deleted name: You know the received wisdom about grief, Skunk, that there are five stages?
unwrapping his hand from the breakfast coffee and lifting it into the air as a fist, opening thumb and subsequent fingers for each counted off:
deleted name: Denial,
thumb
deleted name: anger, 
index finger
deleted name: bargaining, 
middle finger
deleted name: depression,
ring finger
deleted name: and acceptance.
little finger, gesturing with his now open palm,
deleted name: What’s not there, what’s missing?
Sensing this to be rhetorical, Brother Skunk awaits the answer.
deleted name: Understanding. Comprehension. You will long have exhausted your capacity for grief before you ever understand it.
pause
deleted name: Because you will never understand it,
shrugs, collecting up his mug
deleted name: “said Elvis.”
Neither speak her name. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

As if waking to exit her perpetual sleepwalk from out the site of trauma, she comes suddenly conscious of herself in new surroundings, unaware she is in fact already embedded here in the very seat of her oncoming madness; herself, with too her infant son adjacent, and somewhere a door shut tight and double-locked to keep those others out.
Sat on the floor of this new bedroom, her apparent calm has been usurped by the just now discovery of her dead husband’s gloves inexplicably salted away amongst her own things, on what exact circumstance she cannot bear to contemplate, the entirety of him having been, much as she understood, removed while she herself remained in care and convalescent.
She must force herself to focus on the momentary provision of herself’s everything to the absolute not of their wearing, as if in such her actual sanity was subject to being culled in a cruel slow motion, but then sped up to overtake her in real time: somehow her small hands are already engulfed in their pale and unmarked leather.
The only item of clothing she had known him to possess not entirely functional, and though worn so infrequently as to remain unbroken to that unique contour of his hand, still they retain within their interior the faint and distant scent of his hair oil, absorbed from out his fingers; never having seen him with them on, this her sole confirmation they were ever worn at all.
Thus gloved, both hands lie folded in her lap. She watches them worry at each other, swallowing themselves, imagining her limbs now puppet to his will, as if she had of them relinquished all agency, confirmed as one rises to the involuntary wiping of her face and the fabric’s texture simultaneously both rough and smooth.
It is her own demons as exhaust her back into sleep.
When she wakes, she wakes still propped against the bed, and looking down to ascertain the alien sense of her hands sees, crawling slowly across the back of one of the gloves she still wears, a wasp, its movement hesitant, sluggish.
Quickly she claps the other hand down upon it, cringing at the revealed smut of its smashed abdomen, the smeared pulp of black and yellow, remembering again the sense of herself as puppet in the pristine leather spoiled.
Removing now her hands from that brutal echo of his own, she collects the gloves together and takes them down to the kitchen waste-bin for their shedding.
For now at least, she cannot recognise the need for fire. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The fact she is now absent her own dreams determines that degree to which Brother Skunk understands she appreciates hearing the relating of his own. But still too knowing how tired she is from today, and listening to the rasp of her every exhalation as it arrives in its cycle, he opts on this occasion at whatever hour of the morning not to wake her.
Being too important to lose, however, he feels he must still speak through this particular dream as aide memoire, to fix it for himself at least to some degree of permanence, and doing so in something less than a whisper; he forms the words from little more than the rhythmic sound of his own breath, his lips’ separation, and the dry movement of his tongue between.
Skunk: I dr- 
attempting again to swallow
Skunk: I dreamt I was writing letters to old friends, from from, I think starting now, with friends now, and working my way back, letter after letter after letter, and then eventually I came to one friend, who eh, he was, he had been my best friend at primary school, and about, from when I was
having to focus
Skunk: from when I was... maybe eight? and about halfway down, when I was writing, about halfway down the page, I suddenly remembered he was dead, dead in real life, he’d died... he’d killed himself a number of years ago, but in the dream I just kept on writing in the letter to say “I’m so sorry I forgot, I’m so sorry” and then it dawned on me there would actually come a day where this really would actually... become a a a... a not infrequent occurrence, where time and again I would find myself thinking of friends or people I’d known as if they were still alive, only to then remember that they were not.
He listens as each breath and its subsequent exits her body, unaware for now she will never number among those, her own eventual identity as ghost to be for him so absolutely fixed he will not ever even once mistake her for otherwise, her and too that child the conception of whom neither of them could in this moment possibly entertain.
His grief is already something to be experienced at one remove.
On the edge of sleep himself he comes suddenly awake, aware of her hand moving up and onto her stomach, the nails raking across and down into her flesh, creating in their wake an awful sound impossible while conscious, like the high and abrasive whine of grinding teeth, haunted as she is by that tiny ghost of her own making.
Brother Skunk reaches over to gather her vicious clawing fingers into his, to lie on awake wondering about that time, those few friends he has, and how it will be when waiting upon their collective spirit to tap upon his shoulder, or take his hand, to time and again remind him

cogs (ensemble): We are not.

while he himself still was. 

 

 

 

 

In order to clear the requisite space in what had been his mother’s back garden, Brother Skunk had first to tear away in fistfuls brittle thickets of grass, long overgrown and unmanaged in her protracted absence.
His tiny pyre he crafted from whatever he could collect of the apple tree’s discarded twigs and fallen leaves, kindling this with fragments of the paper labels clawed from off the glass surface of so many emptied Jack Daniel’s bottles. There remain of these minute traces still buried in deep beneath the bloodied nailbeds of his fingers, creating a localised tenderness at which he cannot help but worry to remind himself of its ongoing existence, and thus subsequently his own.
Next, a flat card match broken from off its grubby souvenir matchbook, a keepsake from some Nevada hotel whose logo incorporates the bowed and interlocking legs of twin cowboys, and Skunk here lost enough to be less concerned as to how such might have ever come to be in her possession than in the willing of their combustible efficacy to suit his immediate requirement.
The first, having failed to ignite and leaving just a red smear of its bead across the striking surface, is discarded into the pyre; the second he fumbles to fold back upon itself and, held flat beneath his thumb and forced across the sandpaper, comes alive to its purpose, the whole book now carefully placed in amongst the gathered debris as each adjacent match flares to succeed its previous with an audible exhalation.
Skunk (singing quietly, coaxing the little flames on into existence): “Oh Peggy Gordon, you are my darling...”
his voice barely more than a whisper, and at such low volume the lyric seeming that degree less inclined to adhere any too much with its intended melody.
He moves about his work with a deliberate and intense care and focus; shirtless, shoeless, while fragments of the torn dead grass cling to the soles of his feet, and the stained denim hem of his Levi’s.
With such little fare to consume the fire soon begins to starve itself out, but for those few minutes of its duration he sings on, and then as if in obeisance to some otherwise unperceived portent, he stamps hard and quick at the embers with his bare foot, kicking the still smouldering fragments about the dangerously dry grass, before returning indoors.
The sacrament now brought to its close, and with it the understanding this remnant ash marking his flesh is become consubstantial with all ash,
Skunk (closing the back door behind him, and with an involuntary resignation): All my byself.
And too his Uncle Jesus... oh his Uncle Jesus...
Skunk (again singing quietly, his head pressed hard against the door’s glass panel, with this time his intonation and cadence following exactly that of Marilyn Monroe’s for JFK): “Happy... birthday, to you.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

cowboy twin

 

 

 

 

 

cursum perficio

 

 

 

 

 

 for Michael Gira

 

 

 

 

Stagnant at the desk and remote in thought, his any effort at writing temporarily abeyant, deleted name marks time by randomly pulling the nib of the ink pen back and forth across the paper’s fibrous surface, discovering only after the fact that left in its wake was the Möbius outline of an infinity symbol, executed in tiny dimension between the printed grey lines.
Looping on around and back and again, the accumulant ink bleeds out to further darken the absorbent texture, an ourobouros fattening itself upon itself, to become what is more recognisably the mask of the Lone Ranger.
deleted name (comprehending, absently): Hi-yo Silver... away!
Having capped and set aside the fountain pen, he now reaches across and taps one finger upon the black coin on the desk to his right before sliding it toward him until, partway off the edge, he can collect it up with his thumb and drop it into his open palm.
He runs his thumb across the inert and impacted carbon beneath which any surface detail has been interred, imagining it a dense and impenetrable circle sucking all immediate light into itself after her, that black hole to which he might finally surrender everything.
He is not wrong.