Gas Street, The Other Side

Gas Street, The Other Side

after the Shuck sighting, not the myth

(1,057 words)

They always run. Or freeze. Or look away so quickly they bruise something behind their eyes. I’ve grown used to it. Centuries of standing in the wrong light will teach you not to take it personally.

The stories don’t help. Black Shuck, they call me. Doom-bringer. Death’s dog. They say if you see me you’ll be dead within the year. They say my eye burns red as hellfire. They say I pad through churchyards looking for souls to drag down.

None of this is true. Or rather—none of it is true in the way they mean it.

The woman on Thursday—Siobhan, though I didn’t know her name then—did something different. She looked. Not long, not bravely, but she held. Three heartbeats. Four. Long enough for me to see the exhaustion pooled beneath her scrub-top, the heat rash she kept touching without knowing, the way her feet argued with every stone. Long enough for me to glimpse the shape of her life: double shifts, an empty flat, a mother’s calls she kept meaning to return.

I wasn’t there for her. I was there for the canal—for the narrowboats moored like old bones, for the particular sodium light that lets me keep my shape a little longer than usual. The Basin is one of the places I can rest. Where the water remembers what the city has buried under brick and pound signs and new names.

There are old things beneath Birmingham—older than the canals, older than the factories, older than the name itself. I am not the oldest. But I am old enough.

I stood between two lamp posts, where the light couldn’t quite decide what I was. I do this sometimes. Not to frighten. Just to exist without paying so dearly for it. Holding a shape takes effort. Holding it in full light takes more. The in-between places are kinder.

But she saw me. And once you’re seen, something holds.

I followed her home. Not as a shadow behind her on the pavement, not breath at her neck. I followed what her eyes had caught. I was in the groan of her pipes, the complain of her floorboards, the thin silence between a neighbor’s baby crying and stopping. I was in the kettle clicking on before she meant it to. I was the frequency her vision had picked up but her thinking hadn’t yet filed away.

This is what I do. I keep company at the edge of things. I stay where the world thins.

I have been doing that for a long time. I was there when monks raised their first stone and whispered prayers against what they could not name. I was there when the canals were dug—men dying in the mud, their wives not told for days, then weeks, because news travelled on foot and shame travelled faster. I was there when the factories rose and fell and rose again, when the smoke was so thick you tasted metal in your sleep and woke with it on your tongue. I am still here, walking towpaths at dusk, standing in the places where light forgets to reach.

People think the red eye means death. It doesn’t. It means I’ve noticed you. It means you’ve stepped into the part of the evening where things like me are allowed to be real.

Most people step back by morning and forget. The mind is kind that way. It files me under trick of light, under too many hours, under the body’s small rebellions. By breakfast, I am nothing but a wrong feeling—a story they almost tell, and don’t.

But some people—the ones who hold for three heartbeats, four—keep a little of it. A hitch in the air. A loosened seam. I stay with them. Not to harm. Not to warn. Just to be present: a weight at the edge of dream, a warmth against the shin, a pressure that says the dark is not vacant.

Siobhan dreamed of the towpath that night. I know because I stood at the threshold of it. I can’t enter dreams the way some things can, but I can lean against their frame. I can be the weight she felt at her leg, the presence that was neither menacing nor kind. I was simply there, holding the night steady.

When she woke, she found my prints on her hallway tiles.

I left them on purpose. The mud was a courtesy—a way of saying you didn’t invent me. Some people need proof. Some people need to destroy the proof to feel safe again.

I watched her wipe the tiles with a dishcloth, her breath slow and even, like someone counting for her. She wasn’t afraid. Not anymore. She was something else. Something closer to acceptance. Or resignation. The difference is mostly a matter of daylight.

I don’t judge. I’ve been doing this longer than Birmingham has had canals, longer than England has been England. I have watched people weep at the sight of me and people nod as if they’d been expecting me all along. I have seen children wave. I have seen old men tip their hats. Once, a woman in Norfolk knelt and prayed—not against me, but toward me—as if I were a saint of the half-lit.

I am simply what remains when the light runs out and the dark hasn’t quite arrived.

By morning, I was gone. Back to the Basin. Back to water and the sodium hush where I can rest without gripping my shape so hard.

The milk van rattled. The baby wailed properly. The world returned to its ordinary frequency, as it always does.

But I left something with her. Not a curse. Not a blessing. A delay—a fraction of a second where her shadow waits before it follows, where the membrane between what she sees and what she knows stays thin.

She’ll notice it in mirrors. In windows. In the moment before sleep when the room feels like it’s listening.

She saw me. I saw her back. That’s all this ever is.

In the morning she will step into her kitchen and the light will be ordinary again, and still—just once—her hand will hover over the kettle as if she’s remembering someone else’s weight beside her.

Then the click. Then the boil.