Note for photograph: 
Self-portrait as pittura infamante, taken to capture the essence of growing older and ultimately dying in a small town where the concept of anonymity is that much less a given than in a larger city; and where even absent your name you may still be recognised as e.g. “that mad woman who talks to herself” or “the limping old man with the black hair”; and where over time the diminishment of, respectively, your hold on sanity or your already limited mobility may be remarked upon by those who will eventually one day struggle to recall just how many days have passed since they even last actually saw you. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally back in his own room, and sat again upon his own bed, Brother Skunk suffers the regret of sensing he might have spoiled the day, his selfishness right at its tail burning back through the hours to ruin the actual picnic itself, and whatever else for which he might have hoped. Replaying that little of their conversation he can remember, the combined beer and whiskey clouds his any attempt to recall exactly what he had said versus that which he’d intended, and having set aside the dented and empty hipflask hears himself saying now out loud
Skunk: No I thought, I thought, when ehm, when I was really young, and I still believed in him, I thought I saw Santa... I mean, I’m pretty sure it must have been my dad, even,
pause
Skunk: I’m not sure but I
suddenly unwilling to pursue this further, even on his own, and to himself, and so lets it drop.
Skunk: Yes but then, there were times when I also thought I could see, or or, I thought there were times when I could, when Jesus was there and I could see him, or, not see him as such, ehm, but I was aware of him, I I I, I knew he was there.
now vividly recalling that intangible and abstract perception of the numinous Christ come to him in his want.
Skunk (no longer even imagining he speaks to her): It was like a, like a, a, a sort of indistinct shimmer in my peripheral vision, and I could, I could see it if I wasn’t looking directly at it, does that make sense? You know like at night when you see a star or or, when you see a star out of the corner of your eye and it’s really bright, but when you actually look at it it sort of disappears a bit, it was like that. As long as I didn’t look... directly at him, I could tell he was there.
He struggles to actively forget he had felt some connection between the timing of these appearances and the degree to which his mother was simultaeneous with each then so obviously and desperately ill.
Back at the hotel and for her own part, ache¹ is already looking through the relevant pages of the district Yellow Pages telephone directory she’d had brought to her room, making note of those local jewellers from whom she hoped to purchase him a potential present as a thank you for the picnic (and too, the wasted M&Ms), and to have made in him a hole for her, for ever.

 

 

 

 

Numb.
ache¹ (growling): Fuck sake, proceed, proceed if you must, goddammit.
A numbness, absolute and stultifying, accompanying her as she suffers on through the days beneath the crushing deadweight of inertia, existing here upon a plateau of such unvarying hopelessness she can justifiably describe as boring, her specific pregnancy haunted by the residual echo of its own ghost.
ache¹: Jesus Christ this is so, this is beyond boring, I mean come on, this must be the longest nine months of any woman’s life.
with yet several weeks remnant, her boredom both relentless and seemingly, refutably, endless even within the inescapable movement toward what is already assumed its fait accompli, and each day coming awake only to hear again that voice conjured within her skull, not mistaken for Brother Skunk’s but rather
deleted name: This is not purgatory. Try to, just... Try to think of this as a short-term investment for the long-term gain.
no matter it is not him and nor did she ever once hear him speak these actual words, or if perhaps she had they did not necessarily reference this, or more specifically this time,
ache¹: And where are you now? Where are you?
her unspeakable homesickness being repeatedly forced into that much sharper focus by even just the concept of maternity, finding herself as she does outwith the linear continuum of motherhood here in the absence of her own.
Too, her horror at the body’s slow and incremental evolution, her skin stretching to momentarily accommodate this new iteration of the self and its recreation, and in its malleability more alien to her than the little vinyl-covered E.T. doll, who is ever adjacent.
Whether or not harbouring such before, she lacks now any sense of the responsibility for her own situation; having accepted some element of choice is involved she has opted to endure the attrition of moving forward, onward and forward until to finally take with her in that last parting their already named unborn, the baby antler destined never to draw even that one first breath, and a reflection of its tiny unformed face distorted in the glass’ dark surface on the other side of which and playing out simultaneous and in reverse the exact same tragedy for Brother Skunk, who when he does become to himself momentarily visible at those points on the arc of his ongoing inebriation with consciousness enough retained, can only then comprehend the ritual boredom of his actions in their repetition.
It is his anguish to shoulder this fresh brace of death heralded by his mother’s those several months before, his agony is resisting that final temptation to re-establish in dying his place between the generations, suffering on through his own relentless Gethsemane in the perceived absence of his actual Uncle Jesus, the Christ by whom, unbeknown to him in this moment, he would never be abandoned.
He moves through his mother’s empty house offset, as if with a nail driven through just one foot, moves thus skewed and crucified in part, his every day a poor quality copy of its precedent so that he experiences if not a worsening, then at the very least a perpetual tedium of residual despair, with one hand tight to the ever-emptying bottle saying alternately
Skunk: Take, drink, this is my blood which is shed for you.
and
Skunk: Father, remove this cup from me.
his unrelenting consumption of whiskey stabilising the descent toward that plateau upon which he could maintain this continued subsistence, failing to comprehend it is in this very behaviour he constructs such a trap as would specifically hold only himself, to then cry loudly out in his pain upon finding himself inevitably so ensnared:
Skunk: ELOI! ELOI! LAMA SABACTHANI!
the while enduring a loss of such intensity it is that very ongoing intensity as renders it monotonous.
Common to both, their witless ignorance in confronting that through which they understood themselves to move, and move inexorably toward, even at whatever remove from each other on either side of the darkened glass, their mutual inability to extricate themselves from an unyielding grief simply and ultimately bored of itself.
Meanwhile in the wings, an unseen and anonymous hand turns the key in the back of a clockwork mouse who, with his tiny child’s hands soldered to his own, is due to walk out on stage any second now. The key is released, the intertwining cogs move amongst each other, connect, and grind on to propel the newly-wound father and son forward into the frame.
deleted name: It is accomplished.