Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  “I don’t think I understand,” said Alice, looking around her. The room was hemmed with a wide array of junk. There were pop-bead bracelets and telescoping camp cups, plastic spoons that changed color when dipped in cold water, x-ray spectacles, false moustaches, one jelly slipper snapped at the strap. There were decoder rings and rusted slinky coils, an etch-a-sketch blacked in a mad labyrinth of lines, a red whistle, a cantering pony with a frayed, tangled tail. A miniature car. A miniature barn. A miniature cock doodle-dooing from on top of the weather vane. All manner of things, all manner of trash; some it, if she squinted, she might even recognize as once belonging to her. A doll’s head, a doll’s hand, a doll’s dress in yellowed pink sateen matted to the doll’s soft body.

  “I don’t think that’s what I came here for,” she said.

  “Yes,” said the Queen of the Tie-Snakes. Her voice was dry and stealthy, the sound of something moving with economy beneath a season of dead leaves. “Anything you want, dear Alice.” She thrust forward, uncoiling from her throne, and stretched to impossible tension so her head hovered right beside Alice’s own. Her tongue flickered as if in approval of her generosity, her vast, incomparable wealth.

  “Ok,” said Alice, who saw nothing there she wanted, “I’ll take him then,” and she pointed to the man in his lover’s wreath of snakes. As soon as she said it, Alice felt something within her settle. It was a fleshy weight, like a bullfrog squatting to fill its hole, and she wished for a moment she had chosen the doll’s hand—so cunning with its half-moon nails and the hole in the ring finger into which one could insert a gem—or the disheveled pony caught in permanent flight.

  “Yes?” said the Queen of the Tie-Snakes, turning to face Alice, her tongue playing unpleasantly about Alice’s cheeks, “My newest husband is what you choose?” The Queen returned to her chair, propping her chin on her top coil in consternation. “He owes us a terrible debt, Alice dear. I’m afraid you can’t have him for free.”

  But Alice had not come empty handed. First, she offered the ball of tinfoil—so faceted, so bright at its peaks—but the Queen gestured with great disdain to a drift of just such spheres rolling loose behind her throne. Next, she offered the yellow thermos, still damp with traces of coffee, but the Queen sighed as if bored and some of her husbands who had lifted their heads from the brood-nest to watch made a sound like laughter, high and strange. Finally, Alice pulled the book from her bag—she had almost forgotten it, the story so sharply told, its pictures so brief and unshaded—and laid it before the Queen with little hope. A small sorrow pricked within her for the man who was now only loosely wrapped by the Queen’s curious husbands, but who lay so still, limp and exposed on the floor.

  “Ah,” said the Queen, whispering down to the floor to turn the pages with her chin. “Dear Alice, are you sure?”

  “Sure,” said Alice, “why not?”

  And this offering the Queen accepted with great celebration and mounted at the top of her tallest pile. The book sat open to an illustration of the mountaineer bidding his Sherpa farewell, their hands almost meeting through the tangle of the yak’s rank pelt, before turning to face his last fatal ascent. Around them the mountain’s permanent clouds were sketched in childish puffs. Under their feet the mountain’s rock mounted into a brute vanishing point at the page’s far right corner.

  ‘A Brave Parting’ the picture was titled, and the Queen and her consorts hissed their delight.

  So, Alice came to her prize and took him by the hand. Out they went from the Queen of the Tie-Snakes’ castle. Down from the pyramid and over the lake, across the meadow, through the forest, up the passage and out again to the world they had come from whose sky they saw was now burnished gold with the coming evening In the softer shadows where the tree shade touched the viridian stems of clover and vetch the world was cool and deep, plush, inviting. They lay down.

  “My name is Alice,” said my mother to my father and my father told my mother, “My name is Dax.”

  What else they said there, I don’t know. I imagine many questions were asked as my father, who was a beautiful man, saw my mother who had read about many things, whose eyes were weak behind her glasses, who chewed the side of her finger with small sharp teeth like the petulant teeth of a kitten or a mink. Or maybe there were none—my mother satisfied with her endings, my father satisfied with the feel of her corduroy skirt and the pull of her buttons against their strings. Instead my father gave my mother a ring of keys.

  “These are yours,” he might have said to her, “and they open all the doors in all my castles.”

  And what my mother said, his hand at her throat, pinching the ridge of her collarbone. . .

  “You may use all of them, but this one,” my father said, sliding a small key off the ring and holding it up so she could see it in the failing light. “This key is the only thing forbidden to you, and if you use it, I will. . .” my father said, and my mother said. . .her hand on the small of his back. . .his hand. . . .his leg. . .the key under her tongue, thick, a taste like blood. . .and then . . .when she swallowed it. . .the key down her throat, past her breasts and her heart, the key past her belly and the place where my brother was being made. . .lost for awhile. . .for a long while lost in my mother. . .the key. . .little blue key. . .forbidden. . .“I will kill you,” he said. . .until finally, one day, she found it again. . .lost so long she had forgotten. . .and used it. . .a stain like blood unwashable from her hands. . .and made me.

  The World Below The World

  Yesterday, we all went up the mountain. Sitting at the dinner table two nights before, Daniel said, “I don’t understand. Why can’t we wait even just two more weeks? The baby’s so young still. It’s a long trip.”

  This is how he refers to you, Ingrid, ‘the baby.’ Not your name, but your condition. I suspect this is how Daniel refers to all people: the lover, the suspect, the witch. It is to say the not-me, or in your case a distancing that means the not-mine. Though of course you are his, as you are mine and Jacob’s. That is to say: none of ours.

  I wonder if this will change as you get older and begin to resemble one of your mothers. Then Daniel may say, “my daughter,” a different sort of condition. I will always call you by your name.

  In any event, we were eating a rabbit Jacob had snared in the forest, the meat comforted by a nest of halved potatoes and soft, steaming carrots, a bowl of barley, a salad, a loaf of seeded bread.

  Jacob leaned forward to spear a haunch. This is how he argues: stripping the meat from the bone, cutting it into dark morsels and slipping each bite deliberately into his mouth. Jacob is not a large man, but he is tidily packaged. He moves as if he has considered each grouping of his body—the muscles of his arm, those of his back, the relationship of his ribcage to his spine, of his abdomen to his cock. He knows his impact as he hooks an arm behind the ladder back of his chair, takes a long drink, works the muscles of his jaw.

  “It’s not as if I’m belying the importance of your traditions,” Daniel said. He turned to look at me. The two men sit at the heads of our table, which in its former life used to be the front door of the Feed Store. Despite Jacob’s sanding, it is visibly charred at the base where he sits. On wet days, it emits a lingering smoky scent. I sit facing the window. Through it I can see the hen yard and past that to the path we have beaten to the creek, over the creek to the first of our hives. Thingy used to sit across from me facing the mirror that hung there. Through it she could see: the hives, the path, hens, her own self—pale hair darkened to hay, and pressed heavy against her cheeks—the table spread before her and myself. First my face with her own eyes, then the back of my head with the mirror’s eyes. In her last few weeks, Thingy had become terribly swollen. In the evenings, when the swelling was worst, she would work off the rings she wore studded about her fingers and set them in a careful line before her plate. There they caught the candlelight and refashioned it. Five gold rings making the light run like boiling honey pouring from a fire-cracked hive. . .


  Daniel said, “What do you think, Alice? You’re with the baby more than we are.” Both men were looking at me. Jacob chewed. His eyes are so thickly lashed that when he sleeps the lashes curl against his cheeks. His eyes themselves are large, a hazel so high that in some lights they appear yellow, and are set perfectly straight along their axis. If it weren’t for the lashes, his eyes would be too impersonal. When I first met Jacob, the lashes made his eyes seem mournful or nostalgic. Later, I realized they are just hidden, like something moving in the fringes of the forest, a shape I can’t really see.

  Daniel, on the other hand, has very crooked eyes. They reflect himself so well it is as if in each eye there is a smaller version of Daniel, and in each of these Daniels another, even smaller, and so on. There are as many Daniels as there is room beneath each one’s skin for another exact, slightly more compressed copy. Perhaps infinite Daniels. A Daniel at the subatomic level staring out at the incomprehensibly vast universe and asking it the same question.

  Jacob chewed and I disappeared. This is how I argue; by osmosis, bowing my head and considering the barley which has been scooped hollow on one side by the serving spoon. Next to the bowl was a pot of honey, the first of the spring season’s, and next to the honey, a candle rolled from dead wax and pressed in a mold with the same hexagonal pattern as the comb. Then Daniel’s hand, covered as is his body with a nimbus of hair so fine he seems to refract the light around him. And then his fork, two pronged; his plate, nearly empty; his wine glass, the red wine pricked with light. . . . You see how this could go, Ingrid? And I haven’t even gotten to the meat. . .

  “Okay, okay,” said Daniel, holding up his hands and laughing (the smaller Daniel raising his hands and laughing, and the next beyond that, the next). “You’re right. Plus it’s been so beautiful lately.” He turned to you, propped in your basket where Thingy’s plate would have been, and rubbed one fingertip along the bottom of your archless foot. “What do you think about that?” Daniel asked you. “What do you think about going on a trip?”

  You answered him, but he didn’t hear you. Instead, he lifted his wine glass as he forked his last bite into his mouth. “To Ingrid,” Daniel toasted, shifting the rabbit from cheek to cheek.

  “Ingrid,” I said, lifting my own glass. Jacob swallowed. He rinsed his mouth with wine and laid his fork across his plate, considering me now as in the window behind you the tin roof of the henhouse caught the moonlight and held it there. A silver spark brightening in contrast to the mummifying candlelight. Sharp, but easily subsumed.

  And so, the next day we went.

  Let me tell you about the journey, which we make twice a year. First, we prepare. The men fill the packs and I get ready to leave the house. Outside the front and back doors, I make a mark in the dirt. Outside the hen house and their yard, I make a ring of crushed eggshells and draw another mark with a length of charred wood from our fire as the chickens cackle and strut for my attention. Outside the spavined tool shed, which in a previous life was used as a sty, I make a mark and many marks around the borders of the vegetable plot—at the corn which comes to my chest and rustles silkily; at the tomato vines sprung tall this year but not well fruited; at the pepper plants, the eggplants, the beds of herbs, the cucumber vines clinging prickly to their trellis of twine; at the gourds; at the tight budded heads of lettuce. In the mud of the creek bed, I mark against flood and at the hives, at Jacob’s insistence, I mark and ask contritely—you at my hip, you remember—for them to stay a while longer, to grace us in the meadow we have made for them.

  I carry you everywhere on my hip, Ingrid, so you will see the markings in the dirt and remember their shape if not their meaning, but you are restless, I understand, almost giddy in what for you is a new air every morning. You kick and arch away from my body. I put you down and you sit plump and stunned for a moment before reaching to slap at the dust, the garden soil, the scummed pie tins we use to water the hens, the spattered constellations of their shit.

  It takes a long time. When we are finished the sun has already gone mean above the tree line, and the birds settled from their dawn cacophony into more practical matters—warning shrieks at the forest line, the catbird whose mate nests in our eves hawing rustily from the peak of the house to the cemetery gate and back again. Jacob is impatient. He sits at the bottom of the porch steps melting the frayed ends of his bootlaces with a lighter.

  “All set?” asks Daniel. He is fondling the ears of one of the cats, the male who is sleek as a snake and looks at us suspiciously. I do not make a mark for the cats. They won’t let me near them, though they follow Daniel as he works. This one narrows his eyes when he sees us and arches his back slightly for show. He doesn’t move from the swath of sunlight where he is squatting and when Daniel gives his head a final rub with the ball of his thumb he rumbles hoarsely with pleasure. Jacob has already shouldered his pack and set off. As we watch, he slashes the head from a Queen Anne’s lace with his stick and disappears behind the black locust that marks the head of the trail. Daniel smiles at me and shrugs. He scrubs his hands on the back of his jeans as he rises though here is nothing on his hands he needs to scrub away. Cat hair perhaps, which the cat himself leaves behind in a little gray drift as he slips over the porch railing to keep tabs on us from under the house.

  We, on the other hand, are filthy. You in particular, wrapped in the cloth I use to bind you to me when I need my hands so only your head shows, but that smeared with dirt, your fine white hair darkened and matted above your right ear with something I can’t identify. I imagine how we look together. The insect drone, which I hear so constantly I don’t really hear, brightens and shifts to a higher register. You crow and fling your head forward into my breastbone. I am sweating and the places on my face where I have run my hand as I work feel stiff with salt and grime. I envision my face as I sometimes catch it in passing, reflected in the dining room mirror or blear in the thick glass of our windows: nose beaking out of increasingly exhausted cheeks, the chin too sharp, lines beginning to arc around my mouth like parenthesis.

  These are bitter moments for me, before the start of any journey, but Daniel doesn’t seem to notice as he shrugs the pack higher onto his shoulders and latches the straps carefully across his chest. Jacob is out of sight, not even a blue patch of his shirt bobbing through the green and gold forest, and you, little beast, jerk, surprised by something I can’t see which you mark as it travels in the lee of the henhouse, which makes you jerk again as you follow its progress across the yard until you finally lose it behind the cemetery fence.

  “Right-o,” says Daniel. He licks his thumb and rubs it on your forehead with the same absentminded gesture he used on the cat. “Alright?” he says to me, but he doesn’t touch me and I wish for the few moments I allow myself to wish such things, that I could pull my hair over my face and leave it there.

  He goes then, burrowing his fingers into his beard which is new, blonde, beginning to curl. His other arm pumps awkwardly as he mounts the slight slope. We go. Across the loud yard—hens arguing, catbird hawing, insects remarking with tireless scandal, ‘she did! she did! she did!’—out of the sun and into the cool crowning of the forest. You pipe thin notes like a song and Daniel calls out ahead of us for Jacob to wait. Just before we crest the ridge and pass out of sight of the house entirely, I turn to look over my shoulder. The yard has begun to settle with us gone. Even the hens are holing up under their hut to escape the direct sun. Golden motes glimmer above the path where we have kicked up dust in our passing and the house itself—grand but spare, porch strutted with simple columns and rising into gables once trimmed green like a living canopy, but now peeling down to the sun-bleached wood—sits as it has always sat, seemingly backward at the head of the bald, facing the mountain.

  The male cat has come out from under the porch and hunkers in the grass, scrubbing his face with one paw. As we watch he startles, springing tense to all four feet. He is alert to something only he has heard which he watches as it comes ag
ain from behind the house and crosses the yard. Something you greet, seemingly ecstatic, clapping your hands and calling your high song into the suddenly silent air.

  I will tell it to you as it was told to me.

  In the Hall of the Mountain King, there are many families. His peoples are called by many names and come in various forms. Some are well shaped and handsome with long fair hair curling almost to the ground. Some are weak and sandy and live in terror of the wild geese that persecute them relentlessly, killing many of their number. Some of the peoples are water-dwellers and they live in the world like our world but below it. They eat deer and squirrel and wild turkey, never fish, but sometimes a child who confuses them by playing, as children do, at being a deer or a squirrel or a bird. Those they will spit and roast on their fires deep under the river, and though they recognize the mistake as soon as they strip the paper feathers from the child’s arms, they will feast on these children with great celebration as they are not a people inclined to waste.

  Sometimes, when traveling, a person will come across small tracks in the mud of a creek bed, or in wintertime marked in the snow, as if from a group of children all lost together and merrily wandering. If he follows them, often enough the tracks will lead to an open cave in the cliff face, little more than a dugout slanting back into the sheer cliff wall. There the tracks will disappear as if the whole company—boys and girls, he can see here where they have skipped, here where one has veered off to snap the head from a wildflower, strip a length of birch bark from the tree—has walked straight into the mountain, not one of them missing a step.

  Sometimes, people do not return from the mountains at all, or are found many years later wandering deranged through what were once familiar streets. These people never live long back among their neighbors, but while they are there they tell fantastical stories: whole towns hidden in the mountain’s caverns, peoples whose bodies have become encrusted with gemstones—rubies winking at the corners of their eyes and amethyst glimmering like scales at the inside of their wrists—who dance around their cold blue fires and send up out of the mountain the eerie squeal of thousands of gemstones rubbing against each other. And the food! Rough rock chalices filled with wine, phosphorescent mushrooms, pale slabs of fish gleaming with butter and cakes so light and crumbly that though they spent all day eating (a single day that was months for those left behind in the foothills) they never once felt satisfied.