character :: Abigail Palmer
Abigail is just one of those people born under an unlucky star, as they say. Of course, you’d never know it from talking to her: after all, she’s got it just as bad as everyone else.
Or so she thinks.
Abigail Palmer’s parents were loving and hardworking, just like her. And, as fortune would have it, they both had steady employment for her entire childhood! Not a lot of people can say that these days. Both of them worked as miners in the Shaffer Gold Mine: and both of them got their daily wages for the home when the quitting whistle sounded. Some days there wasn’t enough food to go around – all of her friends complained about the same troubles – but neighbors always came through. It wasn’t often that Abigail went to bed hungry, and for the working class…well, that wasn’t too shabby. So, when Abigail turned 14 and she could swing a pickaxe, there wasn’t a question in her mind that she’d go to work for the kind Shaffer family who’d fed her and clothed her all those years.
Over the years, Abigail became a model worker. Her shift ran alongside her father’s, and for some long years they would work together: picking away at the earth, enjoying each other’s company. Her mother even got to retire now that Abigail was pulling her weight: after the mine collapse six years prior the old woman had trouble moving her left side that’d been trapped under the rubble anyway. It was all for the best.
Work got much harder for the family after the young miner’s father fell ill to the Gold Dust sickness. Most miners fell ill one time or another, blood in their cough and the like: but something about this sickness swept through him in great waves. He died of his fever not a month after his collapse, and now Abigail shouldered the heavy burden of her mother’s inability to work. It was a pleasure for her, of course, because it’s better to have at least one parent than none: but six years after her father’s death, Abigail’s mother passed in her sleep. The coroner couldn’t quite guess why, and anyone’s bet was fair game; but Abigail knew her mother’s reliance on the drink to cope with her husband’s passing was to blame. The woman died with her secret.
when I were a wee kid.
So, Abigail had the family home all to herself at 24. It wasn’t much, but four solid walls and a clay floor swept so clean that it could rival the Gold Palace itself was just enough for her! And, for a while there, it looked as if things were truly looking up for her. Vincent Shaffer, the apprenticing son of the Shaffer family, showed up to her mine one night during her shift. Abigail wasted no time in introducing herself, hardily shaking his hand and thanking him for her job – and somehow, even though she’d gotten his beautiful hands dirty (they were really soft too, she noted) – he became her friend. Friends with a Shaffer! Could you imagine?
Vincent was very kind to her indeed. Some days, when he’d stop by, he’d even nod to her when she called out his name and waved his way. He was overseeing her mine as he learned the ropes, and after a few weeks he even pulled her aside. He handed her six Flakes – about a day’s wages – and called it a “Bonus”. Now, even her father or mother had never earned a Bonus before…this was cause for a huge ruckus for herself and her two cats that night. The Bonuses would come from time to time, when she asked for them at least. Not that she ever minded, of course. She worked hard!
Abigail even earned herself a friend or two. After her parents were gone and no one waited at home for her return, she’d linger around the shops and streets of her village to catch up on the gossip. Not much else to do, really. On the outskirts of the region, Abigail stumbled upon a pile of rags by the name of Elizabeth. She was one of those unlucky ones that she’d grown up knowing about: her mother and father didn’t have a good job. She didn’t have a job at all, and she could never get one: she was a Rust. Rusts are untouchable, and if one of the leisure class people ever caught you talking to a Rust you’d be likely to get a beating. But Abigail didn’t see a reason to treat another person like that, beating or not, and some nights she’d break bread with the young woman. She never had too much to say, sitting there in silence and looking at her feet, but she was very pretty and when she did have something to say it was always real smart. Not like Abigail at all, who hadn’t had an education…but Elizabeth had! Before she was a Rust, she’d say, she went to classes and read books. She knew how to read, and that made her a priceless friend. Abigail promised to stop by and give her a Flake or two every once in a while – and she did – for a very long time.
But the real joy in her life began a few years after her parent’s death, when a man she’d never seen in her village before set up a small junk stand at the mouth of the mine. His skin was different – kind of like the Shaffers’ but different from even them – and he was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. Abigail worked with many different types down in the mine, strong and burly men who had made a few advances at the oblivious woman…but something about Zachary Rasheed caught her eye. Although she couldn’t understand a damn thing that came out of his mouth, it was love at first sight.
Zachary Rasheed wasn’t from the Gold region…he wasn’t from any of the Metal Zones. He had hopped aboard a ship and sailed across the ocean to come to a new land – something Abigail hadn’t ever thought about before – and he had stories to tell. Even on her small rations, she took the man into her home and took great delight listening to his stories by candlelight after her shifts. Damn it all if she didn’t stay up far too late, for the first time swept into a world so different from the one she’d always lived. Despite the grime on her clothing and the ruddy color of her cheeks, he even came to enjoy her company as well; and, well, that’s enough for Abigail. Miners don’t live long, so the prospect of ever finding love before death was a real treat. The two got married a year or two later, and all of the junk that Zachary collected and peddled to hapless miners got heaped into the yard around her home. Before long, they had themselves a little castle; it was more stuff than she’d ever seen in her life, but if it mattered to her Zachy that’s all that mattered to her.
my parents got to teach me...
Abigail’s circle grew and grew, her many friends around her falling in and out of love and thankfully giving the little home in the junk pile lots of traffic. She met young Amelia – a woman from another Region who fell in love with the nice young Shaffer man. She was really sweet – and guess what? She even gave Abigail a Bonus sometimes too! The young Rust Elizabeth found herself a man, even in her state: a foreigner who didn’t have a clue what a Rust was, and he didn’t care. His name was Benjamin and he was nearly as smart as miss Elizabeth! Sometimes these people would come to her home and fill it with laughter and light, and these nights were her favorite. Working in the mine was hard, but life was turning out to be a beautiful thing. It couldn’t get any better. Or well, so she thought!
As it turned out, all of these wonderful people who broke bread with her in her home had some radical new ideas that Abigail herself had never fathomed to form. Ideas of democracy, revolution and freedom from hard labor: Elizabeth wanted the strict caste system destroyed. Benjamin wanted it even more as an outsider with grand plans but no ways to break into the inventor’s market: and, to everyone’s surprise, the newlywed Shaffer couple even got on board. It was decided one dark night: they would begin a peaceful revolution. Abigail would rally her friends from the mines, Benjamin and Elizabeth would round up the Rusts who still had some strength left in them, and then Vincent and Amelia would draft all of the papers that the swell of people would demand. The Shaffer estate would remain largely unchanged but with large political upheaval: everyone would should win in some form or another.
The day of the revolution would mark the first real day of Abigail’s suffering. It was all wrong from the beginning: the peaceful revolution the six friends had dreamt did not account for the thousands of angry, bitter rioters. The foundation of their plans shook loose as soon as the Rusts and the Miners met together in front of the palace walls – emotion took over and somewhere in the fray the City of Gold began to burn. Someone had set the mine alight: it’d be a miracle if anyone could evacuate the city alive after that moment. Abigail and Zachary ran arm in arm away from the Gold Palace as the walls began to crumble, all of their friends already inside. She was already mourning the loss of her friends as gunshots rang out behind her - Abigail was the first of the couple to fall, her shoulders burning under the buckshot. Zachary fell next, and the two of them held one another as their blood seeped the street below. The Gold Palace did indeed fall, one carefully sculpted pillar falling right across the two dying lovers. Zachary shuddered in her arms, drawing his last breath before the pain in her legs brought her down right next to him.
Abigail doesn’t talk much about what happened that night, preferring to leave it at that. Her Zachy was dead, her friends were dead, and even when she woke up in a small infirmary many weeks later…she wished she had died right alongside her beloved. For the first time in her long life, Abigail had lost her fight.
It would be weeks before her first visitor came along, a woman in a fine dress and all the gold a Queen could ever wish to own in her entire life covering her from head to toe. Her little Rust friend Elizabeth had indeed succeeded in a plan she formed in secret: she was now Queen of the Gold Palace and suddenly the fine care that Abigail had been receiving made sense. Someone was footing the bill after all. Abigail had the world offered to her: a life of peaceful retirement. She’d been kind to Elizabeth, and now she wanted to repay the favor: but seeing all the fineries of the world couldn’t entice Abigail. She didn’t want cracked marble walls from a fallen empire or decadent food: she wanted another drink of Zachary’s too-spicy tea or an afternoon of gossip with friends sitting on hand-sewn pillows on a swept dirt floor. Elizabeth was furious that she couldn’t give Abigail what she wanted, but now the little Rust had bigger fish to fry: Abigail was given a quaint little chair to wheel about in as she made her way from the Gold Palace, back down the winding streets that she had walked so many years.
Along the way, some familiar faces begin to show up. The kind Shaffer family who had their entire lives ahead of them moved in just down the street, Vincent himself working the mine his forefathers had established. Something about their lives hurt Abigail: while she celebrated their survival, the bitterness growing between them at living on the streets they used to own was tangible.
Life has a funny way of developing bittersweet. By the time Abigail realized she were pregnant, it was far too late to terminate the pregnancy. Even though she considered it heavily, the idea of losing the last link to her late husband couldn’t be defended. If Elizabeth ever did anything for Abigail, it would be the late morning that Giovanni Rasheed came screaming into the world: that malnourished baby would not have survived if it weren’t for the kindness of the nurses once more at the Gold Palace.
is much nicer than that one at least.
So, our fair Abigail’s story ends quite where it began: in her parent’s tiny one-room home, surrounded by a small tower of now-rusted bits of metal the young woman can’t bear to dispose of. She still makes her way down to the mine, at first with a son strapped to her chest and then many years later with a strong young man with ruddy skin pushing her down the ramp.
In a game of politics, the poorer classes seem to have the most to win or to gain, or at least that’s what they told us. Revolutions, elections, and uprisings will come and go: but really, what changes? Political figures cycle through power like seasons, riding on the backs of the desperate as the tides ebb and flow. But at the end of the year, this man or that woman in charge or not, most people begin a new chapter just as they’d closed the last one. The only winners are those who are born winners, or those who are willing to sacrifice - not of themselves - but of others.
