ARC D’X by Steve Erickson

Author:Steve Erickson [Erickson, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

But she didn’t believe she knew anyone by that name. Had she been aware of having said it, she would have been as surprised as Etcher, not because she wasn’t seeing another man but because his name was not Thomas but Joseph.

He was a large bear of a man who spoke in a hush, and he had a stall in the Market. She’d gone there several months after having recovered from her nearly fatal illness, browsing among the Market’s paltry offerings. He made jewelry of a less exotic sort than Sally’s—strings of benign white wafers that hung as plain functional necklaces—and had been watching Sally from the other side of the Market; when she wandered over to him he could barely believe his good luck. Then, as she studied his jewelry carefully, he took notice of the necklace she wore.

“Where did you get this?” he said in his hushed voice.

The way he spoke, the way she could hardly hear him at all, felt familiar to her, as well as the way he looked down on her from a height. She was immediately sorry that Etcher didn’t look down on her from a height. She was immediately sorry that Etcher, a soft-spoken man himself, now seemed so loud. “I made it,” she said of the necklace.

Joseph looked around him, over both shoulders. “They allowed this?”

“I’ve never… subjected it to their approval.” She asked, “Do you think I’d have trouble selling a necklace like this?”

“It’s a very unusual necklace,” he advised her.

She got the idea, then, of selling some of her necklaces through Joseph’s stall. She came back the next day to talk to him about it and, though he was dubious and afraid, since he couldn’t afford to have the police shut him down, he wanted to see Sally again, so he offered to keep her necklaces and earrings under the counter and show them to anyone who appeared adventurous. Unknown to Sally, he bought some of the jewelry himself, so that she’d return.

Slowly he began to steal her heart.

One night she went home with him, and didn’t return to her own circle until late the next morning.

Perhaps it was the jewelry. Perhaps it was that she wanted to be admired for something she created rather than someone she was, since she had no idea who she was and therefore could never really trust anyone who loved her for that. Of course it wasn’t her jewelry that Joseph loved, it was the same intangible thing about her that all the men had loved; from the other side of the Market she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen as she had been the most beautiful woman a thousand other men had ever seen. But she chose to believe it was the beauty of the necklace she wore that attracted him. And then, if she was touched by the familiarity of him, there was also the way that he was utterly different, because though he wanted to ravish her like the others, he was incapable of it.

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