The thing about sharing head space with the shadow is that she never stops. She doesn’t do anything that even resembles sleep. She doesn’t even do anything like rest. She’s in constant motion, like a shark swimming round and round so it doesn’t die.

Which means I don’t ever stop, either. I haven’t actually slept since I was a little girl, in the hospital after the storm that vomited me up onto that beach in Galveston. Even then, I wasn’t asleep. I was drugged. But we’ll get to that later.

When I was young and the shadow and I were new to each other, I used to kind of zone out for a few hours once in awhile. It wasn’t really sleep, but I wasn’t quite conscious, either. It was a sort of fugue state, my mind shutting down to get some relief from the constant, never-ending input from the shadow. My brain would sort of fade into a dull dial tone, and a few hours later I’d snap back awake.

Sometimes I’d wake up bloody with injuries. The shadow once broke both my hands, battering at a door and trying to get out because she couldn’t figure out a doorknob. Sometimes I’d wake up miles away from where I’d started. The shadow would just sort of steer me along towards the next thing that caught her interest, and then the next, and then the next. It was horrifying. She didn’t know about pain, for one thing. Or hunger, or thirst, or the million ways a human body is a fragile thing. When I was a little older, I started my life-long love affair with coffee. Stimulants helped to fight off the fugue states. Later on, I learned better methods. Continue reading →

The music was so loud I could feel it rattling my fillings, a synthesized techno beat with a bass line that shook the floor and vibrated through the walls. Some overly auto-tuned gal was moaning along while colored lights strobed over walls draped in metallic fabric, and out on the dance floor people were gyrating and dry-humping. I sat at our table, glaring into my over-priced, watered-down drink, head pulsing as my shadow writhed in ecstasy. She loved it.

The club was deliberately poorly-lit, and the flashing laser light and wildly spinning spotlights made it easy for my shadow to writhe along the floor, between the dancers, and up among the rafters. She was drinking in the light and noise, the thumping vibrations and the dizzying array of tastes and scents all over the place. This of course meant that I was, too. There was so much mouthwash in my near future, not that it would help.

“See? I told you this would be fun!” Honey shouted into my face. I could barely hear her over the music and the thundering cacophony of two hundred and seventy six heartbeats. And that wasn’t even counting the rats in the walls. She was dancing in her seat, hands on the table tapping along, shoulders undulating and head bobbing.

“Oh, definitely,” I shouted back, mouth a sour twist. “Good times!” I lifted the plastic tumbler and drained the alleged screwdriver. I was in desperate need of some quiet and a cigarette. This was our third club tonight and so help me, I was going to gut the next skinny little asshole who introduced himself by grinding his crotch on my ass while I was trying to get a drink. Or I would, if I’d had a blade on me.

I adjusted the strap of my black knit dress, pulling it back up onto my shoulder. My jeans and blouse and bra were still back at Honey’s place, neatly folded on her coffee table. Honey had made me change, and the dress was one of hers. Despite the fact that I’m almost a foot taller than she is, the dress hung a lot lower on me, almost to my knees. I didn’t have Honey’s curves to fill it out, which, incidentally, meant that the neckline hung a lot lower on me, too. What curves I did have were rather more on display than I might have preferred. She had let me keep my black high heels, and I’d chosen all black jewelry tonight. A choker with a black silk ribbon and a tarnished silver spider cameo, jet-and-onyx beaded bracelets, four rings featuring black pearl, agate, and obsidian stones, and a pair of cast-iron chain anklets done in the finest, tiniest links I could forge by hand in my basement workshop. She’d also redone my hair, giving it more curl and bounce than usual. It hung just past my shoulders, and I’d layered my ruddy locks with swaths of living shadow, making the patches of color stand out all the more. With my pale, pale skin, it was a striking look – and I had, just like that, become a douchebag magnet. Continue reading →