Six Shivering Things in the Kingdom
For Nark & Mormon
Pulvis et umbra sumus
—Horace, Odes, Book IV, 23 BCE
Quivering. So cold. Gradations of darkness. They’re all over Akron. Emergency bands report “Shadow Beings.” I never believed in such bullshit. But something cowers now in my garden. Interdimensional immortals, some people claim; doppelgängers; aliens; ghosts. The dutiful warrant demons, bolstered by their cardinal eyes. After tonight, we no longer vilify tricks of chimerical “imagination.” Now citizens and cops and I have cornered creatures, inexplicably materialized.
Well, quantum calculations long located Akron in the depths of Plato’s Cave.
In our history, these ephemeral entities appeared mostly only to children—quickly dissipating. My boyfriend was a consonant kid; at Cuyahoga Falls, one slid over the stones. Humanoid – pure shadow – brisk, choppy (“Dyschronometric” said his pretentious shrink)—With evil intention, James insisted. This etheric double snatched his breath; he couldn’t budge his neck to check any “presence” there. Neither could the kid detect whether his friends had clocked this shadow mass that passed behind them.
What if out of the corners of our eyes we mark the transient astral bodies of nightmaring neighbors? My stab (at Applebee’s) anyway after he disencumbered himself of his secret, a year into our courting, June, 1989. And I really considered this concept of our spirit/consciousness wandering dimly while we slumber—even after the final curtain call.
James’ brainstorm: Far in the future, people figure out time-travel, and they visit our timeline, but we glimpse only their umbra.
“Then why do you suppose you got the strong sense your shadow-stranger was malevolent?” I asked him, “if they’re just innocuous tourists?”
“In Little Women, Alcott writes some people get sunshine, and some all shadow—so … souls? … incarcerated in darkness, eternally?”
No, not forever—that doesn’t adumbrate how six such essences hypostasized in the Midwest tonight, and thence, began to scream. The first one substantiated “in agony,” according to the butcher, Gualtieri, “in [the] meat locker. [My] balls shrunk up.” Soon, the second shadow screeched when it felt that it had coalesced alone in a snow-strewn, cobblestone courtyard. The third blinked and shivered as it entified, and shrieked and writhed in the Fickett Funeral Parlor. The fourth and fifth of the Visitants to Summit County manifested twinned, but that seemed incidental. First skittering discretely in Stan Hywet Hall, upon tornadic embodiment, both conjoined, becoming doubly aberrant. This thing wrangled, squealing abortively to disentangle from its Other and our explicate World.
Blanketed in our backyard, James and I fucked as was our winter wont. When I first apprehended the shadow glide over his backside, I clenched. Then it scudded over snow, disappearing by our (ice-) pissing imp. I gasped—his boyhood daemon swooping to consume him home? Then … shimmering into form, a naked, palpitating slink. (It bawled) We crab-crawled backwards—like a mirror!
These shadows want utterly nothing from us. Their sanguine eyes belie their enmity.
Six quivering things, existentially irresolute.
Thrust into lucidity, we.
All shiver still.
First Ohio.
Next?
We are but dust and shadow
Shadow and dust but are we