The Shadow that Stayed

It appeared in the middle of the day.

She was combing her hair in front of the mirror when she caught the quick movement in the reflection. She froze, then ran out of the room and slammed the door shut, trapping it inside. Her heart pounded so fast that sweat formed on her forehead, and her breath came in short gasps.

She had always lived with a sense of fear, though she wasn’t sure when it began or where it came from. Perhaps from the horror movies she wasn’t supposed to watch, or from her cousins’ stories told on summer nights when they visited from abroad. They would stay up late, sharing tales of strange things that happened to children sitting by a fire in the forest, or of ghosts wandering through abandoned houses.

Her cousin once gifted her a stack of stories by Christopher Pike and R. L. Stine. It was her first encounter with horror. She spent hours reading them, and carried them wherever she went, to relatives’ houses or her mother’s hairdresser.

Once, they watched The Mummy together and were horrified not by the monsters, but by the beetles that crawled under people’s skin and moved through their bodies until it looked like their heads might burst.

At night, the village slept, but not all the sounds did: the crickets, the dogs, the foxes crying in the distance.

Dread would wash over her every night, imagining a hand reaching out from under the bed. She felt uneasy in the dark, especially after midnight. Power often went out in the village, so she kept a small flashlight beside her bed, the kind used in movies when the protagonist walks, trembling, into a haunted basement. Sometimes, during long power cuts, candles flickered in the bathroom, their shadows forming eerie shapes on the walls.

She often imagined the masked killer from Scream appearing in her living room, or the ghostly woman from an Egyptian film she once saw, dressed in white with fake wings, her eyes wide and unblinking in a bathtub. For years, each time she showered, she half expected to see that face behind the curtain.

After midnight, she felt tense as she moved through the silence from her room toward the bathroom or the kitchen. She imagined burglars who, she’d heard, could climb balconies at night. The foxes’ growls reached her even when she covered her ears with a blanket.

Even knowing it was trapped, she could still feel it chasing her, wings beating above her head, breath rising into a sharp cry. “Mom! Dad! There’s a bat in your room!” The words burst out of her, loud and clear, carrying a tone desperate for rescue.

In winter, she liked the soft rhythm of raindrops tapping on the ceiling at night; it calmed her. But when the rain grew heavy and turned into hail, striking the roof with hard blows, she would pull the blanket over her head and pray the ceiling wouldn’t collapse. Thunder unsettled her the most, the flash of lightning, then the deep, rolling growl that followed, as if it were the wrath of God.

She couldn’t stand centipedes, which she was told would cling to her skin and have to be burned to let go. Once, she found one in her bed at night. She brushed her hand across the bedsheet to slide it under the pillow when her fingers touched something slimy. She didn’t scream, though it would have been the natural thing to do. A soft gasp escaped her lips, barely audible. She threw it to the ground and ran into her parents’ room, insisting on sleeping there. The next day they removed all the furniture and found the centipede. Her father killed it without a second thought, and her mother cleaned the room thoroughly.

Her parents sat at her grandfather’s apartment, drinking coffee on the terrace. Her voice cut through the quiet afternoon. A soft breeze brushed her face, sunlight caressed her shoulders, yet her body refused to feel its warmth. All she could sense was the trembling beat inside her chest.

Her father rushed up the stairs, with her aunt and brother close behind. Her aunt carried a tennis racket, and her father asked her brother to bring two more. They went into the room and closed the door behind them.

They lived in a small village near the mountains, surrounded by greenery. Animals and insects were everywhere, and she learned from her parents that they were enemies. Her parents were gentle. Her father loved literature and music and read her short stories before she slept. Her mother cooked love on the stove and poured it into their bowls every day. They were caring and protective, yet there were no plants at home, and no pets.

Every time she saw a cockroach, she called her dad to save her. Sometimes she would find the bodies of mice caught in the metal trap near the staircase. Her father would throw them away, and her mother would wash the floor with bleach until no trace was left.

Once, she killed a butterfly. She was alone at home when it appeared in her room. She brought the insect spray and emptied the bottle on it. Years later, she wrote a poem about that moment, describing how the butterfly struggled to lift itself, how death dragged it down, how its wings fluttered and hit the ground repeatedly.

She dreaded the devil, who she was told lingered in the dark, and the jinn, invisible creatures said to live among humans. She often sensed the dead, whose souls might still be around the house. She thought of them every time she heard a crack in the wood or a tap on the window at night. But above all, she was afraid of God, who could, with a flick of His fingers, send her and her parents to hell, the eternal volcanic eruption she had learned about in religion class.

Sometimes she would lie awake in bed. She was told that God punished liars by suffocating them. She didn’t lie much, yet from time to time imagined a noose dropping from the ceiling toward her neck. Once, she heard that God punishes those who don’t pray by making them stand on burning coal until their brains boil. Her parents didn’t pray, so she spent nights imagining, with a trembling heart, her parents standing on coal, their skin blistering, their brains boiling. She wished they would pray, so her mind could find gentler things to imagine on those sleepless nights. She tried her best to do her own prayers on time, hoping it might spare them too.

The bat was still inside. From the balcony, she watched it fly frantically around the room, hitting wall after wall, trying to find a way out. The tennis rackets swayed through the air again and again, until her brother struck it. The moment felt like something out of a cartoon, yet it was not funny this time. The bat struck the wall, hung there motionless, then slid slowly down to the floor. It was small, almost like a rat.

A spot of blood marked the wall.

She stood there, staring at it. Soon it would be gone, as if it had never happened.

That night, she lay wide awake, watching the curtains flutter across the room.

A shadow circled inside her, restless and blind, beating its wings against the walls of her mind, flickering each time she faced the mirror.