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When she was little, Abigail Hobbs’ father told her she was cursed by a witch. She tried to run away from home. She saw someone do it on TV.
Her father caught her before her small hand could touch the doorknob, prompting her to scream.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
She looked at him, her shoulder aching under his iron grip. She could not lie to her father, so she told him the truth. ‘I’m running away.’
His grip tightened, and he dragged her back inside to the kitchen. Her legs were shaking from her efforts to keep up. He sat her down on a chair with a little more force than necessary.
‘Listen, Abigail,’ he commanded. She listened.
‘You have a curse.’
A witch had come to their house, he said, when she had just been born. She had cursed her then, and it had been a terrible curse.
‘You can never disobey your father,’ her father told her. ‘Or bad things will happen to those you love.’
She had cried and cried back then, mostly from the pain on her shoulder. But a parent’s words were a cruel thing, cementing themselves into her fate, crawling beside her dad’s fingers into the nerves under her skin.
At one point, her mother came into the room to see her clutching at her folded knees in the chair, her father having left a while ago. She asked Abigail what was wrong, and held her for a while, hoping to stop her cries. The warmth of her mother’s embrace only made the bruise on her shoulder burn hotter. The comforting petting on her back felt like her mom was trying to keep all evil from escaping from under Abigail’s skin. To tame it, like only a mother can. Abigail stopped crying eventually, and went to bed.
Years later, she would find out her father only told her that to keep her in line. A meaningless lie that parents tell to children with active imaginations, to make them listen, make them behave. By now, however, the curse is so deeply lodged into her psyche, she chooses to keep believing in it. Her belief cements it in place. And who’s to say there is no curse, if its effects are there and pointing at it?
Abigail will never admit this to anyone, but she often thinks of what her father must have been like at her age. Or even younger.
Everyone does it, at some point in their life, whether they’ve met their parents or not. They imagine their family in their shoes, living a life similar to theirs. With similar struggles, and similar dreams. It’s something Abigail does to feel closer to them, to forge a path between their souls and pretend it’s not riddled with thorns.
It’s hard not to imagine her father’s past in black and white. A sepia filter over all of his best memories, based on blurred or damaged pictures she’s seen in albums around her grandparents’ house before they both passed.
It’s an odd feeling, to humanise her dad like this. She’s read the books, watched the serial killer documentaries. She knows what is meant to be right and what is meant to be wrong. But the books and the videos and the talks do not share the same genes as her, their blood is not coursing through her veins. It’s not them she sees when she looks at the mirror, not them she hears when she opens her mouth.
It’s freeing, really. A form of ‘self-love’, as they call it. Seeing her dad as nothing but a child, back in a time when he had no daughter, when her curse had not reached and seized him yet.
She sees a small, energetic boy, running along with his peers at school. Even in her fantasies, he is meticulous, clean and obsessive. Everything he does is perfected to an esteemed degree, even kicking a ball that’s a third of his size.
Sometimes she even sees him as a prince, in a faraway kingdom, slaying monsters and beasts to protect his land and his people.
Now, he only slays girls who look like her.
There are no monsters under her bed. They’re all scrambling to get away from her.
It is her curse that holds her in place when her father turns against her. Of that, she is completely sure. There is an invisible hold on her arms and legs as Garret Jacob Hobbs’ handprints etch into her skin, opening old metaphysical wounds, and it keeps her in place as the kitchen knife is dragged across her throat.
You cannot move, it tells her, you must not move. Bad things will happen to those you love.
I love you, mom, I love you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
Despite it all, she can’t help the love that pours out of her as she watches her father breathe his last breath. It pours out of her in a warm, constant stream, and keeps on pouring — until Doctor Lecter’s hands clamp over it, protectively.
The kitchen knife has been plaguing Abigail’s thoughts, ever since she woke up from her coma. She remembers holding it, washing it, putting it away, time and time again. In some moments it feels like she had been taking care of it, preparing it for its big day. She tries to convince herself that whenever she touched it, her skin would tingle in phantom pain, warning her of the future. She soon begins to believe that, too. The tingling is so real in her memory she can scarcely think of anything else.
She thinks, too, of the magic that was put on her. Of the witch who was responsible for it all. On the worst days, the witch’s face is so familiar. Long brown hair and bright blue eyes, a scarf around her neck.
Stuck in Port Haven for days and days, she plucks childhood memories like flowers, adding characters and stories to them that explain her future for her. The memories become so vivid, much like the tingling with the kitchen knife, that she begins to see them and relive them as if she is there again. She even remembers the witch, visiting their house when Abigail was barely an infant, bestowing her curse on her cradle. Other faux memories decorate her psyche, of times when she tried to disobey the curse. Whenever she did, snakes and lizards would come out of her nose and throat, and she would freeze in place. Everyone around her would look at her disapprovingly, and avert their gazes. The critters would scurry away, and leave her all alone. Just like the monsters under her bed once did.
And worst of all, her father’s disappointed gaze would crash into every single memory there was, sternly reminding her of who she was always meant to listen to and follow.
Poor Abigail Hobbs is cursed, and there is nothing she can do to stop it. That old witch is surely dead by now, unable to lift her magic. Abigail is stuck with it forever.
With her father now dead, too, the conditions of her curse have moved on to another person. Another man. She believes it to be Will Graham at first, and resents him for it. His hands are the first to touch her wounded skin, shaking and attempting to stop the bleeding. That’s always how she sees him, when she thinks of him after that day. Shaking. Trying to stop her wounds from spilling over. His touch always stings in her imagination.
She remembers looking into Will Graham’s eyes, covered by blood-speckled glasses. The red dots on the lenses looked like a thousand sets of eyes, all begging her to survive. In that moment, he did not look human.
She plucks the memory, reshapes it. When she visits it again, Will Graham is half-man, half-beast. He’s speaking an ancient language, trying to tether Abigail’s soul to his own.
Soon, though, she realises she is wrong.
As Hannibal Lecter’s eyes are roaming over Nicholas Boyle’s corpse, Abigail marvels in her mind how red his pupils look, even without the aid of blood. She also thinks, ‘ how foolish was I? ’
The memory of Lecter’s hands on her throat rushes back to her like a current, and the story changes once again. His figure morphs into that of a creature of the night, fangs protruding, resting on his bottom lip. His eyes are red, a sea of calm and volcanic soil. He knows of the witch’s curse, and he coats his hands in it.
It was never Will Graham who she should have watched out for. It was the man on the phone.
She remembers his voice, obstructed by the static of the phone speaker. ‘May I speak with Garret Jacob Hobbs?’ it had said. She adds tendrils of black smoke to the memory, seeping through the little holes in the device, lodging themselves into her throat, where they will seep out from later.
She knew right away it was him, when they first talked. She remembers the mute shock of it. If she were anyone else, she would have convinced herself she was making it up.
When he offers to help her hide the body, she thinks of her first hunt. She sees the young deer so vividly, as if they’re standing right before her. Perhaps their ghosts are. There is guilt in that vision, and curiosity. If she were to look in a mirror now, she’d see the wide eyes of a child, eager to absorb the world, not knowing the eyelids are there to protect her from the bad things. No matter what childhood memory she goes back to, her eyes are always wide open within it. Observing, absorbing, learning.
She learns now, too, that there is a bigger predator in the room. And as her curse has doomed her to, she follows in his footsteps.
Abigail has to get up. Breakfast gets served in fifteen minutes. She likes being there early. The early morning is for prey to thrive in. Predators work at night.
She likes to pretend.
But now, she can’t get up. There’s a weight on her shoulders, two wicked hands forcing her down on her bed. An afterimage of her curse, she thinks. The best she can do is flip on her stomach and hike her knees under her torso. She feels like a little kid.
She had a dream, right before she had woken up. The memory of it is still fresh on her mind. She hopes it fades away before breakfast.
In her dream, she was looking at snowdrops while walking down the pathways of a big green park. She fell on her knees, her eyes not leaving the flowers, hot tears flowing down her face. She screamed and screamed, as she always did when she had nightmares, a trick she learned as a kid to force herself awake.
She was shaken awake by her father, who was shushing her, petting her hair and her shoulder.
‘It’s just a nightmare, Abi,’ he was saying, ‘Just a nightmare.’
And then she woke up again. Her shoulder and the side of her head were burning hot, dried tear tracks red on her cheeks.
She stays still, looking down emptily at the mattress, her forehead supported by the edge of her pillow.
‘I’m so alone,’ she says to the bedsheets. It comes out as a wet sob.
‘I’m so alone.’ Does she say it as a lamentation, or reassurance? She is not sure. She just hopes Hannibal Lecter doesn’t hear.
They are changing the sheets today, so no remnants of her admission will be found. Her tears will spin and spin in the washing machine, until their song fades away into oblivion.
She gets up and goes downstairs.
When she steps in the shoe prints on the mud, her own are always smaller. Incomplete. She thinks that if she stepped on a clear patch of land, made her own footprints, they wouldn’t look so small, for there would be nothing to compare them to. She’s so lost in those hypothetical thoughts that she hasn’t realised where the steps are actually leading her.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you in this life,’ says Hannibal. His embrace makes her skin tingle. Her scar has memorised the touch of his hands. She can probably trace his fingerprints in the air.
She stays still, expecting her fate. Idly, she wonders if Will is still in the cabin. If he has made his way back home, or if he has fainted, or simply snapped out of existence. Abigail imagines the phantom specks of blood on his glasses, scattering away like flies as he fades away from reality. She knows she had to leave him, it was in her destiny. Yes, she imagines that is what she would tell Hannibal, if he demanded an answer.
She pictures Will Graham laying on the floor in her father’s cabin, scratching at the floorboards, searching for her father’s face beneath the cracks. He won’t find it there, she knows. What he will find instead is much worse, a cruel fate woven into his fibers by her and Hannibal alone.
She’s in denial the first few weeks after killing Nicholas Boyle.
She refuses to see her actions as they were - a sloppy and misguided attempt at control. At freedom.
And how foolish of her, to desire freedom. In the same way a fish desires the clear air of land, or a man the flight of birds.
Abigail wants to write her dad a letter. She tests it in her mind, on her tongue.
Dear dad,
She can’t get past that first part.
Dear dad. Dead dad. Dear dad.
She stares at a blank sheet of paper, torn from a notebook. It’s one Alana bought for her, when she was still trying to save Abigail with gifts. There are flowers on the cover. It mixes really well with the interior garden in Port Haven. Almost like Dr Bloom had that in mind when she was buying it, instead of Abigail herself.
Dear dad,
Did you know that when you die, your fate repeats and mixes with the blood of your children?
Did you plant it there yourself, or did God?
The words lose meaning as soon as she scribbles them out, so she crumples the paper into a ball. It feels more solid now, with the words out of sight. She starts over.
Dear dad,
The pen turns into a kitchen knife. Abigail stabs through the paper, careful to avoid its guts.
She has to end the letter, somehow, even before she has written it all. She doesn’t know what it should say at the bottom. Not regards, or best wishes, or kisses. Not yours. That word would mean a vastly different thing on paper: a skewed version of a universal truth. She is his, but not in a way that can be translated via ink. She will not allow the ownership of her soul to lose meaning. Not like that.
She decides to finish it off the same way it starts.
Dear dad.
In dreams she is crueller to him, much more honest. More something she has never been.
‘Why?’ she dares to ask him. ‘Why did you want to kill me? What was so wrong with me?’
The girls all answer her instead. They’re the monsters of her fairytale, but if that is so, why are they all so much like her?
They tell her that she should have died instead of them. Abigail wants to agree to appease them, but the best she can do is choke herself awake. She remembers that she is breathing, and they are not. The monsters are gone from under the bed. It’s only the princess that is left. The knight and the evil step-mother are both cooking in the oven. The chef is making dinner.
‘You told me that killing someone is the ugliest thing in the world,’ Abigail repeats Will Graham’s words back to him, her tone accusatory.
When she looks into his eyes, she does not see a reflection of herself as she is - moving, breathing, talking. She sees a picture.
’I didn’t feel ugly when I killed Nick Boyle,’ she admits at last. Being around Will Graham makes it so easy to admit things. To say them out loud and test them on the air around them, even if they’re half-true. ‘I felt good.’
The words add the intended weight to the room. She’s testing the waters, on the one hand. On the other, she's just playing into the game her curse had thrust her into. There’s a pawn glued to her palm, waiting to be moved. She has no choice but to move along with it.
It's an accusation as much as it is a question. The sharp look in her eyes help her conversational partner read between the lines, and Will’s answer silences the beats of her heart, even if it’s just for a second.
’I felt terrified,’ he says, the rest of the room dimming to black with each syllable. ‘Then, I felt powerful.’
’You felt good.’ Abigail wants to smile. It’s more of a knee-jerk reaction, an instinct.
The conversation inevitably turns to Garret Jacob Hobbs. In all of Will Graham’s attempts to connect with Abigail, he can only ever connect with her father’s perception of her. It’s a comforting thought, no matter how bitter it makes the taste of bile in her throat.
’It feels like my dad’s still out there,’ she tells him, her words holding more than one meaning. Will catches the metaphor as much as his circumstance allows.
‘In a way, he is,’ says Will. He looks to his left. Abigail doesn’t have to wonder what he sees. It reflects in his pupils. And in the windows surrounding them.
She wonders where Will Graham’s curse lies. She’s tried asking him a few times, but there's always something holding back her words. The same pairs of hands holding her down in her bed in most mornings, perhaps. The dangers of hope, of understanding. Of being understood.
The two of them cannot help each other, despite Will’s attempts at tethering himself to her. Or to the ghost of her father. She knows it, just as she knows the wings on her back will never sprout feathers.
Abigail knows it’s a bad idea to have come all the way here with Will the moment they enter the cabin.
The veins in his arms are starting to remind her of someone else. She’s afraid that if she looks up to his face, she’ll see someone all too familiar.
Will does not back down. They shoot back and forth between conversations about hunting and fishing, and murder.
‘No, that’s not what I’m asking,’ comes the inevitable confrontation. Abigail feels the air become thicker in the room, tendrils of black smoke filling their lungs. Hers and his both. Expanding with the reality of the knowledge. Of the inevitable, and terrifying, understanding.
It’s a direct parallel to the conversation they had back in Port Haven, though back then, she had been the one accusing him.
On the other side of that question lies Abigail Hobbs’ life and death.
‘All those girls your dad killed… Did you fish, or did you hunt, Abigail?’
And she wants to tell him so badly. She wants him to know. She is about to, too, until his tremors start.
His eyes roll back, pupils darting upwards. He is present at one moment, and the next he is not. Physically, he is there, yes, but his mind has left the cabin, and she is alone. Again. It’s a warning, she knows. If she is honest, someone will get hurt.
Maybe that is Will Graham’s curse. He’s absorbed part of Abigail’s own. He’s absorbed her father. Or at least the aspect of him that gets hurt. Hannibal, on the other hand, is the part that commands. If she disobeys him, Will gets hurt, and so does she. She is in the middle. No one even asked her, warned her.
‘Ever think that somebody could be you?’ she hears herself say, but her voice sounds like Hannibal’s. The words don’t feel like they’ve been sitting in her mind on their own volition. ‘You were there. You saw Marissa. You knew about this place, and there’s something wrong with you.’
Will Graham comes back, just for a moment. Enough to have one last conversation, which dooms them both to their own narratives.
She is talking to him, but she is looking at her own reflection in his glassy eyes. She always has.
She walks away, leaving him alone in the cabin.
There is familiarity to be found in the dance she does with Hannibal, back in the kitchen of what used to be her home. The place of her first death, and the soon-to-be second. The doctor guides her through the steps of their faux crime scene. It reminds her of her hunts, of all the time she spent with her dad. It influences her hands to move freely and the hunch in her back to straighten. She’s in familiar waters, even though they’re tainted with red.
The arterial spray looks real. Fits well with the frame of reference she has in her mind. Abigail revels in the sight of her own blood. So long as she is not mounted on a wall of antlers, she is doing the right thing. The right thing. The right thing.
Will must be out there somewhere, unaware of the seeds of his demise being planted. Maybe he’s still in the cabin, or he’s left it by now. Gone home, hopefully. Abigail wonders what Will Graham considers his own home. She would feel bad for him, in another life. But in this one, she has no room for another’s suffering. There’s only room for the responsibility of putting it there, of causing it. But not for the consequences. Never the consequences.
If she cares too deeply for anyone else, the curse will make them suffer tenfold. She would much rather keep the suffering to herself.
And Hannibal has promised, after all, that all will end well for the three of them. The way he says ‘three’ sits unnaturally on his tongue, compared to the other words, but Abigail does not comment on it.
The air is crisp up here, but not the same crispness she was used to, back in her old home near the woods. Here, the dominant smell is that of the ocean. It makes Abigail feel so small. It’s a feeling she loves, only because she knows it well.
Hannibal comes to visit her, occasionally. She’s learned to appreciate his presence, much like a hostage appreciates the sliver of light from their captor opening the door. They have conversations, talk about plans. Hannibal tells her about France and Italy, she asks him about Will on occasion. The more time she’s spent away from him, the more she begins to desire repentance for her sins against him.
‘He killed Marissa,’ she reminds herself. That’s what Hannibal told her, back when she still believed his intentions were good. Ever since she dug up Nicholas Boyle, that belief has died down bit by bit.
Will has always been a pawn, Hannibal made that perfectly clear, or so she thought. The way he talks about his former friend and patient now makes her think she’s missed something fundamental. It causes her to consider who the pawn in the equation actually is.
Despite the conversations being between her and Hannibal only, she rarely feels like a participant.
Her neck itches. It is so itchy these days. She blames the salty air.
Abigail’s face feels stony, her muscles virtually useless. It’s as if her entire body is asleep besides her brain and her heart, and she just wants to fall into deep slumber along with it.
Last night she woke up at three AM from another nightmare she does not remember. Her eyes were burning, much like two bruises on her shoulder, and before she even realised it, they were filled with tears. She did not sleep afterward.
The rest of the day has been a blur, and now the only thing she can focus on are the dry tear tracks on her face, pulling at her skin as she chews on a piece of bread. She should have washed them off at some point, but she hasn’t.
There is no one around here, no one at all. No one to witness her curse, no one to put it to action. Just Abigail Hobbs, alone in a universe that wants her gone.
She sends Hannibal a text message, asking him when she’ll next see him.
Abigail confronts Hannibal the same week that Will is released from prison, fiddling with a scarf in her hands. She rarely puts it on, but she likes having something to hold all the same.
They’re having dinner on a Friday evening. Two weeks after her text. Four weeks since she’s last seen him. Usually, he brings groceries whenever he visits, but it’s been a while. She has resorted to the canned food and pickle jars in the pantry, stubbornly refusing to take meat out of the freezer. It’s a small victory, especially considering the disapproving glance Hannibal sent her way when he opened the freezer door.
The disappointed glances are all she has these days. They make her feel small again, like a child, cared for by a parent who is still alive. Being disappointed in someone means you have expectations for them, and having expectations means you care.
‘Did Will actually kill anyone?’ she dares to ask. She dreads the answer, because she has known it all along.
Hannibal savours his bite of grilled duck hearts. He has not had time to get some proper cuts, all things considered. Beverly has been properly savoured, and the judge was for a purpose different than nutrition.
‘He never did anything wrong, did he? He was only trying to help me.’ She doesn’t back down. Hannibal only smiles, and says what she wants to hear the least.
‘I think, Abigail, that the mere fact you are asking me these questions means you are already aware of the answer.’
Abigail wants to say that Hannibal’s words make a pit grow in her stomach. But they don’t, not really. If anything, they only serve as confirmation. Her curse has extended to the fathers the universe has given her. She disobeyed Will, and he is now paying for it. Even though he has been imprisoned up until now, she suspects his punishment has barely begun.
Under the table, she presses her thumb hard into the center of her palm, trying to will it to go through her skin.
She feels death looming over her, like one feels a sickness coming right before the fever hits.
The floorboards grow hands and grab at her feet as she walks by, forcing her to stop in her tracks for what feels like hours at a time. She’s been getting blocked ID calls from Hannibal every morning and every evening, telling her of where they will be headed soon, and what will most likely happen. He sounds calm on the phone, as he usually does.
Distantly, she thinks of the man on the phone. Of the day her mother died, and her father transformed into two men she’d never met.
Abigail thinks now, that this is why she gutted Nick Boyle. Foolishly she thought that killing someone would make you turn into them, but she was wrong. When she watched Will Graham do it, she assumed that every murder was like that.
Her father consumed these girls, Will Graham consumed her father. In a sense.
What is left for her to consume? She’d eaten some of her father’s kills, yes, but she never consumed them. When she looked into Nicholas Boyle’s eyes, she saw fear. But she also saw freedom. She wanted to cut it out of him, and wear it round her neck.
Death is coming now, though, and the man on the phone has warned her. Even still, just as before, all she can do is wait.
‘Come here, Abigail.’
Hannibal says it, but it’s her father she sees.
It’s been a long, long time since she last saw him. She never looked at pictures, or old videos. Somehow, she has managed to avoid all the tabloids and news channels that bear his image on their columns. The last thing she remembers is his hand, a knife, and blood.
She stares at Hannibal’s hand. There is a knife in it, and blood.
Theoretically, she could stay in place. Not listen to the command of a pseudo-father, turn away for once, and run.
Her legs ache at the thought, muscles sending shocks and shivers up her body. She’s never run before, she does not know how.
The face of her beloved father is plastered on top of the mirage of the man in front of her. She wants to be afraid. She really does. But all she can feel is how right it is, how everything has led to this. She feels doomed, cursed, unable to turn to anyone or anything in this world, because it’s all been woven into existence with the same purpose - to kill her. To erase her.
She takes a step towards the knife.
The whole room sings.
Were this a fairytale, the furniture would perhaps come to life. The teacups would form little eyes and mouths, the handles turning into noses. They would all cheer her on, and sing, and dance, and take her hand.
Nothing dances as she walks. Only the curtains move, as well as the pool of Will Graham’s blood, reaching across the floorboards in a desperate attempt to hold her.
The choruses of please and no, no, no , sung in Will’s desperate voice, join in with the choir of melodies. There he is again, reaching with his shaking hands, trying so hard to stop the bleeding.
As she steps into Hannibal’s hold, the song comes to an end, the final crescendo weaving itself into the glint of the blade, as it smoothly drags across her neck. The wound reopens, so does a pocket in time, and Abigail sings, but her lips do not move. Will Graham protests in her stead, because she cannot.
He says her name, and his blood touches hers.
She feels it then: her curse, boiling her blood white-hot, before it slowly sizzles away. Distantly, there is a witch’s voice, a mumble, coming from a corner. At last, she says, you are free.
In her last moments, she feels the corners of her mouth move up in a soft smile. Will Graham is grasping at her throat, shivering, begging, but all she can think of is how warm his hands are.
Her father’s hands, Hannibal’s hands, they’d always been cold to the touch. Not as much temperature-wise, but rather a feeling of cold that seeped through her skin and drenched itself in her blood. Will’s hands feel like a home she never knew she had access to.
Will has broken her curse. His cursed blood and her own have mixed together, like tears in a glass of water. At last, he holds her. At last, he is a father.
And she is herself. Not a daughter. Not a curse. Just Abigail.
Freedom feels intoxicating. She does her best attempt to take a few hefty gulps in, for as long as she can. Hannibal has walked away long before her realisation, but his absence seemingly clears the air. Despite the blood flooding her throat, she can breathe more freely than ever.
She looks at Will Graham, one last time. She can do little else but choke, but as their eyes meet, she tries to say Thank you. Thank you, Will.
And his eyes bounce back and forth between her own, and he says, to the open air, Do not thank me, I did nothing. You did it all. It’s you.
No, she responds, I did not. I cannot, on my own. You wouldn’t understand.
When her last breath leaves her, she is still smiling. She is free.
Abigail Hobbs is free at last. Long live Abigail Hobbs.
A daughter, an accomplice, a murderer, a pawn.
A girl.
Just a girl.
‘Hello, Abigail.’
She’d recognise that voice anywhere. She begins to answer. Her mouth does not move.
’Hello, witch.’
’You’re free at last,’ the witch mock-sings. ‘How does freedom taste, dear Abigail?’
’Like blood.’
’You’re not the first to say that.’
She hears the rustling of fabric somewhere in front of her, the click-clacking of heels on hardwood floors. She opens her eyes, steeling herself for the sight of the witch’s ugly face.
Her own eyes stare back at her.
Abigail Hobbs smiles at herself with all the pain, sadness, and adoration in the world. She’s never experienced these things from anyone else, when she was alive. Not like this.
’I’m sorry, Abigail,’ says Abigail. ‘I’m so sorry.’
’Don’t be,’ she answers. ‘We are free.’
Abigail Hobbs embraces Abigail Hobbs, and the warmth of their embrace explodes into a brand new sun. Soon, there will be planets surrounding them. It’s an exciting thought.
She tried to save a fawn, when she was little. Back when she didn’t understand what could be saved and what could not.
She was with her dad in the woods, an accessory to yet another hunt. At that age, all she did was observe and learn. She had not yet reached the point where she would become the bait.
Garret shot a doe. The fawn was bleating a few feet away from her. Trying to reach her, but not being able to move. Its little legs were shaking.
Abigail, aged six, wobbles across to the fawn. She wants to soothe it. Garret yells something at her, probably that she should come back to him. It’s his usual command.
But Abigail is determined. In her eyes, she was sent to this Earth to save this fawn. This fawn on shaky legs, that does not know better. When their eyes meet, Abigail sees herself, with her short hair, carefully cut by a mother’s loving hand. She reaches the little fawn, hand stretched out to soothe.
The animal drops to the ground, dead.
Its heart has stopped from the shock.