?” she said. “I’m going to be gone eventually, why not have a few months of happiness before it totally takes over?”

She had a point, I had to admit, so eventually, I broke down to the idea. We let her friend arrange the deal and soon we had ten small syringes of liquid that we had to keep refrigerated before use. Two days later, after a lot of hesitation, I saw her whole for the first time ever. She had a mole just under her eye that I never would have imagined. Seeing her like that was strange in the best possible way.

We started going out more. I have so many pictures, so many recordings of us at the beach, at the park, at restaurants and bowling alleys and mini-golf courses. But they had their price, and it wasn’t very long before I could watch the skin vanish from her face and be relocated to her shadow.

Then came the morning I woke up next to a body of darkness. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew she was crying. I put my arms around her, held her tight, told her we were going to be fine. She just shook underneath me.

We tossed the remaining syringes of the repair in the trash. I’d never planned on using them, and now they were useless to Stephanie.

Weeks later, the CDC announced that they were running a series of tests that could help with the shades epidemic, and they were focusing a lot of their attention on those individuals that had undergone complete loss. I knew Stephanie would want to sign up, and when she said she was relocating to Atlanta, I didn’t say anything to stop her. I just drove her to the bus station and kissed her on the forehead.

From time to time, I got postcards in the mail that let me know how things were going. I missed her like crazy, but I had hope that after it was all over, she’d be a happier person.

One day in mid December a postcard arrived and had “They got a foot” written in all capital letters and punctuated by seven exclamation points. I tacked the card on a bulletin board along with all the others and a picture of her taken during our repair days.

Then all communication dropped between us. I waited, expecting bad news, thinking she was taking time to word it properly, but then one day, she was at my door just as I was walking out for work. Her. Stephanie. Complete and without a shadow to blemish her skin.

“I had to sneak out,” she said. “They haven’t got it all figured out yet, and they don’t want people in a panic like last time, so they are trying to keep it all hushed until they work out all the bugs, but I had to see you and tell you.”

I called off work and we spent the day together in the next town away. We spent the night in a motel and woke up the next morning and showered together.

Returning home, there were five police cars in the parking lot. All their lights were off, but they were filled with officers. Stephanie kissed my shadowed finger before she got out of the car and flagged one of the officers down. She went with them in cuffs, but she tossed me a wink as they drove past.

Roger came over later to find me crying on my sofa. It had been hours since Stephanie had been taken away.

“You should have seen her,” I said. “I should have taken pictures, but the time just went by so quickly.” I thought about it for a moment. “Why didn’t I take any pictures?”

We sat there a moment longer. A long silence had crept into the room.

“It was great to see her again,” I said with a smile on my lips.

He smiled and patted me on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and that was it. No optimistic words, no well-wishes or dreams, because he knew that I was already telling them to myself, that nothing he had to say could be more hopeful than what was already going through my mind. I’d see her again. Whole. I’d just have to watch the news for signs of her homecoming, like a lonely bride scouting the horizon for her adventuring sea captain.

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