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. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.