Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  In the movie, the princess was spunky, but very very small. At one point she and her entire castle were lifted into the air by a girl with golden ringlets who mistook the thing for an elaborate, sugar-spun candy. She was a stupid girl, willful, but from the princess’s point of view she had teeth like slabs of mountain rock and when they crunched down on the spires of the castles—not sugar-spun at all, but crumbling just the same—the danger was the princess’s to bear alone. All the unfriendly animals had fled long ago; the rats from the pantry, the pigeons from the eves. She had no parents and there appeared to be no prince waiting in the wings to rescue her or awaken her or marvel at her technique with a spindle. In the end, the stupid, greedy girl was somehow thwarted, but the castle which wasn’t candy was not saved. The princess, I assume, continued on spunkily in the ruins. Taking a turn in the garden. Tossing her little golden ball up into the air.

  “I wish the girl had eaten her,” Thingy said.

  “Me too,” said the Nina. “Then there could have been scene like in Pinocchio with the castle floating around in her belly.”

  We had gone to the morning show and when we got back to the house it was only early afternoon. The Sainte Maria had taken part of the Nina’s shift, watching Luke so the Nina could take us with her, and her battered sedan was parked carelessly across the driveway, forcing us to park in the street. It was fall, the trees already drawing themselves up, moving away from us.

  Instead of trudging into the house after the Nina, who was tired of us, happy to leave us behind, Thingy led the way around the side of the building and into the backyard. Though it wasn’t yet cold, the air around us was stiff and heavy with chill. Thingy and I were both shivering, but I understood she didn’t want the trip to end—to return home, even if it is not your own home, is always a small defeat—also, the Sainte Maria was there, the one person who could make Thingy self conscious and whose company she tried to avoid. Thingy plucked a glossy pink strawberry barrette out of her hair and turned it over between her fingers as she perched on the bend in the dragon’s tail. She touched it with the tip of her tongue, as if she expected it to have turned into a candy, and then tossed it over the fence into the dog run where it sat in the dirt catching my eye no matter how I tried to ignore it.

  “What is actually in our stomachs?” Thingy asked.

  “Digestive juices,” I answered. I was in the advanced biology course at school and had memorized the diagram of a cat’s body, drawn splayed open with the animal’s head turned coyly to the side, the tips of her longest teeth just peeping out from underneath her lip. We had studied what each of the organs did, which filled with air and which with bile, and I understood that the general principle was the same for us all. Here a sac to store poisons, here one to distribute blood. A series of taut pink purses to be filled and then emptied and somewhere under all that fur the various holes through which this would be accomplished.

  “I know that,” Thingy said, annoyed with me. She flounced up the back stairs and I followed, a few steps below her. “I meant in addition to that. Like are there things we’re too huge to bother about? Little bits of things that just stay in there and rattle around?”

  She was thinking of Pinocchio, of course, and the giant girl in the movie. What could there be inside myself that I don’t know about, Thingy was thinking. A raft? An oil lantern? The remnants of a breakfast strewn across the table? But I was annoyed too, and cold now, ready to go inside.

  “No,” I said as Thingy scrambled up the railing to peer in the kitchen window. I climbed up next to her and rested my chin beside the dragon’s head. “The only thing in your stomach is purple candy.”

  “Says you,” Thingy said, but her heart wasn’t in the argument anymore. In the kitchen we could see the Nina, the Sainte Maria and Luke all sitting around the table. The Sainte Maria and Luke were finishing lunch, a bowl of soup sitting in front of my brother, her plate empty and serving as an ashtray. The Nina sat with her head tipped in her hand and nodded as the Sainte Maria said something, smoke spilling out from between her lips. Luke was between them, his eyes not quite engaged but not so far away as for it to be impossible to imagine him listening, about to contribute his own opinion to whatever it was the girls were trying to decide.

  “Look at Luke,” Thingy said. His hands were on the table, on either side of the bowl, and he moved them restlessly. The Nina said something and he inclined his head toward her, as if conceding the point, a lock of his hair falling across his eye. The older Luke got the more he looked like my father. A face that was at once both sharp and wide, gaunt cheeks. His shoulders were square inside his T-shirt, and his hands broad and thick knuckled. They curled on either side of his bowl like plaster casts, white and somehow slightly dusty. The Nina said something else and the Sainte Maria laughed and brought a spoonful of soup up to Luke’s lips. He turned his head to her and accepted it ruminatively, again as if he were just on the verge of saying something. A drop splashed out over his lips and landed on his chin. The Pinta, or even the Nina, would have scooped the soup up with the spoon, dabbing at Luke as if he were an infant, but the Sainte Maria folded the sleeve of her shirt over her thumb and brushed it away without looking at him, her fingers trailing across his cheek.

  “What about him?” I said. He was my brother—my brother struck dumb at the moment of his birth—and I paid as much attention to him as I did to myself. Which is to say, we were bodies only, bulging and softening as bodies did. My favorite part of my own body was my breastbone which protruded from in between the new nubs of my breasts as hard and stubborn as a turtle’s shell. My favorite part of Luke’s was his ear, pink and white, whorling in tightening spirals: in, in, in.

  The Nina laughed and leaned across the table. She gripped the Sainte Maria’s wrist and shook it, resting her head on her forearm. The Sainte Maria laughed, too. She looked up across the kitchen and saw us at the window, but it meant nothing to her. She kept laughing. She stubbed her cigarette out on the plate.

  “Fuck you,” Thingy said and pulled away. Luke cocked his head as if he were listening and his lips parted, a smile? For a moment it seemed as if he were opening his mouth to say. . . .

  Later in the week, Thingy was over at my house after school to do homework. This meant we sat in front of the television with our books open before us and a bowl of chips at our side. Thingy liked to slick her fingers with their grease and draw translucent designs on the book’s glossy pages. We were studying the economic output of our mountains and marking maps the teacher had given us with little drawings of apples and hogs, cairns of coal, reams of cloth, different colored triangles which were supposed to represent the spiteful wink of minerals and gems.

  Thingy got up to go to the bathroom. As the final credits came up on the show, I realized she had been gone a long time. She didn’t answer when I called to her, so I crept through the house—turtle-like, slow to everything—thinking perhaps we were playing a game.

  I found her in Luke’s room, lying on the bed with him. Clearly, she had spent some time arranging the tableau. She had rolled him over onto his side and tipped him so she bore the brunt of his weight on her hip. His hand was on her ribcage, just under her breast, and his right leg was cocked over her thigh. His face was buried in her hair and when she saw me in the doorway she put a finger to her lips and raised an eyebrow—as if he were telling her something, as if she were delighted to hear.

  “He says he likes this game,” Thingy whispered, and wasn’t there, sleek in the rustle of Thingy’s fine-spun hair, just the slightest of movements? As if he had nodded, his head sharp and black as a snake’s. . .a whuffling as if he had chuffed between his pale, parted lips, blown into her ear. . .

  Then Thingy jumped up, sliding out from under my brother’s limbs as he shifted more deeply into the pillows, and said, “I was just kidding, Alice. You should have seen your face.” She sat on the edge of the bed and motioned me to help her as she tugged Luke back into a more accustomed place: his impassive fac
e propped at an angle, his long legs bent and his smooth feet crossed over each other on the coverlet. “Look though,” Thingy said, pointing to the crotch of my brother’s sweatpants where the outline of his penis was clearly visible, its bulge rising against his thigh. “He was telling the truth, after all.”

  Then we heard the Pinta cross the living room and we scuttled down the hall into my own room where I shut the door. “Don’t be mad,” Thingy said, holding my hands between her own and scanning my face, but I wasn’t. I was too busy trying to figure out which of all the games was the one they were playing. Which had made my brother come so close to the surface, almost close enough to see.

  “What did he say?” I asked in spite of myself, but Thingy only laughed and kissed me on the cheek. A pretty gesture she had copied from a movie or a television show or a story. The sort of thing a pretty girl does when she is beloved. More importantly, something she does when she has won.

  Then, all of a sudden, we were adults, admonished never again to look back lest we turn into pillars of salt. Of course, we did look back. How could we help it when back was the only view? The past, filled with such enticing details: dancing dogs and sugar plums, purses stitched from a tasseled sow’s ear, slippers that spun and twirled until your own blood ran freely over their soles. Really, there seemed no consequence. Why not live in the bright shadow, childhood a garter snake flashing its yellow racing stripe? And the future? Nothing but gauze and white strapping tape. Miles and miles of it, trussing things up.

  It was our gravest mistake, Thingy’s and mine, but how can you blame us for wanting always to be ourselves? When the rain came and we melted away, even then I can’t say we were sorry. To this day, Ingrid, there is a spot on the creek bank where the butterflies cluster: fritillaries with their military precision, brilliant tiger swallowtails and tiny, West Virginia whites who pump their dusty cabbage white wings so slowly, with such exquisite languor.

  What is it they want there? Are they sleeping, dreaming, dying? Sometimes there are as many as twenty of them, packed so tightly their fairy-haired bodies press against each other, their wings rippling orange and black, yellow and azure, a faint silver-green as if they were a very fine cloth, pinned at one corner but caught nonetheless in a persistent breeze. If you are a quiet girl, Ingrid, a natural observer of the world, it will be possible for you to get close enough to see them in detail. Their narrow heads, for example, on which their true eyes sit like tessellate soup cups. Their tongues uncoiling to flitter about the soil.

  They are feeding, my darling girl, a salt slick there and only there which entrances them with delight. And who is to say if that is the exact spot where Thingy finally fell and could not rise? If that is the exact soil on which she battered at her throat as it swelled with trapped air? Where, in spite of our belief that our lives were uniquely the same, there came from between her legs first a rush of water, then one of blood. . .?

  I am to say it, and I will.

  Right there, on the edge of the creek, Thingy and I melted away in a wash of salt. Right there, slick with blood and earth, right there you were born.

  There is another storm I remember, seven months after Thingy and Daniel moved to the mountain.

  “What is your book about?” I asked Daniel at dinner.

  “Well, it’s difficult to break down into one idea,” he said, eager even then to stab at us all with his fork as he talked. “I’d say, in general, it’s about cloister. About ritual.”

  He seemed about to go on in more detail, the fork twirling in the air as is if trying to hone its focus, but Thingy, who was sitting at his left hand side, a black winter night ringing her head, laughed and said, “Daniel’s all about opposites right now. He’s doing the exact opposite of everything he’s done before.”

  Later that evening, I was out in the yard checking on the hens. It was late. The moon had torn itself free of the trees and was wafting fat and proud across the sky. There had been a noise, an uproar in the hen house as if the hens all at once had sensed some terrible calamity, though when I shone the flashlight around their fence I could see no tracks, no signs of digging. An ephemeral calamity then, or something far in the future. Regardless, I picked up a stick and made a sign at the gate and one at each of the fence’s corners. I wove a sign out of tufts of dead grass and threw it up on the roof. The hens were quiet again and the meadow quiet, the forest behind it all so quiet it was as if it were sneaking up on me, counting footsteps and freezing the moment I turned around. It was very cold.

  When I turned around to go back to the house, I saw Thingy had come into the dining room and flicked on the light. She was wearing a white nightgown, not yet pregnant enough for the peignoir, and sat sideways across the chair, drinking a glass of water, looking around. It was all so clear. I in the cold with my breath frosting in my eyelashes; she in the house, alone and looking not to be, the veins in her legs where her nightgown had pulled up deep and blue and tangled. Then, I heard a noise behind me and when I turned again—always spinning in place, always looking over my shoulder—it was Daniel.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “It’s late,” he said.

  Surely, I said something back. He is a lion-headed man, even without the beard, Ingrid. Or a sheep-headed man, perhaps. Something that nods in the sun, dreamy-eyed, not particularly alert. Something with either the deep ease of a predator, or the power of prey. He hadn’t zipped his coat and there was an exposed triangle of skin, bare and white at his throat. His eyes are blue, I have mentioned that, like Thingy’s eyes. His hands were on my shoulders.

  “What are you doing out here?” he said, and then one of his hands was on my neck, one at the back of my head.

  I have never said Jacob’s name, not once. He and I have always been very quiet, though when I look down at my husband I can see in his eyes a little figure of myself, breasts swinging, hair wild, mouth drawn open like a panting cat’s.

  But, “Alice, Alice, Alice,” Daniel said, and I said, “Daniel.”

  We were nothing more than two people and all the best language for it (thick and tight, pink and wet, deep and hard) was lost in our unwieldy layers and the splinter of sycamore-green clapboard wedging its way into my buttocks where later Jacob would pass his fingers over it, a black seed in the center of a strawberry of blood.

  Did I think about Thingy? Of course I did. But it was night and, thinking herself alone, all she could see in the gilt-framed mirror across from her was her own beautiful face, composed if somewhat puffy, and the cloud of her hair lifting across her shoulders as if filled with its own private breeze.

  Until she stood up that is. Until she turned off the light.

  We didn’t notice when it began to snow, the flakes so light in our collars they were like nothing more than a shifting of cloth, but in the morning the drifts were deep and the whole yard covered with tracks. A hen had been taken after all, the only sign left of her two soft, gray feathers, three drops of blood that fell in a shape like an arrow pointing toward the woods.

  At end of her doctoral thesis, in the margins of one of the very last chapters, Thingy had made some notes.

  “Because we have known each other so long. . . .?” says one.

  “A lack of the Other resulting in hyper-awareness of the Self. . .?” says another.

  “A woman married a man who said he was the sun,” says a third, “but on their wedding night, when she pulled back the covers to get into bed, she discovered that from the waist down he had the body of a rooster. The woman was very angry and scolded her new husband. ‘If we have any children, they will be nothing but eggs,’ she said to him, but when it turned out that he could not help his nature she grew so furious she flew up the chimney and circled the world three times, blotting out the stars as she went. Eventually, because she was making so much noise, the real sun found her, but she had become old in her fury—no teeth and a face as wrinkled as a withered apple. He was disgusted by her and burned her to ashes on the spot thinking, perhaps, he
was putting her out of her misery.”

  “Someone told me this story,” Thingy wrote a little further down the page. “I can’t remember who it was.”

  The Brother’s Tale

  Once there was a boy who was born into a family of great wealth and political power, but who, as sometimes happens, were forced to leave him alone in the mountains for the wolves to eat. There was a wind stirring the dark pines, a dusting of snow on the ground. It was a servant who did the dirty work, though even as she bent to drop him, she wrapped his blankets more snugly about his chest.

  At first he waves his arms and legs in the air, a lusty baby, furious if unusually small, but when no one comes he grows still. Eventually, he is quiet as a toad; then, quiet as a rock. His wrappings have fallen away. His skin is the color of lead. His breathing is so slow he cannot feel it in his chest. . .breath. . .a red squirrel chirring from a tree. . .breath. . .the seesaw of birds calling in the branches. . .And then a woodsman! Just that morning, he sharpened his axe. The boy can hear him coming from miles away: the sound of the forest splintering.

  Though generally an unsentimental sort, the woodsman was charmed by the baby’s tiny size—his fingers no bigger than grains of rice, his head as big around as a bobbin—and took him home where he was wrapped in the woodsman’s wife’s clean linens and popped in the oven to ward off death. Every part of the baby unfroze, except for a part deep inside, hardly bigger than a pea, which was always after cold, severe and leaden. The woodsman and his wife were busy people, but not unkind. A few years later, they had a daughter who had many needs and, because the boy they found in the forest was always silent, it became easier and easier to tuck him away and forget where he had been placed. Lost among the spoons; lost in the crockery. Because the boy never grew though now he had a sister.