“I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon, in which long worms crawl like remorse.” (x)
Gender Identity: Cis Female / She/Her
Faceclaim: Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey
Known in Wind Gap as: The Hellion
+ Enticing, Oracular, Radiant, Steadfast
- Astringent, Crafty, Freewheeling, Vexatious
Hollis is originally from Florida, but disliked what the humidity did to her family garden. She decided to begin traveling in order to understand American agriculture first hand. She keeps a small journal filled with illustrations and notes about her favorite plants, doing extensive research on what works best in what environment.
She was once arrested for hitch hiking in New York state. She was held in prison for twenty four hours and made friends with the guard that stood watch all night.
Hollis’s mother has not been heard of since Eugene, the head of the church, was given the death sentence in Florida two years ago.
There isn’t too much Hollis remembers up until her fifth birthday. She has small snippets of memory, voices echoing off of wood paneled halls and a man’s hands hoisting her up as if she were an offering to something beyond just the ceiling. But everything from five and on, Hollis has sensory overload. She remembers the smell of cigarettes and moss from the church’s main room, the smell of musk and water spray cologne from the police man that carried her out of the hell she was brought into.
Hollis was her father’s fifteenth child, but only her mother’s third. She was born into a small religious sect in Florida where all of the women grew up to be mothers and the oldest son became the next prophet, if the Holy Spirit was willing to take him. As she began to age, any chanting of a prayer or opening note of a hymn sounded like knives being forced down her throat and would send Hollis into such screaming panics, the only thing that would relax her was a sedative.
She spent two months in a hospital in Miami where the nurses called her an angel and would ask questions about her mother, who would only visit on Sundays so that together, the two women could escape any memory of the church they were bound to. In that hospital, Hollis learned how to move memories around like puzzle pieces, shaving off cardboard edges in order to make them fit new things. Her doctor called it coping, but for Hollis, it was finding a new God—one made of green, orange, yellow, and brown leaves that changed and died and reigned anew once spring came. He prescribed her one book from the library a day, but the one that really changed her was the encyclopedia she had found in the gardening section on poisonous plants. The shaved puzzle piece she had now recurved had brought a whole new meaning to Sundays and worship.
Once out of the hospital, Hollis attended school at the University of Michigan with full financial support because of research she had provided that she had done in her free time in the hospital and received her degree in Environmental and Plant Biology. She had felt like she had found her niche and her people at UM, falling into a group of students that believed in things like divination, meditation, and witchcraft. Their liberal views of the universe were refreshing to Hollis, who was still looking for a spiritual connection to something more than the God she was force fed as a child.
After graduation, Hollis began to travel wherever she could, wanting a life for herself that her mother could never truly provide. With barely any money, she began to work on small farms and continued her botany research. Hollis stumbled into Wind Gap after exploring other sections of Missouri. There was a pull inside of the small town, one that she didn’t quite know what to do with. She had been hitchhiking and the driver had dropped her off a mile or so away, saying that anywhere further would be out of his way.
Hollis carried her suitcases filled with plants and duffle filled with clothes into the small town. After staying for just a few weeks, she had enough money to open a plant and herbal remedy shop on the far end of town. Each Sunday, she is one of the only businesses that stays open during church hours where she perches at the window, exploring books about plants, witchcraft, and mythology. In the grocery store, she can hear the neighborhood kids whispering and calling her a devil, a demon, a witch. But each time she hears them, she just smiles and passes by just close enough to make their breath hitch. The fear is more satisfying than the condescendence that she had faced so long ago, anyway.
Because of her trauma as a young child, Hollis grew up to be incredibly imaginative and intelligent. Although she has small periods of naïve stubbornness and immaturity, Hollis is incredibly friendly and loves to learn other people’s stories. She knows that sometimes her strange past and mystery can turn certain people off, but she tries her hardest to appear open and honest. In Wind Gap, people are somewhat less friendly than she would like, but Hollis is trying hard to keep a genuine smile instead of a forced grimace each time someone asks why she hasn’t come to church or invite her to a prayer circle so that she can find their version of Jesus and the Holy.
Hollis has yet to meet anyone that sees the world the way she does, though she has been keeping notes on those who seem somewhat curious or their fingers linger on her goods in the shop the same way hers did when she first discovered her love for botany.
