Broken Shadows

by Tim Waggoner

  You’re always uncomfortable with people reading your work before it’s finished, but all you say is “It’s not done yet. I still need to think of an ending.”

  She finishes reading the text on the screen and looks at you, a skeptical eyebrow raised. “A crazy shut-in and cats?”

  You sigh. “You’re right. It’s stupid.” Your fingers move across the keyboard and you delete the file without saving it. Before your wife can protest, you say, “It’s no big deal. It was just something I was playing around with.”

  Your wife leans over, gives you a kiss on the top of your head and disappears into the kitchen. Your daughter giggles at something on the TV. You don’t look up to see what it is.

  Instead, you stare at the blank-white on the laptop’s display—as stark and barren as an arctic snowfield—and you reach out and press your fingertips to the screen.

  “Please,” you whisper, “let me in.”

  For an instant, you feel the plastic begin to yield, grow soft and welcoming, but then it becomes firm once more. Impenetrable, in the truest, most awful sense of the word.

  Your wife calls from the kitchen. “Hey, hon! Would you like to see what I picked up at the hardware store on my way home?”

  Tears well from your eyes, slide down your cheeks, become snowflakes as they fall to the keyboard and melt.

  You sense movement behind you, and the side of your head explodes with pain and a surprised chuff of air escapes your lips. Though you can barely think through the agony blazing in your skull, you realize that something has hit you on the head, something hard, and you turn to see what it is, too dazed to think of doing anything else.

  You see your wife holding a hammer, eyes wild, teeth bared in a cruel grin.

  “How’s this for an ending to your piece of shit story?” She screams and swings the hammer at your forehead, far too fast for you to even think about ducking.

  A bright flash erupts behind your eyes. The blow is so hard that it spins your head back around and you slump forward onto the laptop’s keyboard. You hear your daughter laughing in delight and clapping her hands.

  “Hit him again, Mommy! Hit him again!”

  The computer screen is splattered with red and you can hardly see the line of letters on the display—letters created when your cheek hit the keys. It’s difficult to focus your eyes so close to the screen, especially with the gray haze nibbling at the edge of your vision, but you read the text, some of it obscured by blood.

  ANFORKOMYUHVVBXUHJNCKOP

  “Well?” your wife says with satisfaction. “What do you think of my ending?”

  Darkness rushes in like an ebon wave and you answer her with your final thought.

  It’s been done.

  As the black closes in, you reach over with trembling fingers, turn off the laptop, and the Word goes…

  WATERS DARK AND DEEP

  Water roaring in her ears, pushing heavy against her eardrums. Hands clawing for purchase, feet kicking, trying to find something, anything solid to stand on, but there’s nothing—nothing but water. She opens her mouth to scream, takes a deep breath first, but instead of filling her lungs with air, liquid rushes down her throat and a shower of bubbles bursts from her mouth. Her lungs feel full and heavy, as if they’re filled with concrete and it’s weighing her down, down, down…

  My camera! she thinks. I can’t lose my camera! Mom and Dad will kill me!

  She looks up, sees a scattered diffusion of light somewhere above her—five feet? Five hundred? There’s no real difference at this point. There’s a whole world of air up there, if only she could reach it. If only she was wearing a life jacket, if only she had learned how to swim…

  A small shape slides toward her through the gray murk: sleek, scaled and streamlined. It’s a fish of some sort. Daddy would know what kind, but she doesn’t. It turns as it nears her face, displaying its flank, a cold black eye looking at her with supreme indifference as it passes, and then it’s gone, returned once more to the darkness it came from, and she’s still going down, down, down…

  * * *

  “It’s all right! You’re all right!”

  Tina struggled to catch her breath. She was sitting up in bed, covered in sweat, chest heaving. Carl sat next to her, hands firm on her bare shoulders as if he were trying to hold her down. The bedroom was dark; it was still night. The darkness made her think of her dream—of the water—and she shivered.

  “Light,” she managed to gasp out. “Please…turn on the light.”

  Carl removed a hand from her shoulder and leaned over to switch on the nightstand lamp. Soft yellow light illuminated her small apartment bedroom, but the corners remained dim and shadowy. Murky, she thought. Like water.

  Carl began gently kneading her shoulders. “You had a bad dream.”

  Tina’s pulse was racing, and she felt as if she couldn’t catch her breath, but she still managed a soft chuckle. “No kidding.”

  They were both naked; normally she slept in a nightgown, but not when Carl stayed over. The sheet was thrown back, the blankets twisted into knots. She must’ve thrashed around quite a bit before Carl woke her. Without thinking about it, she leaned forward and began straightening the covers.

  “Same one?” Carl asked.

  She nodded. “That’s the third time I’ve had it this week. I don’t know why. I mean, I used to have it a lot when I was kid, but I haven’t had it for ages.” She paused, checked the sheets and covers, gave them one last smoothing with her palm. There.

  “Until now,” Carl added.

  “Yes.” She turned toward him and forced a smile. It wasn’t hard to do. He was a boyishly handsome man who kept himself trim by working out and doing a little bodybuilding. Maybe he was no Mr. Universe, but he sure looked good with his clothes off. Besides, she loved him like crazy, which was a good thing considering that they were engaged to be married.

  “Maybe it’s just stress. You’ve got a lot going on in your life: your job, getting ready to start on your MBA…”

  She smiled. “And don’t forget our impending nuptials.”

  A flicker of something passed across his face, a hint of an expression that was gone before it could be fully born. It was his turn to smile then, but it was a thin smile, one that hardly counted as a smile at all, really.

  A second passed, then another, before he answered. “Right.” The word seemed toneless and devoid of meaning, like it had been emitted from a computer speaker rather than the mouth of a man she intended to marry.

  She wondered if something was wrong, if she should ask him if everything was okay, but then she glanced at the digital clock on the night stand and saw that it was sixteen minutes after four in the morning. He was probably just tired and out of sorts from being woken by her thrashing about. That’s all.

  She snuggled into his arms and they lay back on the bed, holding each other.

  “You know what I say about stress.”

  He sighed, but smiled. “’Pressure makes diamonds.’ I think you’ve attended one too many corporate training seminars.”

  She ignored the dig. “It’s all a matter of whether you let things get to you or not. Anything can be controlled—including stress—if you work at it hard enough.”

  “It’s a good life if you don’t weaken, eh?” He kept one arm around her as he rolled halfway over and reached for the lamp.

  “Carl? Could you…leave it on? Just for a little bit, until I fall asleep?”

  He hesitated, but then said, “Sure,” and rolled back over to kiss her. It wasn’t a quick kiss, but it wasn’t exactly a lingering one, either. “Night.” He disengaged from her and turned over on his side, his back to her. She felt hurt, even though he slept like that a lot of the time. But after the nightmare she’d had, she could’ve used a little extra TLC.

  Her lips were still moist with his saliva, and it felt…funny, thicker than it should, cooler. She touched fingers to her lips, brought them to her nose, sniffed—

  —and smelled the f
aint, brackish odor of lake water.

  * * *

  Tina hoped she wasn’t sweating too badly. It was late June, and in southwestern Ohio, that meant high humidity. She could feel moisture being sucked out of her pores with every clack of her high-heel shoes, and she wished she hadn’t worn her blue blazer and skirt today. The fabric was way too heavy for summer, but it was the nicest outfit she had, and she wanted to make a good impression on the doctors at this practice. Maybe free samples were what really sold pharmaceuticals—and her case was bulging full of those today—but looking good in the bargain sure didn’t hurt. Especially when the practice was staffed by all male doctors, like this one.

  As a pharmaceutical sales rep, she was always careful not to park too close to the entrance of a physician’s office. Docs hated it when you took up spaces they thought should be reserved for their patients. Ordinarily, it wasn’t much of a hassle, but the office park was crowded today, and she’d been forced to park her Geo Metro in front of an orthodontist’s the equivalent of a city block away. The way she was sweating, by the time she got inside, she’d be lucky if she didn’t look like a drowned rat.

  She remembered the dream she’d had last night, and despite the heat of the day, she felt a chill ripple along her spine. Maybe drowned rat wasn’t the best choice of image for a simile.

  Tina heard a soft squeeek-squeeek-squeeek of turning wheels. She turned toward the sound and saw a small woman—really small, so tiny she looked more like an ambulatory doll than a creature of flesh and blood—pushing herself across the parking lot on a stainless steel scooter. Tina wondered if there was something wrong with the woman’s legs, if they were too weak to support even her minimal weight and she needed the scooter to get around.

  The woman had blonde hair down to the center of her tiny back, and she wore a white dress and shoes that were so small they looked like they belonged on a doll rather than a person. The woman’s head was out of proportion with her body, so much so that it seemed she might topple over any moment, her head dragging the rest of her body down to the blacktop of the parking lot. She was so small, so thin that Tina imagined she wouldn’t make much of a sound when she hit, no more than a child’s stuffed animal dropped onto carpet. The little woman held onto the handlebars with stubby sausage-link fingers as she half-walked, half-scooted toward Tina, wheels squeeeeeking softly.

  Tina felt the flesh on the back of her neck crawl as the woman approached, and she almost turned around and hurried back to her car. But she stood her ground, afraid of hurting the woman’s feelings and, more to the point, blowing her sales call. Besides, if Tina avoided contact with the woman just because of her appearance, that would make her a…what? Not a racist. A height-ist? Something like that.

  As the woman drew near, Tina relied on her years of sales experience to conceal her true feelings. Just act like you’re talking to a customer. She took a breath, released it, forced her body to relax and put on a “you don’t know me yet, but we’re destined to be good friends” smile.

  The little woman reached the sidewalk, stood and half-lifted, half-walked her bike onto it, sat back down, and then rolled right up to Tina, the front wheel of her scooter bumping into Tina’s left shoe. Tina didn’t wait for the woman to speak; in sales, it was vital to get the first word in yourself.

  “Hi.” Opening lines flashed nervously through her mind and were discarded just as quickly as they came. Nice day for a bike ride…Doing a “little” shopping?…How’s the weather down there?…

  But whatever Tina might’ve said died unspoken when she took a good look at the woman’s face. Her skin was pale, almost grayish-white, her lips round, the flesh puckered and tight as if they didn’t belong to a mouth at all but an entirely different orifice. Worst of all, though, were the little woman’s eyes. They were large, moist and black, like ebon marbles with petroleum jelly smeared on the surfaces. Tina had the impression that she’d seen these eyes before, but she couldn’t…

  And then she remembered. They resembled the eyes of the fish that had swam past her face when she’d almost drowned as a kid. These eyes had the same cold alien quality: detached, distant, and utterly devoid of any shred of human emotion.

  The orifice that served at the woman’s mouth irised open and she spoke, her voice liquid and phlegmy. “In the end, control is a fragile illusion. The more you struggle to hold onto it, the more easily it shatters in your grasp.” Her mouth opened and closed once, twice more without making any sound, as if she were gawping for air. She scooted backwards a foot, turned the front wheel of her tiny bike, and then advanced, making her way around Tina, wheels squeak-squeak-squeaking.

  Tina turned to watch the little woman continue down the sidewalk away from her. The woman’s cryptic words swirled around in her mind, but they weren’t what bothered Tina the most. What truly disturbed her was the glimpse she’d gotten of the little woman’s hands as she’d pulled her bike back and then moved forward. She’d seen that those stubby fingers were connected by gossamer-thin webs of skin—skin covered with glistening scales.

  She felt dizzy, nauseated, and then Carl’s words from last night returned to her.

  Maybe it’s just stress. You’ve got a lot going on in your life: your job, getting ready to start your MBA.…Not to mention the wedding, which Carl hadn’t. But maybe he was right. She was under a great deal of stress, more than she ever had been before. So she had encountered a strange little woman on her way to a sales call—what of it?

  What about those eyes…those fingers?

  Stress could do funny things to a person’s perceptions. The little woman on the bike had been real enough, and she’d said those words, whatever the hell they were supposed to mean, but the eyes and the webbed fingers? Uh-uh. Not a chance they were real. A trick of the light, the mind, or both. Best to just forget about them and move on.

  She continued down the sidewalk, passing office fronts—real estate, financial planning, an optometrist’s—on her way to the doctors’. The encounter with the little woman might have shaken her a bit, but at least it hadn’t put her behind schedule.

  She was mentally rehearsing her opening spiel for whichever doc might be available to see her (and trying to decide if it would be too obvious if she undid another button on her blouse), when she felt a tightness in her chest. It wasn’t much at first, just a sensation as if she were wearing constricting clothes, but then it worsened, and her lungs began to feel heavy, as if they were filling with fluid. Breathing became more difficult, until it felt as if she were trying to suck air through a mouthful of wet cotton. Her pulse rate soared, and she could feel her heart pounding in her ears, the sound not unlike the rushing-gurgle of water.

  Panic surged through her. She dropped her sample case and ran toward the doctors’ office, high-heels clack-clack-clacking on the sidewalk as she wheezed and gasped for air. Her vision began to go gray around the edges (a gray that resembled the murkiness of silty lake water) and she prayed that she’d reach the office doors before she lost consciousness.

  Almost there, almost—

  * * *

  Tina drove away from the doctor’s, embarrassed and angry at herself. She was a professional woman, goddamnit, not some simpering little thing that let her “nerves” get to her.

  I suggest you make an appointment with your regular doctor to see if he or she would like to run some more tests, but based on my examination, I’d say you experienced a mild panic attack, brought on most likely by stress. Not a lot of fun, of course, but nothing serious.

  The doctor had smiled then—a patronizing smile, Tina thought, one that said “There’s nothing wrong with you, so leave now and let me get on with seeing patients who really need me.”

  He’d also offered to write her a short-term prescription for anti-anxiety medication until she could get in to see her regular doctor, but she’d declined. She hated the idea of taking pills to alter her emotions. They were her emotions, and if they needed to be controlled, then she would be the one to do
it, not some damn medicine. Not exactly an attitude her supervisor at Pharm-Tech would approve of, maybe, but that’s how she felt.

  The words the little woman (the little fish woman, she couldn’t help thinking) had said came back to her then.

  In the end, control is a fragile illusion. The more you struggle to hold onto it, the more easily it shatters in your grasp.

  “Bullshit,” she whispered, but without much conviction. She continued driving toward her next sales call and tried not to think about the little woman’s cold, black eyes. Tried very hard.

  * * *

  When Tina was twelve, she almost drowned.

  Her family had been vacationing at a state park that summer: her father, mother, little brother and herself, all crammed into a tiny tin can of a trailer for a week. She’d never been the outdoorsy type and was well and truly bored after the first couple days. Besides, there really wasn’t that much to do, not with her parents. Her dad liked to go fishing, but her mom was too afraid to get into the boat—she was worried about tipping over, about getting sunburned, about getting eaten alive by mosquitoes—so she remained at the trailer, staying inside reading or watching the portable TV they’d brought, even though they could only pick up two local channels out of Cincinnati. Her brother liked to fish, too, so he accompanied their father, which left Tina (who loathed fishing) with only two choices: stay at the trailer with mom or roam around the park and see what trouble she could get into.

  And on the last day of their vacation, Tina found trouble all right. Found plenty.

  She wandered down to the boat dock, hoping to see the cute guy who worked at the nearby food stand. He was a teenager—sixteen, maybe seventeen—and, at least in Tina’s eyes, he was movie-star handsome. She had no illusions that the boy would fall in love with her. At twelve she was coltish and awkward, and besides, her family was leaving for home later. But she just wanted to see him one last time, and maybe, if she was lucky, snap a picture of him with the camera Aunt Karen had given her for her last birthday.