The Suicide of Shadow (also known as: Sun, the Unwitting Murderer)

It was an odd day when the shadow decided to take leave of its body. It was an even stranger hour; the Sun sat high in the sky, steering his chariot in its steady course towards the bosom of the Earth.


When asked why she decided to go, she merely shrugged and murmured a fragment of poetry. And so remained misunderstood; nobody really understands poetry.

The Sun beat down hard, and in his leisurely way, looked down to see what had happened. Even though he was not omniscient, he could tell that something out of the ordinary; something perfectly peculiar had happened.

She thought, Shadow did, that because she was no longer attached to her Person that she would disintegrate, that she would disappear; so her act was one of abject suicide. Peculiarly she remained a tight knot of darkness, albeit a random shape (People act as a prison, a container for all manner of darknesses; shadows are but one).

Oblivious to the Sun’s glare, she ambled to a tight cluster of shade that rested at the foot of a tree. Shadows do not speak in mortal languages; theirs is a code that predates the guttural uttering of man. Nevertheless, in her way; in the way that they shared, she enquired about life bound at the foot of a tree.

The treeshadow jerked maniacally and unfolded from its shifting the Story of Itself (and others like It). It was not a complex story, indeed it was only the revelation of a process: I am never still, intimated the treeshadow, and always, there is someone who seeks shelter in me when the Sun beats down on them.

Her curiousity somewhat abated, Shadow’s attentions quickly shifted to the birdshadows that skipped and at the same time, soared on the surface of the ground. Oh, how she wanted to ask them of their migrations! She supposed that they, too, were always in motion- though in a different way from the shadow that moved and remained irrevocably still at the foot of the tree.

The proud Sun dipped a little closer to the horizon, still with the strange inkling that something was amiss and not quite knowing what.

The clouds cast their own bilious dimness and travelled on their own journeys, adding pages to their narratives, eccentric in their not-really solidity; drifting.

Shadow’s mind turned to thoughts of the Person who was her jailer, and her closest associate. She thought of her now boundless shape and wondered how she existed so long within boundaries. She reminisced thus until the treeshadows tilted awkwardly, extremely, stretching eerily and the birdshadows fled from the swift, swooping bats.

The Sun, who had remained undeterred from his once again inevitable union with the Earth, glanced once more at the scene beneath him.

Shadow perceived an encroaching, as though her random non-shape was somehow extending out, and simultaneously magnetically attracting the Dimness. It was almost imperceptible to her, when, overcome, engulfed by Night, she finally attained sweet Death.

The Sun set, oblivious.

©Ngozi Chukura 2010