The Shadow Economy

This week, a wundersame Geschichte presented with apologies to Adelbert von Chamisso. (Sorry, I know these clickbait introductions are annoying.)

This week's daily stories

Monday

The stories have all got mixed up. You pull a sword from the stone and all the evils of the world fly out. You kiss a frog and it turns into a wolf. There you go, trying to put them all back in order and only getting yourself more muddled. There are fairies in the mountains and dragons in the woods. It’s no good trying to mend things now. There are new stories to learn.

Tuesday

I found myself on that narrow borderline, where I seemed comfortable enough until my clothes started to wear out, where I could survive until any little thing went wrong. It felt like I had tripped but hadn’t started falling yet. I was at all times reaching out, grabbing at the air, calling for the wind to hold me up. On borrowed time, they say. I was defaulting.

Wednesday

In quiet moments I heard music, but there was never enough quiet to hear it properly. What brief phrases I made out seemed to dissolve when the noise returned and pushed them out. Notes scattered into engine pings and cat cries and distant drilling. Finally I sealed myself in the house, cotton wool in my ears, manuscript paper on my lap. I wrote down that strange music, then collapsed into a sleep that left me dry-mouthed and weak-limbed. The next day I played it for Andrea. ‘That’s the theme from the Muppet Show,’ she said.

Thursday

She brought him cake soaked in syrup, too sticky to eat. It made him angry, although he knew it shouldn’t. He watched the sugar crystallise on the paper bag, then threw it away, untasted. The next day she brought him gingerbread, warm and fragrant. But that made him angry too.

Friday

“Wood splits. Concrete cracks. Metal rusts. Why not build in wonderful plastic?” The poster must have been there for decades. We knew we would never get it off in one piece, so we set up lights and took good photographs. We knew that someone, somewhere, would want it preserved. Then we lifted the corner, and the whole thing peeled away, pristine as the day it was pasted up. A moment later the wall collapsed. The photos didn’t come out. We drifted apart.

Saturday

There are new things in the sky, smooth white disks stacked atop each other, that seem to hover in place. I never see them move, except to rise higher until they are too far away to see. They either don't have lights, or they don't come out at night. And they hum, a more sonorous sound than a jet engine. I suppose you already know about them. I suppose everybody does. By now I'm sure people can't remember what life was like without them. You can forget how fast things change, if you don't look up.

Sunday

The fireworks stood in the air, burning like a migraine, more bursting every moment. Soon it would be so bright it would look like daytime. The sound was constant too, every bang turning to a drone. We screamed out at the night to stop letting them off, to give the sparks a chance to fall to earth, but nobody could hear. Behind a cloud, the moon began to burst.

I have been reading...

• Your Sons And Your Daughters Are Beyond by Rosie Garland. Very short, strange stories with bite. Like a box of good dark chocolates, best enjoyed one or two each night, but tempting to devour in one go.
• We Are Not Numbers, edited by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey. This anthology of writing by young Gazans is beautiful and varied and alive, and achieves exactly the goal its title sets out. You can read more from the We Are Not Numbers project at wearenotnumber.org

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This week's story: The Shadow Economy

Pete once read a story about a man who sold his shadow for a bottomless purse, but that was a fairytale. It was meant to frighten you into virtue. In the story, the man sold his shadow thinking he didn't really need it, but then he found out that nobody liked him without it. Pete thought that was stupid. Most people wouldn't notice a missing shadow, obviously. He thought the person who wrote that story had been such an idiot that he couldn't think of any real problem with selling your shadow, so he just made it that everyone except the man knew it was bad not to have one. Otherwise the moral wouldn't work.

Well, Pete was cleverer than that, so before he went off to sell his shadow he worked out all of the real problems there would be. Like: sometimes on a sunny day, he put his back to the sun so he could read his phone screen in the shade of his own body. That would be out. And he had to assume, as a worst-case scenario, that shading his eyes with his hand wouldn't work either. He might come out of the deal looking lit up all over, a bit unnatural, like somebody Photoshopped into a picture where the lighting doesn't match. Maybe that was what happened to the man in the story, and that was why they didn't like him: it was too uncanny, particularly when you hadn't seen Photoshop before. It wouldn't be a problem these days. Looking weird was a flex, so long as the weird looked expensive. And nobody ever asked for more shadows on their face, did they?