Free The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst

no. We don’t know enough about each other yet.”
    I was perfectly calm. I was prepared to give her some time to get used to the idea. “You know everything there is to know about me,” I said. “And I know enough about you to know that I love you.”
    She turned away from me. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    She didn’t speak for a moment. She had made her back stiff and hard, and when I reached out to touch her, she flinched away. “I know you love me,” she said finally. Her voice was ragged. “But how do you
know
that you love me?”
    “Well, I know it because I want to be with you all the time,” I began.
    “No. That’s not what I mean. I mean, how does it occur to you? How often do you really
know
it?”
    “Always. I always know it.”
    “Yes, you always know it, but it’s… it’s like in the back of your mind, right? It’s like… it’s like the way that you know that you’re going to die.”
    I reached for her shoulder and rolled her over so that she was looking at me again. “Lexy, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
    “Well, I mean, everyone knows that they’re going to die, right, but most of the time you let it slip from your mind. I mean, it’s always there in your head, and if anyone asked, you’d know the answer. But then there are some moments when all of a sudden you just
know
it, you know? It suddenly hits you that you’re going to die someday, and you say, ‘Oh, my God, this is the biggest fact of my life, and I’d almost forgotten.’”
    “Well, so what?” I said. “What does that have to do with anything? No, I don’t think about my own death every moment of every day, but that’s because I want to forget it. You can’t go on with your life if you don’t forget about it sometimes. But that’s not the way I feel about you.”
    “But still. That’s the way you experience it, right? It’s in fits and starts.” She turned away again.
    I ran my hands over my face, rubbing hard at the skin, trying to feel the sturdiness underneath. We had not fought like this before, and I felt as if I were trying to swim through molasses. “Come on, Lexy, why are you doing this? I love you all the time. It’s always with me. But what do you want me to say? You can’t maintain that level of intensity every minute of your life.”
    She was very quiet. “Well, I can. I do. I can’t take one breath, not one single breath, without knowing that I love you.”
    I just lay there for a moment, looking at the long line of her back. “Where is this coming from?” I asked.
    She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she turned and looked at me. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I guess you just kind of freaked me out a little, proposing like that, out of the blue.”
    “Do you want me to take it back?”
    She held her hands up in front of her face, looking at the words I’d written. “No,” she said. “I don’t want you to take it back.” She sighed. “But I can’t say yes yet. I don’t think you know enough about me. What if you find out more and you change your mind?”
    “Well, I don’t think that’s likely. But, okay, go ahead—tell me the things I don’t know.”
    “Okay,” she said. Her voice was very quiet and even. “I’ll marry you if you can answer this question for me: Do I have any tattoos?”
    I stared at her. I knew the whole of her skin by heart. Did she think there was anything I had missed? “No,” I said. “You don’t.”
    She lowered her head and parted her hair for me. I could see black ink on her scalp. “Sorry,” she said.
    I bent over her head, examining. I couldn’t make it out. “What is it?” I asked.
    “It’s snake hair,” she said. “Like Medusa.”
    “Wow,” I said. I tried to follow the lines on her head, to make out the scales and the angry snake faces, but her hair was too thick. “When did you get it?”
    “When I was seventeen.” She pulled away from my hands, still resting in her hair, and