Shadow's Theater (Short Story)
“The silence tells a perpetual story…”
Suddenly in the quietest room of the world the people made silence. They made such a deep silence that was itself better than the show that they were about to see.
The children weren’t crying, the adults were breathing like they were hiding every little petal of air that was coming in their mouth, the elders weren’t coughing, nobody in that room attempted to brake that magic silence that was going to tell them an unknown story. That short-lived silence knew he was going to be murdered soon by the laughs, cryings or maybe by the questions of the ones that weren’t able to understand the story. He knew he was destined to perish, that nobody were going to remember anything about him and that he was just a “holy” circumstance. Despite of all, the silence was spectacular and told the more tenuous, pure and beautiful stories, hidden in his audience’s heart.
“The man that didn’t recognize his shadow”
With this phrase the silence was killed, murdered by his creator: the show.
“Once upon a time there was a man that didn’t look behind, he hated everything that could came from behind. He despised his past, he despised his memories and in the top of everything, he despised his shadow.
His hatred was so intense that he started to negate his shadow, he abnegated his existence from the deepest origin of his heart.
His shadow was more tenuous every day, she tried everything to be recognized. She changed to the front side of the man, she tried to twinkle when he was walking in the street. But she wasn’t able to make the man recognize her. She was slowly fading away, as the man was walking the same roads.
Oh, how stern can be the death, that makes beg to every suffering soul in the edge of abysm for a puff of life!
And, with enormous irony, the shadow hid inside the man that, foolishly thought he was finally able to get rid of her.
The man woke up like every day, numb and with less will to get up that the day before but, realizing the absence of his shadow he felt a strong feeling of satisfaction; he finally was able to get rid of the last proof that the past ever existed.
Nevertheless, the shadow was more alive than ever and was growing up inside of him as the time gone by, darkening his entrails like a spilling inkwell as the days going by.
Slowly, the man stopped to talk like he was used to do, replacing his phrases with dark coughed words. These new phrases were gooey and drove away the other people. The phrases travelled in the air unto his house, in the room where he was used to sleep quietly. The room soon got upholstered in black gooey phrases that spilled sticky ink in all the place.
The man got used to this strange situation, but one day when he woke up he realized that the door was sealed and there was no way out from that hellish room. When he got up from the bed he fell, drowning his feet in a dense black liquid. The phrases in the walls were no longer phrases, they mutated in some sort of shadow. A choky scream tried to leave his mouth as he watched that sinister shadow’s theater. The only thing that came out his mouth was ink, sticky and dense ink. The theater was recalling all of his memories laughing at him previously to end that himself had started: a black and dense negation of everything.
As the man was drowning in his own creation, he drank ink, searching for the last puff of life, of air, of reality in a situation that was magically tragic. When he was totally submerged, the man was finally able to touch his shadow with his own hands, that shadow that he tried to annihilate, the same that grew up until the room was totally filled.
Nobody knew anything about that man, maybe he is still negating everything, or maybe he abnegated himself as long as he was able to destroy his shadow. It is only known that nothing remains of that black indelible that covered his life.”
The silence in the theater did a last wink of loveliness before being crushed and chewed by the hands of the audience that were applauding, commenting and acclaiming the show that they had watched.
When the room was left alone, after everybody left, in the silence you could see a silhouette of a shadow in a front seat…
“The silence tells a perpetual story…
The silence adorns it in the eternal ink of past’s shadows."
Thanks for reading my story, I'm sorry for my grammar, english is not my native language but I tried my best!
So nice. you are talented @crispfiles
thanks! I really appreciate that.