shadows , lanterns, dreams
Autor:Hamed gholamalizadeh
Like the night before, he had stayed awake. Behind the window of the cottage, his eyes traced the path that led, a little farther off, to the alleys of the harbor town. The drowsy sound of waves broke the silence again and again. He kept telling himself that what he had witnessed the previous night was something between sleep and waking; but to be certain, he had to resist the onslaught of slumber until dawn— even if it meant losing tomorrow’s chance to go fishing.
Something compelled him to connect the strange behavior of certain townsfolk in recent days to what he had seen. No frown nor smile remained on their faces; their words had shrunk to short phrases, sometimes single syllables, spoken only when absolutely necessary. It unsettled him. His eyelids fought to close, his body thinned by sleeplessness—when the shadows appeared again. He opened the window to see them more clearly, but in the lamp-less alleys and the smudged darkness, everything blurred into haze. He stepped outside and, with hesitant strides, moved toward the alleys.
His cottage—where his father, from youth until death, had crafted tools for fishing—stood near the pier, apart from the cluster of other homes. At the entrance of the alley, he peeked from behind a wall: four shadows, their arms and legs unnaturally long, their faces absent—no eyes, no mouths, no noses. Within the husks of their bodies, colors swirled in a strange liquidity, flowing without blending, like the bleeding tip of a brush left in a glass of water.
One of them slipped through a half-open door and entered a house. Moments later it reemerged, carrying on its back an invisible sack brimming with images: laughing people, beautiful places. The man wanted to know what it had taken. Slowly, he entered the alley and approached the house. The door was ajar. In the courtyard, a man lay asleep, breathing softly. One of the shadows approached from behind and whispered into his ear. The sound he heard seemed to echo from within his own skull: We carry away the dreams. Another shadow emerged from the opposite house, a sack slung across its back. Then, in the blink of an eye, they vanished from the alley.
The man chased after them. He shouted: “Why?… What happens to them afterward?”
One shadow stepped back and said: Do not follow. If you leave the harbor with us and dawn arrives, you will become one of us.
The man froze, watching them disappear. As the sky paled, he returned to the cottage and tried to rest. When he woke, the fishermen had come back from sea. With them lay a corpse they set down on the shore, covering it with palm branches. He approached, trying to glimpse the dead man’s face. It looked so much like his father’s. He stiffened. Forcing words through his throat, he asked: “Who is this? What happened to him?”
One replied: “The sea spat him out.” Another said: “The sea takes the living, and returns the dead.”
They left the body behind and went on their way. The man returned to his cottage, pacing the wooden floor. He could not erase that face. He remembered the days when no one believed his father, who wandered the alleys with a lantern through the night to drive the shadows back to the sea. But the night his lantern fell and set part of a neighbor’s storehouse aflame, they cast him out, and day by day he withered.
The man could no longer bear the heavy boots of memory pressing on his shoulders. He left the cottage and went to the small shed his father had built for his work. From nets and planks he pulled out the lanterns, filled each with oil, and lined them up. When his mind cleared, he realized he was muttering to himself: “When someone’s dreams are stolen, it’s as if the reason for their living is stolen too. Before they take mine, I must act.”
He sat until sunset, staring at the sea. At midnight, when darkness and silence ruled, he lit the lanterns one by one and carried them into the alleys. At every doorway he left a light. Slowly, the alleys began to smile with brightness. The shadows, approaching, quivered as the colors in their bodies roiled and turned back.
No path was left for them in the other alleys either.
The man walked toward his cottage without a lantern. Midway, the shadows blocked his path. One spoke: For years your father stood against us. Now you. Let the end of this harbor come. Soon others will arrive from the sea and take the place of those here. They will come with hope and longing, eager to build.
The man replied: “This harbor has room for all—even the new ones.”
As the shadows dissolved with the coming light, they said: Sometimes, for change to happen, something precious must be lost.
The man returned to the cottage and slept a few hours. When he rose, he gathered the lanterns back inside. Before noon, he went to bury the body that had been left on the shore.
