Becoming Abigail

Now XXXI

The comfort of simple things.

Coffee percolating. Cinnamon buns warming oven and home. Anicecold Coca-Cola on a hot day. Licking out the mixing bowl. Chocolate.

Childhood.

It was perhaps the one thing Abigail had never really had, and yet truly needed. Yet somehow, to be nostalgic in this way for a thing never experienced.

Not that anyone was to blame, she thought, blowing smoke rings that dissipated before they were quite formed. These things just happen. Ije uwa, as the Igbos would say. One’s walk in this life. Interesting that the Igbo don’t believe the path to be fixed, or even problematic. Destiny isn’t a deck of cards stacked up against you. It is the particular idiosyncrasies of the player, not the deck or the dealer, that hold the key. Personality always sways the outcome of the game.

She stubbed out the cigarette on the broad concrete balustrade she was leaning on, the ash-heavy tip drawing strange lines and squiggles. Random.

The memory.

Myth, yet still truer than any lie.

An old woman her father took her to. A witch. To exorcize this devil of a longing in her, his daughter. This longing for death and the ways of the dead. A wanton melancholy that was a deep wound keeping her from life. The old woman’s song that day that wasn’t a day but a dream:

The mind is a bag, we each wear it differently. A palm cancontain a star and yet we search for nothing. Here, child. Here.This is the heart.

And then, cutting strange lines and squiggles with a knife tip in the soot-covered earth by her hearth, sang on.

The heart is a cut. If there is only one opening, it grows wideand we die. Here I cut many openings, child. More than fifty.Straight and wavy. You will bleed many joys, child. How do yousay to a bird, there is no more singing? Feed it a peppercorn.

Then plunging the knife into the flames licking the hearth’s edge, she brought it up and cut Abigail twice on the face. On the left side, a straight line. On the right, a wave. Less than an inch long. Enough to break the skin, the hot metal cauterizing. Then laughing, she asked Abigail’s father to buy Abigail some jewelry. A bracelet. Some earrings.

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?