Mother (barely audible): ..then I’ll have to…

Skunk: What was that Mum?

Mother (as if bewildered, perhaps even hurt by the query): What?

Skunk: I didn’t eh, I didn’t catch what you just said.

her response to this comes flat, and resolute

Mother: Nothing. What do you mean?

silencing him with what he inferred a disingenuous challenge;

Skunk (thinking): How could she not know? How could she not?

Pause.

Mother (barely audible): ..taking both of them…

Thinking back, he could never put an exact date to when it started, when the already acute self-consciousness of his teenage years began to be compounded by the increasing frequency of this behaviour, the forays such incipient lunacy would make into his mother’s everyday life. Knowing neither the source of such activity nor to whom she felt she spoke he could not hope to comprehend her, and in his ignorance of both became irritable; she remained oblivious to being the source of any discomfort.

That he developed the ability to ignore it took him by surprise, his paradigm of sanity simply and rapidly defaulted to accommodate those moments as when she would texture that air immediate to her face with whispers, these partially audible phrases suggesting her half of a dialogue carried out in some concurrent existence beneath the surface of conscious thought.

Such an occurrence in the presence of his friends (whose visits he now began actively to discourage and whose company was thus less kept) he defused with the exaggerated and apologetic rolling of his eyes, implicit in which was the suggestion here was the erratic tendency of his mother’s disposition they would have to as a group suffer, though his actual embarrassment became manifest in the depth of blush by which his face was saturate.

Mother (whispering): ..for Christ’s sake…

He often wondered at their context, and too at whether the words she spoke purposely in this world might emerge as involuntary whispers in that other.

Time passed in which it became worse not in volume or lucidity but in the frequency of its occurrence, until there was a slow but clearly discernible shift in the equilibrium between these two voices. Her conscious speech began to atrophy, becoming little more than a whisper itself until when it finally disappeared it took with it those words as had been its quiet complement, leaving her mute in their removal. That she withdrew absolutely into such dumb suffering filled him with shame at his initial intolerance, that complicit role he felt himself to have taken in their performing. Only the eventual necessity of her hospitalisation allowed him to emerge, liberated and somewhat guiltless, from beneath the weight of its secret.