Seeing Nothing

He watches carefully, observes.

Chance has led him to this quiet place, where insect drone and birdsong weigh further down air heavy already with the season’s heat. He wears a broad brimmed hat against the sun’s blinding glare.

For him this is a day of inactivity. He has escaped the attentions of his tutor,
who had himself succumbed to the drowsing weight of midday.

Before him, appearing to cling to a crumbling façade of ancient, weathered stone, he has spotted the object of his attention. It’s a rectangular tablet, partly bisected by an ornate blade that casts a sharp edged shadow. The tablet is set around its periphery with antique numerals. Upon a single one of these the blade-like shadow falls.

He knows how once this device had measured the progress of the hours, when the old estate bustled with the activities that kept it thriving and prosperous.

The boy watches. Does he see the shadow move?
This is his conundrum: what can he see?

He sees where no sunlight directly falls. How dark that space is contrasted with the brilliance of the sunlight. He knows, has been told, that the darkened space is easily named, its name is shadow.

He compares the creeping shadow on the wall with the shadow that accompanies him as close as a body servant, his shadow, that waxes and wanes as the hours pass. Now, as he stands in the dazzle of the summer noon, it will have shrunk to a pool about his feet. Shadows, like nets, are cast, but not with calculated deliberation. As he watches, he ponders. Does he see the shadow, a nothing, creep?

The distant sun, that teachers tell him is an unimaginably colossal ball of fire, is moving. The ancient wall, he has already learned, is not as unmoving as it appears to be. Yet no matter how hard and long he might look, he has yet to see so much as the slightest twitch.

Shadows, he concludes, must be a species of ghosts. They make nothing visible. That nothing stretches towards the end of the day, becoming at last big enough to swallow everything that exists. Then candles and fires are lit, both of which have their own wild, night-crazed species of shadows, that swoop and leap in silent abandon, counterpointed by the voracious roaring of flames.

When the flames riot in the darkness his attention is tainted by a shadow of fear