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The streetlamps throw out a wan ivory light barely perceptible against the gray pink sky. The sun is beginning to rise. Kit and I play a game. Our shadows blend into the concrete as we run. I jump and miss her shadow by an inch. As I come down she puts her foot out to pin my shadow but I swerve, turn my whole body to the side and keep running. We move in uncertain loops and swirls around each other, stamping our feet, advancing and withdrawing, making our laborious way into the park.
In front of the water fountain, she catches my shadow’s left hand the tip of her shoe. I squeeze my eyes and hold my breath so I won’t say ouch. She takes a little hammer and a golden nail out of her pocket, but as she crouches down she loses her balance, staggering a bit and freeing my hand. I leap onto a painted black bench and run along the bench top. Kit yells from behind me, no fair, no fair.
The sun has taken the gray out of the sky. Our shadows grow and become distinct. The jagged ovals that we’ve been describing become circles. In front of our path are intricate patterns of numbered squares. We play an impromptu game of improvised hopscotch on the still fresh pink and green marks left by yesterday’s children. Kit jumps on the first box, then to the center left, while I follow from center right to the first. I wait a second, breaking our parallel rhythm. She jumps on the middle square, and I dart over to her, stepping on her shadow’s neck. Kit squirms and turns purple in the face. I pull out my hammer and a golden nail, bend down carefully and plant the nail in the scuffed black foam where her shadow’s head lies.
Kit waits until I come over to her feet with my golden scissors to cut her shadow away, and then she kicks me hard. I fall over to the side, off her shadow, banging into my injured hand. She rips her shadow free from here I’ve nailed it to the ground and doesn’t stop running until she’s halfway to the swings to see if I’m okay. The tear in her shadow is visible as a slightly crooked line of light interrupting the smooth flow of dark gray black. I sprint towards her and she runs.
Sometimes I chase her and sometimes she chases me. We zigzag through the swings, under the see-saw, take temporary refuge under the full bloom of elm trees. The sun gravitates towards the center of a sky white with clouds. Our shadows pull in tight around us, getting fat and swollen until they are licorice puddles following our feet. We spin like tops, bouncing away when the other come too near. The air is easy to breathe, lemon yellow with summertime songs and smelling of water melons and melted Popsicles.
When one of us comes to close to getting the other we yell, I’ve got you, I’ve got you. Not so fast, you’ve got nothing. The game’s not over yet. See, you’re getting tired. You can’t jump so high, you can’t run that fast. Just wait a bit and I’ll catch you.
Through the sandbox and over the monkey bars, clearing benches, we chase each other out of the park and back onto the streets. I almost get her against, taking hold of the black wisps streaming along a brick wall in reflection of the golden brown strands of her hair, but she wrenches free, leaving soft threads of negated light in my hand. She grimaces, crinkling her face into a thousand wrinkles. I twist the shadow hairs together and loop them around my finger for good luck and we start again.
Away from the setting sun, through the city streets along a broad avenue where the Don’t Walk signs blink on and off but the traffic boxes stare green, we run. Our shadows grow long and thin. We move in large, uneven circles. The coming night blows bits of dust and paper around our ankles, swirling around our calves and rising, disintegrating, on the wind like summertime cares.
I trip over a crack in the concrete and my shadow falls against the trunk bottom of a pale tree with dark branches. Kit jumps onto my chest and pushes down the black wrist on the bark, hammering a golden nail into place before I have time to shove her off with my free arm. She leans against the stomach and chest. I can’t breathe. Kit hammers her nails into the silhouette of my shoulder, my arm, my neck. I struggle, kicking my legs and waving my arms as much as possible. Kit steps out of my limited reach and hammers the legs at the knees. I make a motion to jump, but I am held down by the golden nails.
Kit bends down with her scissors and begins to cut my shadow away from me. The air carries dust into my nose so that it tickles, but I can’t seem to sneeze. My eyes water. I blink rapidly. Kit pushes me and I roll down the street. She pulls the nails out of the shadow, gathers it up in her arms, and throws it over her shoulders like a king’s robe. It trails on the ground after her as she runs, growing longer the farther the runs from the sun, leaving a swath of city street covered in victory. I chase after her.
We run faster and faster, become more daring as the sun fades into gloried purple and blue, the day’s ending orange pinks. Streetlamps stand out bright against the encroaching dark. Her shadows turn yellow brown with the changing light. The hairs wrapped around my finger loosen and fall away. Kit and I, we run under a sky scraped clean of stars. We run until we are dust and paper, the crystalline memories of games played on gray city cement, traveling on the last ray of summertime sun.
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