Any child can be chased by their shadow. All they need to do is run straight toward the sun on a lazy afternoon. As long as they keep moving, it will be right behind them. They can even turn around and try to chase it, but no matter how fast their chubby legs pump, their shadow will always be a little bit out of reach.

Not so with this child.

He runs across a yard dotted with dandelions, giggling and shrieking, his fingers close on something that shouldn’t be solid, something that shouldn’t fall before he does onto the clover and crabgrass, something he shouldn’t be able to wrestle with and pin in the dirt.

After, sitting in the mossy cool beneath a maple tree, the boy sticks the tip of his penknife into the pad of his ring finger. He turns his face away so he doesn’t have to watch. The first poke doesn’t go through the skin. The second doesn’t either. Only the third time, when he presses harder, frustration overcoming squeamishness, does he manage to cut himself. It hurts a lot, so he’s ashamed of how tiny the bead of blood is that wells up. He squeezes his skin, to see if he can get a little more. The drop swells. He can sense the shadow’s eagerness. His finger stings as a dark fog forms around it.

A breeze comes, shaking loose maple seeds. They spiral down around him, coptering through the air on their single wing.

Just a little drink every day, he’d heard someone on the television say about their shadow. And it will be your best friend in the world.

Although it has no mouth and no tongue and there is no wetness at its touch, he can tell that it’s licking his skin. He doesn’t like the feeling, but it doesn’t hurt.

He’s never had a best friend before, still he knows that they do things like this. They become blood brothers, smearing their cuts together until it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. He needs someone like that.

“I’m Remy,” he whispers to his shadow. “And I’ll call you Red.”