Becoming Abigail Read Online Free

beautiful the lone star next to it.

Now
    VI
    The sound of laughter carried clear across the water and she interrupted her brooding to see a brightly lit party yacht sail past. It was colder now and the water was darker. She longed for some warmth. Another fragment of poetry from Emperor Wu came to her. From the Most Distant Time/ Theyears flow like water/ Everything passes away before my eyes. The lines were loud in her head and a moan escaped her involuntarily. A passing policeman stopped and watched her for a few minutes.
    “Are you all right, miss?” he called.
    Startled, she dropped the cigarette she was lighting. Picking it up, she nodded. He hesitated, but something about the sphinxes menaced him and he moved on. She looked at the still-glowing tip. She couldn’t smoke it now. It had been on the floor. Derek would have smoked it. She smiled as she remembered him. She had only known him for two months, and even then, the actual time spent with him only came to about three and a half weeks, yet she felt like she had known him for much longer. Part of her knew that this was because she brought the intensity of first love to their time.
    And she did love him, in spite of his dirty habits. Now, here, she missed them. The way he would pick up food he had dropped, blow it off, and eat it, claiming: “It’s still good if it has only been a few seconds.” And how he wouldn’t always bathe. She knew this because of the way his penis would smell and taste when she rolled back the foreskin. Funky, like old earth: the taste of the loam of her mother’s grave. She liked that. I miss him, she thought. Will miss him, she corrected. Before the cigarette burned out, she pressed it against her skin. DSHND , she wrote. Death shall have nodominion. She didn’t know where it was from, but Derek liked it. He had showed it to her the first day they met. It was in a book of poems he always carried in his pocket. At least she thought he did. This thing with him was like with her mother. She wasn’t always able to tell how much she was inventing and how much was real.
    She lit a new cigarette. Sat on the back of the sphinx and watched the traffic wink past. She wondered what the people in their cars, invisible to her, would make of her perched up there, riding the sphinx. Pulling a compact out of her bag, she adjusted her lipstick. One last cigarette, she thought. Not that it mattered at this point.
    She coughed through the harsh tobacco, tears stinging her eyes. The coughing fit caused her to drop her bag and it fell at the foot of the needle, contents spilt: a compact, lipstick, some tissue, a purse, and a book Derek had given her by an African writer, to make her feel at home, he said. The book, Fragments by Ayi Kwe Armah, was one of his favorites, he said. She wasn’t sure if he meant from Africa or in general. Back then those details didn’t matter; now she wished she had asked. Staring at the purse and its contents, she made no move to retrieve them, looking away instead to the river, as the poetry grew louder in her head, forcing its way out of her mouth.
    “. . . Think of the days/ When we were happy together/,” she quoted from Su Wu’s poem. “If I live I will come back/ If I die,remember me always/”

Then
    VII
    An abandoned truck filled the frame of her window. It had been there since she was a child and she couldn’t remember to whom it had belonged. Green moss grew over the left side and bougainvillea draped down from an adjacent building to stroke it in the evening breeze; purple flowers against the burn of rust.
    A shrub grew out of the truck’s roof, rising straight up from the floor of the cab like an impatient passenger. Birds nested in its open trunk and, judging from the noises issuing from it at dusk, it was home to other creatures too.
    Grass grew thick around its wheels and you could almost imagine that they were a pit crew eagerly changing tires. That was the way it was here sometimes. A thing was left