Abigail

"Who the fuck do you think you are," Abigail heard her mother say from somewhere to the left of her bed. Instantly she was rolling away from the voice before she even consciously realized what was happening, her mind and body communicating in wordless shouts of terror that only meant one thing, namely to move and to be quick about it.

However, as always, she was too slow, and a lightning bolt of pain flashed across her left hip and across her belly, ending just below her ribcage. Heat blossomed across her skin, and she repressed the urge to scream, and tried to continue rolling, her eyes still squeezed shut. Another bolt of pain flashed across her forearms, which she had raised into a defensive maneuver without even realizing it, and now a cry escaped her.

She didn’t so much fall as fly from the far side of her bed, flailing her arms and legs, and trying to scramble under her bed. The pain in her arm and leg from landing on them was nothing compared to the pain waves rolling across her torso and forearms from the extension cord. She heard her mother's footsteps, quick and light, on the wood floor as she darted around to the other side of the bed.

There wasn't an immediate blow, and Abigail's eyes instinctively opened. She saw her mother looming over her, the long black extension cord hanging from her tightly clenched left fist and her shoulders heaving.

Abigail could usually determine how bad a night at work her mother had by how hard she hit her after she got home, and her howling flesh told her this had been a stupendously bad night. Abigail became truly and desperately afraid for the first night in a long time, afraid that this time her mother would kill her, that her mother had lost complete control and was going to kill her.

"Who the fuck do you think you are, just lying in bed when my house is a goddamned pig sty," her mother seethed, tightening her grip on the cord. "I told you to clean this house, and I come home and it's torn up to hell and back."

Abigail had learned long ago not to actually respond or try to defend herself when her mother spoke, it just made the beating take longer, and every word was at least an extra bruise that she could have avoided. So she remained silent, looking up at her mother with eyes swimming in tears of pain, hoping that it was over, and knowing at the same time that it was only beginning.

Her mother brought down the cord, whipping it through the air and creating this high whistling wail that was completely obliterated by the hard smack of plastic on flesh, and Abigail's own answering wail. She clasped her hands over her screaming breasts, the target of the last whip crack, and started pedaling backwards with her feet, into the wall behind her. Her mother's next whip crack smashed into the top part of her thighs, and another immediately after marched up her stomach, over her navel, and into her solar plexus. She curled up in a ball, retching with pain and terror, and tried to scurry under the bed on her elbows. Her mother brought her foot down on the back of one of her knees, and she cried out. With this new leverage and angle, her mother laid into Abigail's back with the cord, grunting every time she heard her daughter moan and felt her writhe under her heel.

"Bet you won't do it again, will you, I bet you won't," her mother chanted maniacally. Her mother's mouth would be curled into that sneer if she looked, Abigail knew, the same satisfied smirk that had taught Abigail the lesson she'd needed to learn when she was eight and the beatings started in the first place: this wasn’t about punishment, not really, the fact was that her mother beat her because she wanted to, because she could.

The bitch enjoyed it.

Abigail woke up, confused and disoriented. The sun shone through her bedroom windows, and she rolled over, still on the floor. She had to bite her lip hard enough to bleed to keep from screaming at the pain that exploded within her tortured body. She pressed her face against the floor and sobbed quietly, allowing the welts that covered her back, sides, legs and chest, to calm so that she could move.

Leveraging herself on her palms, Abigail grabbed the side of the bed and hauled herself to her feet, groaning at the pop her knee made as it slid back into place. She didn’t look at her body length mirror on the wall at the foot of the bed, she knew what she'd see, and knew that she wouldn’t like it. She did look at the clock on her nightstand, however, and realized that she was already late for getting ready for school. It was senior year and her last year in school, she knew, because while she was smart enough to go to college, there wasn't any money, and her mother would never let her go anyway. That she had no way of going to college, and had given up hope of ever going, would have broken her father's heart.

Thinking of her father made her think of the night he died, the raised voices, the knife, and most of all her mother's deranged laughing.

She limped out of her room, head hanging so she could avoid the many mirrors her mother hung between Abigail's bedroom door and the upstairs bathroom. If she didn't have to look, then she could think that she still looked normal for a little longer, before the horrified looks of the teachers and students told her what her mother had done to her face.

She made it to the end of the hall, the pain in her knee lessening, making each step a little easier, and she slipped silently into the bathroom. She closed the door, and saw a new thing that her mother had put in while Abigail slept, a horrifying, traitorous thing.

Her mother had put up a mirror on the back of the door. Abigail was faced with the full damage on her body and her face, her torn shirt, crusted to her flesh with blood in places, her legs covered in bruises below the hem of her pajama boxers, and up and down her legs there were bright vivid welts that ran under the fabric, lining up with the scarlet snakes of blood that crossed her torso and sides. But the main horror was her face, her mind skittered away from the image three times before Abigail could steel herself enough to look at it full on. And the sight made her sob involuntarily.

The right side of her face was covered in one large bruise, and her eyes both had bags under them. Her nose was bloody, and still bleeding, and Abigail realized with a start she'd been breathing through her mouth since she woke up. Her lip was bleeding from the self-inflicted bite, but also from her upper lip, which was swollen on the right side, and her left pupil had expanded to three times its normal size, making a hole in her hazel iris large enough to put a pencil eraser through. She gasped in terror and sorrow, and as her lips peeled back from her teeth she noticed she was missing three teeth, two on the bottom, including an incisor, and one up top, one of her eyeteeth, just before her upper right incisor.

Her face had been all that she had left of her father, as his clear features had been passed along to his daughter. Now her face, along with her final untouched trace of her father was ruined, and she felt something begin to twist inside her.

A rage filled her then, a rage with such hot intensity that Abigail wasn't even sure rage was a strong enough word for it, surely nothing as mundane as simple rage could describe the emotion that was coursing through her veins. It terrified her, and she closed her eyes, trying to block out her own image in an attempt to get rid of it, but it only got stronger.

In her mind's eye she saw every beating played in rapid motion, every insult, every slap across the face for an unguarded look, replayed in an instant, and knew that last night's beating was going to be the last. She was going to stop it, herself. The police had failed. The police had accepted the self-defense story of her mother when she killed her father, who had only been trying to protect a tiny and frightened Abigail. She opened her eyes and walked out of the bathroom, past her mother's room, where she was snoring loudly, and smiled. It was a smile her mother would have recognized very well, and had she been awake to see it would have realized that her own madness had finally taken root in her offspring.

Abigail made her way down the second floor stairwell and out into the living room, then through the back of that room, still barefoot in her pajamas, her sleeveless tank top and boxers. She stepped through the kitchen, over the cool black and white linoleum, her smile still twisting her mouth, and her eyes filled with purpose and bright fury. She stepped out of the back door, onto the concrete patio and across it, unmindful of the unpleasant cold of the stone, or the freezing dew on the grass once she crossed the patio, and into the garage. She knew without turning on the overhead light where she was going, and used the light that followed her in from the chill November morning to navigate the wide garage. She reached her father's tool box, and dropped to her haunches, opening and rummaging through it.

Cutting herself on the sharp and rusted edges of the tools within the box, Abigail laughed. It was a light laugh, a laugh full of what might be mistaken for mirth, and probably would be, if one couldn't see Abigail's eyes, which had gone bright and feverish. It was not good humor ringing in Abigail's laughter; it was a new sign that her madness was taking hold. She grasped the object she'd been looking for, and hauled it out, a gigantic foot and a half long iron wrench, bright fire engine red, and almost too heavy for Abigail to lift with one hand.

Its head, and the ring that loosened or tightened the jaws on the tool were covered in orange rust, and she grinned at it fiercely as she turned and started back towards the house.

She padded softly down the upstairs hallway, listening to her mother's snoring, and opened the door to her mother's bedroom softly, wrinkling her nose at the smell of alcohol that filled the room. Her mother was sprawled on her bed, on top of the covers, her legs and arms akimbo, her mouth wide open and eyes flickering beneath her eyelids. Abigail stalked up to the side of the bed, her smile every bit a twin of her mother's at her most vicious, and she tightened her grip on the wrench. The flexing of the muscles in that arm caused the welts on her forearm to scream, but still she tightened her grip, and grabbed it with her other hand as well.

Her breath came in short hot gasps, the humid air of the room flowing in increasingly rapid streams, and she stared at her mother's face, hearing the same eight words over and over in her mind, the same ones that had woken her up every night for ten years.

Who the fuck do you think you are, her mother had said when Abigail had fed a cat in the backyard and let it come inside the house. Her mother had killed it in front of her and then beat her half to death.

Who the fuck do you think you are, her mother had said when she'd kissed Jim Craterson, her first and only boyfriend before getting out of his car and coming inside the house. She'd spent three weeks healing the cuts and bruises that her mother had put on her flesh that night.

Who the fuck do you think you are, her mother had screamed in her father's face as she shoved the butcher knife into his heart, taking away Abigail's Daddy, and all because he'd tried to save Abigail when he caught his wife abusing their daughter just like she'd been trying to tell him for three years. Abigail hauled the wrench over her head, holding it with both hands, her body trembling not with exhaustion or fear, but with exhilaration. The strength of madness was reinforced by the force of conviction. Her father's murder and her own torture crashed into her, pushing her over the edge of hesitation.

Roaring, she stretched backwards, bringing the wrench back far enough to be hanging parallel to her back. Her mother's eyes popped open, and a smile tinged with inherited cruelty crossed Abigail's face.

"Who the fuck do you think you are.”