John Schellhase

I Am the Shadow

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2023: VOL. 38.

There were only a few things he remembered from before that day. One was him and Holly in the bath. Their mother had given them a pack of foam letters. It had the letters A to Z and the numbers zero to nine, all in bright colors like a bag of Skittles. He was five, Holly six. Someone— Holly, their mother?—wrote, DAVE IS NO 1, on the pale tile of the bathroom wall. NO was meant to be No., as in short for Number, but the writing on the wall seemed to say that he was no one.

He also remembered wanting to be caught when he started exploring his parents’ bedroom two years later. He had a feeling that it was wrong to be there. But his parents were not home, and Holly was in the backyard or across the street, and after a while, he forgot about wanting to be caught. When he began to open the drawers and the boxes in the closet, he knew that was wrong too. Later, he would tell himself that he was just a kid, that he didn’t know any better, but he knew all along there was a dark power in the closet he should not go near. Then he found it. He found the gun.

He held it in his cupped hands, felt its weight. It was sleek and modern, something a cop might have—or a criminal. He turned it over. He ran his hand along the barrel.

Weeks passed, and then the day came.

He had the gun in his hand. He had slipped his finger into the loop that guarded the trigger. He was feeling the tension of the trigger, was thinking of pulling it. Nothing was going to happen. The bullets were loose in the shoebox where he had found the gun. Still, he was scared. His finger quavered there. It seemed like nothing existed but his hands and the gun, and so when Holly said his name, with a note of concern—“Dave?”—he startled. His finger tensed. The shot shattered the air, and Holly fell back. Blood spread around her as if she had fallen into a well.

Sometimes he would think about the people who moved into that house. Did they know? The carpet had been changed, but were the floorboards stained beneath it?

His parents split up, which might have happened anyway. At school, he stayed in the corners. He said little, performed poorly, barely well enough to pass from grade to grade. Sometimes he would fight boys in the alley behind his new house. He liked the sounds they made when his fists found their ribs, their stomachs, those grunts and whimpers and pre-vomit groans. He liked the dull pain of bruises on his own body and to see himself in the mirror at night covered in splotches.

He kept fighting after high school. He went out looking for it. It was why he lifted weights and shaved his head. One day, though, he hit a man in the nose, and blood burst out like pyrotechnics. It splattered around the man’s eyes, poured down around his mouth like a goatee, and then flowed down his white cotton shirt into a pool on the floor. The sight of so much blood made Dave sick, and he ran around the back of the bar and vomited beside a dumpster.

Afterwards, he stopped fighting and stopped lifting and decided he would try to keep the next job he got for at least three months, no matter how lowly it was or how they treated him. He was hired as a groundskeeper at a golf course. He worked hard. He stayed on for three months and then six, and soon he had been there a year.

As he watched the golfers, he thought of the life he could have had, and he thought also of the life Holly might have had. She had died eighteen years before.

One morning, as he watered the fairways, the thought came to him that he needed a ritual to remember her by. That afternoon, he went to a florist and bought a dozen roses. At his apartment, he tore off the petals and put them in a shoebox. He put the shoebox in his closet, in a place that reminded him of where his father had kept his gun.

On the anniversary of Holly’s death, Dave took the shoebox to work. In the early light of the day, he poured the dry rose petals into a pond on the golf course and watched them drift away. After work, he returned to the florist, bought twelve new roses, and filled the box again when he got home. Every year, he decided this would be his ritual for her.

Not long afterward, a friend’s sister introduced Dave to one of her friends. She was a nurse. A strand of her blonde hair was dyed pink, and she had green eyes and a kind smile. After a few dates, Dave told her about the box in his closet and why he kept it. She folded her hands over his and fixed him steadily with her eyes.

“You have to forgive yourself,” she said.

“Forgiveness,” he told her, not knowing where the words were coming from, “is not some feeling that comes in a moment. What I’ve learned is that it’s something you only get with time. It’s like mastering a craft. You have to keep at it for a long time.”

They married. They had a child, a boy. He was a wild boy. He liked to chase and be chased. With his friends, he played Cops and Robbers and Cowboys and Indians. He wanted Dave to play, too, but Dave could not bring himself to hold an imaginary gun, much less a plastic rifle. He and his wife never bought the boy any kind of toy gun, but their son had a way of inventing firearms out of objects around the house. Once he even bit his peanut-butter sandwich into the shape of a pistol.

“Daddy, please play with me,” the boy often said, and Dave would feel a deep guilt when he declined.

One day, Dave found his son in the closet of the master bedroom with the box of rose petals open on his lap. Dave froze when he saw him. The boy looked up at him with his mouth hanging open.

Then, everything changed. It was as if Dave was possessed. He spread his legs and bent his knees like an outlaw in a Western. He formed his two fingers into the barrel of a six-shooter, which he held at his hip, pointed to the ground. When his son smiled, Dave whipped his fingers out and aimed right at his son’s heart.

“Bang! Bang!” he said. The voice was his but also not his.

His son fell back to the floor, knocking the box into the air. The petals flew up and fell around him. The boy lay still, eyes closed, dead as death.

Dave kneeled down and placed his hands over his son’s invisible wound. The same voice spoke through him again. “I am the shadow,” it said. “I am the miracle-worker. I come from the lands of the north.”

He hummed a low note over his son, and, as if a real miracle was happening, his son’s eyelashes fluttered. The boy opened his eyes as wide as worlds, arched his back, and sucked in a deep breath as if surfacing after a near drowning.

“My name is No One,” Dave said over him. “I am the miracle-worker. My true home is far from here.”

Like a pastor at a baptism, Dave placed his hand under his son’s neck and sat the boy up in the middle of the closet. The boy began to laugh. Then Dave laughed with him, and they collapsed together among the petals on the floor.

“I am No One,” Dave said again. “My name is No One.”