Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  The rest of the ceremony passed in kind of a blur. The King officiated his own wedding and there was a whole file folder full of official documents to read. The courtesans tried to seem interested, but there was a lot of shifting weight and stifled yawning, and for most of the wedding there wasn’t anything for her to do but stand there and smile and every now and then, at the King’s cue, repeat something he had read.

  Then, the King said, “Now for the proofs.” He told her to get up on the stepladder, which she did, and prop her left foot on the top step, which, balancing a little awkwardly in her silver heels, she also did. When she was steady in this position, the King knelt down before her and lifted a velvet sac she hadn’t previously noticed from its place on the end table. He began to peel up her skirts, layer by layer, passing them up to her to hold so that soon she could no longer see what he was doing directly because there was so much fabric pressed under her chin and had to watch instead in the mirror. When the King finally got down to her bare legs, there was a different kind of stirring among the courtesans. She hadn’t expected any of this and felt ashamed. Her legs were so white and skinny in the mirror they looked like some other kind of thing entirely!

  The King opened the velvet sac with a flourish and pulled out a pair of silver shears. He opened and shut them twice for the benefit of the courtesans and then used them to snip the two sides of her white lace panties and pull the fabric away from her crotch like a magician pulling a scarf from the top of an empty hat. The bath attendants had done their job well so everything down there was trimmed tight and blonde, and the King, for the first time paying a little attention to the fact that it was a body there under all those clothes, stroked her thatch admiringly. Then, with the index and ring finger of his left hand, her pulled her lips apart and held them open while he dumped the remained contents of the sac onto the carpet. She gasped in shock. Five rough-cut rubies fell out of the sac and rolled around on the floor.

  One by one, with a little flourish each time, the King inserted the rubies inside of her, pushing the first one up as far as he could with his middle finger, then using each stone to push its neighbor higher up the line. This was a little painful, but there was no blood and the King was fast. The whole thing was hard on Beemis since, it turns out, this was his sister, the only girl he knew who could be reached on short notice, but in the end he got what he wanted (the King had even patted him on the back a few times and called him Blemis, which was close) and his sister didn’t seem too much the worse for the wear. She even looked a little proud up there surrounded by so much floating fabric and hair, chin raised, eyes locked on the mirror. Soon enough the ordeal was over and she was married. She was the Queen.

  For a while, everything went well. As the Queen, she had a lot more free time than she had as a villager and she took up landscape painting and learned how to make lanterns out of rice paper and paste. The King got along with her well enough, and he liked the feel of the stones rubbing the tip of his cock as he fucked her, which he did pretty regularly despite his busy schedule. But then one day, as she washed up in her marble and platinum bathroom after a particularly vigorous session with the King, the Queen felt a sharp pain in her stomach and one of the rubies fell out of her vagina onto the tile. She was upset, but she guessed it probably wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t like she’d ever had rubies up there before, and the whole thing had seemed like more of a symbolic gesture anyway. Nevertheless, she took the stone into the King’s drawing room where he was relaxing on the sofa reading the paper and told him what had happened. He shook his head and put the stone away in the velvet sack which, even though it was empty, he kept on his person at all times.

  Over the course of the next few weeks, the stones fell out of her one by one. Without the stones, the King didn’t find her as satisfying. She was loose down there, flaccid feeling, and even though he tried lots of different positions—her on top, backwards on top, from behind and squeezing her creamy white ass cheeks together for a little extra traction—he couldn’t finish inside her anymore and had to get her to take him in her mouth or do it with her hand. “C’est la vie,” said the King, who had lots of other options. After that, he left her alone. She was still the Queen, but word must have gotten around somehow because people looked at her a little differently. It made her paranoid and she took to wearing her hair down over her face and skulking in the corridors. She got involved with a number of irritating causes and became a major supporter of community theatre. Whenever she ran into Beemis, she pressed him into serving as her escort to the dog show or the ballet and, as she wouldn’t allow him to either quit or transfer and the King had long since forgotten his name, she generally made life miserable for him out of a spirit of revenge but also pity because she knew some things he did not about the nature of the world.

  Sometimes, she would go into the room where her wedding had been held and lift the velvet sack from the end table where the King kept it now that the rubies were back inside. She would spill the stones out on the coverlet and sort them, holding them up to the light and peering through them, piling them in her palm and testing their weight. But, no matter how old she got, nothing ever changed with those rubies. That’s all they were, just rubies, though she could never accept it and so lived a long and tedious life.”

  This is what my father said to me. And with that, my life in his house had come to an end.

  It was February when I left, a cold winter. The snow was fresh and my father, who was out of work, had not shoveled. I remember seeing my tracks behind me as I left the house. I remember expecting something more dramatic; droplets of blood steaming in the snow perhaps, but that was all—just the shape of my feet, the closed door, a patter of blue light from the television shifting silently behind the curtains.

  I hitched my backpack higher on my shoulders. I had packed a couple of changes of clothes, some books. I hadn’t been to school for four months, which was how old the fetus was, though I thought the two things were unrelated. Rather, at that point, I felt like I knew everything I was ever going to know. As if I had reached my limit and anything new would spill over the edge of my brimming head and sluice across my features like groundwater leaking down a ruined face of the mountain. I didn’t want to make a mess, I remember thinking.

  I stood for a long time in my father’s front yard as my shoes soaked through and my toes began to burn, then freeze. Behind the curtains, I could see people walking: my father or Rosellen moving from room to room, but the curtains didn’t twitch, no new light came on and none went out. Then, someone hoisted the venetian blinds in what had once been my brother’s bedroom and sat at the window. It was Rosellen, but she gave no sign that she wanted to communicate with me; no wave, no finger tap on the glass.

  She sat in the window and stared as if I were an image on the television screen, a subplot to a story she had invested too much time into following to turn off now. I stared back and for a long time we were like that: each of us expressionless, each of us gray. Then I turned and began to inch my way down the slick hill. I was going to the Feed Store whose lights came in and out of view behind the trees as I walked, and from there I would go to Thalia’s house high on a bald on the south side of Newfound Mountain. I was like an animal then—my mind a gray buzz, my body a bloody socket into which an uneasy life had been plugged. My only thoughts were not to slip and how cold my feet were. I had no idea my real life had begun.

  Oh, Push sings the kettle.

  Please Push begs the chair.

  The mother hears the siren coming up the hill, but it is going to her neighbor’s house who is also expecting a baby, who was also supposed to travel in orderly fashion to the hospital with her husband, but who has panicked at the early pains and called the ambulance instead, waits now in the foyer with her bag in her hand as they pull into her drive.

  It is a month too early for the mother and she knows something is wrong. “Wait,” she says and says it louder, “Wait,” trying to call over the birth song whic
h is rising all around her, drowning her in euphony.

  But the baby is anxious; it is filled with fear. Something has changed—a light gone out, a dazzle fading—and its absence threatens the baby with a loss that quickens her, makes her rough. Darkness Brilliance Darkness Brilliance. Where is it? She can’t see over this red pounding. She can’t hear over the rush of waters. It is gone. It is lost. The baby feels, for the first time, emptiness and she is enraged. She screams and the world becomes high and thin. It rushes away from her. She is lost in it, her will almost extinguished, and then she feels a thready tug, a fleet little pull from far away as the Other, the baby can sense it, also screams; as the Other, the baby can feel it, also spreads her new hands against a bright light.

  It is the first time the baby has been comforted. It is the first time the baby has been. She lies very still, marveling at the fact of herself, feeling for the Other who is with her, who mirrors her. Who speaks down their shared current: I am I I I. . .I am I.

  And this is how my father found me, many hours later, when he came into the house with a hammer in his hand to see his wife lying dead on the floor, his daughter beside her, and there at the window, unmoved by either pity or awe, the dragon, of course.

  Who else would it have been?

  The Orifice

  So you can never claim to have been misled, Ingrid, here is what the Orifice said:

  “—indicative of both malevolence and a contradictory desire to please. Furthermore, Subject A’s delusions—classic instances of magical thinking on a gradated scale from the superstitious to the frankly paranoid—adhere to a surprisingly sophisticated symbolic lexicon that she employs with evidence of nascent awareness of their primogenitors in both myth and popular culture. Some of these reoccurring icons, to be elaborated on in Chapter Seven, are: snakes and certain birds, the moon, a stone which Subject A varyingly describes as gem-like, rough or water-rounded, fire and ash, lost or hindered children, a dominant female figure in many guises, and bees, wasps and other hive-building insects. Though Subject A is highly skilled at oral storytelling, she displays little to no awareness of narrative goals; i.e. the nature of a story as a transformative tool applied to an existent reality with the intended outcome of either reinvention or manipulation of the audience’s perception. Rather, she operates as if her highly iconographic personal mythology is a continuation of a contiguous narrative line, integrated into the quotidian domestic reality of her life in a supranatural fashion which overwhelms the “natural,” obliterating rather than rewriting. Thus, the dualism between her bodily self and her consciousness is not Cartesian, but rather mythic: the god (or gods) who have influenced her life are irrational and unapproachable, but she must have done something to deserve their attention. From a diagnostic standpoint, it is clear how this paradoxical self image, at once both at the mercy and in control of larger forces, creates the opportunity for a dangerous abdication of personal responsibility, and furthermore—

  —plant produces a stout, blackish rhizome (creeping, underground stem), cylindrical, hard and knotty. It is collected in the autumn after the fruit has formed. It has only a faint, disagreeable odor, but a bitter and acrid taste. The root is an antidote against poison and the bite of the rattlesnake. The fresh root, dug in October, is used to make a tincture. Also known as: Black Snake Root, Rattle Root, Squaw Root, Bugbane—

  —The world is suspended at its corners. We have come after a terrible flood. The boy has a wild brother formed from blood washed in the river. They murder their mother and by dragging her body around the camp they grow the first corn. The bears do not demand of us; the deer give rheumatism; the reptiles make us dream; the birds and insects and smaller animals give disease and make menstruation sometimes fatal to women. The little men transform us and set us to kill the sun—

  —which leaves or roots when eaten produce maniacal delirium, if nothing worse. Necklaces of root, when hung about a child’s neck, prevent fits and cause easy teething. Also known as: Henna-bell, Henbell, Hebenon—

  —overworn green color; clasping tendrils. Thready strings snipt about the edges. Spokie rundles. Bloody flux—

  —running the risk of oversimplification, it is useful to figure the household within the context of a hive mentality. The arbiter of collectivist control (Subject B) is male and asserts a model of behavior whose clear goals are to not only control the necessary health, safety and comfort of what I term here as his “hive,” but also to assert a system of emotional/psychic hegemony through which he believes his essential principles will be replicated in a fractal expansion with the addition of each new hive member; much in the way bees craft additional, identical cells to accommodate the expansion of the colony. Subject A appears to submit to Subject B’s dominance. Indeed, she appears to do so happily which underscores my speculative theory of her causal infantilization outlined in Chapter Two. However, a subconscious conflict has emerged between Subject B’s patrilineal approach and the ardently literal symbolist Subject A’s strong identification with both matriarchal authority and her perception of collectivist identity as a female construct. Subject B views himself in the hive role of the Queen. In his mindset of almost pathological gender narcissism, there is no conflict between the feminine model and his overt masculine identification. In other words, he has subverted the cyclic, holistic nature inherent in a fractal model of community building in favor of an entropic mode which borrows from traditional Judeo-Christian iconography. He begins the timeline of the community, is able to reinsert himself at will along its continuity, is replicated in all other members of the community, and is the sole hive member capable of causing the termination of the community. Subject A, on the other hand, is unable to blend these two models. Thus, while she submits to Subject B’s dominant will, she seeks another, female member of the hive to stand in as the Queen; albeit a Queen stripped of her decisive powers. This, as a clear result of our long-standing relationship, has come to be myself. Since the introduction of Self and Subject C into the hive community a year prior to this writing, Subject A has bifurcated her subservience to both fulfill the rules surrounding Subject B’s hive expansion and serve the material and emotional needs of Self, her proxy hive Queen. As she figures this psychic schism through her usual narrative escapism, Subject A has become a most unusual sort of narcissist: a hive member that is aware of its lack of motility. The only person in all the world, she believes, who is able to know she is not in any way unique—

  —untoiled places, overmuch flowing. Kind hereof. Leaves hereof. Untilled places: whitish-green color. Root hereof, roots hereof. Diverse other places. Thready root, mean bigness—

  —There was a tribe of root-eaters and a tribe of acorn-eaters with great piles of shells near their houses. In one tribe, they found a sick man dying and were told it was the custom there when a man died to bury his wife in the same grave with him. The sky is an arch or a vault of solid rock. It was always swinging up and down. The moon is a ball that was thrown up against the sky a long time ago. Some say the stars are balls of light, others say they are human, but most people say they are living creatures covered with luminous fur or feathers with small heads which stick out like the head of a turtle. Some stars are called Where the Dog Ran. A dog warned us of the Great Deluge and showed us the place on his neck where the skin had worn off so the bones showed through—

  —a solitary, stout, pale stem with tough, strong fibers enclosing a white pith arises from the midst of the felted leaves. Its rigid uprightness accounts for some of the plant’s local names: Aaron’s Rod, Jupiter or Jacob’s Staff—

  —“I become a real wolf,” we say. When a rabbit was stuck in a hollow tree, he sang to the children: “Cut a door and look at me; I’m the prettiest thing you ever did see.” The rabbit we know now is only a little thing that came after. The man could not even see the heart in his hands, but he swallowed it and when the girl awoke she compelled herself to go to him and be his wife. “I have sewed myself together. I have sewed myself together�
��—

  —Shoot hereof. Fruit hereof. Washed therewith: other hot regions. Great broad leaves. Decoction thereof. Blue color. Sundry branches, raw humors. Seed hereof. Germ hereof—

  —remains to be seen what effect the disintegration of the hive community will have on Subject A. While the study is by no means completed, external factors (including the looming arrival of Subject X) along with Subject A’s increasing destabilization render the situation far too volatile for continuing study—

  —She rose and brought half a cake of bread, half a wild apple and half a pigeon. She heard running and the door was flung open and the sun came in. Finally, he stopped and pulled the arrows out of his side. “And now surely we and the good black things, the best of all, shall see each other,” they sang. “A bullfrog will marry you; a bullfrog will marry you,” they sang.

  The Green Knight’s Tale

  Every summer for one month, Thingy would leave me and go to the beach house her mother and father owned on an island off the coast. She came back from these trips tanned very brown, her hair, eyebrows and eyelashes bleached an impossible color, like spider’s thread which can only be seen in the early morning when it catches the dew. She also returned very salty.

  “Lick my wrist,” Thingy said for weeks afterwards, and then, “Eww,” when I pressed the tip of my tongue against her pulse. She pulled her arm away and wiped it on her skirt. But then a few minutes later she said, “But you could taste it, right? That’s the ocean. I brought it all the way back here just for you.”

  One year, when Thingy and I were thirteen, her parents agreed to take me along.

  The trip took four hours. Mr. Clawson drove and Thingy and I played the cow counting game with him as her mother slept in the passenger seat. The car was new, sleek and black with round silver headlights. It was a car that didn’t have anything to prove. The hood ornament was a cat which slunk down toward the grill as if stalking the road.