Becoming Abigail

Then XV

There was a quality of silence. An awe in the face of mountains that had kept their secrets for a millennia. This drew Abigail to maps. Not all maps. Old ones. Printed on paper that was more parchment. Big ones. That unrolled with all the crackling promise of a flying carpet warming up. And lines. Rivers meandering lazily in blues and sometimes silver. Hills rising in red circles, uneven, thick at their bases and thinning toward the top; like balding men. The green ticks of forests and jungles. The brown sprawls of deserts. And the black lines of science, carving things into sections — longitude, latitude — pretending that here, at least, on the flat spread of the map, it was possible to have any kind of dominion over a landscape. Over things.

And sometimes the alchemy of her stare transmuted the parchment into her mother’s skin. The landmarks taking on deeper significance. The Himalayas marking the slope of Abigail’s forehead, spreading into the Gobi desert. The hook of Africa became her nose. Australia her bottom lip. And the islands between India and Tasmania became the fragments of teeth bared in a smile. In true cubist form, the Americas were her eyes. Everything else became the imagined contours of her inner life.

This was how Abigail spent many rainy afternoons, the cartographer of dreams. Of ghosts.