The Spirit In My Shoes

Shadow Box

From inside the house, the feature resembles a kind of alcove recessed into space, a three-sided miniature room overhanging the street. From the outside, the shadow box window, huge but inconspicuous, replicates the dimensions of the Greek-columned porch on which it stands. To the new couple moving into the apartment beside it, the milky rain of light in the window possesses an undiscovered purpose, a place to explore.

Michael, in particular, is spellbound. A month ago, during the realtor's tour, the projected niche immediately enchanted him. Its ethereal and serene glow drew him away from the group, including his wife, the realtor, and the house lady. When he first stepped into its standing space, he felt an intense energy surround him, a presence, an occupation of another living force.

More every day, the reduced proportions of the space charmed him, especially the short pieces of white baseboard, snipped and tucked to fit and frame a square of carpet the size of a card table. He adored the bands of rough weatherboards, in foot-long pieces around the three windows. They rise to a flat-paneled ceiling soaked in the glow of recent antique-white enamel.

"What a cute little room," his wife declared later on the evening of the tour. She cherished the trilateral sets of Venetian blinds illuming the umber carpet inside the window with radially hatched lines of lemon sunlight. Was the shrine-shaped feature more ornamental than functional, more indulgent and playful than practical or planned?

Over the last month, Michael has returned to the protruding space every evening, finding spokes of moonlight radiating inside. Again, in this little room, he feels the same tumid pressure, the kind in a cold car. He likens the space to the confessional in the unlocked Romanesque church on his childhood street. He'd sit in the confessional, letting the immediate darkness soothe him, itself absolve him.

Tonight, through the blinds on the right side of the window, he sees outside into the dark, then inside their apartment where his wife stands. As he watches her, he feels in his suspended, outward angle a detached mood, a feeling of isolation from seeing his wife without him and within another compartment of the house, this fascinating shadow box. In his insular booth above the earth, he suddenly becomes aware of himself as a frail and single person.

By now, they've mastered with their wrists and fingers the rhythmic technique to unsticking the door lock. They've discovered how to glide silently along the dim hallways of the house, under a thunderous white-trim archway, and up a spiraling oak banister, avoiding noisy treads and loose floorboards. They've now territorialized every dimension of their apartment, scenting the bathroom and kitchen with numerous melting soaps, filling the windowsills with potted plants, and dressing the fireplace mantel with potpourri baskets, soap tins, and colored stones found during walks along the inlet.

Neither the landlady downstairs nor the tenant across the hall has shown any interest in the miniature room. So the unclaimed appeal of the alcove is all theirs.

"Honey, what do you think of the little room," he asks, with the newness of the historic Greek Revival house settled comfortably.

Ellen's been propping up postcards of Maxfield Parrish paintings along the mantelpiece. His question interrupts her, and when she turns, she knocks a few postcards off the ledge. She stoops and gathers them in her hands.

"There's a ghost living in there," she announces, standing.

The word ghost strikes him not as a literal embodiment, but as a verification of the tingling sensation he has experienced whenever standing in the space, together with the illusion of hovering over the street, in this place as isolated as a scenic overlook.

He sits up on the sofa. Her claim suggests a kind of paranormal invasion, a supernatural trespassing. "Really, ghosts?"

"No, just one," she corrected.

He has known her to make this kind of absurd remark. Once, she claimed that, in a former life, she had been Lord Byron's lover. Another time, she insisted she had seen her exact portrait in the National Gallery of Art, somewhere amid a series of retrospectives of Flemish Renaissance painters. Her painted face gazed serenely at her. Of late, Ellen has decided she will reincarnate as a butterscotch cat.

"It's probably the person who owned the house," she says.

From day to day, he observes the way she, when either leaving or entering the apartment, swivels her head ever so evenly, like an owl, with her large black-almond eyes protruding toward the shadow box. She stares down the hallway and into the miniature room, seeing something. Her catatonic, bewitched gaze startles him.

"What!" he snaps.

His wife is entranced by the shadow box.

"Honey, what is it?" he demands, stepping into her view. "Thought I saw something."

"What?" he presses, not willing to let her dismiss it.

"A person?"

"I just don't know."

He believes her. She has detected a specter in the dusty bars of sunlight filtering through the slanted sets of blinds.

"Show me what's in there," he braved asking.

She again glances down the hall, into the phosphorus bars of moonlight crisscrossing in this little glass room.

"Oh, Michael, there's something in there right now!"

He starts toward the shadow box. When he turns to see if she has followed, his jaws clinch, insisting she follow. "Show me," he says.

Without him, she steps inside, cleanly and calmly, and glances out the windows. Shadows of leaves cast by a street light flicker upon her skin. Abandoned, Michael quickly follows her and recognizes at once the sensation, not disconcerting, but close and unified. Briefly, they stand as figurines inside a glass display. They press together, shoulder touching shoulder. He clenches her hand, interlocking a few fingers.

"It's just us," he hears her say.

                                                                                      The End