The Shadow

Beneath a flawless sky, she walked along the deserted sidewalk. Her Prada coat, her perfect hairstyle: an image of comeliness and divine grace.

Yet the sun, in its harsh clarity, revealed the deception. Projected onto the ground, her shadow took shape: not as a faithful double, but as a fractured, disjointed entity. A geometry of suffering, a shattered reflection of a wounded soul. While her real body moved forward with calculated grace, the shadow sagged, enfeebled by an invisible affliction.

She secretly carried within her a deep despair. Her recent reading of one of the great Russian authors had deeply unsettled her, especially the way his heroine found herself betrayed there; an echo that resonated painfully with her own solitude, with the man who had left her.

All the effort she had devoted to forging an image of perfection had been for naught. She was the victim of a double betrayal, one of them in broad daylight.