Hex: A Novel by Sarah Blackman

and pressed closer to the house until one day the daughter arose to discover that there were pebbles piled up against the glass at every window and boulders in a dusty jumble blocking the front and back door. Smooth river-stones filled the chimney so that their fireplace had become a rockslide, their foyer a cave-in, their house itself a cave pierced by rays of strange, golden light.
    “Dad,” said the girl, “what were you thinking?” But her father was building a monument to a flea out of sand and didn’t reply.
    That was the day a suitor finally came for her.
    It was her father who answered the door and gave the man he found there a hand as he scrambled down the loose slope of a cairn dedicated to her father’s childhood pet, a budgie named Mary. Her father helped him brush off the knees of his pants and retrieved his hat, knocked from his head by the doorframe during his entrance and rolled all the way to the living room where it had come to a rest under the couch.
    “Shit,” said her father, eyeing the damage to Mary’s cairn ruefully. He pulled a pad of paper from his back pocket and added Mary’s name to the list of cairns to repair which, while very long, still did not compare to the list of ones yet to be built. “What’s your business?” he asked the visitor who was peering around him as if even the dim light of the house hurt his eyes. The man was tall and thin and in need of a haircut. He wore an entirely brown suit with a brown hat to match which he held up before him and turned in his hands as if studying it, darting glances at the father over the bridge of his short, hooked nose.
    “Well, sir,” said the suitor, for it was he, “I’ve come to ask for your young woman. Or not quite,” he corrected himself, fluttering the hat in the air as if to erase what he had said. “I’ve come to ask if you would ask her for me. Your daughter, I mean. I want to make her my wife.” He had a strange way of talking, winding down through his sentences so they ended on a wheeze. The daughter, who had been in the kitchen this whole time counting the cutlery, a task she assigned for herself once a week, rain or shine, popped her head around the doorframe to look at him. When he saw her he smiled and gave a little wave.
    “Hmm,” said the father, sizing him up. “You look pretty weedy to me. Only a good hunter can marry my daughter. It’s kind of a sticking point.”
    “Oh, but I’m just that kind,” said the suitor.
    “Are you sure?” said the father, sounding doubtful.
    “I am just that kind,” the suitor repeated, bending his knees and bobbing a little as if for emphasis.
    “I’ll talk to her,” the father said. “But don’t hold your breath.”
    After the suitor had left, seeing himself out, the father came into the kitchen and sat down heavily across from his daughter who had reached seventy-five knives and was on to the spoons.
    “I suppose you heard that,” the father said, pushing his hair back from his forehead. The daughter had noticed recently that her father was starting to look older. While this called up in her unpleasant reminders of her own mortality—and what would she do with him when he was too old to care for himself, too tired to walk down the side of the mountain looking for rocks, too sore to haul them home and fit them into their piles?—it was not a bad look for her father. He was the sort of man who had settled into his features as he aged. He had olive skin, a mobile, soft mouth, deep lines curving on either side of it from the high bones of his cheeks. He had black hair which he wore closely cropped on the sides and longer on top so it hung in a rakish forelock over his forehead. Recently, it had become marked with the same flecks of white as his sparse chest hair which grew in an even T on his chest. He was fit, all that rock-carrying, and in general looked as if he were blazing with the last full light of day—harder and faster and stronger than the indeterminate