Abyss

The story and the story behind the story

Gillian watched the raging river toss entire trees around like matchsticks. She marveled at its anger, its normally placid waters, still riled from the last gasps of yesterday’s hurricane.

She understood rage, at least in theory. She almost wished to experience it — to experience any emotion, really. But only almost. Desire was another human trait she understood only from a distance.

Gillian passed through life as a ghost, an observer of curiosities she could never truly comprehend. She created no relationships and never once had missed the warmth of human connection. Her parents had understood their strange offspring no more than she had understood them. They had felt relief, she believed, when she had cut ties. Gillian had felt nothing.

Still, the seething river intrigued her as a metaphor for the volatility of human emotion. Emotion that drove others to actions they rued only after inflicting irreparable harm. Emotion that burned cities and toppled nations.

Nothing of the sort motivated Gillian. The closest she came to feeling was a grim satisfaction in a job well done. Perhaps her choice of profession stemmed from this. Her closest approximation to normal human emotion. Then again, perhaps not.

Gillian glanced at her watch. Only ninety-three minutes until her flight departed. It wasn’t like her to cut things so close. She pulled a burner phone from her jacket pocket. She snapped a photo of the body lying at her feet, then instant messaged it to her current employer.

A moment later, the phone dinged acknowledgment of payment hitting her bank account. She hoisted the body over the bridge railing, sending it tumbling into the maw of the raging beast below. The burner phone instantly followed, along with no longer needed gloves.

Oblivious to the cold wind whipping through her light jacket, Gillian counted the clicks of her heels striking the bridge as she returned to her rental car. Ten exactly. A job well done. With grim satisfaction, she headed to the airport.

Photo by Matt Power on Unsplash

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I wrote Abyss in response to a challenge to create a story with the specific intention of making the reader uncomfortable. Does Abyss accomplish this? I don’t know. Certainly, Gillian is a protagonist with no redeeming features.

In writing, we refer to making an unlikable character more palatable to the reader as giving them a “save the cat” moment. This name for a redemptive event for an unlikable character comes from a screenwriting book by Blake Snyder by the same name. Sometimes it can literally be saving a cat, but really, it’s about showing the protagonist doing something good to help the reader root for them.

In The Hunger Games, Katniss, who is pretty unlikable, takes care of her family and saves her sister by volunteering to replace her as tribute to the eponymous Hunger Games, allowing the reader (or viewer in the case of the movies) to find some connection to her.

Gillian has no such moment. She is an extremely broken character, who experiences no emotion. She literally couldn’t care less that she has killed someone. She equates that “well done” job with the counting of exactly ten steps back to her car. Simply an exercise in exactitude.

We have no idea why she is as she is. Was she born like this? It seems so, though maybe something terribly traumatic happened to make her this way. We just don’t know, and so we have nothing we can attach to, nothing that would allow us a sliver of sympathy for her.

I’d like to hear about your reaction to Gillian. How did she make you feel? Did her story make you uncomfortable? Click the comment button below and let me know!

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