At the time, he’s sick of it, the heaviness
settling in his shadow limbs. All those nights
mixing with the same old spirits in New Orleans,
or rattling chains in windowless European castles.
He’s tired of strangers who call themselves experts
on him, then walk through his body on the stairs
call out with cold hearted threats.
So the Shadow Man packs a shadow suitcase,
plans to creep the night (old habits die hard),
to set street lights quaking. He Googles the Queen Mary,
the Titanic, the Bounty. He dreams of breathing icy relief
onto to the handrails, watching the Northern lights,
building an igloo far from the reaches
of anybody with a body.
But he never leaves
and shadow years pass.
then one day, the Shadow Man
finds himself a commuter, slowing down
for crash sites on the motorway, clicking
his shadow tongue against his shadow teeth
shaking his shadow head at the delay.
He drives a shadow Vauxhall Astra, although
he wishes he owned a Lincoln, James Dean’s
Porsche, Grace Kelly’s Rover. (He’s blacked out
windows to hide the Shadow Child’s car seats.)
He pulls into a lay by on the way home,
watches the suicide bridge empty in the dusk.
Not like the old days.
Then the Shadow Man sighs
thinks again of ice and emptiness.
Jennie E Owen’s writing has won competitions and has been widely published online, in literary journals and anthologies. She teaches Creative Writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire with her husband and three children. She is currently working on her PhD with Manchester Metropolitan University.