Field Guide to the Lesser Shadows

Mr. Death

Attends to: endings, recorded and kept.

A man checks his mailbox on an ordinary Tuesday. Mr. Death, mirror-masked, is already leaning against the box next door — not for him, not yet, only cataloguing. He falls asleep every night to a recording of someone else's last breath, worn thin from replay. It is the closest thing he has ever found to comfort.

Mr. Watch

Attends to: duration, counted out to the minute.

He collects wristwatches from the newly dead. The numbers stopped on their faces are never the time of the taking — they are the time of death, kept exact. A woman at a bus stop checks her own watch three times in four minutes. He is already standing behind her, close enough to read the dial over her shoulder, patient as a debt collector who has never once needed to knock.

Mr. Lonely

Attends to: the ache no one names out loud.

He stops strangers on cracked sidewalks with the only two questions he has ever wanted answered. Most people answer him — that is the part nobody expects, how easily the truth comes up once someone finally asks.

“What was everyone frightened of today? What makes you sad?”

Mr. Flowers

Attends to: the wires crossed in ordinary perception.

Gasoline arrives to him as a picture, not a smell. Certain letters print themselves turquoise across a page meant to be black and white. One tooth in his own mouth reads, to him, as orange, and has since before he can remember choosing it. He fills a station wagon at a gas pump on an ordinary afternoon and watches, briefly, a whole unwanted landscape bloom over the nozzle.

Mr. Wiggle Toes

Attends to: the smallest first inch of a much longer distance.

He is paralyzed from the collarbones down, and has been for longer than he counts anymore. Motion returns to him one toe at a time, in a hospital bed no one else finds remarkable. The entire architecture of what he might become again is contained, for now, in whether the smallest toe on his left foot can still be told what to do. It can. Today, it did.

Mr. Magic Bullet

Attends to: the life that shouldn't statistically exist.

He took a bullet through the skull that should have ended everything, and woke up instead one vein over from the life he'd had. He tells anyone who asks — and a few who don't — the same line, recited like an address rather than a confession.

“Your prison isn't made out of concrete and iron, but of bone marrow and flesh.”

Mr. Tinkles

Attends to: the body’s quiet failures, and everyone who looks away from them.

He is the guest whose chair empties a little of the room. A man growing old in a world that files bodily failure under embarrassment, he has learned the exact distance at which company keeps itself. He counts his days in small continences — a dry hour, an unremarked afternoon — and he appears in this ledger because no other record was going to take him. Of every name here, his is the most ordinary. That is what makes it the hardest one to read.