CODA 

There is an absolute stillness to the dusk surrounding those cedar trees as border the hotel’s little grotto, with not even flies hovering above the surface of its pond.
Suddenly upon the nearby grass, there is movement, even if at first indistinct and only peripherally visible: a single leather glove, so pale as to appear luminous, incongruously pristine, and moving seemingly of its own volition, imbued by magic or perhaps as if pulled along by an invisible thread, or pushed on forward by some unseen force.
Eventually the textured head of a large and elderly bullfrog emerges from the glove’s opening to assess the level of immediate peril, 
cog: The scalpel is very sharp. Use discretion when you are cutting. There will be very little blood. There may be a few body fluids.
and having confirmed himself subject to no imminent threat turns now to gaze out across the lawn, regarding the hotel’s looming and twilit edifice, his eyes suffused with kindness and a curious melancholy.
Too, there is manifest within the relaxing of his face and the sigh audibly exhaled a welcome sense of relief: following his several previous attempts this is the first occasion he has arrived to find the pond’s surface not frozen over, affording him the opportunity to finally effect an obligation even he himself does not fully comprehend.
Dragging the glove closer to the water’s edge, he removes from around the bulbous folds in his neck a string, this threaded through a brass coin from which the gold-plate lustre has long since been abraded, and of which he had finally decided he has been the intermittent bearer for long enough.
Out into the air above the pond he tosses the coin, where it seems to hover indefinite and weightless; latent in the solemnity with which this ritual is transacted the notion Frog is returning some vital element to its source, which in a great many ways he actually is.
The splash, when it does come, announces itself incommensurately loud in the stillness, the coin scything back and forth beneath the surface as it descends through the murk before coming to rest among the submerged detritus as if ordained, landing face-up so that the words “YOU WILL SUCCEED” lie in visible proximity with the buckled Moosehead beer bottlecaps, a lone Canadian quarter, and the multiple crumpled profiles of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as decorate those foil coverings peeled from off chocolate coins and now half-buried in the sediment, themselves likewise long bleached of their any original gold colouring.
cog (as if reciting some ritual text): And thus are you returned to the pond...
Frog pulls tighter around himself the glove’s narrow opening, only now with his mission fulfilled acknowledging the drop in temperature, the adrenaline dissipate from throughout his bloodstream
cog (definitively): ..and rightly so, for when Fortune is our own to determine, a good luck coin must surely be the currency of madness. 
sighing
cog: Still, I might hope to wish for...
hesitating for just that moment and then that moment longer, before again looking back up to the looming and brightly lit hotel, brighter still now in the evaporating twilight, wondering as he does which, if any, of those rooms he can see might have been momentarily hers, and which perhaps her last; too wondering if its current inhabitant could possibly have any idea whatsoever of all that had transpired, of those ripples extending myriad and concentric out and on out and across everything everywhere, before he turns this final time to begin again his long trek home, back to The Last Visible Dog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

deleted name (writing): The incineration of the history’s record should in no way be mistaken for the eradication of the actual history itself...
Even in its asking she is already aware of the question’s honest answer,
Mother: What about you, are you keeping up with your diary?
ache¹ before she became ache¹ (wearily): I’ll do it at the weekend. It’s too much if, after homework it’s
Mother: You should, you really should keep it up to date, like every night. If you write it up at the,
trying hard to make this sound convincingly less for herself than her daughter
Mother: But don’t you think, don’t you look at her sometimes and wonder what she’s thinking, she’s, she can be so...
circling for the correct word before landing upon it
Mother: ..inscrutable.
Father: You could always get her a little diary for Christmas.
Mother (immediately reading him): That’s hardly the most ethical
Father: Ethics? God, ethics yet? You’re hilarious.
Mother: By Saturday the things you remember about Monday are, they’re they’re, for the most part they’re the things you’d remember anyway, the things you’ll always remember. You should be writing down the things you’re more likely to forget, and those, you’ll only remember those closer to the moment.
ache¹ before she became ache¹: That doesn’t make any sense at all.
Mother: Yeah, not to, yeah, I suppose you’re right.
accommodating her youth, with such relatively little memory to either carry forward or passively discard.
Mother: Maybe when you’re older though.
deleted name (writing): ..which history you will continue to bring with you on into and through your life, regardless of its ever having been written down, or rendered ashes, or even, in fact, remembered at all.

 

 

 

 

 

  

cowboy lament  

 

 

 

Brother Skunk is remembering
ache¹: The first, well, the first time I remember playing marbles was on the Toronto Island beach, with my dad and my sister. I don’t ah, I don’t think my mum was there, I don’t remember her there so I’m pretty sure she wasn’t, but then when I when I, when I think about it, where else would she have been?
shrugs
ache¹: Anyway, no matter, we were having a day out, and on the way to the ferry we’d passed some shop where Dad bought us a bag of marbles which, they were just... they looked pretty, I guess, but I didn’t, we didn’t know there was anything you could do with them, and then after we’d had our picnic lunch Dad took a stick and drew a, a circle in the sand and that’s ahm, that’s when we played marbles.
within which she was then herself remembering
Father: And now you roll your, no, no, this one, the bigger one, you roll that into the circle to see what
ache¹ before she became ache¹: Just throw it?
Father (gesturing with his arm): No, no, you roll it, you roll it in, like
collecting up his own shooter
Father: This is just, this is a practice shot, it doesn’t count, okay? We haven’t started,
before demonstrating to them both how to roll the marble in amongst the others, each with which it comes into contact clicking out of the way, some few of which are hit hard enough even to be forced from out of the circle.
Father: but we haven’t started yet.
Having disposed of all their marbles, Brother Skunk and deleted name stand looking out across the surface of Lake Ontario in the unrelenting and cloudless heat. The younger man’s scalp bakes beneath his black hair; it is ill-considered to be drinking whiskey in such temperature, still the hipflask is almost empty.
He tips just a little of its remnant onto the sand within the circle they’d outlined for their game, the liquor pooling momentarily in one of the tiny pocks before being absorbed invisible.
Then, in dislodging his Bazooka cane from its upright position, he signals his intent they should remove themselves from the sun’s immolate brutality. He feels as if the wire of his ear-ring hook is conducting heat, boiling that blood immediate like a filament, his lobe pulses with the degree of temperature relentlessly searing through its flesh.
Still they remain standing on by the empty circle, as if within its delineation and their play they had somehow conjured something of the occult, initiating a communion with their unmentioned common dead now holding them fast by whatever spell moving in whichever direction inbetween.
Closing his eyes and tipping his head back to expose his face directly to the sun’s heat the older man says
deleted name (sighing): I harbour this... a completely irrational fear that as I’m dying, this is, this this fear that I’m going to accidentally be, I’m going to stumble onto something out of the blue, something that maybe I’ve spent my whole adult life actively, or even just passively avoiding, and it will turn everything on its head
spinning his index fingers around themselves
deleted name: and this thing suddenly becomes an all-consuming obsession, or rather, it eh, it would if I had the time, and that’s the worst part of it, that
Skunk (puzzled): Like what, what, what do
deleted name: Oh, God, anything. Anything. Anything I’ve not, jazz, or or... a certain type of food, a a food from a certain country or region, or the films of a certain actor or director, or a particular genre of fiction,
Skunk: Okay, and
deleted name (laughing): Opera, even! And with this will come the awful realisation that I don’t actually have enough ti-... life left to indulge and discover all of this to the extent that I’d feel compelled, and that sense of regret that, why didn’t I engage with it sooner.
He kicks at the sand, hoping in such to obscure or eradicate the drawn circle, to break whatever hold it exerts upon him, upon them both.
deleted name: I mean, imagine you were taken into hospital with ehm, well, to, well, to die, basically, and while you were there you happened to pick up a newspaper and read one of those little Charlie Brown comics, and you think, you fall in love with it, or with the characters or whatever, something that you never looked at your whole life because you thought it, they were... something, something not for you, and now here you are about to die knowing that there are literally thousands, thousands upon thousands of these little comics and you will never get to read them all, or maybe em, maybe not even see another single one.
Skunk: But on a, if you...
he stabs his walking stick back into the sand, the better to move his upright palms toward and away from each other as if subject to a repellant magnetic field
Skunk: I mean, that’s everything though, right? That’s
deleted name (confirming): Yes,
losing and attaining focus both at once
deleted name: yes that’s, that is everything.
deleted name (later, writing): to recognise too late the immeasurable joy there is to be found everywhere, and in everything, even in the shadow of what can seem in its moment an insurmountable adversity. If that proximity to death will heighten an appreciation of the known and unknown both, then might it not help to understand that proximity as a finite and measurable sum, with the time between now and then being so relatively short as to make almost no difference.
Both men burn on beneath the sheer weight of heat, unaware they stand themselves circumscribed within a larger circle, scratched around their lives by a ghost.
Ghosts, plural.

 

 

 

And it is all the time now she can hear the wasps, even when temporarily absent, their ubiquity having created a perpetually audible low residual hum she can neither not hear nor ever quite bring to focus, and in which her paranoia infers a correlation; reduced to such persistent and yet sufferable tinnitus, every room of this house in which he had never lived has become host to that echo of her dead husband’s voice.
And it is to this soundtrack of her own madness she adds periodically, intoning e.g.
Mother: “ELVIS PRESLEY IS DEAD”
unaware of herself a decade and more in arrears of a culture which in its continued momentum is passing her by at some speed, and in whose wake she did not even recognise herself abandoned, mired as she is in the stasis of her own lunacy.
And it is in the new and sustained absence of her only remaining child, now grown, she locates herself in freefall toward the embrace of this exact inescapable psychosis, collecting up the stoppered bottle of her husband’s bay rum and pouring out into her palm a measure to wring between her fingers; to hope in such she might of him disinfect herself; to inhale the clove scent like an element of venom prescribed as its own antidote.
And it is all the while above her in the attic those two dead and bandage-wrapped bullets haunt the rafters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On that sole occasion his temporary sobriety suffers him unmitigated access to the actual dimension of his grief, its breadth and depth, he feels as if a massive internal and consolidate scream erupts sudden and simultaneous into the viscera from the aggregate surface area of his skin’s lining, a volume of implosion unceasing until quietened with whiskey and the eventual willed eradication of consciousness, saying to himself over and again throughout as he swallows
Skunk: Carpenter, goddamn.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

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.