Chris Abani: Becoming Abigail

Absently rubbing her finger along the two lines on her face, the only marks on her body she hadn’t cut herself, she wondered what happened to that jewelry.

She thought of her father hanging from a ceiling. The taut rope cutting the world into two: the moment before life and the moment before death. And in that rope, she wondered, was there the memory of her mother?

And what would be the line for her?

Derek?

Abigail?

A line is a lie. Who can tell what it will open onto?

It was Molly. It was Derek’s wife.

And how many kingdoms had been lost for sugar? Or taken. The English knew all about that. About the slavery of desire. And so it was that the cocoa that Derek made to help Molly sleep, not sweet enough, led her downstairs.

Before death. And certainly before hell, there is always descent. Going. Down. Then death. And hell. Hardly a breath apart.

Turning the knob, opening. The door, opening. And there was Abigail, rump on the edge of the kitchen table, skirt up around her waist, naked breasts rubbing pert lines of sweat up and down Derek’s chest, ankles locked around his back. Lost in the hot damp of Abigail: Derek. And over his shoulder, the women locked eyes. Abigail smiled.

Then Molly’s scream. The stab. The look. Death. The look and the collapse onto the linoleum floor. Soft. Slow. Just as Abigail would have imagined it. An autumn leaf. Falling. Cocoa, like old blood, spilling down the front of Molly’s pale blue dressing gown. Rusting. Derek. Turning. Seeing his wife falling, even as his hips still jerked their urgent need. Then his mouth opened to call her name, screamed “Abigail!” instead, as he exploded into her.

Before he could pull up his trousers, Molly was gone.

Running down the street. Night. Late. Dressing gown stained with the bleeding of her pain. And then the police later. Derek looked cowed. Molly shamed, perhaps a little regretful. Abigail fought the blanket and the policewoman wrapping it around her. Fought the annihilation she could feel coming. The cold steel around Derek’s wrists wrapping themselves around her heart.

“Hush, my love,” he said. “Hush.”

Then night and rain. And the policewoman soothing her: There, there.

In her room. Back at the hospital. Still raining. In the distance, Nina Simone on some cleaner’s radio. I put a spellon you. In the distance.

Had her mother known this particular pain?

It didn’t seem possible. More likely that she was becoming herself, this Abigail. In this particular moment, in this particular way. As particular as the dots burning across her body, mapping a constellation.

Revenge is a raven.

Feathers blackened from hate. And Molly was relentless in her pursuit. Shame turning to the certainty of faith.

The reprisals were swift.

Derek was fired from his job and brought up on charges for the abuse of a minor. Nothing Abigail did helped. Her impassioned denial. Her letter saying it was her fault. Her choice. But they said they were doing this to protect her. That she didn’t know what choice was. But she did. She who had been taken and taken and taken. And now the one time she took for herself, the one time she had choice in the matter, it was taken away. Maybe, she thought, maybe some of us are just here to feed others.

She struck match after match, watching their brief phosphorous flare. No, she thought, maybe I am not here as food, but to live for one phosphorous moment. No, she thought, bringing the flame of the last match to the tip of a cigarette, maybe I just light the fuse of my own destruction.

Forbidden to see or speak to Derek, she could only watch, heart on fire, as his disgrace was finalized publicly. Unable to comfort him, to take the look from his eyes when she saw him in court. The shame and the blame. No, she wanted to scream, no, my love, my heart. This was my choice. Damn this world, she thought, though she didn’t really blame anyone. Things were just the way they were. Besides, how does a hunter tell a vegetarian lion from the rest? This time a peppercorn will not suffice.

And the social worker who bumped into her in the hallway of the court as she watched Derek dragged away to await sentencing. Guilty. Guilty. Thin-lipped and angry, the woman bumped into her, and looking from Abigail to Derek and back, and mistaking the anguished look on Abigail’s face, said to her: Don’t you worry, sister, that monster is going away for a long time. And then the anguished look on the social worker’s face as Abigail’s not inconsiderable right hook connected with her nose.

Looking down at the terrified woman, she licked the blood on her knuckles.

But even that sacrifice hadn’t been enough. It was just like the Igbo said. The sacrifice is always commensurate to the thing wished for. Sometimes a lizard will do, sometimes a goat, or a dog, sometimes a cow or buffalo. Sometimes, a human being.

That day, she knew she would never see Derek again.

But her love was the full measure of her decision.

As she blew smoke into night and the river, she knew, this decision was hard.

A lie always sounds better told in English, her people said.

The heart knows the truth of this betrayal. The wish, the courage, it all falls away before the heart’s lie. The realization that she could not live without Derek was not as sudden and surprising as her difficulty in the face of this task. Here she was trying to find the strength to save him.

She looked down at the river, then at the cigarette. A tug sounded its foghorn and the wind picked up. With a sigh she flicked the stub at the darkness and followed it.

Blair Holt, who never lets me be less than the artist I am sometimes afraid to be. Percival Everett, to whom nothing is inconceivable. Cristina Garcia, Aimee Bender, Steve Isoardi and Jeannette Lindsay, Ron Gottesman, PB Rippey, Johnny Temple, Johanna Ingalls, Kate Gale, Andrea Tuch, Parissa Ebrahimzadeh, Peter Orner, Douglas Humble, Johanna Parker, and Kristen Bonkemeyer.

The first finished draft of this book was completed in Marfa, Texas, while on a very generous Lannan Foundation Writers Residency. Thank you for always supporting and believing.

And Yvonne Vera, whose words are sublime: May You Rest In Peace.

If I have forgotten to list you here, forgive me, but please accept my thanks.