2019/109: Black Oxen -- Elizabeth Knox [reread]

2019/109: Black Oxen -- Elizabeth Knox

Before I went, before I blew out my lamp, I painted footprints leading up the beach from the water. I wanted to give my jailers a turn. I wanted them to imagine, if only for moment, that I'd walked away into the picture.

"Anyway—I put out my lamp and lay down to rest and keep watch. But I fell asleep. I thought I slept. For, without a change in the light, or atmosphere, a man walked down the faintly gleaming patches of my receding footprints—the paint was still wet—and stood before me. He was old and small and dark-skinned—and he had his shirt open and was applying traction to his ribcage with his own two hands in order to show me what was missing."

"What was missing?" said Juanita.

"His heart, of course." [p. 284]

After I'd finished my first read of The Absolute Book, I had an urge to reread Black Oxen, one of my favourite of Knox's novels. (The link there goes to my original review from 2015. There's no ebook but I found a copy via the Internet Library.) The two novels seem to be in the same key, and there are shared themes: sisters, amnesia, moving between worlds, a central character who doesn't understand his origins or his powers, and who makes choices which seem amoral.
( no spoilers )