BY LAILA AMADO
There are darker shores than these, longer nights. The year I was born, the sun never came up at all. Mom read books to me by the glow of gas burning under the tea kettle boiling on the stove, and the pages bloomed with the blue and purple auroras of reflected light. Green, when the winds wailed in the chimneys. “Gas burns green when a witch is near,” Nan said, pulling the shawl tight around her shoulders.
The first time I saw the shadows was in the winter of my seventh year. Rolling down the slope towards the ice of the river below, a piece of cardboard instead of a sled rotating under our scrawny butts, I held onto my best friend’s hand, her cold fingers squeezed in my snow-crusted mitten. I remember her name—Ilse.
Pale blue walls of the river banks rose upwards towards the night sky where the stars rotated around the silver pin of the North Star. We raced towards the other shore to see who gets there fastest, frozen winter air puffing in our noses. Then came a noise. Dry like a pistol shot.
Ice cracked underneath our feet, jagged thunderbolt lines breaking open, and the darkness spilled on the white snow like curdled ink. Ilse screamed. I stumbled on the tilting shards of ice, staring transfixed at the shadows reaching for me, black and foul.
And then I was airborne, Mom’s hand yanking me up into the air. With me nestled underneath one arm and Ilse dangling under the other, she sped away, the blades of her skates dissecting the tentacles of darkness crawling across the white ice. “Mommy, what is it? What is it?” I screamed.
“Don’t worry, baby, Nan will take care of this,” Mom said. I turned my head in time to see a brilliant flash of light and the outline of an old woman’s thin figure standing against the burning night. I remember how the darkness receded, seeping back under the ice.
Nan’s woolen shawl has been mine since that day. Over the years, the colors of the yarn have faded, and sometimes I think it holds together on memory alone. When an illness catches up with me or a different kind of sorrow, I wrap myself into its familiar cocoon, stroke the soft fabric.
By now, that childhood memory of broken ice and looming danger is little more than a dream, but it certainly wasn’t the only time I saw darkness come alive. When black shadows roiled in the eyes of the man I loved, I packed my suitcase. Wrapped you in a blanket and left, quiet as a mouse. “Mommy,” you said in that sleepy voice all children have before their first milk tooth falls out. “Mommy, you smell like sea waves and burning pines.”
He never followed us, but the shadows did. Every time, in every new place, earlier or later I spotted them out of the corner of my eye. With every year, there seem to be less and less places to go. The world is becoming smaller.
You turn in your sleep and talk. About fires burning in the dark, and the frigid air of the lands you never knew, and the ice cracking all around us. Your hair coil on the pillow, full of storms yet to pass. I step outside, inhale the humid, fragrant air.
Southern nights have a palpable weight, full to the brim with the scent of bougainvillea and blooming orchids. Silence around the old veranda is absolute, save for the war cries of moths throwing themselves against the light bulb. The pages of the book in my hands turn with a steady rhythm and the soft shawl sits around my shoulders like armor. I know the shadows are out there, just outside the circle of my light. This time when they come for us, I will not run.
Laila Amado writes in her second language, lives in her fourth country, and cooks decent paella. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2022, Rejection Letters, Milk Candy Review, Café Irreal, No Contact, and other publications. In her free time, she can be found staring at the Mediterranean Sea. Occasionally, the sea stares back. Follow her on Twitter at @onbonbon7