Skunk: Not at all?

ache¹: Nope, not for weeks, not since... y’know.

Skunk: So but do you,

pause

Skunk: That’s so weird. Do you remember any, what eh, do you remember the last dream you had?

ache¹: The last dream I remember, I dreamt I was there the exact moment God told Elvis not to make too much mess when he killed himself.

 

 

 

 

Father's day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

deleted name (writing): It’s less that everything happens for a reason, and more that we try to impose reason on everything that happens.
pause
deleted name (writing): Especially if it is happening to us.
writing, in fact, to himself.

 

 

  

The closer they are to Christmas, the longer it takes her each evening to put to bed their infant son, as frustrated by the slow crawl of advent as he is excited by the morning’s prospect of opening each little calendar window, both routines from which her husband has absented himself.
She lullabies the little Brother Skunk with memories of distant Christmases, her voice become a sedative to decelerate his agitation and bring him to sleep.
Back downstairs, and entering again into their ongoing and unresolved back and forth
Mother (choosing her moment): What should we get for him?
knowing from the child himself over and again the idea of whatever presents brought and left so much less thrilling than his anticipation of a visit from Santa Claus.
Father: I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t think it matters. You choose.
and then the silence, through which, fearful to interrupt that reading to which he has returned, she must wait until he again momentarily sets aside the latest of his library-borrowed western novels,
Mother: What about you?
Father: What about me?
Mother: For Christmas, what can I get you?
His answer is so long in coming she has already given up on its ever arriving, her assumption he has opted to ignore the question not unusual.
Father (finally): Cowboy gloves, pale leather, so they will wear their ageing.
pause
Mother: Cow-
Father: Nothing else.
and still to be thinking on this exchange as she passes another night lying full awake and willing the onset of her menses, now that many more days late than she will dare admit. 

 

With dinner now finished, and their emptied dessert plates still clutter to the table, Brother Skunk and ache¹ sit on regardless; neither of them, each subject to their own reason, is in any rush to leave, and with it being late enough to understand they need not surrender their places to incoming guests having been among the evening’s last admitted covers, there is zero pressure felt so to do.
Of the two, Skunk is himself perhaps especially hesitant, knowing once he does indeed leave the restaurant there is every possibility of his having to go on home, while for her part ache¹ is, in this moment at least, without notion to force the issue either way.
There is no sex as yet, sexual activity being for each exclusively masturbation (excepting her acknowledged unlucky once just those mere months past) though both understand they cannot be far from, another scent as percolates that air between them. Both recognise it spiralling toward and away, toward and away, and neither aware it will tonight crash on in toward them, their mutual intake of alcohol continually collapsing those barriers yet remnant inbetween. At point of impact, Brother Skunk will be literally falling down drunk, or damn near, his any inhibition or embarrassment a deal diminished by the Tennessee whiskey disseminate throughout his coursing blood, additional testament to this the space around and between their dead plates cluttered with several empty bottles of Moosehead lager, squat beneath that bottle of Jack Daniel’s through which they are almost finished making their rapid progress.
Perhaps in lieu of sex itself, or as its willed precursor, their talk veers toward that masturbation.
Skunk: I ehm, I mean from my, I had no reference points at all, I didn’t know anything about it, nothing, hadn’t read anything about it in books or spoken about it, I mean, definitely not spoken about it with friends. Looking back, it’s entirely possible, it’s probable even they all spoke about it with each other, but just, just not with me. I was that naive.
bending down to scratch at the sudden quiet rage of his inflamed ankle, but not willing to unlace the boot in which it is wrapped.
Skunk: Or or, well no, I mean, I’d heard... something, but without any reference points it made no sense at all, almost as if whatever I’d heard was in a different language,
pushing his chair back some from the table to cross his legs, and noticing with no little embarrassment some nondescript chewed foodstuff spilled upon the black denim of his 501s
Skunk: but I remember the sensations, but no, not the actual event, not the time or place or anything like that, even what age I actually was, I would think 12 or 13 maybe?
unaware he is in motion, pulling now at the soft angles of his self-cut black hair
Skunk: I must have known it was somehow connected to sex and making babies, I must... but, and I wasn’t sure if this was somehow expected, or if I was maybe broken
ache¹: But didn’t your mum
Skunk (immediate): Oh my Christ no! No. Never.
both laugh
Skunk: I was... just venturing out into this unknown territory, on my own
laughing
Skunk: just a... lonely explorer... with no roadmap
ache¹: No Roadmap for Masturbation sounds like a terrible album title.
both laughing, her hands spanning an imaginary marquee
ache¹ (too loud): “ELVIS! LIVE IN VEGAS! NO ROADMAP FOR MASTURBATION!”
Skunk: Shh Jesus shh, calm down.
She shakes her head to dislodge what seems a tiny sound suddenly apparent deep in her ear, and attempts distracting herself by asking him if he suffered “nocturnal emission”, laughing, over-enunciating each syllable to define this the least desirable thing as might ever occur to anyone, but then zones out as he starts to answer, straining again to fix and decipher the vague and barely audible irritant, until eventually, frustrated, she forces herself to re-focus upon his words partway through his response.
Skunk: waking up with this sort of... a pale... sort of watery phlegm in my pyjama bottoms, so this actually happened to me in my sleep before it did when I was conscious.
ache¹ expresses her curiosity as to whether this remains an ongoing concern.
Skunk: What? No, Jesus no, if, even if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t tell you the last time that
ache¹: Okay, okay.
falling suddenly silent as one of the wait staff appears to collect the detritus from off their table, standing each of the dead beer bottles upon the tray before checking the whiskey,
cog: Can I get you guys anything else?
ache¹: We’re all good here, thank you.
both bewildered that he then leaves their dessert plates uncollected.
Skunk splits the bottle’s last dribble of whiskey between their shotglasses.
In this extended silence she determines it to be a voice she can hear, and begins to wonder if it is in fact inside her head at all, or if it belongs to someone out beyond the windows, or in a distant section of the restaurant or kitchen, and is irritated to have her attempt at locating its exact origin interrupted again by Brother Skunk who seems anxious to return to the topic.
Skunk: The weirdest thing I do remember though was wondering if that was it? Having first had that sort of hot dry itch and not realising that was the first part, that that wasn’t all of it, then keeping on going to produce this... ejaculate, I did wonder if that was all of it or if there might be some other stage
She looks to see if someone has headphones on closeby, if this is in fact an easily explicable residual leakage. It has the texture of a distant itch beyond the reach of her scratching.
Skunk: I remember making no end of trouble for myself by keeping going, thinking maybe there’s another part to this, something more, that this bit is just the prelude.
ache¹ (back, laughing): Did you just say prelube?
Skunk (laughing): I did not.
both laughing
Finally the wait staff arrive again to clear away the dessert plates.
ache¹ blinks repeatedly, hard, as if clearing her ears of fluid.
ache¹: I’m stuffed and I still feel hungry. Is that weird?
emptying her shotglass.
Skunk: Well, do you want to order anything else?
likewise tipping the last of his own glass’ content into his mouth.
ache¹: I don’t think so.
Skunk: You sure? Toss for another bottle?
ache¹: Toss, what?
Skunk (one hand now jammed to his face, the other making a quick and loose circling gesture): Flip a coin, flip a coin.
ache¹ (with some heat): Flip with what? It’s not like I have any money. I don’t need it.
Skunk: That’s not what I
ache¹: That’s how it came across.
hating to be so suddenly ambushed by this reminder of her defined existence, and taking it personally, snaps again
ache¹ (definitive): Don’t ever forget why I’m here.
Absent his any concrete understanding of her ongoing circumstance, Brother Skunk feels himself assigned his rightful place as participant spectator in the unknown and occurring whatever, suddenly wondering if she actually is in fact aware of that moosehead quarter he has been carrying everywhere concealed in the watch pocket of his Levi’s.
His new quiet offers space enough that she can again concentrate on the sound, only now come barely discernible as a frantic and desperate screaming as if being created at some great remove, not a multitude but instead a single tiny voice operating at the extent of its capacity to be heard, with that distance between her and its source noticeably diminishing, and no clear notion as to which body is in motion toward the other.
Un-nerved, she tries pulling everything back up from out where she’d abandoned it
ache¹: Shall we go up?
reaching over to the seat adjacent in which she had earlier deposited her little E.T. doll, and dragging him out into the air by one of his skinny and flaking brown arms.
Skunk (shrugs, resigned): Why not?
clumsily rising from his seat, before reaching over to lightly tap his finger upon the mouth of the empty whiskey bottle
Skunk: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

 

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

 

 

 

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.