With
the rope now a silhouette loop against the glare of illumination overhead, deleted
name scratched at the itch its absence left across his naked chest, his
fingers returning wet with the effort’s sweat of its securing. Steam rose up
from off his flesh, as if housed within itself was some latent cremation
consuming him from the inside out.
His
skull still boiling with noise he sat at the root of this makeshift gibbet and
watched his body exhaust itself of breath, each exhalation containing less and
less of the cigar and each only momentarily visible before being absorbed in
the stillness of early morning; the settling noose above pulled the shadow of
the lamp-post crooked back about him.
He
became aware of a dream-like shift in consciousness; the dark houses that
surrounded him on three sides fading off behind the solidifying fluorescent
interior of some vast storeroom, its walls lined with racks and shelves filled
he knew for fact with every article of clothing he had ever owned and worn, the
chronology issuing off from his immediate left with the tiny garments that had
swaddled him as an infant while below them the floor and lowest shelf bore
their concomitant footwear, each pair for as far as he could see incrementally
larger than its precedent.
The
school uniforms visible elicited a shiver of recognition, and such memories as
surged in its wake he did not even struggle to subdue, conceiving in his
unbelief a surrogate self to age inside the empty raiment receding along the
walls of the vault.
Extending
far beyond a point of focus, the shelves became a blur of colour across which
his eyes began to rush in search of sense until approaching him again on the
other side he could discern the more recent suits, the winter coats of dark
pure wool and the summer’s pale linen jackets, and closer still and so familiar
those clothes in which he had only yesterday been attired. Thereafter, the
remnant space upon the ground matched the exact width of those very shoes upon
his feet, and above them a solitary empty hanger, the sight of which had him
ascribing to this vision’s existence the revelation that his life might be
concluded with no more gesture than the removal and storage of the clothes he
currently wore, so that with the archive thus complete he might mount for the
final time his own random and impromptu gallows, singing
deleted
name: “I’ll remember… everything. I’ll remember… everything.”
