Hex

by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

I am a woman who wakes up hungry. Tom touched only coffee till noon. You do what you’re capable of at some point, so Tom and I left each other. I wanted breakfast, he wanted liberty, and who could blame either of us.

You looked at me as if I’d invited myself to your house. I looked at you as if through a screen door.

I’ve been gathering legends of Aconitum, monkshood’s parent toxin, and they pop up everywhere. In Shasekishu, in Shakespeare, in Medea. In the funny little pamphlet on your windowsill from the British Homeopathic Association. Hapless thirteenth-century Japanese servants mistake dried aconite root for sugar and almost, but do not, die of it. Henry IV imagines the poison as blood mingled “with venom of suggestion.” Medea fails to poison Theseus with aconite-tipped wine. Athena, armed with aconite, transforms Arachne into a spider. The moon

Imagine being a pudding cup of a person and encountering a confident, elegant, powerful scholar who knows what to do with her shoulders.

So from South America to the American South, where Texas startled them with its everything.

The biggest difference between you and Barry is that while you both need to be seen, you, once seen, are quelled, whereas Barry, once seen, sees back. He acts upon the seer. He wants to be seen again. He never wants the seeing to end. He believes he has an infinite amount to reveal, a body full of secrets to hand out as rewards to the loyal witness. The single most dangerous thing about Barry is he spends his days getting thanked—thanked for his guidance, for his attention, for his good vibes—a tradition that has instilled in him both a knee-jerk humility and a much deeper belief in his own indispensability.

It seems everything wants to be very near to its opposite. I picture Ricin and Ricinus as twins, as Romulus and Remus, Romulus who will eventually kill Remus but who for now lies beside him, cozy and sucking from the teats of a she-wolf.

We’re friends now, which is most of what we ever were. Tom refers to the relationship as “A Disappointment in Love.” He’s heavy into tapestries and goblets, for context.

Tom doesn’t drink for this reason and lives instead in the self-intoxicated state of medieval unicorn daydreaming, his substitute vice.

We need to stand a chance. there stands an awesome Upas Tree lone watchman of a lifeless land. No bird flies near, no tiger creeps; alone the whirlwind, wild and black Pushkin. If a Russian thinks it’s too bleak—the point is that I am the creeping tiger. I want in on the whirlwind.

“You want our menfolk to wage battle,” I said. “Against each other.” “Yes. I want each to improve himself at the expense of the other. Then we will arrive at two evolved men.”

I never want more than half a banana, but I always want half a banana. Bananas really back you up into a corner this way because all and nothing are both unacceptable options.

It was Halloween night, we were living in a semi-enlightened society, nobody would sassy-bark us, there was no reason not to get witchy.

The department wanted to make it clear that this gathering was a favor and an inconvenience, and asked us not to bring any partners. The goal of the party was that it should seem, pretty much immediately afterward, that there never had been any party.

She’d worn her platforms as armor and even they had been taken away from her.

The person who believes in you is the most dangerous person you know. The person who believes in you can unbuild you in an instant. We haven’t learned how to curb that danger. We don’t know what to do with the person who names our life. The one who says Do this, right now, not that and the this that person casually suggests becomes your entire livelihood. The one who lends you a hat that allows you to enter a room. A coat to survive your own winter.

It isn’t as if you aren’t beautiful, you are beautiful. It isn’t as if you don’t find me, in whatever way you find me, beautiful. It’s that our interest in each other is a cold lake and neither of us wants to jump in. We want to stand together, at the edge of the cold lake.

Barry never expected Mishti to go to dinner with him. He expected you to marry him, because he is gregarious and rich and you were the opposite and old enough to crave your inverse, but he never expected Mishti, a woman too young to need anything from anyone, to want anything from him.

Do not eat a raw cashew do not eat a raw red kidney bean do not eat elderberry or a potato do not eat the rind of a mango do not put a hydrangea flower in your mouth and a daffodil will induce severe drooling and aloe the healer will make you convulse.

I don’t understand how it occurred to humans to cook the inedible into the edible. Why we peel the mango. Why daffodils go on the vase on the table and not the plate, why aloe is softened into a goo, where we found as a species the courage to say this bad thing can be made good again, can be made, furthermore, delicious! It’s religious, it’s a very small, very daily resurrection. It’s a courtship of the sinister.

I met you and I didn’t want you. Why want you? I’d never seen a grown woman wanted. I’d seen my father reach into the sink drain and remove wet slices of onion, because my mother couldn’t suffer their texture. That was enough devotion.

Maybe cowards can only desire when they feel desired. Maybe runts need encouragement. Maybe my central identity is coward runt. In any case, you introduced a crazy and immense idea to me that day.

It startled me that you’d throw such a bedsheet over our pet elephant and bring its shape into sight, call it Elephant, serve it to us hot, but it didn’t surprise me.

I poured the wine. Carlo swirled his glass, tasted it, didn’t like it, and said it was good. Mishti drank hers in a gulp and then sat back in her chair so that the rest of the night might happen to her.

I looked at you and the difference between age forty and thirty and fifteen felt very small. We all stood awaiting the day we’d grow up and leave home.

You said, to be clearer, “I am not in love with you, Nell Barber,” and it was the kindest and most legitimizing thing you could say, as if you could have loved me, as if you only happened not to, as if you only didn’t, not couldn’t, not wouldn’t dare.

The hymn says: I am like one who has been anointed. The train says: Stand clear of the closing doors.

Birds Eye frozen vegetables.

Oh god this is familiar

She’s started skipping class, as if rebellion were only now occurring to her, at age twenty-six.

Joan, my exaltation of larks.

Mishti has never been the relying type, she’s been the providing type,

We haven’t spoken in about one hundred days. Silence is a greater authority than love: you obey it, protect it, grow it as a matter of pride. You’d rather break your heart than break your rule.

You told me the difference is that “to marry” is a reflexive verb. I had forgotten your life with Ragnar, your Danish history. You marry yourself, you said. You poison another.