It should be a dark night, but the moon peeking out behind a sheath of dense cloud turns the shadow to an abhorrent grey. My gaze reaches out along the dulled horizon, my hand shakes as I grip the bottle of gin; I pour another glass, as my head hangs loose.

Distant bells toll one o’clock as the night glows with the encompassing greyness. The glass of gin remains, sat, accusingly, my side. The moon’s sheen glances off the lonesome child curled, intertwined in her bedding. She is whispering her silver secrets, feverishly unable to keep them quiet, each breath becoming one with the dismal, dreadful grey – it wraps around her and catches them up and envelops them into the night. Raising the glass to my lips, my gaze returns to the murky horizon, under the feeble moonlight.

I rise with a sudden jerk, the twinkle of shattering glass oddly beautiful as the gin cascades down, down, down. They look like ants with their dark dress, starkly contrasting the moonlit grey, and their scuttling, swarming movements as they jaggedly hone in. My mother would have taken me by my hand and said a desperate, pleading prayer, but that is foolish – ‘The Shadow’ controls our contentment, there is no use for a god. So I stand there, still, with my back to the sleeping child, guilt welling up within me as I feel her judgement.

There is one piercing rap on the door. Still, I stand there, half-facing the door. Another piercing rap brings me to my knees, the shards of glass digging into my skin. A final, piercing, resounding rap unleashes the floodgates of panic within me. Scrambling, I seize the bottle of gin and, now crouching, I stalk towards the door, overcome by panic and worry and fear.

The lock in the door clicks with a gentle indifference. With blood now dripping down my knees and with a wild, soundless scream of fury, I face the dreaded door. One, and only one, ant scuttles into the flat. I want to cry and scream, but no noise escapes me. The ant strides over to me and, hardly noticing my sordid, sorry, soiled state, looks down on me.

“We have come for your daughter.” He states, “The Shadow has decreed that she be taken away. She has been dreaming. Dreams are unpredictable. The Shadow must be able to predict. The Shadow must remove what it cannot predict. The people must be utterly content. Dreams jeopardise contentment.”

With a sweeping movement, he leaves me to my wretched being. I hear the muted rustle of the duvet as he bends down to pick the child up from where she lies, still muttering her pernicious secrets. I turn to look upon her face, precious and little, her forehead wrinkled as she dances wildly through worlds of dreams.

“Don’t you need my consent, my signature somewhere? Surely you can’t just take her?” I rasp, pleadingly, staring him dead in the eyes. “You can’t just take her.”

He sweeps past me once more, with the child in his arms. At the door he looks back, smirking.

“Why ever would we need your consent? The Shadow has analysed the data. It knows what will bring contentment. This brings stability, contentment. Your contentment most of all.”

Now he is gone. The child, the sweet, sleeping child, is gone with him. I do not need to look out the window to know that the ants are, once more, scurrying across the greyed landscape. In a fit of sudden, overwhelming rage, I throw the half-empty bottle of gin to the ground and watch as it shatters into a thousand, thousand pieces.

Rage is now replaced by grief, and I sag onto the floor, into my sea of broken glass, a sea of pain and danger and hate. A tear rolls almost imperceivably down my cheek, not shed for the loss of the child but for the hole where my heart is. For there must be a hole! How could a parent lose their child and not feel angry at the one who has taken her, or be aggrieved by the loss? I writhe, tormented by this feeling of emptiness, my mind spirals further and further until grief becomes guilt and I am stricken by the fear and the anger and the desperation I had felt before. I know that she judged my act, my drama, my pretence. Then all is silent, eerily silent; my mind becomes empty, and I escape into sleep.

The sun casts a gentle shadow across the room as I sit up from where I was laid on the floor. I get up to my feet and feel my body hang lightly; my head raises to be held high, my back is straight, my shoulders are released from their hunched position. I move to open the window and breathing in a breath of the faintly humid air, I look down upon the streets shining under the adorning sunlight. Smiling, I murmur lyrics from a song my mother used to sing to me ‘Light that shines is the light of love, Hides the darkness from above’ and cross the room to fetch the brush for the glass littered everywhere.

I laugh and dance around the flat, my body light and my mind free, now no longer plagued by worry about the child’s dreams, my only discontentment gone. I laugh and smile and rejoice in everything. Then the streaks of blood lining my hands catch my eyes and the night before crashes back to me. For one brief moment, I feel ashamed of my joy, my relief and I stagger to take a seat away from her judgement, shining through the sunlight. But that moment passes, and I instead marvel at the beauty of the sunlight; sat here, in the shadow, I am content.

For without the shadow, there is no contentment in the light.