The Shadow Self [Short Story]

In the night my back itches. I scratch in heated dreams. I scratch with hallucinations of Poe and Jung and Lacan and shadow puppets dancing on the ceiling, daugerrotypes and cut-outs. There are certain dreams that trap you in half-sleep, half-wake, more binding than chains. Somewhere in the universe there is a prison constructed from backlit, panting dreams, constructed of pillowed walls and cotton sheets, staffed with nurses who patrol the sleeping figures wielding syringes full of nightmares like viper venom. No one leaves.

I scratch and scratch, until my outer shell dislodges from my bone. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to live in my waking hours without wearing the whiskey-disinfected, sex-soaked shell of NAMELESS that I can’t stand the feel of a sheet against my raw skin. And when I wake, NAMELESS is in a pile underneath me, her textured insides pressing into my back like toxic needles, making me go numb at the base of my spine. When I rub my thighs together, the old skin burns. I’ve come undone. The skin of NAMELESS hisses,

“You’re nothing without me.”

And I swallow when she speaks, touching the porous wounds in my freshly exposed body. I needed more time than this - getting rid of my shell was supposed to be a gradual process, wading into a cold pool, But now she’s sliding up from underneath me, reforming into a dense caricature of a person. She’s gliding over to the mirror, putting lipstick around the sharp hole in her newly formed face. She pouts, at least I think that’s her way of pouting, and a little bit of black ichor seeps out the flap of skin that forms her slender back.

When I leave my apartment, she walks behind me, in the gutters, sidestepping sidewalks. We go into a bar together. She says, “I’m better at being you than you are.” I ask for a rum and coke, the bartender ignores me and turns to NAMELESS, smiling. Nameless orders a molotov cocktail, smashes the windows, burns down the bar.

I run, but she finds me out on the pier, shivering in my ragged clothing, even though the city is on fire and hot embers touch the back of my neck. She slips behind me, her flimsy arms encircling my waist. Her hole of a mouth leaves smears of lipstick in my hair.

“One day you’ll want me back,” she said, “And even on the days you don’t, I’ll be here.”

I try to writhe away from her, but she clings fast, her skin leaving blisters against my raw arms. She laughs a little, like she’s been practicing, the cadence, the rhythm, the volume - she laughs like a sensual sociopath.

Somewhere in the universe there is a prison constructed from her cocaine tongue and bleach-blonde hair, a prison of angry warm drugs and spine shivers that makes people slip into delirium. They will not wake to find they’ve spent the last several years in underwater bars and hiding underneath vehicles, on airport runways and elevators that only go down. They will not wake at all.

There’s nowhere to go in a city falling apart, except the derelict underground. I begin constructing my new home underneath the piping of the city while NAMELESS breaks the doors. I paint the walls cinnamon, she paints over them with black. I put my mattress on the floor. She builds instead, a gilded cage on a platform and urges me to crawl inside. I drink gin and tonic, she prefers whiskey that tastes like sour kisses from men dying in hospitals. Whenever I look away, she burns something that I love - a memory of a tree riddled with glowing white worms, a ghost of a dream about a slender blonde with arms reaching for me, one of my Philip K. Dick books. NAMELESS won’t stop until I wear her smile like a rictus mask again, until I go to the edge of the city and blow out my organs like chunks so she can replace them with herself, filling up my chest like a noxious gas.

She sits in the corner of the room, draped over a chair. I can’t help but think, my heels look better on her, my black lipstick looks better on her, my Chanel Coco Noir smells better on her. She wears me better than I wear me, and I’m wearing away.

She seduces my boyfriend in the night, and he crawls away from me and sleeps at her feet. He doesn’t remember my name. One night I awake from a dream of coagulated, sentient blood, to find that she’s set him on fire. She lights a cigarette with his burning t-shirt.

“I’m going to keep burning everything you love,” she said. “Until the only thing you love is the burning.”

---

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