Hex: A Novel by Sarah Blackman

Author:Sarah Blackman [Blackman, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781573668675
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 2016-04-01T05:00:00+00:00

One day, to the crossroads came a white horse ridden by a young and weary rider. They were on their way back down to the valley after a trip to a mountain town to secure the hand of a lovely mountain bride who had been promised but, souring over the months of postal courtship, now refused her betrothed on her father’s very hearth. “That cunt,” the young and weary man said over and over as they came down the steep road. He murmured it into the white horse’s mane as he sank exhausted over the pommel and every time the horse flicked back one soft, sensitive ear as if to agree.

It is impossible to say what the horse thought of all this. At this point he was only a horse, though a handsome one with round knees, strong haunches, a lustrous tail and yellow hairs bristling from his pink, speckled muzzle. He had been born in a barn not so many years ago. He remembered everything that had happened to him since that point: sliding from his mother’s quivering vagina and laddering himself upright on his own quivering legs, a whisk of straw scrubbed over his face and in his nostrils, a cold breeze as the barn door opened and someone else came in. After that came many, many days that were largely the same.

Immediately after birth, the white horse had been given to the young and weary man as a present and this man had formed the basis for almost everything the white horse knew about himself. For example, he knew he was an animal and that to be an animal was to stand when someone told him stand and go when someone told him go. He knew the sun, which was like his curry brush, and the grass, which was like the bit in his mouth. He knew a sly kind of joke which had to do with his eyes and lips and a quick, sideways shuffle and, if the man were in a different mood, he knew a stupid, towering fear of brown leaves and blowing paper down from which his master could disdainfully calm him.

The young and weary man was mostly patient, but sometimes used the lash. He mostly remembered the horse’s soft mouth, but sometimes sawed the reins until the corners of the horse’s lips split and bled. In this way the white horse learned what was expected of him and, because he knew nothing but this expectation, came to understand his most intimate self as a figure of what he would do next. Not what he currently was; not what he desired to become.

This is not so strange. Who expects a mule or an ox to have a spiritual life? Who suffers a crisis of self alongside a flea? The world is full of dawning. The sun comes up. If a man or a woman or a horse is awake to see it, they might mark the very moment when the sun appears to pull itself free of the horizon: shivering like a yolk, bouncing into its shape.

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