Shadow within Shadows

My shadow is much more beautiful than me. Dense, sharp, and without uncertainties. I also think she is younger. She has very long legs and black hair. She doesn't even look unhappy; even if she does, I hardly notice it. I like to think that she has everything I don't have: good grades, a swimming certificate, a degree in International Relations, a lot of boyfriends, five sisters, a flower garden, and collections of Chimamanda’s books and handbags.

In my house there was always too much light: my mother, my Uwoma, hated the dark and all our rooms were lit up like television studios, or penitentiaries.

"Where do the bulbs go?" Uwoma asks point-blank.

"Into the bin for glass," I say instinctively.

"Silly." Oh, yeah. Bad thing, my instinct.

Light bulbs all go into lampshades, chandeliers and wall sconces. On, all the time. And the dark, the dark where does it go?

Every day Uwoma and I ask questions like: "What about the wax plugs? The iron wire? The weeds?"

"What about the pencils? The receipts?" We are obsessed with the destination of things: the damp, the undifferentiated? The paper, the plastic. What about us, Mom, where did we end up, where will we end up?

She opens the big bags with a dry gesture and divides the things. Things from now, things from before, from when we lived with him and there was no need to keep all the lights on.

Of course, there was a need, my shadow whispers to me, and I'm sure she makes a little titter, though I can't read her lips.

So I shut up and help Uwoma: in the yellow bag, we cram the books, the boxes and the drawings. I pick one up and recognize the old house: the sloping roof, the hedge, in the centre the round window - the Onogiri’s house where I used to play hide and seek with Naana, Uwoma said laughing when she was still laughing. She snatches it out of my hand and tears it to pieces.

Yellow sack: paper, cardboard, the old house, the empty boxes, the Onogiri’s eye, anger. My shadow replicates my gestures behind me. She mimics me. Witty.

My shadow had a happy childhood. Till adolescence crept in. She was pretty pleased when she could still eat Uwoma's noodles made with groundnut oil. It was beautiful when she could still walk around naked jumping from one house to another and picking the ice balls from the sky; my shadow had all of that.

Surely she sleeps more than me, does not have dark circles and does not consume a tube of concealer per week (the tubes then go into the plastic bin. Like life before). She does not wear white pants, shirt and undies to bed because she believes that will drive away bad dreams, and above all she is young. Pretty. And Calm.

"You are beautiful," I whisper to her sometimes. She does not show that she notices, she just stands there, black black, at most nodding, following me as I move my head to get a better look at her. She is capable of sitting beside me for hours, barely visible in the dim light of the PC, while I do what - I am sure - she cannot do: I use words.

Not that words don't have one, a shadow. Sometimes it is so magnificent and gigantic that it eats up everything. It comes out of the monitor, widens and flows until it fills the whole room, the house and then the city, to the brim. The night we escaped from the Onogiris' house was exactly like that: dark to the brim. Since then Uwoma has wanted only light. And silence.

"Where does the darkness go, Uwoma?"

"Don't ask dumb questions. Into the undifferentiated bin," she says, or maybe I imagine it. My shadow, as usual, is silent.

I steal a drawing and keep it hidden in my room. I look at it and look at the signature, bottom right: his initials, crossed. I touch them with the tip of my finger. The letter of the first name, the letter of the last name, which is no longer ours, mine. I repeat it in a whisper, lest I forget. He casts a thick shadow of his own.

"Aren't there any more of those drawings?" Uwoma asks me, her eyes pinpointed, the way she does when she has to prick and puncture my every word to find out if it is false. "No," I say. But maybe the shadow has been making marks behind my back, maybe the pins were pricking: Uwoma doesn’t believe me. She rummages through the boxes we have not emptied since that night.

Scarves, first editions, mummified roses. Scented cards, empty flasks, drawings.

Where do they go, mother?

Away from us, they go.

There will be a separate collection for all this, I think (wet, sentimental, undifferentiated, hostile, plastic, love, glass, family, paper and cardboard, some nights).

Come, I say to my shadow, who wags her tail from box to box, and I see her quivering with desire to wear those tiaras, to put a satin stole on her skinny shoulders, to comb her hair with gold combs, to slather her shadow skin with French creams. It's not your stuff, I tell her, I tell myself.

It's nobody's stuff anymore and all we have to do now is put it aside and dispose of it. Isn't that what you do with memory, with pain?

We make beautiful sacks, Uwoma and I: over here the old things, over there the nameless things, over there the things that still have a name, and we don't say it. Some names are shadows.

"Excuse me," Uwoma sometimes says, giving me a brief caress.

"It's okay, Ma," I tell her, and try to take her hand, to hold it on my face. She pulls it away like I'm burning up, running away.

"Let's go to work, there's so much more stuff to throw away."

It was her last night, she, my shadow, made the trouble. She knocked over the bags and everything got mixed up, things from before, from now. Chaos. A catastrophe. Uwoma started crying. So I grabbed her and shook her. Or maybe it was my shadow, I don't know.

“Say it, Omo, say it, tell me”. She said.

"I had to stop him. He was going to hurt you like he always hurt me. And every time I look at you I see my face, and I'm afraid to see those purple marks again. Then I see his face, too." And she pulls her hand away as if it were hot.

She was crying, mixing the fear of then and the fear of now. My face and hers. My shadow nodded: she always knows everything. And she helped me; we gathered everything in the bags, in bulk, not dividing anything. No more, before and now. My shadow and I put everything outside the door. The sacks, the objects, the names. And lots of light bulbs too.

Yesterday was our first night in the dark. So quiet, so soft. Mom thought I was asleep, but she came close to me and put her hand on my cheek. "You are beautiful," she whispered and left her hand there. I pretended to keep sleeping and we stayed like that, shadows within shadows.

Hannah Imordi

Ps I do not own the rights to the image, it belongs to VectorStock.