The Girl Who Traded Her Shadow

There was once a girl in a country of long summers who was offered, by a stranger at a fair, an unusual bargain. He would take her shadow, which he explained was of no practical use to her, and in exchange he would give her a small purse from which, whenever she wished, she could draw one gold coin. He was very polite about it. He implied it was a favour to a girl of obvious promise. She, being fifteen and intelligent enough to see the numbers but not yet old enough to see the trick, agreed.

For a time the bargain worked exactly as promised. The purse produced its coin. She bought things she wanted. She bought things she did not want, because she could. She bought, at one point, a boat. The absence of her shadow was, at first, invisible; it was midsummer, and the world was so full of light that nobody noticed one girl walking through it without casting a mark on the ground.

By autumn people began to notice. Dogs shied away from her without knowing why. Children pointed. Adults did not point but grew, in her presence, quietly uncomfortable in a way they could not put a name to. She stopped being invited to things. She responded, sensibly, by buying better things than the things she was no longer invited to, but they were not, somehow, the same.

It was a shoemaker, of all people, who explained it to her. Shoemakers know a great deal about shadows because they spend their lives at ground level and see, all day, the shapes people leave on the pavement. 'You did not sell him something useless,' he said, kindly. 'You sold him the small, dark thing that told the world you were solidly here. Without it you are, to most people, faintly not-quite-real. They do not know why they cannot rest with you. They just cannot.'

She spent a great deal of the purse trying to buy her shadow back. The stranger could not be found. In the end she stopped trying and set the purse down on a shelf. She began, slowly, to build a life in which her presence had to be reasserted by other means — by the reliability of what she said, by showing up on the days she said she would, by doing work good enough that people forgot, when they were with her, to look at the floor. It took years. It was not glamorous. Her shadow, in the end, never quite returned; but she acquired, over time, a kind of substitute weight that did much of the same work.

Most of the bargains offered to us at fifteen — and at twenty-five, and at forty — are variations on this one. Some small, dark, seemingly useless thing about us is offered up in exchange for a purse that produces coins. We take the deal. The coins are real. The shadow is real too. The lesson is not that you must never trade; sometimes you must. The lesson is only this: know the price. If a stranger at a fair tells you a part of yourself is of no practical use, walk on.