The Soul Shadow

Found standing in the cut rows of the ash fields a week after the harvest crews had cleared everything else out of them. The folds are carved into one sheet of relief, ridged where the cloth pulls tight over shoulders that were never in there. Two hollows sit where the face goes, cut all the way through, so the wall behind it shows in the sockets. The hem never closes. It twists down, thins out, and curls back on itself the way smoke does when it changes its mind about leaving. Out in the ash fields they hold that a soul cut loose from a body leaves its shadow behind, and that the shadow keeps the shape for a while before it forgets how. The Rotting Harvest is the season the black stalks come down, and by the end of it the rows are full of them. Every cold season a house hangs one on the door, one shadow for every name the harvest took. It's bookkeeping. A house that skips a year gets counted anyway. Printed shallow and wide. Every layer line lands as a fold in the cloth, which is the whole point of building it flat.