The Day the Shadows Swapped

When Kai woke up, his shadow had four legs and a tail.

He noticed in the bathroom. He lifted his arm to brush his teeth, and on the wall, his shadow lifted a paw. He turned his head, and his shadow's ears flopped.

"Biscuit," said Kai slowly, to his dog, who was sitting in the doorway, "look at your shadow."

Biscuit looked. Biscuit's shadow was standing on two legs with its hands on its hips.

Nobody knew how it had happened. Dad thought it might be something to do with the full moon. Mum thought it might be something to do with the two of them sleeping in a heap on the landing again. Kai's little sister thought it was the best thing that had ever happened and wanted to swap with the cat.

The day was difficult.

At breakfast, Kai reached for the toast, and his shadow's nose went straight into the butter dish. At the park, Biscuit ran after a ball, and his shadow, running behind him on two legs, kept tripping over its own feet and had to be waited for. When Kai tried to do a cartwheel, his shadow did a sort of rolling-over that made a lady on a bench laugh so hard she dropped her sandwich, which Biscuit, at least, thought was a good result.

"I want my shadow back," said Kai at lunch, trying to hold a spoon while his shadow held a paw up for a treat.

"Woof," said Biscuit, which seemed to mean the same.

They tried everything. They stood back to back and jumped apart. They spun round three times. They ran at each other and crossed over, like two people swapping sides of a skipping rope. Kai's shadow wagged. Biscuit's shadow scratched its head.

By teatime they had given up, and Kai sat on the back step with his dog's shadow and Biscuit lay in the grass with Kai's, and the sun went slowly down, and the two shadows got longer and longer, stretching across the lawn, until the dog-shadow was the size of a horse and the boy-shadow was the size of a lamppost.

"Mum," said Kai, "what happens to shadows at night?"

"They go to sleep," said Mum. "Same as you."

"Where?"

Mum thought about it. "Underneath you, I suppose. In the dark. Where it doesn't matter what shape they are."

Kai looked at his long dog-shaped shadow. The sun slipped behind the fence and the shadow went faint, then fainter, then it was simply part of the evening, and so was Biscuit's, and you could not have said where one ended and the other began.

They went up to bed together, the way they always did, Biscuit on the rug and Kai under the covers, and Dad turned the light off, and the room went dark.

In the dark, nobody has a shadow. Or everybody does, and it is the same one, big and soft and covering the whole room.

"Night, Biscuit," said Kai.

Biscuit sighed, the long dog kind.

And somewhere underneath them, in the dark where shape does not matter, two shadows that had been in the wrong places all day lay down next to each other, got comfortable, and, without anyone noticing, quietly changed back.

In the morning Kai brushed his teeth, and his shadow brushed its teeth, and Biscuit's shadow scratched behind its ear with a hind leg, and everything was as it should be. Except that Kai's little sister had gone very quiet, and the cat was nowhere to be seen.