Shadow Chaser
Elias sat at his desk beneath the dim lamp, acutely aware of the subtle shifting of shadows around him. The walls held the weight of things unspoken. His fingertips sometimes traced the grain of the desk during pauses in conversation, moments when patients would stare past him, toward the sliver of sky framed by the narrow window. Shoes creaked on the linoleum; breath caught, released. Every object had listened more closely than he ever could. Yet something about the shadows tonight felt new—less like shapes cast by light, more like thoughts edging closer to words. He stared at the quiet corner he had long avoided, as though it waited, patiently, for him to stop pretending he hadn’t noticed.
Slowly, deliberately, he rose, each step a quiet negotiation within himself. It felt peculiar yet somehow essential to approach the darkness he had always sidestepped. As he moved forward, the shadows seemed to shift with him—receding softly, as if to make space.
Weeks earlier, Elias had found himself attuned to the hospice clock's steady ticking. The sound had always comforted him, anchoring the room with its certainty. Sunlight filtered through the blinds in pale, broken strips. The walls bore the usual shadows, but that day they seemed to move with a more personal rhythm. Across from him sat Amara, hands resting in her lap, expression calm. There was a stillness about her—not the stillness of resignation, but of balance.
“You never seem worried,” Elias had observed, a question hidden in the remark.
She met his eyes. “Should I be?”
He hesitated. “Most people worry. About time running out. About what they didn’t do.”
Amara tilted her head. “I tried to make peace with things while they were still happening. Not everything, of course. But enough. I don’t think we’re meant to tie every thread.”
Her words unsettled him more than he let on. That night, while locking his office door, Elias noticed the tremor in his fingers. It wasn't new. It was simply harder to ignore now.
He’d lie awake listening to the hush of the heater fan, the wind brushing the siding. His thoughts came in flashes—his daughter’s silhouette at a younger age, the smell of oranges in winter, the feeling of being late for something unnamed. He recalled the patients who had spoken of children they hadn’t called, places they never went, words withheld. It wasn’t the dying that troubled them—it was the unfinishedness of their lives.
He began drafting a letter to his daughter that night but left it unfinished.
In the corridor near the kitchen, Elias spotted Robert staring into a vending machine as if it owed him an answer. When Robert turned, he had the look of someone still living in a world that had already let go of him. They walked back to Elias’s office without speaking.
Robert didn’t sit right away. He wandered the room in slow, half-curious circles, finally settling into the chair across from Elias like someone claiming a familiar seat at a table no longer theirs.
“You know what gets me?” he said, then paused. “I always figured there’d be more time. Not for anything dramatic—just… to become who I was supposed to be.”
He didn’t speak with bitterness. Just weariness. “There’s no crescendo. No grand reconciliation. Just a slow fading. And now I think about my brother, and Maya, and that shop I never opened... and I wonder what was so important I kept choosing not to call.”
Elias wanted to say that regret was a kind of fidelity. That remembering meant something. But he said nothing. Robert wasn’t asking for wisdom. He was asking to be heard.
After Robert left, Elias sat in the quiet and felt the weight of what hadn’t been said.
The diagnosis came in a late afternoon stillness. The doctor’s voice was slow and soft, like pages being turned in a book he’d forgotten he’d written. Elias didn’t flinch. He only nodded. That night, he walked home without his coat, though the wind had begun to rise.
The following days unfolded without urgency. Elias returned to his routines. He cleared out a drawer. He lifted a scarf from the drawer. It still held the faint smell of woodsmoke and cold mornings. His fingers moved slowly over the wool, folding, then unfolding, then folding again. He watched the shadows move slowly across the floor of his office, the way he sometimes watched his patients leave—gently, without comment.
He sent the letter to his daughter. Two lines. No explanation.
Conversations with Amara continued, though fewer. The silences grew longer, but not heavier.
“You’re still running,” she said one evening.
“I’m not sure I know how to walk.”
She smiled faintly. “Then maybe start by standing still.”
That night, Elias stood by the window, the streetlamp casting long, delicate shadows into the room. A sudden wind rattled the frame, then passed.
The next morning, he found an envelope slid beneath his door. Four lines. No blame. Just a time. A place.
He read it twice. Folded it slowly. And for the first time in weeks, Elias wept.
In the days that followed, Elias thought of them often. Robert, with his restlessness and fractured reverence. Amara, with her silences that didn’t hide but offered. Two separate compasses pointing in different directions. And yet, somehow, he had followed both.
One afternoon, the sun drifted across the room, lighting a corner that had always been in shadow. Elias watched as the darkness receded without protest. Not vanished—just softened. As if making peace with the light.
He sat with the silence. With the things he hadn’t said. With the choices he hadn’t made. With the regret that no longer bit sharply, but hummed at a lower, more bearable frequency.
Death, he thought, wasn’t a gate or a wall. It was more like a hallway—long, carpeted in silence, familiar in a way you never noticed until you were far down its length. And the shadow that followed you? It didn’t lunge. It paced. The more you hurried, the closer it came. But when you turned, it stepped back.
When he saw Amara next, they said nothing for a long while. Then, as if responding to an unfinished thought he hadn’t voiced, she said, “Maybe once you stop running,” she said, “it doesn’t feel the need to follow so closely.”
He gave a quiet laugh, almost surprised. “Maybe then you realize… the hallway was never closing in. You just hadn’t turned around.”
That evening, Elias walked the hospice halls alone, slow and steady. The lights were low. The shadows long but quiet. As he returned to his office, the corner no longer waited—it welcomed.
He closed the door gently behind him, and sat down.
The ticking of the clock continued.
And the shadows stayed just where they were. |
