Abigail

Abigail had not left the house for six hundred and thirty-two days.

          She laid, on her back, in the overstuffed leather of a cracked and scuffed sofa. Her eyes were buried in the crook of her arm. Pinpricks of light filtered through plantation shutters, boring into her chalky skin. The hair on her head was sleep-greased and lank and red like the hair on her legs and under her arms. She snored softly, mouth hanging open.

          Abigail started, pulled her arm away, and squinted in the dim. She was confused for a moment, unsure of where she was, but the uncommon feeling faded. She knew these walls, knew the fading navy paint and the dull molding at their feet. Knew the overfilled bookshelves: dark-stained oak built-ins that matched the massive, looming desk in the center of the room. Knew the cobwebs, long abandoned by spiders and conquered by dust, bridging the blades of the ceiling fan. Knew the shutters, deep green but sunbleached on their outsides. She knew the house like she knew her skin.

          The couch was stuck to her back and shoulders, and it sucked at her as Abigail sat up. It was hot, and she was sweating. Ratty cotton clung to her stomach and chest. She stripped off the tank-top and threw it, wadded, into the corner. She pulled her legs over the side of the sofa and planted bare feet onto the hardwood. As she stood, she groaned and cracked her neck, and the floorboards creaked with her.

          She padded down the hallway, past sheet-covered mirrors and locked bedrooms, and down the stairs. She walked with a slump in her shoulders and a curve in her spine like gravity was too much for her to bare. Eyes sticky with sleep, Abigail gripped the bannister for support. She knew which steps would wail under her small weight, had mapped them as a child. She stepped on them all for the company of noise.

          At the foot of the stairs was the front door, flanked on either side by windows that Abigail had long since blockaded with cardboard and masking tape. The mailslot was stuck open. She slammed it closed and wiped her fingers on her shorts and bent to pick up the mail. Envelopes and ads, she passed through the dining room and tossed them onto the table with the rest. The pile was high and due for an avalanche, and many of the envelopes were stamped an angry, demanding red. They said things like PAST DUE and FINAL NOTICE.

          The kitchen was marble topped and wood hewn like the rest of the house. She opened the fridge. Cold and light spilled over her naked torso. She picked a half-eaten can of peaches and ate it over the sink. Staring at a blinded window, she tried thinking of nothing. The house, the empty house, was quiet. The kind of quiet that hung in the air, stilled the light and shadows, that filled every splinter of wood, every knickknack, every carpet fiber, every wire. Pushing at her, condensing her, trapping her. It filled her mouth and her nose and seeped down her throat and into her lungs and stomach and into her intestines and blood, so that it flowed out of her and through her, and she could feel it beating in her heart and soul.        

          Abigail turned on the TV and upped the volume as loud as it would go. She tossed her spoon into the sink where it clattered against the rest of the dishes. She trashed the peach can and went into the laundry room and put on a wrinkled t-shirt. She collapsed into the sueded cloth of another couch and looked at the TV without watching it. She let her eyes glaze.

Later she ate again and read and masturbated and sat at the TV. She counted the dust bunnies of grime and red hair along the baseboards. The sun faded to moonlight, and when it rose again Abigail drifted off. On the border of dreaming she made herself a promise, as she had yesterday and as she would tomorrow. She promised she would change, that she would soon be someone else, somewhere else.

Abigail had not left the house for seven hundred and twenty-one days.

Sometimes, pacing through rooms, Abigail would stretch her body wide to fill the empty spaces of the house. She spread her arms and hands and fingers high above her head, reaching for the small cracks in smooth ceilings. Her steps were massive and loping, so that each footfall thudded down into the foundations, shaking the furniture and rattling her dead mother’s crystal. She spun on the balls of her feet and turned on her heels and danced without form or music until all the pent energy leeched from her blood.

At other times, she spoke to herself. Abigail’s words twisted and skittered across octaves, between voices, so that whatever room she was in filled with ghosts of her own imagining. She sang, too. Her voice was not high, clear, or beautiful, but her dead father had always liked it.

She’d had a sister once, who was too young to have left much behind. A few tick marks on a wall in the garage, one for each year of growth signed Catherine in clumsy scrawl. And there were toys, odds and ends, that sat untouched on side tables and under dining room chairs.  

The dead had rooms on the second floor.

At the top of the stairs was the master, bordering the study. Down the hall, Abigail’s room faced Catherine’s. The doors were thick slabs of wood stained a brown so dark it might have been black. Each had a round doorknob of oxidized bronze and a keyhole. All but the study was locked.

Some nights, when songs and distractions couldn’t dispel the silence, Abigail would creep up the stairs and press her ear against a door and listen and hope for some remnant of life. But she had never opened the doors. And she didn’t believe in ghosts.

          The day Abigail’s family died, they had eaten breakfast in the kitchen nook and left their dishes. Abigail had never moved them. A bowl and spoon, calcified milk and sugar pooled in the bottom, crusted and jaundiced. The hollowed shell of a half grapefruit, warped and desiccated like ancient shoe leather and grey. A plate, cleaned but for the coat of bacon grease whose shine was killed by dust.

          Sat in her place, beside the plates, she ate rice and beans. She was still hungry when she finished but didn’t eat any more. She licked her plate clean and rinsed it and added it to the pile in the sink. The plates, the bowls, the silverware stacked high over the edge of the basin, leaning into the wall and creeping to the windowsill.

          Abigail had always been small, but now she was thin. She lifted her shirt and counted her ribs. Taut skin spanned her hipbones. She ran her fingers over the bones, finding them unfamiliar and alien. Her knees and elbows protruded, huge and knobby next to wasting legs, arms, hands.

          The money, the inheritance and the insurance, was running out.

          “You can’t sit still forever,” said Abigail in a low, gruff voice.

          “You can’t sit still forever,” in a voice much like her own but higher.

          “You can’t sit still forever.” A voice higher still, childish lisps on the s sounds.

          She looked back to the nook, to the empty plates and places and made herself feel nothing. In her mind she closed a door. Later, she ate again (barely) and read and masturbated and ate (barely) and sat at the TV.

          Abigail had not left the house for eight hundred and two days.

          The house swelled in the storm. Its old, rheumatic joints ballooned up in the wet. All the air of the place was damp and smelled like earth and sawdust. It was cold, going on freezing, and Abigail had taken to wrapping herself in blankets that trailed behind her like robes, cutting wide, clean swaths in the dust of the floor. She lit candles for warmth and light, drifting from room to room with a flame in hand, flickering at the end of a long sliver of wax. If she stopped and sat, the chill would sink into her bones and never leave.

          Candlelight birthed strange creatures. Sharp edges like teeth grew out of the walls. Spindly shadow hands and arms spawned from wall hangings and bits of kitsch, small goblin things that covered the floors and snatched at Abigail’s feet.

Thunder cracked overhead. Its great bellow shook the house, and Abigail with it, so that she felt a tingling in her bones as if invisible lightning had wrapped its claws around her chest. Banshee winds whistled and moaned past the windows. Abigail imagined them as solid snake-things, slithering through the streets, encircling the house and hissing outside her doors.

A million schizophrenic drumbeats hammered the roof. The rain was working its way in: dripping from ceilings, worming through windowsills. The beating grew louder, denser, heavier, until Abigail was sure it must be hail. It grew harsher still, and her mind wandered to meteorites and missiles.

Abigail was under siege. She paced faster and faster, caged and feeling it unlike ever before. Under the shell of wool and cotton draped over her shoulders, she wringed her fingers and sweated everywhere.

A lull, a retreat of wind and hail and thunder.

She breathed deep and sighed. Then she heard glass shattering upstairs. Seeing a crack in the walls, the storm launched its second assault, and now Abigail was frozen. Wind rattled overhead, shaking her locked doors. A grating noise, and a massive thud. Banging, and more of the hail, but closer now, just above her.

Abigail rocked in place and listened, one ear cocked upward. She pulled air through her teeth and grimaced and climbed the stairs. A low breeze skated over the steps, filtering down from above. She went slow, climbing one stair at a time. In her blankets, hunched against the cold and bent from fear, she looked an old woman struggling up a mountain.

Catherine’s door battered against its frame, shaking the walls. Rainwater oozed from the crack beneath, and flickers of distant lightning cast strobes on the hardwood. Abigail leaned into the door and pressed her ear against the wood. Inside, she heard the shrieking gales and the hail, and she heard paper flapping. She remembered: afternoons of ink-stained fingertips, sixty-four packs of crayons, washed-out watercolors, and Catherine smiling over her work, pinning it to her walls.

Abigail was furious now. Furious at the memories, at herself for remembering. Furious at the rain and wind and hail for its destruction, for its trespass. She shrugged off her blankets and went into the office and dug into the bottom drawer of the desk. She found the key to the bedroom doors and pocketed it and then went back down the stairs, taking them two at a time.

In the kitchen, she opened the door to the attached garage and stepped in, and then back out as she saw the total blackness inside. The stench of rot, hot and sticky and too-sweet, hit her in a wall. She dug through a kitchen drawer and found a flashlight, turned it on, and pointed it into the garage.

Stacks upon stacks of shiny plastic bags cascaded down from the back wall to the front. The garbage reeked of death and decay. Abigail gagged and dry heaved twice. She pinched her nose and stepped in, landing one delicate step between bags, and then another, until she was surrounded by the heap. The floor was slick and tacky in places, gummy between her toes. The taste of it was in her mouth, acid like mold and rotten strawberries. Air painted thick onto her skin, a second layer of spoiled flesh.

She aimed the light and found what she was looking for: her father’s shiny red toolchest. She moved for it, too quickly, and misaimed her step. Her foot crashed into a bag, and the thin plastic split. Her right foot sank into its guts up to the shin, a sludge drowning her skin. The smell was unbearable. She turned her head and retched onto the heap, though she had little but bile in her stomach. Somewhere there was a mass of skittering and motion under the far bags as rats shifted to her sounds.

She made it to the chest and pulled open all its drawers and took her father’s staple gun and a thick, oily canvas tarpaulin. She followed the low candlelight and found the door back to the house. On the threshold she looked down at her feet, at the coated skin and matted hair and filthy toenails, and jerked her head back up. She took off her sweatpants, took the key out of the pocket, and wiped her feet with their tops and tossed the ruined fabric into the garage and pulled shut the door.

Remnant grime followed her upstairs, greenish-brown footprints on the wood and carpets. She came to Catherine’s door and unlocked it. The wind pushed, and Abigail pushed back. Inch by inch, the door cracked and then there was another lull in the wind, and Abigail staggered forward and stumbled into the bedroom.

The broken window was a great, circular porthole that dominated the outward wall. Shards of glass jutted out from its perimeter and scattered like shrapnel on the floor. Under the glass was a bench windowseat built into the wall where Catherine had often sat and peered out into the wide world like the sole passenger of some giant ship. The floor was littered with all of Catherine’s drawings and paintings, soaked through and tattered and lost. Pellets of tennis ball hail filled the corners. Catherine’s narrow brass bed had flipped and stood now on its side against the wall. Her soft pink comforter, stamped with a cartoon princess, laid crumpled underneath. The walls were as pink as they’d ever been. Abigail stared at the room for a while and felt like crying, but didn’t let herself.

She went to the window and tried to step up onto the bench, but she was weak from hunger, weaker than she’d realized, and she had to claw onto a corner of wall to pull herself up. Abigail wobbled and misjudged her balance and fell forward. As she caught herself on the window frame, a spike of broken glass caught in the palm of her left hand and sliced it from heel to joint. She called out, cursing, and leaned back into the wall.

The staple gun was heavy, and she could barely reach the top of the window with the tarp. Blood ran from her hand, winding in rivulets down her arm and under her shirt. She drove the staples through the tarp and into the window frame, and she was sweating by the end of the effort. She stepped down from the seal, careful to avoid more broken glass, and looked at the window from afar.

Cradling her wounded hand between her breasts, Abigail stooped to collect Catherine’s drawings. The rain started again in earnest, pelting the tarpaulin. The wind came, and the canvas ballooned out like a fat stomach. There was a ripping noise, and the fabric tore away from the staples. A circle severed from the middle of the tarp and caught a gust and flew off down the hall. Rain and wind flowed like all the seas of the world through the porthole.

Abigail straightened and walked to the door. When she tried to close it, a gust caught the wood and jammed it back against the wall. She went to the hall and leaned her head against the door to her own bedroom and then turned and slid down until her legs crumpled beneath her.

The rain was so thick that she couldn’t see the sky beyond it, only a solid grey. She gathered her blankets up and built a shield against the wind. Her teeth chattered, and her hand was still bleeding, and she was very cold.

All the doors were open now.

Her parents’ bathtub was a great porcelain basin mounted on cast iron lion’s feet. Pristine except for the dust, Abigail wiped the tub with a cloth and ran the taps. The faucets only offered water as cold as the house. On the white tile next to the tub, she’d put an old propane camp stove she’d found in the pantry. She filled a huge stockpot from the taps and set it to boil on the stove. When the water bubbled, she poured it into the stoppered tub and filled the rest from the taps.  She tested the water with a hand and disrobed and stepped in.

Grime haloed out around her feet and shins, her thighs, her stomach, her chest, her shoulders. The clear water turned grey and murky. She laid back, and closed her eyes and let the warmth sink into her. She lowered her stinging hand into the water, and red drifted off her palm, swirled into the grey. She cleaned the wound, which was angry and swollen, and thought of gangrene and blood poison, and she frowned. She flipped the hand and counted the blue veins through transparent skin. Tracing the veins up her arms, she came to a stop at her shoulders, which were spotted with dull freckles. She took a rag and scrubbed herself, head to toe, and then drained the wastewater and filled the tub again. After two more rounds in the tub, her skin was bright pink, and her red hair shone with wet. Feeling human again, she drained the tub a final time and wrapped herself in a thick terry towel.

          There was a photo on her parents’ dresser of when they were young, younger than Abigail was now. They were smiling and happy. Abigail looked like her mother, a hollowed out version thinner in the cheeks and darker in the eyes, but the resemblance was plain.

          In the photo, Abigail’s mother wore a dress, fine and emerald colored. Abigail found it in the closet, zipped into a garment bag. She put the dress on. It was loose, but right in the length. Abigail took the photo from the dresser and sat at her mother’s vanity table.

          She had never shuttered the windows here, and so Abigail did her makeup by sunlight. She held the photo close to find all the right shades. She shadowed her eyes, blushed her cheeks, lined her lashes. Soft red on her lips. She blurred all the hungry lines of her face until she had made a ghost of herself.  Her mother was there, in the mirror.

          Abigail’s throat caught, and she put a hand to her lips. Her mother did the same, a tear streaming down her left cheek. Abigail smiled, to see her mother’s smile, and she laughed, a short sound like something fleeing her chest. She reached out and touched her mother’s fingertips, the glass cold.

          In a voice much like her own, but higher, in her mother’s voice, she said, “I love you Abigail,” and then she remembered everything.

          It came tumbling in all at once. Abigail slumped in her creaking chair, crushed by the weight of remembering. All the things she’d forced herself to forget, all the things she’d lost, surrounded her like a net drawn tighter and tighter until it pierced her skin. This razor sadness squeezed her lungs of air that exploded from her mouth as huge, heaving sobs. She doubled at the waist and put head to knees and darkened her mother’s green silk with her tears.

          From a window, a solid block of yellow sunlight cut her in two across the waist, lighting her back and face so that her skin grew warm like the tears spilling from her eyes. Black mascara streaked her cheeks. She looked high and low on her parents’ walls and peered beneath their bed and searched for any meaningful trace of them, but she found nothing. It was only a room, deserted. She wept until her body was dry, wringed out.

          When she was finished, Abigail felt lighter. Something had crawled off her back. She closed her eyes and felt every inch of her body. The soreness in her bones, resting against the hard floor. The hunger in her stomach, which did not growl but rather gnawed. The aching pulses in her hand. When she opened her eyes, her parents were standing over her, and Catherine stood in the hall, and they were all smiling and reaching out to her, beckoning her. Abigail slammed her eyes shut and opened them again, and the ghosts, visions, hallucinations were gone.

          When Abigail turned the tap of the kitchen sink, no water came out. She tried other taps, in the bathrooms and the laundry room, but the result was the same. The water was gone like the food, the power, the life, and so the house was dead.

Abigail paced around the husk, dry-mouthed and empty, the last spark of life in its belly. She would pause at times and inspect the flames at the ends of her dwindling candles. They danced and flickered under her breath while the puddles of mottled wax at their bases grew and their time ran out, and she felt a kinship to the flames.

          She found herself gravitating to doors and windows, to standing for long whiles before Catherine’s broken window. Frigid breezes rolled out of long sky, and she imagined herself free of this ruined house, flying in the cold, her skin hardened to stone so that she couldn’t shiver or be broken.

She held her hand now to the wind, and the air cooled her wound, blew away the stink of rot. Already she was losing feeling in her fingers. The hand, the hunger, the thirst, the cold— these were clocks hanging around her neck, and if one rang so would the others.

She smelled smoke, and not the candlesmoke she was used to. The acrid, dense smell made her throat itch. Abigail ran to the steps and found the stairwell filling with a jet cloud that brought stinging water to her eyes. To her right, in her parents’ room, were flames gobbled up a set of velvet drapes. Her room was alight, too, and the study. Books on the wall went like kindling, and the long runner carpet in the hall caught an ember. She was surrounded by flame, feeling the heat at her back, and smoke lodged in her lungs so that she was coughing every few seconds. She thought of the broken window, and jumping, but the idea terrified her, and Catherine’s room was catching red.

          Abigail took a deep breath and charged down the stairs, into the fire. She couldn’t see, instead counting the steps as she went until she came halfway down and ran full on into a blaze. The wall of fire stood immovable at the foot of the stairs, creeping its way up, chewing the floorboards around the front door. Abigail backtracked and struggled over the bannister, and then jumped onto an unburnt spot below. The kitchen, the dining room, the living room: all lost to flame.

          She went low, crawling on her stomach under the smoke. She pulled herself forward with her hands, embers searing her fingertips and chest. Motes of flame slipped down the front of her loose dress and burned her collarbones, her ribs, her empty stomach. Her skin became raw and red, and it sang out in hot pain.

          A window broke behind her, at the front of the house. Air rushed in, filling a vacuum, and the backdraft ignited the air. A fireball bloomed, filling the space above Abigail with a deep orange span of destruction. Agony blazed across her calves and back as her skin bubbled from the heat and blistered, and she screamed and sucked in smoke and then coughed. Her lungs ached for air.

          She felt new flames, lapping at the backs of her thighs. Abigail turned and found her mother’s dress alight. She could smell the burning silk, even under the rest of the smoke, strong like scorched hair. Abigail rolled over onto the flame, but it still crept up her legs and back. She pulled her arms out of the dress straps and shoved it down her chest and past her waist and kicked the silk away, into the fire.

          The back door, wreathed in flame. It was close, but to Abigail the distance stretched eternal. Her thoughts were scattered and strange, strangled by lack of oxygen. She stood, scrambling to her feet, and her head was lost in black smoke. In the cloud, she saw Death’s face, an old friend. She stumbled below the black and gasped in soot sullied air. Abigail limped to the door, burnt legs failing her, and then she was there. She grabbed the handle, and the brass seared her already burned hands, but she pulled the door open and found fire on the other side.      

          Abigail dove through the fire and landed hard on cold concrete. She pushed off the ground with both hands and put distance between her and the house. Her body cried out in pain burned and naked to the air. Steam spilled off her. She coughed and hacked and doubled over and then collapsed onto the yard. Winter yellowed grass filled the gaps between her toes, cool and rough and brittle.

          She looked back to the house, through the flames, and saw nothing but the inferno. No Death, no family, followed her into the light. Wood groaned and crackled, and the house’s roof slumped and collapsed.

          The air was freezing, but the sun shone high over the burning house. Between coughs Abigail breathed deep, swallowing the smoky air like it would end her hunger.

She could hear the world anew, like thick plugs of wax had melted from her ears. From far off, she heard sirens. Voices nearby. Eyes peered over fences, and then full faces emerged. They called out to her, but she didn’t know what to say. Abigail had not left the house for a very long time.