Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in Ostrova ·
The Women Who Sell Their Shadows at Ostrova Fair
At the midsummer fair in Ostrova, a row of women in grey shawls sits by the cattle pens, offering to buy the shadows of people who have had a long year, and the price is always fair and always paid in advance.
- status: rumor
The midsummer fair at Ostrova has been held on the same meadow for six hundred years, and the stalls have changed a great deal in that time. There are lorries now, and loudspeakers, and a bouncy castle for the children that the council insists is safe. But at the far end of the meadow, past the cattle pens and the rope swing, there is a row of folding chairs that has not moved in living memory, and on the chairs sit the women in grey shawls.
Nobody in Ostrova will say how many there are. Some years there seem to be four, some years seven, and one or two people swear they have seen a dozen, all sitting side by side with their hands in their laps, very still, watching the crowds go by. They do not sell anything. They do not call out. They wait, and sooner or later someone walks up to them, usually someone who has had a long year, and sits down, and says quietly that they would like to be rid of something.
The rumour is that the women buy shadows. Not the outlines cast on the grass by the sun, but the dark weight a person carries behind them through the bad times. Grief, worry, a debt that will not clear, a fear that keeps them awake. The women take the shadow from the person's back, fold it neatly, and put it away in a wicker basket under the chair. Then they name a price in coins that nobody remembers receiving, and the buyer leaves the fair walking lighter than they came, with their shoulders loose and their step quick.
The price is always fair. That is the rule. The women will not take more than a shadow is worth, and they will not give less. Some people say the price is paid in years. Others say it is paid in a small favour, due at some future fair, which the women will name when they come to collect it.
A woman from the village, Agnes Pell, who sold her shadow in the year her husband died, told her daughter that the price she was asked had been one afternoon of her own life, the afternoon she had spent waiting for a letter that never came. She said she did not miss the afternoon. She said she was glad to have it gone. She did not sell anything else after that, and she has never once looked for the afternoon again.
The fair committee say the women are a folk custom, a way for the village to talk about grief in a season when it is easy to forget it. The children say they are witches and dare each other to sit on the empty chair at the end of the row. The older people say the women have been there since before the fair was founded, and that they are not selling. They are keeping what they buy, in the basket under the chair, against the day when the village needs its shadows back.
This story is told by the stallholders at the cattle pens, who say the women are always the last to leave the meadow at dusk, and that they fold up their chairs in perfect step, and that the basket is always heavier on the way home.