Light casts Shadows by Duchan Caudill (ebook reader screen TXT) 📕

In the sultry late afternoon, having rested in the plateau’s high grass, they descended to the rocky plain, where rushing frothy rivulets charged toward the river. The water was cold, and Francoise, having lavished its glacial taste, let Paul spontaneously taste the coldness on her lips. She then leant her forehead against his shoulder and exhaled a pained laugh.
Now that she had come closer to him than she had ever imagined, she was eager for a response. He looked over her shoulder at the serried boulders, recalling how Francoise, in the time he had known her, had fortified herself against any advances from the ranks of her admirers. He had always thought of her as a very good friend.
He was now somewhat more nervous than she, and he was overtly grateful for some diversion that would allow him to mask his nervousness. He motioned toward the seam of forest trees.
“There’s a cave in that forest,” he said. “It’s a labyrinth of rock.”
“Je sais

– I know,” she answered. “As a child, I imagined that there would be an enchanted kingdom in the middle of the cave, a kingdom where everyone was happy, where everyone was befriended to everyone. So very much unlike the world as it is. The cave itself has many passages extending for miles. People have disappeared within its passages, forever lost, perhaps already forgotten.”
“All of us are bound to be forgotten,” Paul replied. “But though so it is – I don’t care to be remembered.”
“Yes, you do,” Francoise countered. “Not necessarily to not be forgotten by the masses. But you would want to be remembered by someone. By that someone special to you…”
They did not speak again until they reached the hotel in the nearby border town, where Francoise had lived as a child. She led Paul to her room like a slightly overwhelmed celebrant of a rite that was beyond her understanding. Having closed the door, she rested the somewhat tensed frame of her lithe body against it.
“We must behave ourselves well,” Paul whispered when she touched his shoulders.
She smiled, thinking of the static situation as an insoluble private riddle. She then moved away from the wall and girdled her arms around his waist, so that he felt her clasped hands pressing against the small of his back.
“What next?” she asked.
When she tried to kiss him on the mouth, he moved away, passed by her to stand by the window. He repeatedly tugged at the belt that regulated the movement of the jalousies, and, as if lured into a trance, said seemingly in a monologue:
“I feel attracted to you, yet I am truly unable to want more than your sympathy, unable to go beyond the realm of a…”
“Of a Platonic ideal,” she concluded for him, a brief tremor of disappointment in her otherwise stable, soothing voice. “But – do you remember the Allegory of the Cave? When he, who freed himself of the chains and ventured upward to the entrance of the cave – well, when he saw the light, he knew that the world of shadows he had known in the pit of the cave was but an illusion.”
“You are telling me what, Francoise?”
“I could be for you that beacon of liberating light at the entrance of the cave. Leave whatever doubts you have in the pit of that cave.”
“Am I living in a shadowy pit?” he asked more to himself than to Francoise.
She couched her head on his chest and listened to his heartbeat. He tried to say something, but she gently pressed a finger against his lips.
Francoise had a high concern for his well-being, and, among other winning attributes that complemented her personality, it was her tender concern that had initially endeared him to her.
“It’s all right,” she said, as if feeling that she had relieved him of some burdening strain in his thoughts. “But while I wait for you - don’t change too much of yourself for me. I will wait for you at the entrance of the allegorical cave.”
“But did not he, who reached the entrance, become another, an opposite of who he was, of who he had been?”
“Yes, to an extent he had changed, having seen the truth in its splendor.”
“He returned to the shadowy pit,” he said. “And nobody in that realm of shadows believed him when he told them of the light of awareness,” his response tapered to an end.
“As long as you and I share our truth, I will wait for you at the exit or at the core of the pit. Regardless of where you will be, I will…”
A knock at the door interrupted her, and having opened the door, Paul slid past her and a housekeeper into the hallway, the length of which he followed to this room at the end of the hallway.
He hastily wrote something on paper, which he left with the receptionist.
Meanwhile, Francoise had changed into her nightgown, standing beside the door and resting her cheek against the wall. She anticipated that Paul would soon visit her. Whenever she heard steps in the hallway, she slightly pinched the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes and smiled, feeling very much like someone expecting a surprise that seemed too wonderful to be true.
However, having waited for some time she donned her clothes and walked toward his room. Unresponsive to her calling him, she descended to the hotel lobby, where, searching to descry him among other guests, the receptionist had sent to her a bellboy with the note that Paul had written.
“This was left for you, Madame.”
She slowly, almost hesitantly, took the note, and, trying to decipher the words Paul had penned in erratic cursive, she felt a laborious heartbeat in her throat.
She read:
Even so in the brightest bright of light,
Life without you – always darkest night.
But Love lures me not from deepest cave,
As all Love is shadowy realm of the brave.
Farewell to you, so tragic to have to end.
Your consolation? My heart won’t mend.

Remember: light casts shadows short and long...

Short story and poem (c) Duchan Caudill 2011

Publication Date: 12-17-2011

All Rights Reserved