Dale next door lost his shadow six years ago.
So somebody needs to explain whose shadow is standing in his kitchen right now.
I saw it Tuesday night, walking the dog past his place. Kitchen window lit, Dale at the table with his coffee, alone, same as every night for six years.
On the wall behind him, a shadow stood with its hands at its sides.
I stopped so long the dog sat down. The shadow didn’t move. Neither did Dale.
Everybody on this street knows Dale’s story, even though nobody has ever been told it. Spring of 2019, an ambulance at two in the morning, and when Dale came home a week later, the noon sun couldn’t find him.
No shadow at all, and you don’t ask a man why.
Carol was already gone by then. His wife. Sarasota, her sister’s place, that’s the story we all got.
Six years of not asking.
Wednesday his water bill landed in my mailbox. The substitute carrier mixes us up all the time, and I’ve never been grateful for it until now.
Dale made coffee. His kitchen burns bright as a dentist’s office, every bulb going, because light costs nothing when you have no shadow to manage.
Nothing under his chair. Nothing under him when he crossed to the stove.
And by the pantry door, a shadow stood against the wall and watched me the entire time.
I know shadows don’t have eyes. It watched me anyway. I talked about gutters because the only other option was saying it out loud, and there is no script for that.
Then I noticed the thing I can’t unnotice.
Dale is a big man, shoulders that fill a doorframe. This shadow was small and narrow, and it held its head high, and its hair was gathered off its neck in a bun.
Carol wore a bun every day for thirty years.
I asked about her on my way out, casual as I could fake it. How’s Carol liking Florida?
“She calls every Sunday,” Dale said. “Happy as a clam down there.”
Behind him, the shadow turned its head from me to him and shook it, slow, left, right, left.
I carried my cup to the sink just to have somewhere to go. The shadow slid along the wall ahead of me, past the window, past the calendar, and stopped flat across the basement door.
It was still there when I left.
That night I opened the Department’s anomaly form on my phone and got exactly one field in. Registered owner of shadow in question. The dropdown gives you three options, self, family member, unknown.
There is no box for what I think the true answer is. I closed the form.
But I made myself a deal. Dale said she calls every Sunday, so I’d watch one Sunday, and if a phone rang in that kitchen I would let all of it go.
Sunday at six I sat on my dark porch, and Dale’s kitchen was lit up like a stage.
At quarter past, he took the phone off the wall and started talking. I could hear the murmur of him through the window screen, easy and warm, a man catching up with his wife. He laughed twice.
Twenty minutes, and the phone never rang.
I walked the dog past to be sure. Dale talking, nodding, phone against his ear, and the shadow flat across the basement door the whole time, holding still.
Monday I called directory assistance for Sarasota and got Carol’s sister’s number.
Disconnected. The operator was chatty, checked the record for me, no idea what she was handing over. Cut off in March of 2019.
Carol left for Sarasota that April.
I keep laying the pieces out and they keep making the same picture. The number that died a month before she moved toward it, the phone that talks without ringing, the bun, the basement door.
Dale says Carol calls every Sunday, and here’s the part that scares me worst. I believe him.
So who has been calling him every Sunday for six years?
