Every morning, Eli woke with ink on his hands.
At first, he thought it was a childish habit he’d never quite outgrown—sleepwalking with pens, maybe, or scribbling in the half-dream between rest and waking. But Eli owned no pens. His apartment was spare and colorless by design, a place where nothing lingered long enough to remind him of anything.
Yet the ink kept appearing. Black, smudged into the lines of his palms, beneath his fingernails, sometimes trailing up his wrists like veins.
On the fourth morning, he noticed the letters.
They were written on the wall behind his bed, small and careful, as if whoever wrote them was afraid of waking him.
I REMEMBER.
Eli stared at the words until his vision blurred. His breath came shallow, the way it used to when he was a boy hiding under his desk, counting seconds until the shouting stopped.
He wiped the wall clean with shaking hands. By nightfall, the fear had settled into a familiar numbness.
He slept with the light on.
That was when he saw his shadow move.
Moonlight spilled across the floor, and his shadow stretched long and thin against the opposite wall. Eli lay frozen, eyes open, heart hammering, as the shadow’s arm lifted—slow, deliberate—while his own remained still beneath the sheets.
The shadow bent down.
When it rose again, new words bloomed on the wall.
YOU LEFT HIM.
Eli screamed.
The memory came back all at once.
His brother, Jonah. Younger by three years. Loud laugh. Always hiding behind Eli when their father drank too much, when the house filled with broken glass and slurred accusations. Eli had promised—over and over—that he would never leave.
But at sixteen, Eli had run.
College acceptance letter. A duffel bag. A bus ticket bought with money he’d stolen from their father’s coat. Jonah had stood in the doorway, eyes wide, asking when Eli would come back.
“Soon,” Eli had said.
He never did.
Jonah died two years later. Overdose, the report said. Accidental.
Eli had buried the truth deeper than the ink in his skin: I abandoned him.
The shadow did not write for two nights after that. On the third, it wrote only a name.
JONAH.
Eli stopped fighting sleep.
That night, he stood up while his body remained in bed. He was weightless, hollow, watching as his shadow turned to face him—not flat now, but full, shaped like a man made of darkness and grief.
“You used me,” the shadow said in Jonah’s voice. Not accusing. Just tired.
“I was afraid,” Eli whispered. “I didn’t know how to save us both.”
The shadow held out its hands. Ink dripped from its fingers, pooling on the floor like spilled memory.
“You could have remembered me,” it said. “You could have spoken my name.”
Eli fell to his knees. For the first time in years, he cried without trying to be quiet.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I see you now.”
The shadow nodded. It pressed its hands to Eli’s chest, and the ink soaked in, warm instead of cold. The wall behind them filled with one final sentence.
REMEMBERING IS STAYING.
When Eli woke, the walls were blank. His hands were clean.
But something had changed.
He found Jonah’s old number in his phone—still there, untouched. He didn’t delete it this time. He spoke to it. He told the truth to friends who’d only ever known the quiet, distant version of him. He volunteered at a shelter downtown, helping boys who flinched at raised voices and pretended they were fine.
At night, his shadow lay still.
And for the first time, Eli let the past walk beside him instead of chasing him from behind—no longer something that haunted his sleep, but something that shaped the man he chose to become.
