Hex: A Novel by Sarah Blackman Page B

the last years of their lives and, though they had been separated all that time, recognized each other from their babyhood as the stars of a traveling circus show. In the end, one of the elephants died and the friend went back to the place they had last been together to do things like lean disconsolately against a tree and turn over rocks with the tip of her sensitive trunk. It made the daughter a little weepy, though she had known from the beginning this was how it would end. She turned off the television and read a couple of chapters of a book instead. Soon, she drifted off to sleep on the old plaid couch where she had slept many an afternoon away in her long time in that house, lulled by the sound of her father pounding two rocks together in rhythmic counterpoint to the ticking of the clock which hung above her head.
    When she woke up, her husband was home. He had brought only three small fish which she cleaned and scaled and pan-fried in butter, keeping their bones for a soup.
    “No luck?” said her father. He pushed his meager portion back and forth on the plate, knife scraping against the china.
    “Not today,” said her husband, bobbing his head up and down over his fork as if too nervous to take the bite into his mouth.
    “Tomorrow will be better, I’m sure,” she said.
    The next day her husband went out again to a different fishing spot at which he claimed to have never had a bad day. “Brook trout as big as your arm!” he said, wheezing. “Their bellies fat and speckled, eyeballs good for soup. You’ll see,” he said, kissing her at the door. In his excitement he nipped her so sharply that afterwards she checked her lip for blood.
    The day passed in much the same way: laundry and dishes, watching and reading. The clock in the living room—a wood block carved with figures of rabbits and a swooping owl her father had picked up somewhere before she was born—broke the hours into minutes, the minutes into seconds, the seconds into even smaller parts that were so quickly gone they had no names.
    Finally, her husband came home, but she saw right away he had not been successful. He had a sheepish air about him, pausing in the hallway to bob in the door frame and look in on her where she lay reading on the couch, and he carried the creel slung from his fist as if his prey were very light. In fact, there was almost nothing in it at all: just two worthless spring lizards limp inside a folded dock leaf, their bodies pierced as if he had caught them with a spear.
    “What am I supposed to do with these?” the wife asked her husband, holding one of the lizards up by its tail. “My father will never eat a lizard,” she said, shaking her head.
    “Does he have to know?” said her husband. “Couldn’t you bake them into something?”
    She was dubious, but she set about making individual pot-pies, rolling the dough out thick, covering the butchered lizards with a kitchen towel as her father came into the house and walked past her, went into the bathroom to wash up for the meal. “What happened, anyway,” she asked her husband who was sitting at thekitchen table watching her work. “I thought this place was a sure bet. Brook trout as big as my arm, remember?”
    “I know, I know,” said her husband, hanging his head. “Everything was going really well, but then a bird came along and scared all the fish. I would have shot it, but I didn’t bring my gun.”
    He looked so mournful, blinking his round eyes at her, his shoulders hunched, that she took pity on him and after the meal, which her father picked at and largely did not eat, the wife pulled her husband into their bedroom and locked the door. In the dim light that filtered through the rocks covering the window, she looked down at her husband’s body, at his hand on her breast, at his bony chest rising up to her as he propped himself up on one elbow, and thought, just for a minute, she saw a wash of feathers fluttering at his throat. But this was wrong, of