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ensues will steer your mind immediately away from such psychoparanormal wanderings and back to safe, mundane things like how Marge and the girls are doing and how much longer it might be until the Red Sox win another pennant and how it’s wonderful to see him again and you can hardly wait until next time, and he says, “Hahaha, me too,” before he disappears. But he’s lifelined you back to the real world. But he isn’t there, just as you knew he wouldn’t be, so your smug smile is lost to the blank brick wall and then a window, in which you see how foolish it looks, and turn it off. And then, just as you pass the inset doorway, which of course contains a deep shadow full of shadows, your shadow sticks again, but this time for a much longer time. And although your left foot has rotated almost fully through its heel-to-toe motion, and the tip of the sole of that shoe has begun the process of breaking the bond gravity has formed between it and the sidewalk, and the heel of your right shoe is well on its way to its appointed landing spot, your right thigh and calf tense just a touch, and your abdomen tightens just a bit, and you keep that foot up, delay the landing for another half second, sensing somehow if that foot falls before your shadow reunites, you and shadow-you will be severed forever. You have no time even to consider why that’s such a terrifying thought. In a panicked instant, your right shoe, still suspended above the sidewalk as you continue to move forward in one-millionth-of-asecond frames, you’re certain you’ve heard of that shadow-severing thing happening to someone else sometime, so it certainly could happen to you as well, despite the fact that you’ve spent a great deal of time thinking that surely nothing really bad could happen to you. Have your shadow and your shoe somehow wrangled responsibility for your karma and conspired to show you that something bad can indeed happen to you? Your brain screams, But they can’t do that! They’re only a shoe, a shadow! But the shoe is reaching for the sidewalk, and you can practically hear it laughing at you because gravity says you can’t delay the footfall forever, and it’s descending, and your heart’s pounding, and at the last possible