Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,35
crazy tender.
YOGURT
I stood behind the bar pouring an old man a long Jack and thinking about everyone doing each other, everyone getting it done, doing, done, and what could I do, I’d over-frozen my monkshood seeds and my castor hadn’t bloomed. I couldn’t buy any more seeds, I needed to use my next shifts to pay Tom back for lunch and probably other things, years of miscellaneous expenses I couldn’t remember, I suddenly wanted to clear my accounts with him, to clear myself of him, and to get my own groceries. I pretend I don’t need groceries but I’m going to develop early-onset cataracts for lack of protein. When I imagine winning the lottery now I imagine Greek yogurt: for life! I don’t even want a flavor. I want so much full-fat original Fage that I could swim laps in it.
One thing you wouldn’t expect is that you can use Greek yogurt as a sauce for tortellini. I’d even call it the best of all possible sauces.
Joan I’m not getting anywhere. Joan you probably hate Greek yogurt, it probably isn’t even really Greek. Joan why are you sleeping with Tom? Why are you a living creature who needs to sleep at all? How am I supposed to sleep when I have such a library of heinous imagery to project for myself on my eyelids? In every eyelid movie Tom’s long hair is brushing gray paint up the length of your back. I get up from the floor and squint at my flowerpots. I’ve planted my stupid frozen monkshood but everyone will tell you they’re touchy the first year (“finicky about germination!” “don’t expect them all to germinate!” “don’t panic!” “dammit!”) and my hopes are low. They could grow to be four feet tall if they grew and blossomed, and so much blue would be a richness, but I need their roots most of all and if they don’t send out roots this year, they don’t.
I’m betting on the castor. The first tiny seedlings have come up from one of the two seeds, can you believe it, you screwed my ex-boyfriend but I got a castor plant to grow in December. These so-called ornamental breeds throw up seedlings in one to three weeks and mine, because they are mine, took five weeks but I’ll take it. We are all very good at taking.
I just want to show that it’s possible to stop something from happening. I know I didn’t stop you and Tom from happening. I—I want to show that anything can change its course. To reset something’s destination from this to that, such that even when it’s at this, it isn’t there yet. The aconite and the ricin are already here in my apartment doing what they think they’re built to do, being bad, and I’m trying to teach them that they have other options. They could become architects. Schoolteachers. They’re city kids but they could live in the country if they wanted to. They’d learn how. They’d start hiking. On the weekends they’d churn butter.
If ricin is defined by its toxicity, what will define a nontoxic or detoxified ricin? It gets to be a whole new soul. It gets to like living. Joan I don’t blame you for changing your destination. But even you, right now, in the height of your abandon, can’t think of Tom as there.
NUTS
Your email said the grant would cover six months of research with some drool-bait adverb like “generously” or “comfortably.” I deleted it and then permanently deleted it like a deranged person because I was reading it too many times.
I guess it’s a relief that the National Science Foundation also finds you worthy of recognition. Mishti had started to convince me that my admiration was misplaced; it isn’t misplaced. You are 63,446 dollars good, Award #1808234, Original Start Date: December 15, Projected Duration: 6 months. The funding council unanimously wagers that your pollen-pistil work is going to help out our country’s bees.
We met on the steps of the library because it was snowing and you wanted to be snowed on. You were completely bundled, black hat, black scarf, black gloves, black boots, but rising up toward your jaw, out from under the top of your scarf, I saw, very purple, a hickey.
A hickey, Joan.
You wanted to be snowed on.
The first time you allowed your eyes to meet my eyes you looked like a woman in love. You, too, are a deranged person. You looked at me with a peaked, frantic, paranoid flush as