Chris Abani: Becoming Abigail

He was good. Not interfering when she decapitated all her dolls and recreated a funeral for each one. He grew uncomfortable yet still remained silent when she shot six birds from the sky with her rubber catapult and stones collected almost as a meditation from the loose gravel bordering Abigail’s grave. He was silent even when she dressed them in lace torn from the trim of her mother’s wedding dress. Collecting sticks into bundles that she arranged in geometric patterns, she placed the lace-wrapped birds on these funereal pyres, deliberately holding each one over a candle that stood like a sentinel, until they filled everything with the scent of roasting meat and the revulsion of burning feathers. She took seven photographs of her mother from the family album, tore the faces out and turned them upside down with seven candles on them while she muttered an incantation over the torn faces. Collecting with the deliberateness reserved for communion wafers, she then took the candles off the photo fragments, picked up the fragments, and held the severed photos of her mother’s face up to the light before cramming them into her mouth. As he watched her, her father decided that she had crossed the line. She had watched him then with a calm that terrified him, strong even as he unraveled like an untrimmed wick.

The psychiatrist he took her to was overworked and underpaid and only interested in the truly mad. And there were no end of those in their town, wandering the streets naked and sometimes violent, occasionally attacking family members with machetes before settling down to eat the cleaved-off flesh as directed by some unseen deity or demon. The doctor had no time for a mildly confused and lost little girl who he felt just missed her mother, so he prescribed sweet-tasting children’s aspirin for her and sent them home.

So her father took her to the local witch. He didn’t entirely believe that she was a witch, or that there were real witches. As far as he could tell, she was just an old woman who profited on people’s fear. The old witch smiled as she first consulted a spread of cards and then bones and then coins, before telling him to go and buy a heavy silver bracelet and earrings to match, as she needed to use them to anchor the girl in this reality. Reluctantly he did as he was told. As the old woman slipped the jewelry on Abigail, her father asked her if it was necessary.

“Of course it is. You are a man. You know nothing about raising a daughter and buying her nice jewelry.”

That memory made her smile and she looked at her sleeping father almost tenderly. Putting the beer glass and empty dishes in the sink, she returned to wake him to go up to bed. But he looked so peaceful that she left him there on the couch, draping a lappa over him for warmth. As she turned out the lights, she was startled by how clear the moon was. And how beautiful the lone star next to it.

The sound of laughter carried clear across the water and she interrupted her brooding to see a brightly lit party yacht sail past. It was colder now and the water was darker. She longed for some warmth. Another fragment of poetry from Emperor Wu came to her. From the Most Distant Time/ Theyears flow like water/ Everything passes away before my eyes. The lines were loud in her head and a moan escaped her involuntarily. A passing policeman stopped and watched her for a few minutes.

“Are you all right, miss?” he called.

Startled, she dropped the cigarette she was lighting. Picking it up, she nodded. He hesitated, but something about the sphinxes menaced him and he moved on. She looked at the still-glowing tip. She couldn’t smoke it now. It had been on the floor. Derek would have smoked it. She smiled as she remembered him. She had only known him for two months, and even then, the actual time spent with him only came to about three and a half weeks, yet she felt like she had known him for much longer. Part of her knew that this was because she brought the intensity of first love to their time.

And she did love him, in spite of his dirty habits. Now, here, she missed them. The way he would pick up food he had dropped, blow it off, and eat it, claiming: “It’s still good if it has only been a few seconds.” And how he wouldn’t always bathe. She knew this because of the way his penis would smell and taste when she rolled back the foreskin. Funky, like old earth: the taste of the loam of her mother’s grave. She liked that. I miss him, she thought. Will miss him, she corrected. Before the cigarette burned out, she pressed it against her skin. DSHND , she wrote. Death shall have nodominion. She didn’t know where it was from, but Derek liked it. He had showed it to her the first day they met. It was in a book of poems he always carried in his pocket. At least she thought he did. This thing with him was like with her mother. She wasn’t always able to tell how much she was inventing and how much was real.

She lit a new cigarette. Sat on the back of the sphinx and watched the traffic wink past. She wondered what the people in their cars, invisible to her, would make of her perched up there, riding the sphinx. Pulling a compact out of her bag, she adjusted her lipstick. One last cigarette, she thought. Not that it mattered at this point.

She coughed through the harsh tobacco, tears stinging her eyes. The coughing fit caused her to drop her bag and it fell at the foot of the needle, contents spilt: a compact, lipstick, some tissue, a purse, and a book Derek had given her by an African writer, to make her feel at home, he said. The book, Fragments by Ayi Kwe Armah, was one of his favorites, he said. She wasn’t sure if he meant from Africa or in general. Back then those details didn’t matter; now she wished she had asked. Staring at the purse and its contents, she made no move to retrieve them, looking away instead to the river, as the poetry grew louder in her head, forcing its way out of her mouth.

“. Think of the days/ When we were happy together/,” she quoted from Su Wu’s poem. “If I live I will come back/ If I die,remember me always/”

An abandoned truck filled the frame of her window. It had been there since she was a child and she couldn’t remember to whom it had belonged. Green moss grew over the left side and bougainvillea draped down from an adjacent building to stroke it in the evening breeze; purple flowers against the burn of rust.

A shrub grew out of the truck’s roof, rising straight up from the floor of the cab like an impatient passenger. Birds nested in its open trunk and, judging from the noises issuing from it at dusk, it was home to other creatures too.

Grass grew thick around its wheels and you could almost imagine that they were a pit crew eagerly changing tires. That was the way it was here sometimes. A thing was left where it broke and the land, the forest, soon claimed it back, giving it new meaning, until one day you simply forgot that it was the rusting carcass of a once red truck.

And yet even staring out at that truck, thoughts of Abigail filled her world. By all accounts she had been a tall, thin woman whose eyes held a power beyond the black pools of her irises. Tall, thin, and dark, she, this Abigail, looked so much like the other that her father had named her the same. She was more ghost than her mother, however, moving with the quality of light breathing through a house in which the only footprints in the dust were those of her dead mother. Even her laughter, at once wild and reigned in, was all Abigail.

It remained unspoken between her and her father, but as with all silences, it had all the well-worn familiarity to it of an over-loved pet, shedding fur everywhere it went, leaving faint traces of its animal scent on the hands. And always in that smell, the possibility of danger, of an edge untamed, like a knife unseen in the suds of a washbasin, nicking a finger painfully. Yes, this thing was like that. The shadows under the smiling eyes that said over and over — you killed her. You. Why her? I loved her.