Free Hex: A Novel by Sarah Blackman Page A

father and Jacob introduced you to the mountain.
    Thingy’s manuscript burned quickly in spite of its dampness. By the time I stirred the last pages into ash—“. . .indicative of both malevolence and a contradictory desire to please. . .” I read as the page disintegrated into lacework, spiderweb—the men had already waded out into the pool and thrust you under the water once, twice, three times, the spray which fanned out behind you glittering like gems, or magic seeds, or scales. With my eyes closed, I listened. In my mind, I copied what I heard, what echoed back from the mouth of the cave as the words Thingy had labored over lifted up on the drafts of smoke, drifted unmoored from their meaning.
    The water was very cold, the feel of it on skin like crunching an ice cube between one’s molars. Understandably, you were screaming by the time the men waded back to shore. Your face, usually so placid, was drawn tight as a knot and your ears, the skin around your flared nostrils and howling mouth, your fingertips and toes and the bobbed plug of your navel were turning a delicate bluish-gray. But I was there, a conscientious minder. I stoked the fire high and bright and soon we had you warm again, swaddled in towels like a grub pinking inside its cocoon. You were calm and I was calm. A wind across the Orifice carried over to us an old lost song about a turkey in the autumn forest, looking for his meal, imagining the sweet gold of the acorn when he finally found what he sought. A knot popped in the fire and a drift of papery ash rode up the spire of the flames.
    By the time we came back around the mountain to the house, it was night. The clearing was dark and unremarkable, the hens asleep, the house just a collection of boards and nails fastened together and bid to stay put. You were exhausted and made the transition from darkness to electric light without waking up. I took you upstairs, set you in the bassinet and lay down beside you in Jacob and my bed.
    It is easy to imagine a romance in this. Two girls in white—I had changed into my nightgown—asleep under the eaves of the house like dolls filled with wadded cotton. Often Thingy and I would go to bed before the men, both exhausted by Thingy’s pregnancy, and this is what I would imagine then, lying in the close dark that is the second floor of any wood-heated house, listening to the drift and pitch of Jacob and Daniel’s voices as they crossed the floors below.
    Two dolls, silly things, picked for their pretty faces and theengaging lilt of their limp necks. Two dolls, heads too large, bodies sexless blanks ready to be dressed. But then, with the house finally silent and the moon gone round the mountain peak, its crescent a soaring caliper measuring the sky, an eye might open, roll. A finger with a hole in the center just the right size for a stone might stir and lift.
    Most nights I went downstairs first and Thingy joined me. We sat in the kitchen, the only light a conical spill from the battered overhead lamp, and ate the leavings of dinner, often the makings for the next night’s meal, talking, remembering some things, mutually and silently agreeing to forget others. Being with each other as we had always been and you held between us in your hot chamber, waiting only for the word that would call to you and you alone: awake!
    When I awoke, it was much later. Jacob had come to bed and was lying with one arm crossing my stomach, hand limp over my hip. The house was quiet. I was a little worried you would wake up when I got out of bed (you often do, imperious, I might add, as if I owe you some explanation of just what I am about), but you were heavy and still, your white sleeping singlet aglow in the faint light seeping through the window.
    In the kitchen, I erased a sign. In the living room and before the front and back doors. At each of the windows, I erased a sign, and at the foot of the stairs, at the end of the long hallway where I paused for a moment to look