Aurora Magazine 2018

knew that it was the same dog, because he would always fix his gaze on her with his piercing yellow eyes. Somehow, she just felt that recognition every time she laid eyes upon him. She told her mom about it, but her mom never seemed to have seen him. He would always disappear whenever her mom looked for him and reappear the moment her mom stopped searching. It got to the point where she’d start to see him in her house. She’d look down the hallway toward her room and he’s be standing in the shadows, staring, eyes seeming to glow back at her. She never felt threatened by him; instead she was comforted by his presence and took to calling him Shade. Af- ter a month or so, he began to sleep in her closet pretty much nightly. Her Chinchilla, Petey, never seemed bothered by Shade, and thus she left him be. Yet still, her mother couldn’t see him. She believed Steph had made him up as a sort of imaginary friend. After a few months of hearing of Shade, her mother became tired of it and told her to knock it off. Steph, upset that her mother didn’t believe her, became frustrated and, later that night, begged Shade to show himself to her mother. Apparently, he did so sometime that night, because her moth- er contacted a Medium the next day. The lady who came into the house didn’t say anything about strange feelings or hateful auras, and Steph doubted her. But when she mentioned Shade and his love of her bedroom, the lady’s face seemed to drain of all color. Looking down the hall, Steph realized that she’d seen Shade. And he definitely wasn’t pleased that the Medium was there. He radiated anger, his teeth bared at her and eyes nar- rowed to slits. M U Ñ O Z

60