The Shadow Tailor

In Valdecierzo, shadows wore out like any other cloth. They frayed at the elbows, tore at children’s knees, faded with the years. That was what Ezequiel Urrutia’s workshop was for: he was the only shadow tailor for forty leagues around. Irene, his apprentice, had spent two winters threading needles with dark thread and repeating the first law of the trade: a shadow is never thrown away. It is mended, or buried with its owner.

There was something else everyone there knew: the river gives back its drowned. Shadows float, and they pull bodies towards the bank the way a sail pulls a boat. That was why nobody in Valdecierzo ever vanished completely. Not even on the night of the great flood, eleven years before, when the water swallowed half the mill.