The Lovely Shadow by Cory Hiles

it’s in the Christmas crap. Good
old clear tape, in the same box as the wrapping paper!”
    I felt around for a bit, being very careful
not to bump my right hand into anything. I pulled out and opened
every box that I thought was in the same vicinity as the Christmas
supplies, and stuck my left hand blindly into each of them, feeling
around, trying to discern the contents.
    This might sound like a simple task, but it
was actually a terrifying ordeal. My imagination was acting up
again. I kept imagining that I was going to stick my hand in a box
and hear a slight scuffling noise as a large, hairy hand with
cracked yellow fingernails came reaching up from the bottom of the
box to grasp my hand and pull me into the box. I would find that it
was not just a box, but a magical door into another world, like
Lucy’s wardrobe to Narnia.
    I was afraid I was going to be pulled into a
dark cave that smelled of mildew, sweat, and decomposing flesh. I
would land on my back on a pile of human bones and the last thing I
would see before dying would be the huge, square face of a troll as
he grabbed my head and twisted it sharply to snap my neck.
    In my mind’s eye, I could see the troll’s
face in vivid detail. His skin was the color of an army convoy
truck—a brownish green color. His lanky hair was brown and greasy,
and was hanging down along the sides of his huge head to his
massive shoulders in wavy, stringy clumps. As he leaned toward me
to deliver the death snap some of his hair would swing across his
face, obscuring his eyes. He would toss his head to get the hair
out of his eyes.
    Then he would focus his bulging eyes on mine,
making certain that I knew who it was that was getting ready to
take my life. His eyes were as big as pool balls, with cream
colored irises, and big, pitch black pupils the size of nickels.
The whites were not white at all, but rather, they were yellow and
had blood vessels weaving about in them like some sort of bloody
road map.
    Below his nasty eyeballs sat his flat, pudgy
nose. It looked like a regular, human nose looks when you put a
finger on the tip of it and smash it down towards your upper lip,
except it was about three times larger. And his lips were almost
the size and shape of bananas. They were be wet with saliva and
pulled back into a wide, stupid smile revealing brown and yellow
teeth, the size of dominoes. His teeth were all crooked and
chipped. A few were missing, and there were chunks of rotting meat
caught in the gaps.
    That was what I saw in my mind’s eye every
time I stuck my hand into a box. Thus, just like getting to the
boxes took me a good long while, going through the boxes took me a
good long while as well.
    ‘If I ever get out of this basement,’ I
thought, ‘I’m really going to have to cut back on the scary
movies!’
    Eventually, though, my perseverance in the
face of possible death in every box paid off. After boxes of old
plates, outgrown clothes, miscellaneous knick-knacks, and one box
full of old books, I found the box with rolls of wrapping paper in
it. I pulled all the paper tubes out and set them aside and felt
around in the box until I found two rolls of clear tape, still in
the dispensers, lying at the bottom. I pulled both of them out and
quickly scuttled my butt out of the darkness and back towards my
chair.
    The process of getting to the boxes, and then
going through them had taken me so long that the washer had already
run its full cycle by the time I got back to my chair. I set my
tape on the chair and headed straight for the washer. The last
round of self induced terror had brought my thirst levels back up
considerably.
    I got to the washer and opened the lid and
gave a cursory sniff inside it. All clear! There was only the faint
smell of detergent and no more sour stink. I carefully reached over
(with my left hand) and turned the washer knob around to the start
position again and pulled the knob out to turn on the washer.
    Water began pouring into the