A City of Silhouettes
Rosemary Melchior
There is a second city inside of her own.
Runa first slips into it by accident- a step off the bright sidewalk, when the shadows cast by the building behind her line up in a perfect seam between the cement and the grass. One moment the sun is slowly burning the curves of her shoulders, and the next the world’s gone cold.
It’s still a park, or something like it, but now rendered in shades of blue like an aching bruise. A field of tall grass rolls out in front of her. There are no people, no sounds, nothing except for the wind tracing lines across the meadow. Like it’s been waiting for her. Instinctively, she jerks backwards. Back to color and noise and ordinariness.
This is the first time.
She learns that this second city is made of shadows, of silhouettes and impressions. Tall skyscraping buildings paint new buildings on the ground. Bridges make secret paths where there was nothing but river there before. Laid over her own, it’s a city that can only be entered when the sun is just right– hard to find unless you know it’s there.
In the next few weeks, Runa tracks down all of the city’s gates – both the wheres and the whens that they open. She keeps the list secret, a constant refrain inside her mind.
When she’s running late for work, she slips into the skinny shadow of an office high-rise that cuts across midtown. Traffic disappears and she races through the field like a child, like she’s getting away with something, palms open against the foxtails and the wildflowers.
When her roommate crowds into her space and tells her about the fabulous drinks the night before that Runa wasn’t invited to, she imagines herself in another place. One of her own, tinted blue like the shadows before dawn and where the breeze moves through it like waves.
When a date goes bad, his angry words just a few steps ahead of his grabbing hands, she flees to the only gate that’s open this late- a modern apartment building, with perfect angles that she disappears into. Burying herself in milkweed and clovers, her breath is the loudest thing in there.
Runa knows how to go into a dark spot and come out the other end.
But even cement cities don’t stay still.
Construction rings constant throughout the real city, the big city, and buildings climb higher by the day. Their shadows bleed into each other, merging to take over half the park and destroy the elegance of downtown. New gates open; old gates close. Runa loses them one after another, knowledge falling out of hands that were just getting used to the weight.
When Runa next makes it into the silhouetted city, the space is all wrong. Too wide, too endless, bare of the meadows from before. Surrounded by a flat blue expanse, it doesn’t feel like an escape any longer. It feels like an emptiness that’s overwhelming.
Real estate brokers and billionaires did this. They have the power to change things they don’t even know exist.
It’s this thought in her mind as she starts waking up earlier so she’s not late for work – this never belonged to you. Skirting the shadows when she passes them, not risking a slip into the other world. Within a few weeks, it’s as if the second city was never there at all and Runa can’t keep the feeling from her chest – like a heavy weight pressing her into the ground, grinding her into reality.
One Thursday, she’s taking the long way to lunch when someone collides with her side. Pain splashes down her arm and she whips her head around to see who it was. An older man, in a suit, face pale and soft like a low hanging moon. Neither of them apologizes but he does give her a wink. At a different time, he would have bounced off of her and straight into the silhouette of a church spire against the painted crosswalk. A new gate.
A bigger city means a more obvious one, and maybe other people will find their way through.
Something stiffens inside her; Runa’s hand goes slowly to the forming bruise. She’s not going to let this shadow city bury her like the real one. She refuses.
Forgetting about her lunch and ignoring calls to go back to the office, she waits. The fields might grow back, or they might not. When the sun hits just right, she takes a deliberate step forward through the crosswalk gate. If they’re going to build out there, she’s going to build in here.
Looking around the unmarked sky, Runa will make it irrevocably her own.
Rosemary Melchior writes speculative fiction set in futuristic cities and cold northern landscapes, always in the present tense. Her work has been published in Writer’s Digest as a contest winner and in Luna Station Quarterly, as well as featured on the podcasts LeVar Burton Reads and In Short.