A Shadow Taken

I walk the creek bank.

Mud takes the shape of my steps. Water talks over stone.

I feel the eyes on me before I see anything at all. The back of my neck knows first. The chills follow.

I stop and look toward the trees.

Nothing.

Then something at the water's edge catches the sun.

Light explodes from the shadows.

White. Blinding.

I jerk my gaze away and stumble, my foot kicks something loose.

I catch myself and look down.

And find her eyes.

Pale. Unblinking. Staring up at me from beneath the dirt.

Not a coin. Not a gemstone. Not broken glass.

A face.

I crouch.

Cloth has rotted away around a small case half-buried in the bank. Inside, beneath old glass, is a photograph. Or something like one.

I tilt it toward the light.

The woman disappears.

Another angle and she returns, pale and spectral against the silver.

I tilt it again and the image reverses, her face sinking into negative, those strange eyes seeming to remain after everything else is gone.

I turn the plate once more.

There she is.

A young woman caught somewhere between light and shadow.

No name. No date.

A ghost pressed into metal.

There is no reason she should be here. And absolutely no reason I should feel as though she saw me before I saw her.

I cannot look away.

I take a picture. I share it.

Does anyone know who she is?

I have to know.

If it had crossed your screen, you would have clicked too. Zoomed in. Read the comments. Clicked share. Tried to put a name to the face.

A life to the name.

The post goes viral.

At first, there are only questions.

Then, the questions find answers.

The answers find more questions.

And a woman invisible for nearly two centuries becomes impossibly exposed.

She lived when a photograph could do what a looking glass never could.

It could remember her.

It could keep her shadow.

She could never have imagined what the world would someday do with her likeness.

She had been warned.

Maybe you should have been, too.

Now I am left asking:

How much of a dead woman belongs to the living?

And what happens when curiosity becomes obsession?