Annabel
by: Pazz

Adrienne paced sullenly across the creaking floor of her study, which was dark with the shadows of the night creeping from every crevice of the room. Her husband’s hushed orchestral music echoed mistily from downstairs in the living room, where he listened to the radio nightly. The dim electric light, which hung limply from the ceiling, cast an artificial glow on the brown notebook sitting on the oak desk, full of rejected writings. Finally, Adrienne convinced herself that she would be better off seated than pacing about. The evening news had just been on the television in the living room, and this was how Adrienne learned of what had happened to her mother’s friend, whom Adrienne affectionately called “Aunt Annabel.” She lowered herself into the comfortable suede-lined desk chair and opened the brown notebook. The curved letters of her handwriting, formed in black ink, stared up at her from behind the folders of the book. She took a few moments to sit under the artificial light, her thoughts rapidly drifting from memory to memory with Aunt Annabel. Poor Annabel, she thought, suddenly recalling a particular occasion, on which Adrienne and her mother had been sitting with Aunt Annabel in Annabel’s old living room, sitting on her fluffy floral-print couches and listening to quiet voices echo through the radio, cloaked occasionally by a few seconds of static. Reception was never good at Annabel’s house. Aunt Annabel’s husband, whose name was James or Jacob or Joseph or something like that, soon arrived home and demanded that Annabel set the table. Obediently, the woman stood up, set her newest craft on the seat of the chair, and stalked in silent, almost invisible enmity to the kitchen, where she began setting plates on the dining room table for all of us, no words ever escaping from her lips. Adrienne, being the young girl that she was, wanted to see Aunt Annabel’s new project. Her stitches were always so pretty, flowing easily across the surface of the panel as if they were the very particles of the original photograph. This week’s work was a pair of tigers, their heads held high in reverence and their clawed feet positioned as though they were walking across the panel together. Adrienne was in awe at the sight of these beautiful creatures. Her mother called her back to the couch and instructed her not to interfere, and she listened. Aunt Annabel had given the panel artfully stitched with the images of those reverent tigers to Adrienne as a birthday gift, knowing how much Adrienne loved the work of art. Adrienne reached into the topmost drawer of the desk to retrieve the panel. She stared at the tigers, whose bright orange and Indian red fur still shown vibrantly across the plain white linen panel. She gently stroked the stitches with one finger, then set the panel back on the desk and turned to a new page in her notebook. It wasn’t fair how Annabel so easily accepted how James/Jacob/Joseph treated her, acting as if she were his object. The words seemed to flow straight from Adrienne’s pen. She fell into a silent reverie, angry with Aunt Annabel for not standing up to her husband for the sake of her own rights, but more sad for her than anything. Adrienne’s eyes continually drifted from her work to the tigers, whose forms proudly displayed the courage Annabel never had.