In this house, in all the houses on this block, the shadows wait impatiently until the people sleep. Then they pull away from the humans and roam free, as creatures with their own names and desires. For the shadow called Rob, detaching himself feels like stripping tough adhesive tape from his skin; he pulls his head away first, then his arms, then his legs and toes, and knows that he's free when the prickling and tingling subside to a residual itch. The shadow called Lindy thinks of an amoeba dividing, the sister cells at first joined by bulbous lumps of cytoplasm, then by many thin tendrils, then by a single thread; she feels a snap when this thread breaks and she can glide away unfettered.
The shadows, who have lived together for years, slip into the moonlit kitchen, where they gossip and gripe in shadow talk. They leap or inch along the walls, sometimes tall and lean, sometimes compact and squat as ground creepers; they stretch out dark elastic arms to crawl across the linoleum or pull themselves onto the ceiling. To fleshlings, their shadow talk sounds like the groan of warped floorboards, the complaint of copper pipes carrying icy water, the thumps of dislodged twigs beating a martyr roof.
"Today, my human dragged me all around town," Lindy moaned. "Literally dragged - and you all know what I mean. One of her shopping trips, and she had to walk to every store on five different streets. Pulling me behind her, my feet glued to hers, over every bump in the concrete, over shattered glass, even over a dog turd. If I was flesh, like them, I'd have bloody gashes crisscrossing my legs. A concussion from my head bouncing over so many curbs. Bruises up and down my arms from banging into fire hydrants and lamp posts. The skin on my back would be ripped away. My back feels raw and my arms feel black and blue."
"That's nothing," the shadow called Freddie grumbled. "At least you didn't get attached to a kid. Kids run, and they don't stay on sidewalks and grass. They run into the woods, to dig for treasures under stinky rotten logs or build a fort with Daddy's junk. They drag me over tree stumps, prickle bushes and angry voles with sharp teeth; they drop splintered boards with rusty nails on top of me; my chest feels stabbed in a hundred places. And my kid likes sports. When he rolls on the ground, he crushes me; when he charges in a new direction, he hurls me back and forth until the world spins around me."
"I thought I had it made when my first human died, thought I'd be set free," Freddie continued. "But as soon as the old geezer's heart stopped, I got wisked away, quick as the snap of a finger, to a nursury, and got glued to a baby as soon as it plopped out of the birth canal. Talk about being led astray by hope and all the myths of shadow culture".
Rob snaked one elongated finger over the chair cushion, crept upward, let his torso drape over both sides of the seat while his arm stretched over the linoleum towards the stove. "The humans just don't respect us," he muttered, as his other arm contracted into his torso. "We're flat, and they're three dimensional; they think that anything which isn't three dimensional isn't real."
"True." Lindy arched her thin form around the ceiling light. "Have you ever seen them even look at us? Ever heard them talk about us the way they talk about their sons or their cats or even something as invisible as 'justice'? They just assume that we'll always be attached to them, call us 'optical phenomena', and feel free to batter us."
"We're stuck," the dark form on the chair growled. "Flatlanders in a three dimensional world, enslaved to arrogant, careless three dimensional beings. We must have bad karma."
"But what can we do?" Lindy glided down the wall, towards the other two.
"Play more tricks on them," Freddie quipped. Attached to a child, he knew all about pranks; the others hunched in dark silence, remembering when their own humans had been very young.
"We've already had lots of success with the Disappearing Wrench Trick, they get mad enough for a heart attack," Rob mused, a black grin spreading over his black face. Sometimes, a favorite hammer disappeared from the orderly tool box or the handle of meticulously oiled and polished pruning shears vanished overnight. Sometimes buttons were ripped away, tearing the silk which the woman wore so proudly. Sometimes each new pair of scissors went missing, inconveniencing one of the fleshlings at 10 PM when no stores were open. The shadows had taken 18 pairs of scissors, 4 hammers, 8 wrenches, 20 tooth brushes, 30 socks, 4 car keys, 2 TV remote controls, 2 can openers, 15 folders labeled "important records" and one roledex; they'd dropped these into the crawlspace under the house, the sewer grate in front of the house, the aluminum trash cans on garbage collection day, the neighbor's pick-up truck, and the woods where kids built their forts. Then the shadows had waited for the bickering to start.
"Hammers don't have legs, they don't walk away", the burly fleshling would holler, and turn towards the human called "a wife". The wife yapped that she had no use for hammers, but what about their son, the brat who worked at being an explorer and a builder and a universal pest. The humans tossed the blame back and forth like a hot grenade until the room seemed ready to explode in a girestorm of anger.
"If I was three dimensional and could draw cartoons, I'd draw scissors with legs; the blades cross back and forth like legs, and really walk away," Freddie blurted, then paused. "Isn't Easter soon? One of the three-dimensionals' favorite holidays, something associated with eggs and rabbits? Maybe we could do something with dust bunnies."
"Huh?"
"Well, " Freddie quipped, in the excited alto of a child's shadow, "They talk about 'proliferating like rabbits'; get a girl and boy rabbit together - next month you have 10 rabbits, next year a hundred. Bunnies are sex fiends. So, I was thinking....well, none of these humans likes to dust; the mop is a decoration and the vaccuum cleaner's been in storage for months. So what about dust bunnies?"
"What about them? I'm just glad I'm flat; no sinuses to get clogged when I breathe in those particles".
"Dust bunnies are a kind of bunny!", Fred exclaimed. "They can proliferate fast, maybe faster than rabbits, maybe overnight. What if we collected all the dust those fleshlings never think about, the dust clogging the back of the refrigerator and clinging to the oven underneath? What if we roll all this dust into bunny sized balls, hundreds of them scattered through the kitchen and living room and bedrooms? When our humans awake, the house will be colonized by dust bunnies. And the man will wonder if dust bunnies really do reproduce during the night; he'll remember how often the wife has said 'The bathroom really was clean last night. The dim lights didn't just make the dirt less obvious; dirt really does have a life of its own. Dirt gives birth to more dirt while we sleep'."
The other shadows understood. They darted, faster than striking snakes, to the refrigerator's rear, the oven's underbelly, the hollows under the basement staircase, the top ledges of windows where blinds hid grime from lacksadaisical cleaners. The walls, floors and ceilings flickered as they foraged for material.
The shadows slithered and cascaded in dark arabesques over the walls and floor as they rolled dust clumps together into dust balls, then molded these into fuzzy gray forms with smaller dust spheres attached in back and long protruberances suggesting ears in front. Freddie counted 127 dust bunnies; some were as small as baby-bunnies, some as big as pregnant-mamas.
"This is *much* better than opening the refrigerator door and letting all their food rot overnight, " Rob snickered. "Call it a Holiday Special."
"Just wait till we get them on Friday the 13th!," Freddie exlaimed.
The three nodded invisibly. Noting the first fringe of indigo in the east, each slid silently towards his assigned human, glided up bedposts towards toes and torso, nestled beside the fleshling and waited for the glue of fate to bind the two together. Each thought about today's prank and future pranks - something memorable for Memorial Day, something Big for Friday the 13th, something to make them labor for Labor Day. Each waited impatiently for the moment when the human stumbled groggily from bed and, joined at the feet, the shadow could watch cinematic emotions and invisibly smirk at the shadows' revenge.
