Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,1

make. Love it with abandon, proudly, building a temple upon it. But how can you do it, how can you really give yourself up and praise anything, when the world is too balanced to allow for a lopsided devotion, when each thing is always reckoning with its anti-self? Perhaps they’re all the same, your various choices, and committing to one is the same as committing to any. Your only job is to build a temple.

In memoriam to the temple torn down, to my years of studiously laid bricks kicked over, to a classmate and all her skin, I close the old books and open this one. These savage castor beans and monkshood seeds are no longer the lab’s property. Rachel’s experiment is now my own; I can destroy it or it can destroy me, as I please. I please! As with the old work, the new work is for you, Joan. What isn’t for you? More life collected, documented. You’d like that, wouldn’t you like that?

YOU

You dusted the edges of your shelves as I picked scrambled eggs out from under my fingernails. I had expected to find your office swarmed. Being alone with you now felt supersonic.

“So what,” you said.

“Well, the whole what,” I said, wanting you to comfort me.

You hate comfort and I know that. I watched the end of your braid fuss against your collarbone.

“I have nowhere to work,” I said.

“Work anywhere.”

“I have no control, therefore I have no experiment.”

I had to speak clinically in order to speak passionately. At the rate we were diverging, I soon wouldn’t be able to speak to you at all. A mouse shot out from under your desk and seized the inch-long cylinder of string cheese you’d cut for it.

You clapped your hands once in satisfaction. Then you looked at me and forgot the success and moved down to study the gray, claw-footed saltcellar now resting emptily on your floor. The day flew in at us through your closed window. I wanted your inch of string cheese.

You said, “You have cold and temperate environments in your own home.”

I said, “You have cold and temperate environments in your own intestines.”

You blinked at me maliciously as if your eyelids could slap my cheeks.

“That lab was only extracurricular,” you said, emphasis on the ric. “I let you play with it because you’re a slobber toddler who needs a toy. What are you telling me—you’re changing fields now to what, to botanical toxins?”

“I’m trying to neutralize botanical toxins.”

“I thought you were generating a fossil-calibrated phylogeny of the American oak.”

“No department in the country needs an oak specialist.”

“What do they need?”

“Healed evil.”

You made a face, a sanguine, unruffled pout. Your boredom made me cringe. I knew your every cue so well I might have become a bacterium in your gut. You coughed into your hand. I missed you and saw you changing into someone I would lose.

“I’ll keep to my work and you keep to yours,” you said.

“I need pizzazz,” I said to your carpet. “I’m no star.”

“Your oak work was reliable.”

“I have to blow minds to keep up with you, Joan.”

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

“Forget the oak work. I want to do Rachel’s work. Doesn’t somebody need to do it? We’re just going to let her die?”

“She died, Nell.”

“I’m saving her soul.” What I didn’t tell you is that I should have saved her life. That I go to bed at night certain her soul is going to grab my soul by the neck and strangle me from the inside out, because I was standing next to her and did nothing, and because why should I be allowed to keep living? “I’ve advanced her methods,” I said, to stay on your track. “I think if I keep it going, I could speed up the disarming of poison to a rate that would almost undo the fact of the poison in the first place. You would call me The Great Undo.”

“I never call you.”

“And even if I kept on with the useless oak thesis,” I said, “which I’d only do to satisfy your soul, your majesty,” I curtsied, “I no longer have a school.”

“That’s your current problem.”

You rank problems as current, finished, or irrelevant; it usually makes them smaller. This one didn’t shrink.

“They expelled you precisely to stop you from continuing Rachel’s work,” you said. Action verbs like expel aren’t spoken in Kansas and my shame swelled. You leaned toward