Shadow Dancers
A Chicago's Grimm tale inspired by The Lamb and the Fish
Mark watches his step-daughters play in the park. They’re okay, he figures. Six and seven, they’re round cheeked with fine hair. They love their mom; they play dress up, cuddle on the couch, and make messes in the guise of helping.
Mark found them sweet at the beginning of his relationship with Rachel. They’d been shy, and winning them over had been a fun challenge necessary to get closer to Rachel. He knew how important to Rachel the girls are, and never minded her having to get back to relieve a sitter. They could also be very entertaining, saying the darndest things.
But eight months into their marriage, twelve months into living together, Theresa and Melissa are no longer cute. He knows he agreed to be their stepfather, but he’s starting to regret that. How they crawl into Rachel’s lap and disrupt his time with his wife. How their current moods impact what dinner is. He’s getting a little tired of chicken nuggets and tacos.
And then there’s this - free time that used to be spent alone he now has to spend being a parent. He told Rachel he’d take the girls to the park, so here they are, Theresa and Melissa playing tag with a gaggle of children. He doesn’t even have coffee to hold to keep his hands warm.
Not that 55F is cold, but the bench is metal, and he hasn’t moved for thirty minutes. He wants to be at the house, watching a show with Rachel. Maybe one of those crime dramas she thinks is too much for the girls. Or even home alone, reading in an extra wide armchair.
There’s a scream of excitement from the playground, and Mark scowls. There’s other adults here, some of them talking in pairs, others simply watching the kids play. He wants to pull out his phone, but doesn’t want to deal with the side-eye he got last time when there’d been a fight he ignored between Theresa, Melissa, and another girl. The other parents know him. Or at least, they know Rachel and know that he’s her husband.
They gossip. Word would get around.
So Mark sits there, watching the girls but not really, daydreaming about what his life would be like if they weren’t there.
It’s not that he hates them; the girls are sweet, but children just…get in the way of the lifestyle he wants. He never planned on having them. Theresa and Melissa are Rachel’s kids, but now people seem to think they’re his too, and all he wants is them gone.
There’s a house, he knows. Bloody Mary is a school yard horror story, no weeping mother actually crawls out of the mirror if you say you dropped her baby. But the whispers he’s heard about the Hansel House are softer, lower. Sometimes, the shadows twist when the topic is brought up.
It’s not an option. He doesn’t want Theresa and Melissa baked in a witch’s oven and served as meat pie. That sounds horrible, even if it’s far-fetched.
He lets his eyes drift to the small collection of trees on the edge of the park. It’s truly small - three trees and a bush. He keeps half an eye on the bit of forestry as he watches the girls run up plastic stairs in a race. There’s birds around the park, and some squirrels are starting to store nuts. Mark watches a chipmunk scamper between two trees, only to backtrack quickly.
It’s odd behavior, and calls attention to the fact that for the past fifteen minutes Mark’s been staring at this piece of land, not a single creature has walked through it. He squints, thinks the shadow under the bush is a little too dark. That the bush itself is a little dark. He should be able to see through the branches this deep into fall, but the center of the bush is darkness, and the shadow around it is nearly a perfect circle.
People whisper that the shadows eat people. Mark’s not sure that’s true. How does a shadow eat? He always thought it might be like a sinkhole in a sand dune; the ground under your feet suddenly disappears as sand falls in from on top of you and the darkness surrounds you completely. Just…faster because of Chicago weirdness. Nothing has ever emerged from the shadows. Not creatures, not bones, not the shoes of missing little girls.
Things that step into the shadows are erased from the world.
It’s a thought that sticks with Mark for a day, a week. And then he sees his opportunity.
They’re coming back from a rare night out, with the kids, of course. They’d gone to see a movie, and the city streets on the walk home are dark and full. The girls are in front of them, sharing their favorite parts. Mark and Rachel link arms behind them as sentinels, keeping an eye on the small forms as they weave around people walking in the opposite direction. Mark wants to be one of those young adults, on their way to a bar to start his night, not on his way home to end it. Because they’ll put the kids to bed and Rachel will say she’s tired, and maybe there will be one kiss as they spend five minutes putting things in place.
“Careful!” Rachel calls out as Melissa pretends to be a ballerina, twirling away from a woman. She continues her fake pirouette at the mouth of the alley.
“Don’t worry about it,” the woman tells Rachel. “I’m fine.”
Mark absently notices that Theresa has joined her sister, using the mouth of the alley as a mock stage. There’s a shadow creeping behind them. He positions himself parallel to them and perpendicular to Rachel and the woman.
“Little girls, right?” he says with a smile. “Always playing at being a star.”
“Wanted to be a rock star myself,” the woman says.
There’s a couple passing by. Mark times it in his head, then steps backward into the woman. She wobbles on her heels into her partner, who in turn stumbles toward the alley mouth. Melissa and Theresa jump back, but the couple doesn’t pay any attention to the kids. They’re glaring at Mark, chastising him about watching his step. Rachel comes to his defense, apologizing.
In the alley, just beyond the edge of the light, he sees Theresa’s bright yellow coat disappear.
He sees Melissa jump, sees her reach for her younger sister, sees her open her mouth to scream, sees her turn toward her parents. Locks eyes with her.
Mark puts a finger to his lips in a shh gesture.
Melissa gets ready to scream anyway, but the shadow in the alley writhes and she’s gone, just as silently as her sister.
“Melissa!” Mark shouts, pushing past Rachel and the other couple. It’s too late, he knows it’s too late, made sure it was too late. Rachel would have pulled them away from the alley’s entry as soon as she saw where they were twirling.
“Girls!” Rachel shrieks, running into the alley. As one, Mark and anyone nearby on the street pull up the flashlights on their phones, shining the light into the alley.
But there’s no trace of Theresa and Melissa.
They make the news as one of the most public shadow losses in fifty years, and Mark doesn’t want to think about what made a shadow so desperate to shallow children so early in the night, with people two feet away.
Rachel is being haunted. She hears the laughter of her girls in her ears, sees their dancing shadows on buildings as she rides the L into work. She’s not sure if a funeral is the right call, are her darlings dead? But they’re gone, gone gone gone, aside from the images and sounds that tease the edges of her mind.
It’s grief, she knows that, grief magnified because it feels like she’s going through it alone. Mark is soothing and cares for her, lets her lie in bed, strokes her hair, and brings her water to drink. But he doesn’t ache for Theresa and Melissa like she does. Rachel knows he wasn’t their birth father, but she thought he’d loved them too. He had agreed to be their dad and now…
Now Rachel is watching the shadow forms of her daughters dance on their shared bedroom wall. How they perform for the real shadow of three-foot doll, elongated to stretch halfway up the wall, a doll that stands there as the girls pretend to be ballerinas before shrinking to the floor out of sight.
She’s not sure if they’re really her girls, these shadows. The things shadows swallow disappear. That’s what all the whispers say, and the forums online too. Chicago’s grim corners never give up what they’ve taken.
And it’s true, Rachel can’t reach into the bedroom wall and pull out Melissa to stroke her hair back from her face. Can’t grab Theresa’s wrist to guide her to bed. Her daughters are gone.
But something tells Rachel these figments of her mind are based on facts.
Rachel places her hand on the wall. The shadows of two girls rise from the baseboard and layer themselves so her hand is next to their faces, as if any moment she could turn her palm and caress their cheeks one after another.
Some part of her daughters are still here.
That’s enough.
For now.
“Babe?” Mark calls from the hallway.
As one, the shadows press their fingers to their lips in a silencing motion, then dance away into the shadow of the open door.
They never show themselves to Mark.
She’s the only one who sees them. Knows them.
Mark pokes his head into the room with a quiet hey, before slipping behind Rachel and wrapping his arms around her. “This room keeps making you sad. Maybe it’s time to turn it into something else, it’s been three months.”
Maybe she’s the only one who loved them.
She spies the wisp of a scarf from the shadow of the door, as if following a spinning girl.
You can’t peel shadows from the wall. Chicago doesn’t give back people, her daughters belong to the city, but she can give them a playground. And they won’t play with Mark.
“An artist’s nook,” Rachel says, already imagining playing with items to make shadow castles and forests for Theresa and Melissa.
She turns in Mark’s arms, leaning back to look at his face. He’s looking at her. He always looks at her, never sorrowfully at the girls’ beds or clothes or pictures. He leans down for a kiss; he’s been so touchy lately, replacing the feel of little hands with his larger ones. Rachel turns away and looks at the cheap flip phone they’d gotten Melissa just a week before, still sitting on her end table.
“And I think the first thing I’ll make is a call to a divorce lawyer.”
Chicago’s Grimm is a collection of urban fantasy stories inspired by Grimm’s Fairy Tales set in Chicago. Subscribe to make sure you get every story and if you liked it consider getting me a Ko-Fi ☕or picking up one of my short story collections.
