Once, in a very old house, at the end of a very narrow lane, two children lived with their mother. The children were very content in their old house.
In the winter, when the floorboards felt like ice and they put off getting out of bed as long as they could, they made fires in the stone fireplace in the drawing room, and pretended to read the books with no pictures inside.
In the spring they went tot he attic and let the birds in, scattering crumbs on the floor, holding as still as they could to coax the birds into their palms.
In the summer, when the house swelled with heat and the apples burst with juice on their branches and the grass turned green and then withered in the hot dirt, they raided the blackberry bushes until their hands were brown with dirt, purple with juice, red with blood where the thorns had scraped them, and leaned against the old ash tree in the backyard that someone had told them was to ward off evil.
In the autumn they watched leaves fall from their branches like flakes of gold from gilded statues and lay on their backs thinking of their wonderful summer, and also thinking of candy-flavoured hot chocolate in the coming months.
Then there was the inbetween month. Their mother did not believe in this month, and insisted that when they were older they would grow out of such fanciful tales. The children did not think you outgrew the inbetween month.
This was not a month when grass and trees flourished, when wind blew, or water fell, or the wind howled, or the sun burned.
This was a month when shadows grew.
They grew long and black and thick as ink puddles. And not just puddles, but streams and rivers and oceans of shadows. They reminded the children of the shadows in between houses, and of the shadows between the underbellies of beds and the floor, and of the shadows in between rooms in long, dark hallways.
The children kept at least two candles lit at all time in the inbetween month, in case one blew the other out. They kept their eyes on the shapes of the shadows, lest one turn into a hand or a mouth and come too close. When the girl was scared she held her brother's hand as they climbed the stairs and went down the corridor. When the boy was scared he climbed into her bed at night and pulled the blanket over his head. But the shadows, they realized after the third year in the house at the end of the lane, were not very frightening.
And they left presents.
The first present was a black flower. Not red-black, or purple-black, or blue-black. It was blacker than black, blacker than night. Like a piece of the world cut out in the shape of a flower, a stencil through which the children saw the void. The shadows left it in a vase on the girl's bedside, so when she woke with her brother (who had crawled in just before midnight), they saw it open its petals like a hand uncurling its fingers.
The second present was a black cat. The children were not sure at first what it was. It vanished in direct sunlight, and was skittish. When they held their hands out to it the cat fled. But at night they felt its black paws on their cheeks, its warm fur against their necks, its purring like a triphammer.
There were other presents: black candies that tasted like several fruits at once, or like honey, or like chocolate, or like ancient seeds pried from pods that had lain in the sun. There were sugarplums with black sugar. There was an old book with blank pages that, when the children flipped through it quickly enough, showed them a story of a shadow house and the girl inside it who lost her shoe. There was black paper and black pens, black ribbons and black bows, black glass sculptures and even a black knife that looked like sharpened shadows.
When the children's mother finally deemed them too old for such stories, and sent them to bed when they tried to tell her that she could see the black cat in just the right light, the children became angry.
In the winter they would not come out of their beds at all, keeping their feet warm and the fireplace cold. In the spring they did not venture up to the attic, and watched the birds out the window instead. In the summer their mother was dismayed by the animals that came to eat the blackberries that had fallen off the bush in the backyard when no one had bothered to eat them. In the autumn there was no one to watch the leaves turn colour, and they curled and turned brown and became a graveyard of leaves.
Then the inbetween month came again. This time the children were ready. When the shadows left them presents on their beds they kept their eyes open, hoping to see faces. In the hallways they stared at the shadows, and held out their hands. The shadows were as skittish as the cat had been. But the shadows were lonely, and they took the childrens' hands. And the children knew what it was to belong to nothingness. To the absense of light. It was the most peculiar thing. They knew what it was to be the space in between two things when the shadows took their hands their arms. They knew what it was to be the space in the world where only void shone through, when the shadows had swallowed them up to their necks.
Then they knew what it was like to be shadows, and to live without seasons and months and houses and blackberries.
Art by Anonymous
Text by Lucie MacAulay
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