PodCastle

* Author : Troy Wiggins
* Narrator : Dominick Rabrun
* Hosts : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, Jen R. Albert, Summer Fletcher, Peter Adrian Behravesh and C. L. Clark
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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Originally published at Strange Horizons.


Content warnings for violence and racism.


Rated R.
Sound clips used in the introduction can be found here:
https://freesound.org/people/Mega-X-stream/sounds/427414
https://freesound.org/people/Robinhood76/sounds/93570
https://freesound.org/people/zimbot/sounds/122983
Dying Lessons
By Troy L. Wiggins
I learned how to bend light from my mother. Nights after I came home from math and Spanish tutoring were spent in our backyard, deep in the trees where no one would catch me learning the basics of refraction, drilling the slight movements that would keep me from moving too much air, or creating too large a shadow and revealing myself.
“This is a last line of defense,” she would say, telling me over and over again like I wasn’t listening, which I usually wasn’t because I’d rather be in the house playing Final Fantasy or something. Mama didn’t care and would talk right through my distraction. “The number one thing to do in any situation is figure out a way to calm things down before you have to blink out.”
“Why not just blink out before anything happens?” Mama was a teacher through and through, and she’d never lose patience with me or breathe hard when I asked a question. Instead, she would smooth back her crinkly black hair, or smirk like she knew all the secrets of the world and didn’t feel like telling me. Then she’d bop my nose or pull my ear.
“You can’t let them know everything, baby. If they know everything, they’ll definitely use everything they know against you.”
I learned how to spin shadows from my father. Back before the bus company laid him off and he had to pick up another overnight job, we’d go on fishing trips in the early morning. In the dark space before dawn he’d show me a different way to disappear.
“You can’t yank on the shadow like it’s a ornery dog on a leash,” he’d say. My Daddy was so black that only his teeth and eyes were visible in the dark morning, even without the shadows bubbling around him.
“You gotta caress it, you gotta love on it and convince it to help you out, tell it all you need and all you scared of. That’s the only way it’ll come.”
“Why do I need the shadow when I can bend light to where nobody can see me?” I’d ask. Sometimes this would make my father angry, and he’d suck his teeth or skeet a jet of watery saliva into the brush. Other times he’d rub my near-bald head and look off at the rising sun.
“Use ya head, boy. You grown in the eyes of the world now. It’s people out there just looking for a reason to take ya ass out, and you better be ready for em. This shit’s real. You hear me?”
I would nod.