Free Hex: A Novel by Sarah Blackman

flaps, all marked by strands of hair that poked like golden wire through the loose weave. As I lifted the first of them, I thought I had found a memento box. I was breathless, you understand, overwhelmed. It had been a strange few days. I felt something was off in me: a lodestone stripped of its magnetism, needle wildly oscillating. The house was empty. Jacob was in town making funeral arrangements and Daniel was in the hospital with Mrs. Clawson who would not speak or look at him. You were there, too: blue as a spacewoman in your plexiglass pod, your eyes bandaged lest they be dazzled by this planet’s strange light. I had opened a window and outside I could hear the sounds of summer coming to the mountain. Bird song and ambient rustle of new leaves spreading their palms toward the sky.
    If a truck had gone by or someone shouted, a dog barked or a lawnmower chugged into reluctant life, I would have been transported to my own childhood lying on the floor of my bedroom with a book open on my chest, watching the green dapple of the tulip poplar across the ceiling. Waiting for Thingy to come home from her swimming lessons and let herself in the backdoor. Calling to me, “Alice! Alice! Come on. I haven’t got all day,” as she crossed our kitchen, flip-flops slapping her heels, atrail of water snaking behind her as if she were a selkie or one of those lost children come back from the world underneath our world to rummage in my father’s refrigerator for something to eat.
    I opened the first box—a winter scene, children skating on a frozen pond ringed by dark, precise firs while in the far distance a doe, exposed!, sprung across a clearing, her white tail lost in the dazzle of the drifts. Instead of treasure, the junk of memory (a resurrection) I found a manuscript; chapters twelve through twenty-one, to be precise. Eventually, I read the whole thing. It was typed (when had she done this? where had she done this? there was no typewriter in the house, not even in the clutter of Daniel’s study which, you may be sure after this, Jacob thoroughly searched), neatly annotated and close to finished. Thingy, displaying a facility for both subterfuge and psychological theory I had never suspected, had compiled her research, analyzed her data sets, crafted charts and bar codes, carefully codified the experiences of a life I had thought she was merely living. All that remained was to draw her conclusions. She had left notes, hand written on graph paper in her loose cursive, but her final word on the subject had been a question.
    “Given the directly quantifiable development of the motherless child into the fanatical narcissist can Subject A’s reaction to the introduction of a proxy-child (female: Subject X) be extrapolated within secure parameters? Does the cultural history of Subject A’s titular hive rival (Self) render the data-set too specifically referential? Consult Ellis and Wilson,” Thingy had written.
    Underneath this, in a different pen and dated the day she died—her last word on this, and almost any, subject—she hadwritten, “If A is the worker who figures Self as the Queen, how will she perceive Subject X? Rival, sister, or child?”
    The other two tins—one red, one green and stamped with a worn, Nordic version of St. Nicholas—contained the rest of the manuscript. The middle and the beginning; I had started with the end.
    I found the title page in the green box. Narcissist Delusion in Collectivist Isolation , she had called the thing; then a semicolon, Broken Matrilineage as a Developmental Model for Gender Pathology; then another semicolon, Thingy never did know when to stop, Wicked Witches and How They Come to Be(e) ; long dash, A Case Study . Underneath all this she had typed: by Ingrid Isolte Clawson, and after her name, in letters that had been traced over many times, etched into the page, Thingy had written: PhD.
    So. That is what I was burning, Ingrid, if you would like to know, on the day your