the shadow child CHAPTER ONE

I had never drawn a breath. Not once had I expanded my lungs, filling them with the air of my world - I'd never even seen my world, nor had I heard it. It's odd to say the least, when you stop to consider that I wasn't even aware of my own existence until I existed no longer.

It has been a year and a half since I died. My death was my first memory, the only memory I have in which I was still bound to my family, though the ties were wrought with anger, grief, and blame. Now, my presence is only felt through its absence, as my mother ruefully reminds herself to take only three plates from the cupboard at dinnertime. I never even joined them at the table, but in her heart I'm always there. She has boundless strength, my mother. Even in her grief she couldn't dwell on her own loss. I tried to hug her once, before I knew she wouldn't feel me.

My father feels me like emptiness - I'm a faceless shadow of a dream to him, a shadow too thick to release and too thin to keep. He cries for me more than Mother, because he had no physical way to let me go. He loves unrelentingly, long after the thing he loves seems to be gone. The tiny slice of life experienced by his unborn child is like a severed limb to him, and like a wounded soldier who's lost a leg in battle, he swears he can still feel the life in it. I'm there, in his mind and heart, and when he closes his eyes he can hear my pulse. But when he opens his eyes, there is nothing.

Julian says I'm fortunate because I was taken before I knew what pain was, or loss, or even need. He knows what those things feel like. He has a brother too - sometimes we watch them together. When I watch the people who would be in my life, I only guess at their emotions - or rather, I can only guess at how they feel. I almost never feel anything, because I never learned how. It's only when I watch my brother that I begin to believe that I might be human after all. If guilt and sorrow were weighty enough to push a man through the ground, you would find my brother at the Earth's core. Even when he's happy, I can feel his loneliness. It's almost the only thing I feel.

I can also feel intensity. I try to use it to push through - Julian did it once, with his brother. If I can do it too, I'll reach out to Clark. He believes it was his fault that they lost me - but it was me who left. I'm safe, and it's those who love me who are left to suffer. I want to tell Clark I'm sorry I couldn't hold on, but I just wasn't meant to be there.

He was.