Love, Electricity and Her Shadow

So, she pulled tightly on the shadow at her toes until the seams strained and the fabric of her soul began to tear. With a great pair of metallic shears, she hacked away at her transparent twin until she stood ungrounded and disconnected; the shadow, a shredded whisper, crumpled against the skirting board. Was this the floating feeling she had longed for? Those once precious, now disparate electronic images had become heavy silver ball bearings in the hem of her slip and she desired only weightlessness. Pixels had replaced flesh, and a low buzzing hum was her most sensuous experience these days. To cut away half of herself seemed the most logical answer - nothing and no one else could be touched. She was the only tangible entity.

Her violently whimsical gesture left her with nothing but silvery hairline lacerations that leaked cobwebs. The cobwebs were like cotton wool and snagged on every twig and piece of jagged metal she glided past in her deceptive facade of freedom.

She was weightless, but not in the way she had hoped. She was hollow, and without the crisp assertiveness of her shadow's magnetism, she was undefined. Occasionally, she tried to love, but she was so listless and so vague that she couldnt muster the determination with which she'd proffered her heart in the past. Her essence was bleeding from her fingertips in sinewy silver strands, and she'd forgotten how to feel.

The matrix of ones and zeros screeched white noise at her, and in her newly permanent winter, this electronic blizzard was a comfort.

*

In a downtown market, where toothless women with Jamaican accents feed puppies at their breasts, and where elderly men sell teddy bears in back alleys, a man with a gnarled face, deeply etched like the shell of a walnut, sells shadows and souls for fifty cents a piece. Some he stole, some he found, and some he exhanged for a litany of vices.

*

Now she wanders through static and deadtime, having condemned herself to irreparable disconnectivity. Without her shadow - that delicate, beautiful assurance that she is real - nothing else can exist to her, and she might never love again.