A Shadow Drifts Along
A shadow floated in the water. It drifted and turned as the current did, like weeds or sticks. Its head hung limply beneath the surface, and its arms and torso were pulled outward. The midday sun struck the water, and it split into myriad beams, yet none passed through the shadow’s back. So it is that this scene continued, day and night and shadow, for long stretches of time, too long for us to understand, and the current carried it a distance unknowable, for at these lengths, distance can not be understood.
Until finally the shadow was washed up on a beach, where the tide dropped it with no thought. The shadow was blown over and over by the wind until it was covered in sand. When the shadow was totally covered, it lay still for many many weeks and months while violent storms raged and waves tried to drag it back out to sea. Lightning struck the shadow and hardened it to glass. And then the waves grabbed that statue and wrought it back out to sea, where it drifted on and on again for time and distance unknowable.
Then finally the glass body was carried to the inward flowing mouth of a river, and it drifted along past banks covered in moss and dirt, where hardwood trees grew upwards for hundreds of feet, and the sun fell slowly through the canopy, such that night and day were almost the same. It passed through desert canyons and between snow covered mountains, ever facing downward into the water, the glass enclosed blackness drifting along only a few feet below the surface and miles above the bed, for time and distance unknowable.
Then the river put it at the foot of an immense black volcano that spat lava and ash upward and outward for miles and miles in all direction. It lay there, face down, while molten rock and ash pounded it from the sky, and harsh grainy winds blasted its surface from all directions. The shadow lay there for year after year, suffering in the torment, and always facing down. Its smooth glass body was sanded away and shaped down to simple curves, scratched all over so that no smoothness or reflection remained. And then the volcano erupted in a fashion so fierce that the entire distance of the unknown world shook and waves crashed on unknown shores, landing hundreds of miles inland and destroying all that they touched. And a boulder, too large to understand, came forth into the air from the belly of the world, and it arced back and down, where it landed on the worn down glass shadow, finally shattering it and hiding it from the world.
Over a period of time too long to understand, the harsh winds softened that boulder and wore it down, taking a fingernails width off the surface every hundred years, until it was a pebble and all the dust and glass shards it had hidden were carried off into the wind, where they pass out of sight and memory for all things. And the world created no more shadows, having not the heart to leave its creation to its own machinery.
