Mabel, Mabel, etc.

A note: This isn't really up to my usual standards, but I kinda procrastinated, so it's a bit rushed. The premise is also a bit confusing so that doesn't help either.

It was too uncanny. Mabel laughed uneasily, but it was muffled by the fleece scarf wound tightly around her neck. Her sock was beginning to slip off inside of her left boot.

Her whole ensemble looked like a North Face catalog on steroids. 

Mabel gazed out of the window. The view - or perhaps the lack of one - was dismal. 

Jamila Noureddine on Channel 4 had said there would be snow, but Mabel had never imagined snow like this, snow that seemed to erase time and memory and send it all flying into the air to whirl around with the white ashes outside. This wasn’t a blizzard. Blizzards didn’t cry.

Mommy, tell me the story. Of how I came to you.

Hm? Oh, the story. Here, sit next to me - no not on that pillow, that’s the nice one. There. That’s good. Once, in a land some call suburban Michigan, there was a young maiden named Mabel-

But I’m Mabel.

Yes, you are Mabel, my dear, but I am Mabel too.

But you’re Mommy.

I’m both, my sweet. We have the same name, isn’t that funny? Now, not another word out of you, or I’ll stop telling the story.

Silence.

So. Mabel was studying to become a doctor. One day, Mabel went to the market to collect provisions. It was winter, and the snow was swirling outside. But while Mabel was inside, putting pancake mix and bell peppers into her basket, the snow began to fall harder and harder, until looking outside was like looking at a blank piece of paper.

Mabel had heard her origin story from her mother over and over again, until she heard it for the last time last year. Her mother had never mentioned any family and none showed up. It was a lonely funeral. How curious how quickly the doctor becomes the patient and the patient becomes the buried, their elderly neighbor Gideon had said after offering his condolences and a halfhearted lasagna. Gideon was always saying stuff like that.

The story changed a bit every time, some details snaking in and out of the version of events. Plus, her mom had been an embellishing sort of person. Mabel was too. Still, she knew what came next. That part always remained the same.

Mabel became aware of the silence around her. The machinery had stopped whirring, and the other customers had all disappeared one by one into the white beyond. She soon found that the checkout lines were empty too. It was like everyone but her had shrunken down to the size of an ant and joined the snowflakes outside. She was completely and utterly alone in the Kroger’s.

Mabel looked back towards the cashier-less, customer-less lines behind her. A draft fluttered through all the plastic bags. A shiver ran through her, but not from the cold that had inevitably snuck in through the cracks in the walls.

She had read once about liminal space, places meant only as waiting places, or bridges from one place to the next. Staying for extended periods in liminal spaces gave you the feeling that something was off, like waking up after a too-long nap. Mabel felt that way now.

Mabel reached into her basket for her protein shake. She could pay for it later, she reasoned. When the inexplicably missing cashiers returned from whatever weird break they were on. The flickering self-checkout screens looked sketchy. Until then, the place was all hers.

In fact, maybe being snowed in was a good thing. Mabel set her basket down by the door and skipped to the book aisle. One paperback romance after another greeted her until - ah, a book she’d been meaning to read. The patio furniture display beckoned her, with its shiny wicker and promises of “unbeatable comfort”. Mabel curled up in an egg chair and began to read.

Except, she couldn’t. Something was tugging at her. Mabel couldn’t ignore the striking similarities. It was almost as if- as if history was repeating itself.

It wouldn’t be so impossible, would it? Mabel (the mother one, not the currently stuck in a grocery store due to a most unfortunate snowstorm one) had always been a believer. In what exactly, she couldn’t say, but it seemed she had believed in many things: ghosts, aliens, pyramid schemes. A never-ending time loop in which Mabel was doomed to stumble upon and raise herself again and again… It didn’t seem too extraordinary.

Mabel sat upright and wondered how she would raise the chil- herself, really wasn’t it? She would raise… herself. She had raised herself, she had been raised by herself, she had no choice in how she would raise the child because it had happened already, time and time again, for who knows how long. Mabel sunk back into the cushion as the reality of the situation sunk in.

The incident with the broken hose, the first tooth she’d lost, the anger-blurred day she’d threatened to run away, Mabel remembered how her mother had smiled melancholically through it all, as if reliving when she’d done it all before. She would do the same, and so would her daughter, and the next Mabel, and the one after that… 

Just as she was about to brave the cold, a sound stopped Mabel in her tracks. A crying baby. Now, a crying baby in an abandoned grocery store with flickering lights scared Mabel almost as much as a laughing baby would have under the same circumstances, but she knew she couldn’t just leave a baby alone in the building that was growing freezing-er and freezing-er.

She followed the wails to the meat section, where a cardboard box sat on the floor. Inside lay a baby girl, with shining eyes and small flower-petal feet. The baby’s cries faded as she took in Mabel. Maybe she knew this woman would be her mother.

Mabel noticed a tag around the baby’s wrist, like she was for sale with all the hunks of meat surrounding her. The tag said, loud and clear, “MABEL”. Mabel looked around in vain, searching for who could’ve left this beautiful baby for her especially. It was only after she flipped the tag and read the other side, “my name is”, that she realized ‘Mabel’ was not the recipient, but the gift.

I’m getting ahead of myself, thought Mabel. I haven’t even found the baby yet.

Yet. She wasn’t even denying it now. All there was left to do was to await the fate she knew would come. Cry, cry, I can’t bear it any longer.

A wail pierced the silence of the store.

Then frantic searching, searching, finding, then the letters

M A B E L

like a prison sentence in her hand.