Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,40

against his own shoulder in the most patient melancholy. I stood and genuinely worshipped Saint Fiacre. I wanted some air. I found an exit that led me, as if by his guidance, into an herb garden exhibiting over two hundred medieval plants. Outside it felt less like winter than the lack of every season: a harsh, open, blank day that had never been colored in. All the same it was freezing and for the thousandth time I missed my coat. I missed the way my hood had held my head and taken care of it. I don’t miss my parents per se but I do miss care. Joan if you ever let me care for you I will ask for nothing in return, and you will occasionally shield me in some essentially warm way that induces my deepest gratitude. I made a slow lap of the plant beds, depositing my little dragon puff of breath above each sign:

Horseheal, Peony, Feverfew, Asparagus.

Figwort, Sneezewort, and Self-Heal.

Horned Poppy and Mole Plant.

Mouse-Ear Hawkweed.

Squirting Cucumber.

Common Valerian, Annual Sage, Birthwort, Bearded Iris.

Madder, Weld.

Lady’s Bedstraw, Dyer’s Alkanet.

Flax, Woad, Agrimony.

Bugle, and a full rush of Aconite Monkshood.

In one bunch, at the base of a gnarled tree: Quince, Cowslip, and Christmas Rose—Black Hellebore.

Hound’s-Tongue. Bistort. Adderwort, next to Dragon Arum.

Tom hadn’t yet found or followed me, none of the museum’s visitors would leave the heated building, I stood alone with my favorite creatures. Tom stood alone with his favorite creatures. There’s a version of the world in which there’s room for all of us. In which we all belong here, also anywhere, even everywhere. Who did you stand with, that cold day, your lover and your servant in their rightful places, your rightful place nowhere?

Your email popped up on his phone as we were standing in the coat check line. He swiped it open immediately and didn’t stop me from blatantly hunching over to read along. Leaning against him to see the screen was the most physical contact we’d had since the last time we’d slept together. He sleeps with someone better now, I thought. I sleep on the floor with a bag of dirt. Rightful places. The department’s Thanksgiving party had been so weird, you wrote, you wanted to throw a better Christmas party, at your home. The email was addressed to all five of us, and it was ludicrous to see our names together in a row. I pictured you asking Barry for Carlo’s email address and the multiple simultaneous panic attacks that must have provoked through the citywide energy net.

Tom blanched. “What does Joan want from me?” was the odd thing he said.

“From you?”

“I have to monkey myself in front of her husband like a monkey?”

“I think that’s a small price to pay.”

“Who’s paying? What a fucking circus.”

I saw the six of us seated around a ping-pong table under the high center of a tent. You and I would sit at the table ends like monarchs. The email said Sunday at seven o’clock. I mutely postponed walking out of Tom’s life to Monday.

A woman handed us our two coats, they’d been nuzzling each other on adjacent hangers, and I tipped her with the six cash dollars I had from tips crumpled in my jeans pocket, showing Tom that I could afford generosity. He didn’t register the exchange at all, he was rereading your email, scowling at it, as if it were a draft notice. I had no remaining sympathy for him in what I’m sure he dubbed his predicament, and having repaid him a miscellaneous and insufficient but satisfying $150, I readied myself for your party, knowing I’d be the only guest with nothing to lose and everything to eat.

BERRY

I carried a bouquet for the hostess. You opened the door wearing a floor-length charcoal nightgown. You’d let your braid out and your crimped hair wreathed your shoulders. Your twin stone earrings hung like upended monoliths from each lobe. You had painted your fingernails white. You had darkened your eyelashes and eyelids and eyebrows. Your nightgown was strangely formal and acceptable. You had opened the gown’s top button to reveal your collarbone. A tiny moonstone shuddered on its chain in the collarbone’s middle hollow. I thought in all plainness that I would now expressly die. You reached your arms out toward me and pulled one sleeve of my coat off my arm, I gave the bouquet to my other hand, you pulled off the other sleeve, and with the down corpse of my soul in your arms you