I say, ''Don''t be frightened, Susan.'' I show her the brass hand in the floor.
I have forgotten that, of course, she might look at anything there, anything at all, it would be so much ink upon paper. Remembering, I am filled again with wonder—and then with a spiteful kind of envy. I have to draw back my hand from her arm, for fear I will pinch her.
I ask her, as we walk to my room, What does she think of my uncle?
She believes him composing a dictionary.
We sit at lunch. I have no appetite, and pass my plate to her. I lean back in my chair, and watch as she runs her thumb along the edge of china, admires the weave of the napkin she spreads on her knee. She might be an auctioneer, a house-agent: she holds each item of cutlery as if gauging the worth of the metal from which it is cast. She eats three eggs, spooning them quickly, neatly into her mouth—not shuddering at the yielding of the yolk, not thinking, as she swallows, of the closing of her own throat about the meat. She wipes her lips with her fingers, touches her tongue to some spot upon her knuckle; then swallows again.
You have come to Briar, I think, to swallow up me.
But of course, I want her to do it. I need her to do it. And already I seem to feel myself beginning to give up my life. I give it up easily, as burning wicks give up smoke, to tarnish the glass that guards them; as spiders spin threads of silver, to bind up quivering moths. I imagine it settling, tight, about her. She does not know it. She will not know it until, too late, she will look and see how it has clothed and changed her, made her like me. For now, she is only tired, restless, bored: I take her walking about the park, and she follows, leadenly; we sit and sew, and she yawns and rubs her eyes, gazing at nothing. She chews her fingernails—stops, when she sees me looking; then after a minute draws down a length of hair and bites the tip of that.