Chiaroscuro

Cam found at an early age that he could manipulate shadow. As a toddler he watched them bend slightly out of his way as he learned to walk. When he was a teenager, he ruined most of his romantic opportunities with his favorite trick of dimming the lights at will. As an adult he refined his technique until he could bend and shape the smallest fragments of shadow to make elaborate patterns. Like his teenage years, his adult life was marked by loneliness due to his socially awkward application of his gift.

As the years of his life faded, Cam began drawing more and more into his shadow craft. First he stopped looking people in the eye when he spoke. Before he long he gave up speaking, then listening, and finally, looking at people at all. He withdrew into his basement apartment downtown and soon became lost in the old city underground, forgotten by, and forgetting, the world.



Through the dark days and the deep nights he would crouch in front of his flashlight, lamps, and candles. The shadows would shift and bend and then, in a spiral of light and dark, they would coalesce into elaborate designs and patterns. As Cam left humanity behind him, the shadows began to appeal to him until he thought he could hear them, feel them, speak to them. Gradually, he stopped shaping them and became shaped by them.

In the dusty store rooms and forgotten apartments downtown one may occasionally observe the light and shadow behaving erratically. If one looks closely, there will be a wisp of shadow shaped like a hunched old man. He's there, still painting the shadows.