She told me not to go out at night for a while. I agreed.
I lasted until Saturday.
I had to go in for an emergency shift. No choice. I told myself it was just a light. I told myself I was a grown adult who analysed data for a living and understood cause and effect and rational explanations.
I told myself a lot of things on that walk.
Delaney Street was dark when I passed it. The lamp post: dead, the way it had been for six years. I almost laughed with relief.
Then I noticed the shadows were wrong.
Every other lamp on the block threw clean circles of light. Sharp edges. Normal geometry. But my shadow — cast by the lamp twenty feet behind me — was stretching toward me instead of away. As though the light source had moved. As though something was very close, and very bright, and directly at my back.
I stopped walking.
The shadow stopped too.
I did not turn around. Every nerve in my body screamed at me not to turn around, and for once in my life I listened to my nerves. I stepped sideways, slowly, until I reached a shop doorway, and I stood with my back against solid wood and looked at the street.
The light hung in the air six feet behind where I’d just been standing. Same amber glow. Same patient, floating quiet.
It wasn’t following me home.
It had been waiting for me to come back to it.
We stayed like that for a long time, the light and I, while cars passed on the far intersection and the world went on being normal. Then it drifted — not toward me, not away — but sideways, until it hovered directly over the old lamp post, and went out.
The lamp turned on.
The regular lamp. Fixed to its pole. Burning amber-warm in the rain-wet dark.
I went to work. I did my shift. I didn’t take any route home — I slept on Dani’s couch and watched the sun come up before I moved.
This was three weeks ago.
The lamp on Delaney is on every night now. City records still say it’s decommissioned. My photos still show it dark. I’ve stopped trying to photograph it.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, the detail I can’t file away or explain.
The night it waited in the alley — when it finally drifted back to its post and settled and the lamp came on — I looked at the pool of light it threw on the sidewalk.
There was a shadow in it.
Standing still. Human-shaped. The shadow of someone who wasn’t there.
It was facing my building.
It was the right height to be mine.
And whatever cast it had been standing there long enough that the rain had left a dry patch on the pavement all around it — the kind of dry patch you get when something has been standing in one place for hours, blocking the rain.
Long before I ever stepped onto that street.
I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it wants.
But last night, I finally looked out my window — and the shadow in the lamplight lifted its hand.
Very slowly.
Like a wave.
Like it knew I was watching.
Like it had always known.
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