Free Hex: A Novel by Sarah Blackman Page B

over the yard, each object in it picked out by starlight against the black swale of the forest. I erased a sign over each of the bedroom lintels and at the bottom of the stair which lead to the attic. Finally, I cracked the door to Daniel’s room, paused there to listen for his uninterrupted breath, and slipped inside.
    I was almost finished, a sign wiped from under the bed, the door to the closet, the windowsill, when, from the tin roof of the woodshed which joined the wall just below the window, something hurled itself at the glass. It was one of the cats, the female: fat and white and fond of Thingy who used to leave the window open for her at night. She rubbed her wedge head against the glass followed by her body, the flirting tip of her tail. Then she came around again and spat, battered the pane with her paw. Her white face was sharp as a snake’s, her eyes slitted. I stumbled backwards and Daniel caught me by the wrist.
    “What are you doing?” he said, reasonably enough. He was turning his head back and forth on the pillow the way he might if he had a fever, trying to find a length of cool cloth with his cheek. “What time is it?” but even as he asked he was pulling me back into the bed with him, and even as I answered, something innocuous, some dull tale of drudgery, he was pulling my nightgown over my hips and I was helping him, arcing my back, sliding my haunches up as he moved on top of me and met me, as he looked down at me, his eyes navy blue in the bad light and inside them a smaller Daniel pressing into me, a smaller one inside that. Smaller and smaller until he was so minute he could stop inside that one long shuddering moment and look around.
    Afterward, I slept in Daniel’s bed. Sometime toward dawn, he surfaced long enough from sleep to ask, “What was at the window?”
    “It was her again,” I said, staring out into the graying corners of the room. The birds were waking up, starting all over as they did every morning, too brainless to remember where they left off.
    “The cat?” he said.
    “Yes,” I said. “That’s what I meant.”

The Daughter’s Tale
    Once there was a widower who had an only daughter. He was always admonishing her to marry a good hunter, someone who could provide for her and keep her into her old age. This was somewhat ironic because the widower himself, who had been renowned about the county in his younger years for his sharp eye and skill with a knife, had forsaken hunting all together in favor of building cairns out of river rocks in the backyard. He was building a cairn for every animal he had ever killed. As he had lived many long seasons alone with plenty of time on his hands and had all those years a daughter to feed, this meant the backyard was rapidly starting to fillwith stones. All the grass had been smothered, the tomato vines crushed.
    “But father,” said the girl as she stood on the back porch and surveyed the ruin, “I’m too young to marry.”
    “Nonsense,” said her father, taking off a work glove to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist. “Why, when I was your age, I had already outlived two wives and soon would have outlived a third. You’re never too young to make a start in the world.”
    The cairns were often top heavy and had no mortar to hold the individual stones together. No matter where the father and daughter went in the house, at all times of the day or night they heard the sounds of rocks sliding off each other and clunking to the ground. “Goddamnit,” the father would say, “there goes another one.” Much of his mornings were spent repairing the existing record before he could go on to commemorate something new.
    Well, they lived in this way for a long time: the father admonishing, surrounded by rocks; the daughter washing the dishes, swirling her rag around the face of each dish as if it were the face of a human man, a husband she would come to love. Her father’s cairns grew more and more elaborate