Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  “In God’s parlor the fire is always lit,” Mrs. Clawson meant to say. “And God himself so wealthy than when he runs out of firewood he can bring to hand any sort of ornament or precious trinket to throw on in its stead.”

  What a despot God is! How Thingy would have admired him.

  “He’d shat himself,” my father said so long ago in our living room while light swam across the legs of a beautiful girl who didn’t know it yet.

  “Don’t look so shocked.” He laughed. “There’s worse things in the world than a little smell.”

  To me, just a couple of days ago, he turned and held you out, cradling your bottom in his palm as if you were a sack of sugar he was considering buying at the market. The laundry machines hummed and clunked behind us. The elderly couple wheezed in peaceable witness. Sometimes, of all the other possible images, it is still that hole in a dead man’s head I see when I look at my father. “How could you resist sticking a finger in?” I want to ask him. It’s what I would have done, although, since I’ve never asked, I don’t know that it’s not what he did as well. I can imagine it of him. We’re not all that different, after all. Father and daughter. Doomed from the first genetic twining to be too much alike.

  I took you from him and held you in the crook of my arm, Ingrid. Then, I hoisted the basket onto my other hip as if about to leave, but when we just stood there, the terrarium light smoothing all our edges into one another, I slid the basket back onto the counter and asked instead, “How’s Rosellen?”

  “Rosellen? She’s fine. The same,” my father said. His eyes were still on you, a beautiful baby falling asleep with her hands curled on her chest. Over his shoulder I saw Jacob open the door and stop to take in the scene. He said something to Daniel standing behind him and then turned and went back out, pushing Daniel along with him. They stood indecisively in front of the window for a minute and then went back up the street the way they had come. To the truck, no doubt. To the groceries souring in the open bed. It was time to go, but there was my father, who was looking at me now, tapping his wedding ring against his belt buckle with a rhythmic ting. He edged around the corner of the folding table and fidgeted, leaning forward to chuck you, Ingrid, under your milk-sweet chin.

  “Listen,” he said, moving closer. He took my arm, his hand almost meeting around my bicep as it always did no matter how many years passed or how long it had been since we saw each other last. “I was so sorry about what happened. With Ingrid, I mean. I never told you how sorry I was. I know it must have been hard for you.”

  Hesitantly, he brushed my hair away from my temple and kissed me there, his lips full and dry against my skin, the way he might have many many times when I was young and reminded him in some obscure way of my mother, always so far away with her books and her baubles, her sharp little teeth and her habit of sucking the tips of her hair. Or, perhaps, when I reminded him of himself and, in that fashion, he remembered both that he had made me and that he had meant to. That, from the very beginning, it was my face which had swum in the air between them as he sat at the kitchen table and my mother, belting a strawberry-patterned apron around her swollen abdomen, slid a knife from its block and began to chop.

  “I’m sorry, Alice,” my father said. And that, Ingrid, though I believe I will see him many more times after this day, is how my father said goodbye to me.

  “I have to go,” I said and hurried toward the door with the basket.

  “Look, it’s Alice,” said the Sainte Maria, rising from the recliner all those years ago. She stooped over me and picked me up, balancing me on one hip though I was almost too big for her. My legs dangled past her waist, coltish and covered with blonde down. My father came over and pinched my chin, moving it back and forth as if his next step would be to examine my teeth.

  “How long has she been there?” he said and he leaned down and kissed the top of my head. How warm his breath was, stirring my hair. How warm it must have been on the Sainte Maria’s collarbone, and how close he was as he straightened up again, taller than her, his lips level with the top of her pink, flushed ear. She shifted me slightly so I was no longer between them and then, quite suddenly, stepped back and whisked me away into the dim kitchen where the curtains were drawn and the overhead light burst on like a flashbulb, overexposing the scene.

  “You’ve dropped a sock, dear,” the old woman called after me, but we didn’t stop. We didn’t look back, though afterward I wondered what my father looked like, standing with his hands empty for once. Or maybe raised to wave at us as if we were departing down a long avenue of flowering trees, dancing further and further away in the pollen-hazed light, instead of pushing open the Laundromat door and stepping out into the hot hum of the parking lot. Goodbye, Goodbye, my one true love. But no one gets to say that. Not in real life. A boy on a fat-tired bicycle swerved to miss us at the last minute and bumped off the sidewalk into traffic. Jacob honked the truck horn and motioned for us to hurry from up the block. The place where my father kissed me last was like any other stretch of skin on my body: a net designed to let some things out and keep others tucked inside forever.

  Goodbye, goodbye, God says, propping his feet up in front of the fire. It is a cold night, the owls hooting far away then almost at the window. When the fire burns low, God tosses in a rosewood ring box, then, in quick succession, a silver cruet, a bronze-molded shoe, a dancing doll, a collection of stones all shaped like hearts, a little dish of Jordan almonds, a pat of butter, a loaf of bread.

  What strange light the fire now gives. Almost like being underwater; almost as if, were he to look up right now, God might see another face peering down at him. A child’s face, too young to be wary, and fringed for some reason with paper feathers; blowing, for some reason, a wooden reed in order to make a high, gobbling song.

  Subject X

  One morning in April, Thingy rose from her bed and shooed the cats out the window. White cat, tabby cat; sister and brother. They paused at the edge of the roof to look back at her before leaping from the gable and swirling along the gutter like rain. It was a beautiful day, the first of many. This was what had been promised.

  In the meadow the bees were also awake. For weeks now the workers had been busy turning cups of wax out of the comb. The Queen, so large, so humbling, had filled every one with an egg and some of her daughters had come behind and sealed them off. Pat, pat, pat—the little girls, still asleep, but growing. Pat, pat, pat—princesses all.

  So too, in April the trees fur with new leaves and, in the lower elevations, redbud, then dogwood, burst open and shake their boughs as if weeping. Pink, white, red; how beautiful in the hollow where the trillium bloom. How beautiful the lady’s slipper, swollen and yellow. . .rare and yellow. . .coming down the stairs now with her peignoir sweeping around her swollen white feet.

  Thingy poured herself a glass of milk and pulled a chair up to the table. There was no one home: Jacob in the forest, Daniel tinkering with the truck’s worn engine, Alice in the parlor eating bread and honey. No, of course not. But someone had baked a pie and left her a little dish of strawberries by the cutting board. They were sour in the early season, tiny and rough.

  But no, she would not accept them. It was too little, too late: the little white bowl, the stained board. The morning was getting on and she, in an unusual place at the table, the wall to her back and before her the window, the meadow, the mountain. . .Inside her the baby with so little room she could see the elbow, the heel, the palm of the hand as it passed across her stomach. Thingy drank her milk. She pressed back, palm to palm. The morning was getting on and that little bowl. . .

  Unconscionable! As if to say: little featherhead, little mummy. As if to say: bought and sold with nothing more than fifteen berries, fresh and wild, pulled from the forest edge. As if her favorites could blind her. As if the long years, the secret histories, could shut her up.

  But she could see, could she not? Out the window, up the slope to the first of the trees. What was the difference between watch
ing and waiting? Between now in the clear day and all those nights when what was growing grew? The bed was empty when she woke and the moon a cold spectator drifting past the window. In the morning, Daniel would be back again, his clothes in their accustomed pile by the door. He was always so sleepy these days. His eyes were always so clouded and far away. There was mud on his shoes. There was wet grass rubbed into the knees of his pants. “And you? How did you sleep?” he would say, one ear pressed against her stomach so it could have been her he was talking to or the baby inside her which spun and kicked in response to his voice.

  And where was Alice, after all? There, across the meadow, hunkered in the grass with a basket, dressed in white. A strange shape for Alice, like a tent collapsed in the grass, fluttering at the edges, but Alice where she’d always been: in plain sight.

  In April, a fingering wind blows, inspecting what has been sewn. Catch hold, little girls, fat on jelly! The nurse maids have all left to attend the Queen who has not been fed for a week. She’s a strange shape now, stripped for flight, and all her daughters around her jostle to feel her touch. A stroke of the foreleg, a drape of the wing. By the time you are born, your mother will have already flown and left it up to you to decide who you will dance with and who you will sting. Who you will starve and who you will marry.

  Thingy left her empty glass at the table. She went outside into the day.

  And so it was that one last kindness (a bowl of berries, painstakingly picked) revealed us all for what we were. It was too much for Thingy: not what she knew, which only on that final morning, her belly resting across the tops of her thighs and light streaming around her from a window I had just washed, did she allow to become certain, but what I knew of her. That she liked these little berries and that she would be greedy for them. That she liked comfort and part of that comfort was to assume her power in our relationship without having to assert it. And yet, here in my house. . .And yet, now on my mountain. . .

  I had never woven any signs for Thingy. She was too close to who I was, not a future that could be manipulated, but a constant present, and I was the same for her. That’s why she chose to write about me. That’s why, had I been any other woman, she might have risen to the occasion of my betrayal with a kind of towering, operatic glee—it was a story, after all, and a familiar one with recognizable characters (the temptress, the errant knight) and a common-place denouement. Because it was me, however, she rose confused and then, quite frankly, deranged. Had she seen herself in the mirror before she left the house, she might have given herself pause—self reference was always Thingy’s stabilizing compass point—but she did not. By some quirk of habit she sat in the wrong place and so, when she made her final decision, all she saw was me.

  Even as far away as I was, I heard the door slam and turned from the bees to see her as she started across the yard. The sun was wicking through the thin fabric of her gown so her legs glowed as they stretched, then snipped into shadow. She was coming too fast for her condition, her gait rolling, her face red. When she got to the creek, she waded across it without bothering to lift her skirt and, because she was already yelling, she couldn’t hear me warn her back. It was the spring swarm, the old queen leaving her hive to her bloodthirsty daughters who, as soon as they awoke, would set about stinging each other to death. Thalia had shown me how to soothe them with smoke. How to follow the swarm and drop them gently from their first resting place onto a white sheet on top of which I had placed a new hive box, a convenient palace if not the one they might have imagined. Thalia taught me how to think like the bees—long live the Queen and all her retainers, her glittering retinue, her genius for organization and power won simply by the facts of birth; everyone a daughter: the nurses and the knights, the cooks and the thieves. But no one ever taught Thingy anything. I shouted, but on she came.

  Cinderella dressed in yella

  Went upstairs to kiss a fella

  There were so many rhymes we used to sing. Songs about steamships and snakes, princesses woken and princesses dead.

  The first of the bees settled on Thingy’s hair, then, as she batted them away and pressed forward, they moved into Thingy’s hair, burrowing without stinging as if they believed themselves caught in a cloud of filaments, promising pollen. As they burrowed they blended with the color of her hair and seemed to disappear making it seem as if her hair itself were heaving, roused as all of her was roused, standing on end. Still, she came forward, beating her arms against what must have seemed at first nothing more than the usual fringe of docile workers hovering around the hives. I, in my bee-keeper’s nets, stood startled and clumsy in the middle of the field, mouthing incomprehensible gibberish.

  The Throne Room. The Singer’s Hall. The Grotto. White limestone for the fronts and sandstone for the portals and bay windows. The Knight’s House, the Courtyard, the Bower. Dove marble imported to finish the arch ribs, the columns and capitals. Inside, every room a mural and every mural’s coppice home to startled hinds picked out in gold. “Spare no expense,” her Majesty said. A Rumford oven to turn the spits. A wishing table sinking through the floorboards in a clatter of bisque and bone. And in the Grotto: a waterfall, a rainbow machine. In the Queen’s Quarter’s: a blind alley, a panel of opaque screens. “Her Majesty wishes,” her Majesty said, “for the ship to be placed further from the shore, that the knight’s neck be less tilted, that the chain from the ship to the swan be not of roses, but gold. . .”

  How disappointing then when the first scouts came back with no better news than a lightning-struck tree, a hollow log, the crumbling rim of an old tractor tire. How enraging when her materials turned out to be nothing more than spit and polish and her artisans the same feckless children she had left behind her. And so when a dragon stumbled into their midst? When it reared practically before her with its flashing eyes and floating hair? Well, what better dream of coursers could she hope for, even without the pomp and bugle blast? A war Queen after all, an old one. Stripped for flight atop a snow-white charger.

  “Her Majesty wishes,” her Majesty said, “to sting it to death.”

  “Go back,” I yelled, or something like it.

  Whatever Thingy said, her last words to me, were lost to the bees who settled on her hands, her face, her lips and, when she opened her mouth to scream, her tongue, her teeth, her cheeks, the back of her long, long throat.

  Cinderella dressed in pink

  Went upstairs to strut and slink

  Cinderella dressed in black

  Went upstairs to take it back

  When Thingy finally turned and ran back toward the creek, it was too late. The bees were maddened, one wave wrenching their ruined bodies across her flesh even as the next landed and stung. When she fell and I finally reached her, they had made their way down her bodice and up her skirt, and when I ripped the peignoir off of her and flung it away to float downstream, I saw they had welted her breasts and her belly, her thighs and even up across the swell of her pudenda. There were bees squirming under the fold of her breasts, bees trapped under the mound of her belly. All across her body were strewn their stingers and the white run of their guts, the curled bodies of the dead and the furious thrust of the soon-to-die.

  I rolled her in the creek, swatting bees out of her hair and away from her face. She was blind by then, almost surely, her eyes swollen to slits and her body’s sense of itself so damaged she didn’t squint or blink even as I sluiced creek water directly into them. What did I say, my last words to my friend? I can’t recall. I know a bird called close at hand and then another and another, attracted by the feast of bees. I remember shouting and, from across the field, Daniel and then Jacob shouting back as they began to run. I remember dragging Thingy’s body by the ankles downstream to a pool where I could submerge more of her, and the flapping of my nets around me, and the rasping noise she was making in the back of her throat.

  Her hands rose in front of her face as if trying to break away from her body and then fluttered there, lost. I was too busy tr
ying to save her life and I didn’t grab them as I should have; I didn’t hold them in my own as she died.

  By mistake she kissed a snake.

  How many doctors did it take?

  The birds chipped and willowed, delighted at their bounty. The water flowed over the rocks and the bees fell back slowly at first, then faster as the Queen, left with only a few loyal guards, dropped down onto the white sheet I had spread for her and, with exquisite slowness, waddled through the dark arch of her new home.

  And then Jacob and Daniel were there. Someone, perhaps even me, was making a low, moaning sound and Jacob hooked his hands under Thingy’s arms and pulled her body from the water. “What happened? What happened?” Daniel said and Jacob made two fists and pressed them like a rolling pin against the top of Thingy’s rippling belly.

  No matter what reason Cinderella mounts the stairs, it is always only one snake that bites her but as many doctors as you can count to bring her back. In black, in pink, in red, in yellow; in gauzy skirts and cut-off jean shorts, polka-dots and a pattern of twining roses, she climbs, eager for her assignation. I would like to end the song here and let her climb forever, busy imagining whatever it is she thinks she will find in the chamber at the top, always just a riser away from the mistake that will kill her or, at the very least, send her into her ruinous sleep.

  But there’s always another verse. The rhyme demands it. And so it was with my Thing whose thighs I spread as far apart as I could and between whose legs I saw first a thatch of bloody hair, then, eyes already open, turning as if to examine me, your face, Ingrid, born at last and so familiar that, when I cried out, it was not in grief, but recognition.

  The Orifice

  And the Orifice said:

  There once was a woman who married the sun. . .