THE SHADOW OF THE OBJECT - Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays, and a Portrait Gallery

Aug 7, 2026

Upload by Rowan

A narrator recounts a domestic miracle turned catastrophe: a dog that has protected the home for years is suddenly driven by an unknown force and bites the narrator’s hand, starting a chain of emergency decisions, brutal pain, and surgical intervention. In the hospital, time blurs through waiting rooms and medical preparations, while vivid fragments of anesthesia, necrotic tissue, and recovery visions surface. The story blends memory, bodily transformation, and philosophical reflection on tangible matter and intangible space.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages140

Reading Time3 h 36 min

AccessFree to download

The disappearance of props and the arrival of danger

Emergency transport and the hospital waiting room

Surgery, anesthesia, and fragmented recollections

[OceanofPDF.com](OceanofPDF.com) About the Author Chloe Aridjis is the author of Book of Clouds, which won the Prix du premier roman étranger in France, Asunder and Sea Monsters, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She writes for various art journals and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her most recent book is the collection Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays and a Portrait Gallery. She lives in London. [OceanofPDF.com](OceanofPDF.com) ALSO BY CHLOE ARIDJIS Book of Clouds Asunder Sea Monsters Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays, and a Portrait Gallery [OceanofPDF.com](OceanofPDF.com) Chloe Aridjis THE SHADOW OF THE OBJECT [OceanofPDF.com](OceanofPDF.com) For if ’tis Tangible, and hath a Place,’Tis Body; if Intangible, ’tis Space. LUCRETIUS, De rerum natura [OceanofPDF.com](OceanofPDF.com) I The fewer the props the greater the magic, a famous magician once said, although in my case it wasn’t the flourish of a wand but the wave of my own hand. My own hand made certain things vanish and conjured others into existence. Yes, its mere movement brought about more change, more transformation, than any magic trick. On night three of my visit home, after watching a film with my parents in their bedroom, I’d risen from my chair and waved goodnight. The mistake, we later concluded, had been to wave. All the dog saw, we concluded, had been a disembodied hand. A hand – floating, beckoning, threatening – mid-air. He had watched over our home for eleven years, this dog, been taken for daily walks and given the run of the garden, slept pressed against my parents’ door each night, a magnificent Alsatian with a coal-black face and golden eyebrows, occasionally he growled but for the most part he remained composed, his inner life and ours mysteriously, harmoniously, aligned. Until that moment when he was possessed by an unknown force, his eyes glowing amber, teeth sinking into my hand. One second a searing pain, the next nothing, the pain too new, too vast, to identify. My mother threw the television control and missed. My stepfather reached for the cane by his bed, until then never used on anyone, and after receiving a blow on his hind legs, there was no choice, the dog released me, but not without difficulty since one of his canines snagged on a bone and had to unhook at just the right angle. At night he turns wolf, my mother would say, and it was true his mood grew feral after dusk. But until then, the wolf had protected us. The elderly taxi driver who took us to the hospital seemed lost in thought as he wound through the sinister scrublands of Chapultepec Park. Please hurry, it’s an emergency, we urged, but the man took a meandering route via the tercera sección, deserted apart from the packs of hounds that were the spirit of its wilderness and ravines. We arrived at the hospital after thirty minutes, or perhaps it was forty or forty-five, time marked only by increments of pain, followed by limbo in awaiting room inhabited by a silenced television and a howling boy. Old episodes of El Chapulín Colorado played across the screen, the sight of a grown man dressed as a red grasshopper even more absurd on mute, my stepfather kept laughing and my mother now and then too, how could they laugh when I had just been bitten by our dog, well, how could they laugh full stop, and as the pain shot up my arm I wondered how much more I could endure. The clock on the wall read 2:25 when the hand surgeon arrived, bathed and perfumed, in a black leather jacket. I followed the man to a cubicle, where he drew the curtain, and in that snug space he unwrapped the provisional bandage my mother had thrown on and poured alcohol and iodine into my wounds, my hand on fire as he set to work removing some of the debris. Eight deep bites, he counted, on the front and the back and in the fold of my thumb, but I couldn’t bring myself to look.

FAQs

Why does the narrator describe the moment as a “mistake” after waving goodnight?

The narrator later concludes that the mistake was the act of waving itself, which seems to have triggered the change that led to the dog’s violent possession.

What happens to the dog after dusk?

The dog’s mood becomes feral at night, and although it has protected the family until then, an unknown force takes over, changing his behavior dramatically.

What medical procedures and sensations does the narrator experience after the bite?

The narrator is taken to the hospital, the wounds are cleaned and prepared, and surgery follows. The narrative includes the anaesthetist’s question, the emergence of words about necrosis on waking, and sensory fragments like light, equipment, and a television in the room.

Aug 7, 2026

Upload by Rowan