Frances Hammond-Young
Frances Alice Young was born to archivist Kim Seol-hee and microbiologist Graham Young in Copenhagen on a snowy spring morning in 2005. Her family was small but tight-knit, her parents were so in love they warmed up cold winter days, Frances’ memory of her parents was always tinged in warmth.
Frances was in her home with her aunt when the police lights flashed in the window. Aunt Sarah stood and spoke to the officers, Frances thought the officer looked cool in his big vest with a radio on his belt, she did not know what he meant when he said her parents had crashed through a barrier on a snowy highway, but she was excited to know she’d get to spend more time with her aunty.Frances was 5 when she moved with her aunt to the weird forest with no entrance. The trees were taller than she’d ever seen before and they seemed to warp unnaturally around the car as Sarah drove. Frances’ uncle was quiet but he loved that Frances loved music, her cousin liked to play with her, always playing hide and seek and taking her on adventures, and her aunt was warm and soft, always gentle with her.
Aunt Sarah, uncle Dai, and cousin Fiona, turned into mum, dad, and big sister. The warmth from her Copenhagen town house turned into hiding in the garden while mum and dad had a screaming match. Fiona turned into Finlay, and their adventures together turned into Frances cowering alone in her room while Finlay hung out with his best friend.
Frances found safety in other ways, her best friend Amari had a garden that could swallow you, and Frances weeded and talked while Amari slowly pruned all her plants. Frances found safety in music, singing to herself, then to Amari, then her grandparents, then in the gazebo in the town park to celebrate the solstice.
Frances met Gabrielle first, she was often the first to find people who appeared since her house was so close to the forest, Gabrielle was confused, and then angry, and then Winnie saved Frances. But Frances stayed around Gabi, and slowly that anger turned into a warmth she had only felt when she was 5.
Gabi opened a corner store, and she took in Frances to help stocking, and Frances talked to all her neighbours more and more, and they told her their problems, Dusty couldn’t think of a birthday present for Pippa, Coen lost one of Takeshi’s tools and didn’t know what to do. Frances started working out solutions and getting better and better at giving advice, and suddenly she found she loved helping others more than anything.
Sarah left when Frances was 12, her last tie to her biological family running off to be a sailor, and Frances cursed her out, hating her more than anything. Frances spent more time with her dad, Dai had never been very active but something about losing Sarah broke him. He stopped teaching Frances on his old fender, and stopped fighting with Finlay, he barely ate and barely left his room. Frances started taking care of him, making him food every day and cleaning his room, making him get changed and doing his laundry, she took on the job of doing groceries and taking care of the entire house, her love for music got overshadowed as she worked and worked and worked.
Frances saw Finlay less and less and Amari and Gabi more, spending all her very limited free time helping Amari garden and Gabi run her shop. She felt fulfilled when every second of her day was filled with jobs, she made a name for herself always offering help around the town, if she wasn’t working for Gabi she’d clean for her grandparents or work at Dusty’s pub. Today Frances has forgot how to care about herself at all…