Before the Sun Arrived

The first morning it happened, Mara thought it was a trick of the streetlamp.

She woke before her alarm, before the garbage trucks, before the first commuter train dragged its metallic sigh across the edge of town. The sky outside her bedroom window was still a dark, uncommitted blue. The kind of blue that hasn’t decided whether to become morning.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood.

Her shadow was already on the wall.

Not the soft blur cast by the lamp on her nightstand. She hadn’t turned it on. This shadow was long and narrow and precise, stretching up the paint in a sharp vertical line. It reached the ceiling. It touched it, almost thoughtfully.

Mara didn’t move at first. She waited for the world to explain itself.

Nothing shifted. The shadow remained.

“Okay,” she said aloud, to no one in particular.

Her voice sounded absorbed by the room, as if the air were thicker than usual.

She stepped to the left.

The shadow followed.

It followed perfectly.

She stepped right. It mirrored her exactly.

She exhaled. The ceiling fan ticked lazily overhead. Outside, a single car passed, tires whispering over damp asphalt.

When she reached for the light switch, the shadow thinned and fell into place like something pretending to be ordinary.

By the time the sun rose, there was nothing unusual about the day.

The second morning, the shadow arrived earlier.

Mara woke to a faint sensation of being observed—not by a person, but by a posture. She kept her eyes closed and listened. The house made its usual small sounds: the refrigerator humming in the kitchen, a pipe settling in the walls.

She opened one eye.

The wall across from her bed was marked by a long silhouette that did not belong to the angle of the window.

This time, it was taller.

Not dramatically. Just enough that her stomach tightened.

She sat up slowly. The shadow did not lag. It did not hesitate. It seemed to anticipate the movement, stretching before her spine fully straightened.

She swung her feet to the floor and stood.

Her own outline settled into the larger shape like a smaller figure fitting inside a coat that was not yet hers.

Mara pressed her palm against the wall.

The shadow pressed too.

It was not cold. It was not warm. It was simply there.

“Too much coffee,” she murmured, though she hadn’t had any yet.

In the bathroom mirror, she examined herself carefully. Same jawline. Same faint crease between her eyebrows. Same scar along her collarbone from childhood, pale and unremarkable.

But when she turned off the light and stepped back into the dim hallway, the shadow reached past her shoulder.

Just slightly.

As if it were growing into something she hadn’t authorized.

By the fourth morning, she stopped pretending it was coincidence.

The shadow now arrived before any natural light touched the sky. It stretched along the bedroom wall in confident lines, longer than her body by half a head.

Mara began waking a few minutes earlier each day, as if to meet it.

She tested it in small ways.

She raised her arm halfway. The shadow’s arm lifted a fraction sooner.

She tilted her head. The shadow’s chin dipped before hers did.

It was subtle. Almost deniable. But the timing was wrong.

She stood very still and waited.

The shadow did not fidget.

It held her outline with an ease that felt practiced.

“Who are you?” she asked quietly.

The room did not answer. But the air felt charged, like the seconds before a storm decides to break or pass.

Mara lowered her hand.

The shadow lowered its hand.

Together.

She stopped mentioning her sleep to her coworkers. She stopped searching online for neurological explanations. The search bar had suggested epilepsy, stress hallucinations, carbon monoxide leaks.

She bought a detector. It chirped obediently. The house was clean.

The shadow grew.

Not monstrous. Not wild.

Just taller. Straighter.

When she stood in the kitchen before dawn, the shadow extended down the hallway, bending at the corner in ways light should not.

She found herself adjusting her posture during the day.

Rolling her shoulders back.

Lifting her chin slightly higher.

Walking with a steadier pace.

In store windows, she sometimes glimpsed her reflection and felt a flicker of unfamiliar recognition—like seeing a version of herself that had already made a decision she was still circling.

One afternoon, a child in the park paused mid-run and stared at the pavement beside her.

Mara followed his gaze.

The sun was high. Her shadow should have been small.

It wasn’t.

It stretched long across the grass, cutting through the playground in a dark, unwavering line.

The child squinted, then ran back to his mother without saying anything.

Mara stayed seated on the bench until the clouds shifted.

The seventh morning, she did not wait for it inside.

She woke before the shadow fully formed and stood at the front door in her bare feet.

The sky outside was still unlit. The street held that suspended hush before the first bus, before the first porch light flicked off.

She opened the door.

Cool air brushed her arms.

For a moment, there was nothing on the pavement.

Then it appeared.

Her shadow slid across the porch steps, stretching down the walkway before any sun had declared itself. It reached the sidewalk and continued toward the middle of the street.

It did not waver.

Mara stepped forward.

The shadow did not follow her this time.

It led.

Not quickly. Not urgently.

But ahead.

She paused at the edge of the porch, her toes curling against the concrete.

The sky lightened by a shade, barely perceptible.

Across the street, a neighbor’s blinds shifted slightly, then stilled.

The shadow extended to the center line of the road and rested there, as if waiting for her to decide whether she was still someone who required the sun to explain her shape.

Mara stepped off the porch.

The pavement was cool beneath her feet.

Her shadow moved farther into the street, lengthening into the quiet.

No cars came.

No one called out.

The horizon brightened, faint and unresolved.

She walked toward the place where her shadow had stopped—only to find that it had already begun to stretch again, reaching past the intersection, into the dim curve of the next block.

Mara did not look back at the house.

The sky was still undecided.

Her shadow moved forward.

And she followed.

—Flower InBloom