Even Shadows Have Shadows

It began on the asphalt, under flickering streetlights and the stink of gasoline. That was where my younger brother, Thomas “Tommy” Alister, stopped being human and became a stain the rain couldn’t quite wash away. It was 1976. He was eighteen. I was twenty. The drunk driver lived. Tommy didn’t.

The first time he came back, he was still breathing.

“Alex,” he whispered from the doorway of my room weeks later, in the exact clothes he’d died in—jacket torn at the shoulder, shirt soaked a shade too dark to be anything but dried blood. His fingers twitched like they were remembering the impact. “You let me die.”

I tried to touch him.

My hand went through his shoulder.

The doctors called it a hallucination. I called it a punishment.

Overfelt Hospital for the Mentally Insane took me in after that—white halls, stale air, locked doors that shut like teeth. They said it was for my own good. They said the visions would fade once the trauma settled.

But Tommy did not fade.

If anything, he sharpened.

That was where Dr. Elias Crane found me.

He liked to sit too close, elbows on his knees, tie perfectly straight as if nothing in his life ever slipped out of place. I, on the other hand, was strapped to the chair the first time he asked about Tommy.

“Tell me again,” he said, pen poised. The light above us buzzed, casting shadows that twitched every time it flickered. “When did you start seeing your brother?”

“After he died,” I said. “But you know that.”

“I want to hear it from you, Alex.” His voice was smooth, a scalpel disguised as silk. “Details matter.”

I stared over his shoulder, at the far corner of the office where Tommy stood, fiddling with his hands the way he always did when he was nervous. Only now, every twist of his fingers left faint smears on the wall behind him, like he was dragging the accident along with him.

“He’s here now,” I muttered.

Crane followed my gaze. Of course he saw nothing. He only smiled that thin, practiced smile.

“On a scale of one to ten,” he asked, “how real does he feel to you?”

“Ten,” I said. “He feels more real than you.”

Tommy tilted his head, eyes cloudy, teeth tinged red. “Don’t disappoint him, Alex,” he murmured. “You know how they treat the ones who fail their progress reports.”

I flinched.

Crane’s pen scratched across paper, dissecting me in ink.

I spent about a month in Overfelt before he told me it was time.

“We’re going to do a progress assessment,” Crane explained one morning, standing in the doorway of my room like a judge about to read a sentence. “Just a conversation to see how far you’ve come.”

“That means you want to know if I’m still seeing him,” I said.

He didn’t deny it. “You want to go home someday, don’t you, Alex?”

Someday. Not now. Not soon. Someday. The word felt like a life sentence wrapped in hope-colored paper.

I nodded, because that was what they wanted.

But every night leading up to that assessment, my mind did laps around the same thought: escape.

They let us walk the grounds sometimes—a supervised shuffle of broken people in thin coats, trailing along the cracked path that circled the hospital. Beyond the rusted fence stretched the real world: trees, a road, the sky that didn’t hum with fluorescent lights. Every step outside, my heart hammered at my ribs like it was trying to run without me.

“You could jump the fence,” Tommy would say, matching my pace, only visible to me. “Guard’s slow. His left knee’s bad. You’ve seen it. You’d make it before he even turned.”

“And then what?” I’d hiss under my breath, trying not to get caught talking to the air.

“Then you breathe,” he answered simply. “Instead of rotting in here.”

For weeks, I rehearsed it in my head—the angle, the timing, the exact second I’d break from the group during those walks and sprint for the weak spot in the fence by the dying oak tree. I pictured my hands catching the top, metal biting my palms, the taste of real, unfiltered air in my lungs as alarms shrieked behind me.

Every night, the plan grew sharper.

Every day, Overfelt pressed in tighter.

The morning of the progress report, Crane led me down the long hallway toward his office. His shoes clicked neatly against the linoleum; my bare feet whispered.

“How are you feeling today, Alex?” he asked without looking back.

“Like a lab rat,” I said.

He chuckled softly. “That’s an improvement. Last week you said ‘condemned man.’ Progress.”

Tommy walked on my other side, out of sync with our steps, eyes fixed straight ahead.

“This is it,” he whispered. “Your one shot. You know they’ll never let you out if you tell him I’m still here.”

“Do you still see your brother?” Crane asked, as if on cue.

I swallowed. For a moment the corridor narrowed, walls pulsing in and out like lungs, the overhead lights dragging our shadows longer, then shorter, then longer again, until I couldn’t tell which one was mine.

I imagined the walk outside. The fence. The break. I’d obsessed over that moment so much it became more real than any therapy session. More real than Crane’s smile.

Yes, I thought.

“No,” I said.

Crane halted, turning to study my face. His eyes were the only thing about him that seemed alive—sharp, dissecting, always searching for the lie.

“Good,” he murmured at last, and the word chilled more than any threat. “Honesty is the first step to recovery. We’ll see how honest you can be in your report.”

Tommy leaned close, his breath cold against my ear. “He doesn’t believe you,” he said. “He never did. You escape now, or you never escape at all.”

We resumed walking. With every step toward Crane’s office—toward his questions and his charts and his verdict—one thing grew louder in my head than his voice, louder than Tommy’s, louder than the hum of the lights.

This is your one and only chance to execute it.

The progress report was for him.

The escape plan was for me.