The Ancient Astrologer's Crystal Globe
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
She began keeping a list of things that were not her fault: the weather on Tuesdays, the particular angle of light at 4:17 PM, the way her mother had arranged the spoons in the drawer before she left, the existence of moths. At first, she did it in her notebook, but eventually she wrote it in the margins of takeaway menus, recorded it beneath house numbers on the street, scrawled it into the pages where she kept the names of writers and books that she admired. Isabelle became someone who could move freely through a house, who stepped on to a street with her head held high. She hadn’t imagined the project could be such a relief. She told herself that this
was the way in which she would contain it, was the way in which she would live inside it, like some ancient astrologer’s crystal globe.
When her therapist asked if her father had had a personality disorder, she thought of her father in peak hour traffic, one hand gripping the wheel, the other still curled around the cigarette that flickered between his fingers as he pushed the car forward hissing and feathers of black smoke surrounding him. She thought of him with a damp towel stuffed fiercely into his mouth as he listened to intoxicated sheep munching leaves from the trees beside the shed. His hands: who knows what they were holding. Not keys, not a phone. Some days he’d arrive home with six honey bees attached to his jacket and a petrol can of languid petrol, a snug rubber bung. Isabelle examined the hatchets tucked into the cheese cloth cover of their tool belt.
Mum told her the attic would be the perfect place to start.
Several mornings ago, Isabelle discovered two of her last remaining eggs in a lush bed of hair. When she inspected her mouth, formulas of mucus bubbled in her cheeks. She pinched them between thumb and forefinger and threw them into the boiling water on the stove. Maybe we are never adults. She kept one next to memories of her father.
So she went back to the attic. There she found her father’s aviation magazines, some faded photographs of clouds in the sky, a bottle of golden nail polish, a deck of cards with a spider carved into them. She saw that the blackening morning makings he’d ground under his tongue had turned black bugs within◆ About the ending
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