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You are alone on a deserted island, and you are trying not to starve. It is harder than you once imagined when playing survivors with Abigail on the oceanside cliffs.
Everything is harder without Abigail.
Though there are monsters and ghosts here, you are not afraid of the dark. Something about it comforts you, feels like home. There have always been monsters and ghosts for you. But you build a fire anyway—sometimes to cook, sometimes to keep warm, sometimes just to help you remember the world of before, where there were fires in hearths and a father who loved you.
You wander the island alone for many days, scavenging for berries and carrots and birchnuts. If you’re lucky, you catch a rabbit or two, or perhaps steal an egg out from under the beak of a tallbird. You try to fight off the creatures that also roam this land—the giant spiders and aggressive frogs and snarling batilisks—but you don’t hit very hard and eventually find it easier to run away.
You get used to making a new camp every night. The waves of baying hounds make it hard to stay in one place for long. You haven’t truly had a sense of home since Abigail, though, so it’s okay. You don’t need a home, let alone here of all places.
One night, while waiting out the cold and the dark, you take Abigail’s flower out of the knapsack you’ve fashioned from twigs and long prairie grass. You miss her, and you cannot help but hum to it, your voice an alto flute.
Something about the flower—a chrysanthemum that you picked together on your last shared birthday—is different. While it was once shriveled and tightly closed, tonight it seems like it has bloomed again, the petals still dried but now open, full, and round, rustling faintly in the breeze like an orb of paper-thin feathers. There is a slight glow about it, too.
When you lay the flower by the fire, it floats gently above the ground. An ethereal hum, mimicking your own, emanates from the center where the petals connect to the sepals. You can’t quite figure it out. So you take it with you carefully, sew a small pocket into your skirt so it doesn’t get crushed by the knapsack under the weight of your survival.
You carry Abigail’s flower for days until, purely by accident, you spear a butterfly while trying to defend yourself from a killer bee, and it falls dead to the ground, orange wings twitching. The flower begins to bristle and shake, the petals rippling as if a windstorm was brewing inside it.
And then, from the center, comes Abigail.
It takes you a moment to recognize her. She doesn’t look like she used to—a bit more nebulous, and translucent, and intangible. Just a shapeless blob, really. But she has the same eyes, and the bow that matches yours where her hair would be. It is your sister, there can be no question.
Abigail does not talk anymore, just makes a strange sort of whooshing sound, but you quickly learn to communicate. You never needed to talk much when she was alive anyway.
There are other ways in which she is not herself, though. In life, she was always brave Abigail, strong Abigail, adventurous Abigail—the pep and energy to your doom and gloom. And she is still strong, but now her vivacity has turned to rage. She gets angry—inexplicably, irrationally, violently. She lashes out; she glows red. She attacks the monsters, but also the rabbits and butterflies and birds. (But not you. Never you.) She storms off and disappears for days sometimes, leaving you alone with her tightly closed flower once more.
But she always comes back.
You are both adjusting to the new normal, you think. It’s probably difficult to be dead, and harder still to be raised from the dead. So you do your best to appease her. You calm her when she gets riled up. You lead her to the spiders when she needs to take out her agitation with a bit of murder. And in return, she stands guard every night, protects you from the hounds while you attempt to sleep, and eventually you are able to settle down in a spot on the grasslands. You build a camp with a tent and a fire pit and even some stone walls.
It is still a hard life. It is still not the life you wanted, or expected. It is still an island where you are surrounded by monsters and ghosts and trying not to starve.
But Abigail is here with you again, and for now, that is all you need.
