The Second Shadow

I

At first, he thought it was nothing more than the winter light playing tricks.
A low sun, long evenings, angles that made ordinary things look uncanny.
That was how he explained it to himself initially.
But explanations, like good intentions, wear thin under repetition.

It began one Thursday in late October, the kind of evening when the day seems to end abruptly, as if the sun had been upset by his behaviour and turned in early. He stepped out of the baker's with a paper bag under his arm, and when he turned toward home, he noticed it: a second shadow cast beside his own. Definitely his, yet not quite aligned - as though it had been poured like some liquid that pooled in odd areas - but animated in a way that loosely followed his movements.

He blinked, shifted his weight.
His familiar shadow followed obediently.
The other one lagged a beat behind, like a child unsure whether it was allowed to mimic.

He stood there squinting at the pavement until a man behind him muttered pardon and nudged past. When he glanced back, the second shadow was gone. Only one remained, thin and stretched across the asphalt, its edges flickering under the street lamps.

He told himself he was tired.
He told himself it was nothing.

That night, he told himself many things, most of which he did not believe.

 

---

II

Over the next week, the second shadow appeared intermittently - always at dusk, always a little behind, like a stray dog reluctant to be shooed away. It rarely mimicked his movements directly. Instead, it watched. Or that was how it felt: the strange, quivering sense that something which should be him was studying him with curiosity, or disappointment, or both.

Only once did it move first.

He was waiting at the crossing near the church. A man in a hurry brushed past him, almost knocking his phone out of his hand, and he muttered a mild, reflexive apology - ridiculous, since he wasn’t at fault. Instantly, he felt a shiver at his side. He looked down.

The second shadow stood taller. Shoulders squared. Chin raised.
It looked, impossibly, defiant.

He hadn’t moved a muscle.

Heat crept up the back of his neck. A small, traitorous voice whispered inside him: That’s what you should have done. That is how you should be.

Startled, he stepped back. His own ordinary shadow shrank. The second one seemed to swell with a quiet, dangerous pride before collapsing into nothing as a bus roared past, its headlights washing the pavement.

He hurried home, pulse thudding, telling himself he was imagining it.
But he knew he wasn’t.

It wasn’t just the defiance.
It was how right it had looked.

As if that bold stance was the version of him the world had somehow misplaced.

 

---

III

Oddly, the shadow never fully manifested in sunlight. At noon, it fused seamlessly with the rest of him, indistinguishable from any other man's silhouette. But in the soft dislocation of dusk - the in-between hour - something in him was less vigilant, and something in it sharpened.

And in certain states, something stranger still occurred.

The first time was after two glasses of wine. Not drunk, not even lightheaded. Just softened. The edges of his thoughts unclipped. He sat on the sofa staring at nothing in particular when he noticed, by the faint glow of a lamp, that his shadow had thickened, its outline fuzzy as though saturated with warmth.

He blinked.
It blinked.
He moved his hand.
It didn’t.

Instead, it leaned toward him, as if curious, as if seeking entry.

A wave of vertigo swept through him. The room tilted, or he did. When he closed his eyes, he felt something pass over his skin - a coolness, or a settling - and for one suspended moment, he could not tell where he ended and it began.

He jerked awake. The shadow was gone. Or rather: only one remained, crisp and obedient, exactly where it should be.

He vowed to drink less.
He did not.

 

---

IV

He began drifting through the days as if underwater. Work emails went unanswered. Meals blurred into a series of tasteless obligations. He avoided phone calls from his wife, who was still abroad helping her mother recover from surgery. He told himself he was busy; he told himself he was fine.

But it wasn’t fine, and under the surface, he knew exactly why.

Some nights, before sleep, he would lie on his back and watch the faint double-shadow cast by the streetlamp outside his window. At first, it behaved. Then, slowly - almost tenderly - it would slip its shape over his, like a coat being pressed against him from above. He felt it as pressure, a kind of weighted longing, neither erotic nor violent, but urgent.

It wanted something.
Or perhaps it wanted him.

He would jolt awake, gasping, sheets tangled.
The shadow would be still and ordinary.
He would stare at the ceiling, heart pounding, angry at himself.

He had always prided himself on being even-keeled, reliable, and modest to a fault. Not a man given to illusions or drama. Yet now he felt like a man who had accidentally left a door ajar in his own mind - and something was slipping through.

 

---

V

One evening, walking home from the post office, he caught himself rehearsing a conversation he’d been avoiding: I think we need to talk about us.
A conversation with his wife.
A conversation he didn’t want to have because he already knew the ache it would cause.

The thought alone made his stomach knot.

When he sighed - a heavy, exhausted sound - the second shadow swelled beside him, growing taller, darker, fiercer, as if urging him on.

Go on.
Say it.
Break something open.
Be honest for once.

He stiffened. “No,” he muttered under his breath, startling a woman walking her dog. He stepped hurriedly away, and for a fraction of a second his shadow - the real one - froze while the second one moved forward alone.

Pride.
Defiance.
Permission.

It terrified him.

He retreated so violently into his old mildness that the second shadow shrank back, folding in on itself like a reprimanded animal.

That was the moment he understood:
The shadow didn’t crave destruction.
It craved freedom.
His freedom.

And he wasn’t ready to grant it.

 

---

VI

The Sunday before his wife was due to return, the weather turned grey and damp. He walked to the river to clear his head, though nothing felt clearer. The water moved sluggishly, reflecting a distorted sky. He leaned on the railing and closed his eyes.

What do you want? He whispered.

A breeze lifted his hair. When he looked down at the pavement, there it was: the second shadow, standing perfectly still, perfectly aligned. No distortion. No arrogance. No cowering.

For the first time, it looked like him.
Exactly him.
As though it had been waiting for this question.

He swallowed. “I can’t just tear everything apart,” he said, voice cracking. “I can’t.”
The shadow tilted its head.

“It would hurt too many people.”
It remained steady.

“I don’t even know what I want.”
The shadow, impossibly, leaned in - the faintest overlap, like two transparencies aligning into one image.

He closed his eyes.
For a heartbeat, he felt whole.
Then terrified.

He staggered backwards. The second shadow recoiled violently, shrinking into a small, hunched outline. Almost childlike. Almost afraid of him.

The reversal made his throat tighten.

“Please,” he whispered, though he didn’t know to whom. “I’m trying.”

 

---

VII

That night, he dreamt he was walking down a long, dimly lit corridor lined with mirrors. In each reflection, he saw two versions of himself: the man he recognised and the one he didn’t - taller, clearer-eyed, braver, reckless, alive. The second version beckoned him with a hand resting lightly against the mirror’s inside surface.

When he raised his hand to meet it, the glass rippled.

He woke before contact, heart hammering.

 

---

VIII

The next day, the second shadow didn’t appear at all. Nor the next. Nor the one after that.

He felt its absence like a missing tooth - tonguing at the gap compulsively, helplessly. He found himself lingering at dusk, pausing at street corners, glancing down sidewalks as if expecting company.

Nothing.

Part of him was relieved.
Part of him felt abandoned.

He realised, to his horror, that he had grown dependent on the shadow not as a threat, but as a mirror.
A mirror showing him a version of himself he no longer knew how to reach.

 

---

IX

One evening, on the verge of sleep, he sensed a familiar weight at the edge of the bed. His pulse quickened. The room was dark, but faint streetlight painted two shapes on the wall: his own shadow, soft and familiar, and beside it - thinner, tremulous - the second one.

Not bold.
Not merging.
Just waiting.

He didn’t move.
He didn’t speak.

The two shadows stayed still for a long time, neither approaching nor retreating, until the distinction between them blurred into the half-light.

He lay there with a strange, aching understanding:

Everything in him that wanted to break free and everything in him terrified of breaking anything were going to coexist like this for a very long time.

The shadows did not merge that night.
But neither did the second one disappear.

It waited.

For him to decide which version would step forward first.