Truth Come to Shadows

The sidewalk before me was busy enough to distract from the discomfort of the metal bench I sat on. So far, I had seen two incidents from over the top of my phone.

When a girl in a pink coat cursed, I was alerted of a third incident. She had stumbled, dropping her cup of coffee in the process, and the expletive came out as involuntarily as a cough. She stepped into the liquid and right back out with the tiniest of splashes. Her white shoelaces still dragged through the puddle, soaking up the light brown. They had caused her trip--at least that was what she believed.

The girl didn’t see the shadowy creatures that scrambled out of the sewer, big ears flapping as they bounded to her feet. She didn’t feel when their tiny claws found purchase on her canvas shoes, or when they tugged the neat, double-knotted bow apart. Her curse covered their titters of glee and the soft padding of their paws cushioning their landing as they leapt back to the safety of the shadows.

Nobody ever noticed them and their huge glassy eyes. But they were here now, marble eyes glittering as they watched the girl stomp off to wherever she needed to be.

I’ve seen the creatures all my life. Whomever crossed their paths found their days ruined. They slipped in and out of the shadows to do all sorts of things, just little things that put lines onto people’s faces and shadows under their eyes. 

I tried to tell my parents about them and their little habit of snatching away people’s happiness when my mom’s report went missing. A creature had taken it straight from the printer to the recycle bin below. They didn’t believe me. 

Neither did my classmates or my teachers. It was normal for kids to trip on the playground. They were clumsy. And it was perfectly reasonable for the bin of spare crayons and markers to vault itself off the shelf of its own volition. Right?

I used to argue with them, insist that these creatures were the cause. I should have stopped. They never listened. All it ever did was make me realize that people could snatch happiness from a life the same way the creatures could.

Liar, they called me.

Stop making up stories. Stop making excuses.

You’re crazy--hallucinating monsters like that.

Liar.

Maybe I was crazy. Not a single other person had ever seen the creatures. Science and coincidence, chance and probability proved that shoelaces came undone and things fell and belongings got lost. Certain sciences could even explain how these events dragged people’s moods and faces down too.

It didn’t explain how these creatures were fact to me and fiction to others. They couldn’t be both real and fake. That much, I knew.

I slapped my phone, screen down, onto my lap. Nowhere could I find evidence or history about creatures like these. In my peripheral vision, I tracked one as its shadow grew from the shade of a tree. It looked right at me, sharp teeth bared in an impish smile. The throng of people marched past, eyes ahead.

Hallucinations. The internet had told me they were caused by mental illnesses or a lack of sleep, fevers or social isolation. But I slept well, ate well, and rarely got sick. I was perfectly healthy.

Perhaps there was an explanation, though. There had to be.

I stared at the creature. It fixed a glassy look on me. Its eyes were full of light.

Maybe the others were right. Maybe I was crazy.

And the creature was just smoke and shadows. A trick of the light. Just a figment of my imagination that plagued me like the voices that whispered that I had been lying to them and myself this whole time. I shut my eyes, and the darkness shrouded my vision, shielding me from any more falsehoods I could tell myself.

I imagined a duster, full of fluffy feathers, dancing across my mind as I cracked my eyes open. It brushed along the line of light that grew with each moment as my eyelids raised, discarding any of the creatures.

Where the creature had been was just the swaying shadow of a tree. 

Lies.

Hallucinations.

Madness.

The creature was gone. It was truly false. 

Like a pit opened at my feet, my heart sank, taking the rest of me with it like an anchor. I shut my eyes. A different kind of creature consumed me, the same color as those imagined imps without the glassy eyes or flapping ears. 

All this time I had been lying to myself. My senses had deceived me. Each thought was followed by the truth that the others had preached, clawing at my insides until I fell to my knees.

The ground struck me harder than I expected--there was no infinite pit below me, for it had been a lie too. But when I opened my eyes, my vision was still blanketed with shadows. The darkness swarmed around me, clawing up my legs, sinking little teeth into my back, brushing against my skin coarsely. The shadows were moving, flashing bright eyes at me. 

Creatures. 

They gathered around me, pushing me to the ground, making crude gestures only my eyes could see. 

They were real. Real to me if not anyone else.

The truth freed me from their grasp. They scattered into the other shadows, off to find their next victim. The last one lingered and looked back before vanishing. I swore it winked at me.

It took me weeks to discover the whole truth, another three incidents.

First, there was a girl who stopped to glance at her reflection in a store window. Lines creased her brow before a familiar shadow scampered up her back and raked a paw through her hair. Her frown deepened. She stumbled as she went away.

Then a man was tripped by a creature that followed after his pinging phone like a moth to a flame. When he shut it off and smiled at a passing dog, the creature lost interest and disintegrated into dust.

It wasn’t until I came across a couple arguing that it struck me. It began small. The boy was upset that his girlfriend was 25 minutes late. The girl was upset because she was only late because she had to pick up his broken laptop from the repair shop. Within a minute, the argument escalated into insults, past grievances, and their deepest insecurities.

The couple was oblivious to the creatures that flocked to them the moment things became personal. A colony of creatures clambered up onto their bodies, writhing and wriggling, until the people were no longer visible. Only their voices carried over the clicking chatter of the creatures, a sound like they were gnashing their teeth together. They grew in size, in number, and in energy through the argument. 

When the argument ended and the couple separated, the sea of creatures cleaved in two, miniature seas of shadowy ears and glimmering eyes that followed the individuals. Both girl and boy had lost the natural sheen to their skin. Their eyes seemed clouded over. Uncoincidentally, both stumbled as they parted.

When the truth found me, I stopped seeing the creatures. They vanished because they were never really creatures in the first place. 

Yet they were as real as my mind, as my heart and soul. As real as anyone’s, but without the physical form with floppy ears, beady eyes, and clawed paws. They were what festered in those depths--an imagined manifestation of it. They were born of anxiety and insecurity, spawned by the very people they plagued.

They ruined people’s days when the person allowed their own issues to haunt them. It was simple. A real and simple fact. Not a lie, but the truth come to light--or to shadows.