A Love So Bright JP Fallavollita
A man fell in love with the shadow a mannequin cast.
He would stand for hours, everyday, outside the window of the women’s
fashion store, hands cupped around his eyes, warm breath against the glass, staring intently upon the beautiful shadow shaped by the mannequin of his affections.
“Oh, that is just his way,” people would say as they passed him in the street,
raising eyebrows, holding their children closer. “He is harmless. He just has an infatuation with that plastic model. Love’s will is strange, indeed.”
But everyone was mistaken. They didn’t understand the hidden subtlety in
the man’s peculiar behaviour. They couldn’t comprehend that it wasn’t the plastic model that gripped the man’s longing attention. It was the model’s shadow that evoked such passion – the way it fell across the floor, slowly, mysteriously, so much like lingerie by the bedside, careful and delicate and arousing. In the daylight, the shadow shimmered and swayed. The man saw, in that sometimes faint gray and sometimes opal black silhouette, the fine softness and gentle sloping lines of a woman’s neck, the curve of a shoulder, the contour of a young, firm breast, a hip, a thigh. Never mind what people thought! For the man, it was as real and as tangible as could possibly be, this love.
He would stand by the shop window all day, listening to the shadow speak to
him with a crisp, bright and delicious voice in the morning, with a hazy and wanting sigh in the afternoon, and with a demure, slightly pleading whisper at dusk, satisfying his passion with breathy, sensual words. The finely feminine contour,