Free The Shadows, Kith and Kin by Joe R. Lansdale Page B

there.
     
    Waiting.
     
    Watching.
     
    Shadows.
     
    And one of them had spoken to me.
     
    ––
     
    Lying in bed later that night I held up my hand and found that what intrigued me most were not the fingers, but the darkness between them. It was a thin darkness, made weak by light, but it was darkness and it seemed more a part of me than the flesh.
     
    I turned and looked at my sleeping wife.
     
    I said, "I am one of them. Almost."
     
    ––
     
    I remember all this as I sit in my chair and the storm rages outside, blowing snow and swirling little twirls of water that in turn become ice. I remember all this, holding up my hand again to look.
     
    The shadows between my fingers are no longer thin.
     
    They are dark.
     
    They have connection to flesh.
     
    They are me.
     
    ––
     
    Four flashes. Four snaps.
     
    The deed is done.
     
    I wait in the chair by the window.
     
    No one comes.
     
    As I suspected.
     
    The shadows were right.
     
    You see, they come to me nightly now. They never enter the house. Perhaps they cannot.
     
    But out on the porch, there they gather. More than one, now. And they flutter tight around me and I can smell them, and it is a smell like nothing I have smelled before. It is dark and empty and mildewed and old and dead and dry.
     
    It smells like home.
     
    ––
     
    Who are the shadows?
     
    They are all of those who are like me.
     
    They are the empty congregation. The faceless ones. The failures.
     
    The sad empty folk who wander through life and walk beside you and never get so much as a glance; nerds like me who live inside their heads and imagine winning the lottery and scoring the girls and walking tall. But instead, we stand short and bald and angry, our hands in our pockets, holding not money, but our limp balls.
     
    Real life is a drudge.
     
    No one but another loser like myself can understand that.
     
    Except for the shadows, for they are the ones like me. They are the losers and the lost, and they understand and they never do judge.
     
    They are of my flesh, or, to be more precise, I am of their shadow.
     
    They accept me for who I am.
     
    They know what must be done, and gradually they reveal it to me.
     
    The shadows.
     
    I am one of them.
     
    Well, almost.
     
    ––
     
    My wife, my in-laws, every human being who walks this earth, underrates me.
     
    There are things I can do.
     
    I can play computer games, and I can win them. I have created my own characters. They are unlike humans. They are better than humans. They are the potential that is inside me and will never be.
     
    Oh, and I can do some other things as well. I didn't mention all the things I can do well. In spite of what my family thinks of me. I can do a number of things that they don't appreciate, but should.
     
    I can make a very good chocolate milkshake.
     
    My wife knows this, and if she would, she would admit that I do. She used to say so. Now she does not. She has closed up to me. Internally. Externally.
     
    Battened down hatches, inwardly and outwardly.
     
    Below. In her fine little galley, that hatch is tightly sealed.
     
    But there is another thing I do well.
     
    I can really shoot a gun.
     
    My father, between beatings, he taught me that. It was the only time we were happy together. When we held the guns.
     
    ––
     
    Down in the basement I have a trunk.
     
    Inside the trunk are guns.
     
    Lots of them.
     
    Rifles and shotguns and revolvers and automatics.
     
    I have collected them over the years.
     
    One of the rifles belongs to my father-in-law.
     
    There is lots of ammunition.
     
    Sometimes, during the day, if I can't sleep, while my wife is at work and my in-laws are about their retirement—golf—I sit down there and clean the guns and load them and repack them in the crate. I do it carefully, slowly, like foreplay. And when I finish my hands smell like gun oil. I rub my hands against my face and under my nose, the odor of the oil like some kind of