Wednesday 20 March 2024


 



Note for photograph: 
The likelihood of rationally walking yourself through a complete mental breakdown during which
-it is impossible to listen to people talk without first wondering whether their every single uttered word has been previously scripted i.e. doubting that anyone could ever actually speak coherently and articulately without recourse to those words having been pre-written
-likewise having spent so much time typing or transcribing actual speech, everything heard or thought is accompanied by the mental visualisation of those words being typed out on a keyboard 
-you suffer the ongoing sense of your limbs coming loose from the body, an inability to make hands, arms, feet, legs cohere to the main corpus



 

Tuesday 5 March 2024

 

 




He has a cold, his speech subject to coughing, and thus his voice filters through the telephone audibly thick and blunted with its congestion.
deleted name: When I was in my early twenties I went to a Hallowe’en party all dressed up in a black suit, white shirt, black tie...
pause
deleted name: ..and a, a a, a skull mask. The eh, the suit had actually been bought for my grandfather’s funeral not ehm, not that long before, my first suit
before correcting himself
deleted name: it wasn’t, it wasn’t actually a suit, it was just, it was just a black jacket and trousers, but
coughs
deleted name: And the mask... it stank; it was some weird rubber thing which, like a full over-the-head rubber or latex mask, and it had a weird sort of synthetic... chemical smell; the longer you wore it you could really taste it on your breath.
coughs
deleted name: I kept it on for as long as I could. I think the, my original idea had been not to take it off at all, and it had a hinged jaw... mandible, but it didn’t fit properly, way too big for me, so whenever, I would have to manually pull down the jawbone whenever I had to speak, which I tried to keep to a minimum, just... for eh, for effect.
sounds of blowing his nose, coughing
deleted name: Anyway, it all eventually got to me, the smell, the taste, just... sweating away inside this thing, so I did eventually have to remove it, but that left me just a guy in a suit.
coughs
deleted name: Not... and having already established this... persona, once they realised I’d had to... people would now come up to me and say “oh, you’ve taken the mask off” because having worn it for so long that had become a thing in itself, and whenever anyone would say that, I would look them straight in the eye, point at my naked face and say “No, this is the mask.”
delivered with some finality, but his monologue usurped by her playing what she believes perhaps some manner of trump card
ache1: I’m pregnant...
his response immediate
deleted name: I’m aware.
that much disappointed in herself that she is surprised she is still surprised, still
ache1 (hoping to re-inflate a bubble she might yet subsequently burst): ..again.
all this being replayed in his absence, a god outwith the machinery of its own creation; that his part in the narrative has been replaced prompts
deleted name: ..being the exact sole reason I am telling you this.
determining these words, even as they are being spoken, to be their last direct communication.
deleted name (the handset placed back upon its cradle): Et in Arcadia ego.





Monday 15 January 2024

 

 

 

  

twin: Thirst?                  
twin: Thirst.                   
 twin: The nipple?           
twin: The nipple.           
twin: Colostrum?          
 twin: Colostrum.            
twin: The nipple?          
twin: The nipple.           
twin: Milk?                    
twin: Milk.                     
  twin: The straw?              
  twin: The straw.               
twin: Water?                  
twin: Water.                   
twin: Beaker?                
twin: Beaker.                 
 twin: Juice?                    
twin: Juice.                    
 twin: The glass?             
twin: The glass.             
twin: Cocacola?            
twin: Cocacola.             
twin: The mug?             
twin: The mug.              
twin: Coffee?                 
twin: Coffee.                  
twin: The bottle?           
twin: The bottle.            
 twin: Beer?                     
 twin: Beer.                      
 twin: The shotglass?       
   twin: The shotglass.          
twin: Whiskey?             
twin: Whiskey.              
twin: The shotglass.      
 twin: The shotglass.       
 twin: The bottle?            
twin: The bottle.            
  twin: The bottle.              
twin: The bottle.            
twin: The bottle.            
twin: The bottle.            
twin: The bottle.            
twin: The bottle.            
twin: The bottle, empty.
twin: The bottle, empty.
   twin: The straw?               
  twin: The straw.               
   twin: Water?                     
 twin: Water.                    
 twin: The swab?             
  twin: The swab.               
twin: Water?                  
twin:                              
twin: Water?                  
 twin:                               
 
 
 
 
 

                        

 

Sunday 24 December 2023

Saturday 2 December 2023

 

 






Ranged across the top of the single-sided A4 sheet are a series of graphics Brother Skunk cannot at all decipher, their resolution having so far disintegrated through those however many generations of photocopies re-photocopied, each that much more distant from its original iteration, as to be damn near illegible.
Skunk (examining each in the row): Jesus they could do with printing a new menu, what are these even supposed to be?
holding up the sheet and indicating one of the images with his finger
Skunk: Any ideas? A chicken maybe? Broccoli?
below which, a series of unticked checkboxes, possible options for tomorrow’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Having been handed it by the nurse, ache1 had indicated she pass it instead across to Brother Skunk, sat bedside,
ache1: Surprise me.
along with a pen procured from on top of the bedside cabinet.
These two words come distorted through her bloated lips, the afternoon’s newly-dried blood collected at the mouth's outer edges. Now that she’s conscious he tries not to stare at her face, that one eye in particular still swollen shut, the colouring to her skin he has watched change on a daily basis.
He recalls those first words she had spoken to him, or at least in his presence, her voice seeming to echo out through the depth of its sedation.
ache1 (mistaking him for an employee of the hotel): I miss my Channel 16
making of course no sense to him whatsoever
ache1: I want my porn.
His visits have been regular enough for several staff to know him now by name, coming to the hospital as he does each day directly following his bookshop shift, either on foot or taking the bus at the weather’s dictate.
From that accumulant time spent speaking with his own insensate mother he is not unused to pouring monologue out into the void, and so he would initially chat to her absence with a degree of candour, relating incidents from the day, reminiscing, or simply voicing such thoughts as came to mind in any given moment. When she does eventually however surrender that blank finity to regain consciousness, he suddenly finds himself struggling to locate any topic of conversation as might now sustain them both, questioning if whatever he had hoped for might be slipping away, or if those hopes had ever indeed had any basis in anything at all other than being the cornerstone of some baseless fairytale he had himself created to carry him forward from each day into its tomorrow.
From off the bed-cover he watches her gather her little vinyl E.T. doll back within the dark bruising of her forearms, a gesture perceived less as its collecting unto herself than its sequestering away from him, regardless his own role in its recent repair. The stiffness of her limited movement betrays each attempt to minimise the physical pain she still endures in what seems like her body’s every individual bone.
ache1: Hey thanks again for this little guy, that’s,
visibly emotional
ache1: seriously that that ah, that was really thoughtful. I I
Skunk (hurt): That’s okay, it, I, it wasn’t
Embarrassed, he returns to the menu momentarily forgotten in his hand.
Skunk (all or nothing, a grand swing for the fences): I remember, I was, I must have been twelve because this was when
a little hesitant at the outset
Skunk: I’d just started secondary school
clarifying for her
Skunk: high school, would, do you call it that,
ache1: Yeah, or
Skunk (neither hearing nor listening): and I have no idea why this started, but I became obsessed with photocopies. A guy in my class, his dad worked in the university library and had access to their photocopier, which I’d never, I had no idea what it even really was other than you could get a copy of something, but I can’t even think now why... I have no idea how I would have found out about them, I mean, as something to which I might even have access
visibly working on through his own bewilderment
Skunk: though I was aware of... you know, getting reprints of photographs, but I wasn’t... Anyway, I think they cost something like, maybe two pence each, I think, so I would bring things in to class and give them to this guy along with however much money it would cost
ache1 (a lukewarm element of humouring him): Like what, what were you
Skunk: Oh God... cowboy, Lone Ranger comics
and on, ignoring her reaction
Skunk: At one point my mum must have picked up on all this, and she decided to get something copied as well, though now, exactly what I have no clue, maybe knitting patterns? but I still remember her asking “do you get the original back?”, which at the time I thought was really stupid, but looking back I mean, of course I was being equally stupid spending all this money on getting these poor quality copies of things I already owned
his own sudden and all too visible recognition of this as prompts her to laugh, which laugh he determines her consent to continue even as she herself is saying
ache1: Proceed.
Skunk: It was like that, there’s a moment where you discover that all those trophies that you see in cabinets, or at other people’s houses, things their parents had won at sports or whatever, you could buy the,
rubbing now at the hairs rising upon his forearms
Skunk: The first time I saw a row of them in a shop, on a shelf, and you could just buy them, and have the little panel engraved with whatever you wanted... that was just
remembering
Skunk: ..weird, disappointing. A real… Santa Claus moment.
Interrupted as the nurse re-enters the room pushing before her a small trolley, from which she hands ache1 a glass of water, and a tiny cardboard tumbler rattling with tablets. She waits to witness her patient swallow each of them individually.
As the nurse leaves, Brother Skunk reaches into the interior pocket of his Levi’s jacket and pulls out the new Jack Daniel’s silver hipflask, the unscrewing of its cap producing an all too-loud skreek he momentarily fears will alert the nurse and bring her back, cringing to recognise his sudden lack of self-resolve at the very moment he is attempting bravado.
Skunk (swallowing, nodding to ache1): Tennessee medicine.
even as he is saying the words not knowing why he’s saying them, any thought of her possibly being impressed already clearly dead in the moment, her face registering exactly how not impressed she actually is.
ache1 (pretending this latter hasn’t happened and going back): As you said that makes no sense at all, if you already had the thing itself, why make a copy? What possible purpose...
She watches him actually consider this, before defaulting to his eventual
Skunk: Well Jesus, I mean, ehm,
pause, shrug
Skunk: why not?




Wednesday 15 November 2023

 



                                                                                                                                        



                                           ache1: the just forgotten colour of my mother’s eyes
                                   Skunk: the now forgotten colour of my mother’s eyes
                                   deleted name (writing): the long forgotten colour of my mother’s eyes

 

 


Tuesday 7 November 2023