I went for a walk today, book in hand, down past the creek and up the street for another two blocks to a sprawling green city park. The fields were covered in dandelions and weeds, but places further south of the creek were more lush and green.  I walked to a tree some hundred yards from the baseball fields, empty, the edges sharp, the lines smooth and untouched, ready for an evening game. The tree was thick around and cast a long shadow in the later afternoon sunlight.

I ran my hands around it and stepped carefully around the roots and the pebbly base. Finally I knelt where the grass turned from cheerful green to muted, dark, almost blue. I ran my hand over the edge of the shadow, feeling it, where the grass was warm, cheerful, where it turned cold, a hint of wet. I

I kept my hand moving across the tips of the grass, their ends rustling in the breeze. I studied the way each blade cast its own shadow across the others, swaying moving, a shimmering like river water, first bathed in sunlight, then in darkness. In the setting light, against the movement, it felt as if I knelt on something living, a creature beneath me, each blade of grass sharp, teeth, rows of them.

I stood up and looked toward the sun. I squinted in the bright light, closed my eyes against the solar heat, felt the sweat prickle at my temples, the edge of my hairline.

I turned, the star too bright, looking back at the grass, and I saw my shadow, stretched, too long, a distortion of myself. At once my heart raced and in my fear I slipped into the shadow of the tree. At the same instant my skin grew cold, my blood ran cold and I sat down, hard.

For a moment I was too afraid to move, frozen in a kind of irrational fear. Too afraid of my own shadow to leave the shadow of the tree, but too afraid of the shadow of the tree to stay. My heart raced, my blood ran in my temples, pounded, as if to beat a decision into me.

Move, Katie. Move. Go, get up and run. Get away from these shadows. Get home -

Home. Like that was any better.

Move, Katie. Move. Turn the doorknob. There’s no monster on the other side.

“Perhaps if I just wait until sunset.”

But sunset wouldn’t come for another three hours, and the idea of staying in the dark of the tree for even another ten minutes sent a shiver down my spine that ended at the base of my back and forced its way into the ground like some parasite fleeing a sick host.

Move, Katie. Move.

But there is a monster. The shadow will be there. That irrational fear. This time I won’t see an empty apartment, this time the monster will be clear, running with me, pacing me step for step, long, lanky, some beast mirroring my motion on the other side of the tree, half-disguised in the growth but unconcerned of stealth, no need to hide.

It’s the monsters that hide that you need worry about.

At once the thought brought a kind of comfort that let me break from the tree. As I ran I made a pointed effort to stare forward and slightly to the left, trying to avoid my pursuer to no avail, a blackness from the corner of my eye.

It’s alright, Katie dear. No need to be afraid.

Funny thing, fear.

Even as I write this, it returns, growing in an intensity as if to remind me in the same way that my shadow is always with me that it’s still here and has always been here. There is no irrationality in the moment. It makes sense, it chimes, it beats it’s logic to your mind and whispers voices in the night.

Compounding fear, I hit the door still at a run and collapse against it, closed, inside now, away from the light, trying not to think, trying to dismiss the thought that followed me the last few hundred meters,

Why should I trust the voice that tells me not to be afraid of the dark?

As a child, mothers don’t tell you to be unafraid of strangers, mothers don’t -

I think that’s about all for now.