Engaged
in their marbles upon the lake’s narrow beach they might easily be mistaken for
a day-tripping father and son, but there is something of divination or even the
occult to the visible arrangement of their ritual: the antler-topped stick
upright in the sand, its lengthening shadow witness to passing time and cast
across the roughly-furrowed circle to which each man kneels in his turn,
flicking small glass balls at those others its perimeter contains.
deleted
name (at this sound of clicking glass): The music of the spheres.
Wiping
his mouth, Brother Skunk squats to rest his hipflask against the base of the
stick and take his shot.
Skunk
(pushing his hair back behind his ears, the tiny silver ear-ring bright against
the black): I’m going to bake in this. There’s… Every year there’s always one
day when I get caught out, and I bet this is it.
his
voice retaining the awful residual grain of its grieving.
deleted
name tips his face back briefly to the sun high overhead.
deleted
name: You may well be right there.
Skunk:
When we get back over can we go back to where I saw that baseball cap, the
green one?
deleted
name (smiling good-naturedly): The Levi’s one?
Skunk:
Hmm.
This
had been his idea, to do together something she might approve, or find amusing,
and so on their way to the lakefront they had purchased a small set of marbles
from a rotating rack of cheap toys in the first store they found to stock them.
The
ferry ride, their crossing the island to its shore side, and even their first
couple of games had passed in a near silence, save Skunk’s superfluous
explanation of the game’s rules for deleted name who regardless let him
talk on. But with the accumulation of whiskey Brother Skunk begins to emerge
from his bittersweet preoccupation, until he can finally ask at least one of
the questions by which he has been for some days now beset.
Skunk:
Do you think… Is it possible she knew she was dying, and maybe wondered whether
antler would die too? Or or… or do you think maybe she even, she thought even
if she died antler would be okay?
deleted
name (standing): Skunk that’s no way for you to be thinking. If you carry
on like that, you know, if you start chasing these thoughts around, well, these
are thoughts without resolution, right? I can only advise you to leave that
stuff far alone.
Skunk:
I know I know I know I know I know. I do wonder if she knows what’s
happened now, if she knows I’m…
deleted
name: What the dead leave behind is of absolutely no consequence to the
dead themselves.
Skunk
(his face overcome with sadness): Well, there is no comfort for me in that
thought.
He
sits down on the sand, stretching out his legs to frame between his boots the
row of concrete blocks out in the water.
Skunk:
Do you have kids?
deleted
name (scratching at the beard incipient upon his face): Hmm?
Skunk:
Do you have any kids?
deleted
name: Not… no.
pausing,
before
deleted
name: No, no I don’t.
understanding
this not to be a moment where he might ask back whether Skunk thinks he will
ever be a father himself.
Instead
he watches his young companion empty the hipflask’s heeltaps into himself and
thinks but does not speak of a Lethe distilled and bottled, affording even on
this side of death the momentary luxury of dissolving us from ourselves.
Before
returning for the ferry back they attempt skimming their marbles like stones
out across the surface of the lake. Unsuccessful, they settle for throwing them
one after another high as they can into the air above, relishing the water’s
odd little belch repeated as each small object drops and is swallowed from
existence.
