Every evening, just before the city turned completely dark, she went outside with a collection of empty glass bottles tucked inside a canvas bag. She was collecting shadows.
Not the large shadows cast by buildings or trees, but the tiny ones people left behind without noticing. A woman crying on a train would leave a thin gray shadow beneath her seat. A boy waiting for his mother would leave one curled around the edge of the pavement.
Lovers leaving each other left the darkest shadows of all, heavy and almost blue. She gathered them carefully with her fingertips and sealed them inside the bottles, where they moved like smoke whenever she carried them home.
Her bedroom was crowded with them. Hundreds of bottles stood beneath her bed, beside her windows, and along the shelves. At night they whispered softly to one another, telling stories she could never quite understand.
She never opened them because she believed every shadow deserved somewhere safe to exist.
Then, one evening, while walking beneath a broken streetlamp, she noticed a shadow following her.
She stopped. It stopped. She walked faster. It followed.
Finally, she turned around and reached for it, but her fingers passed through.
That was when she realized it had never belonged to anyone else.
It was hers, and she had been collecting everyone else's shadows because she was afraid to look at her own.