The
first minutes of morning begin their slow crawl all around deleted name
as he sits watching an old black and white movie on television, one bottle
half-full of beer in his hand, an empty row of others alongside the chair. To
Clark Gable’s on screen toast
cog:
Stick that in your thoughts and see what comes out.
he
responds by raising his Moosehead in salutation
deleted
name: Cheers.
and
drinking.
ache1/Skunk (raising
shotglasses and drinking): Cheers!
It is another wet Sunday afternoon.
Brother Skunk and ache1 watch a tv matinee in her hotel room
ache1: Marilyn Monroe is the
original reason for men calling women cows. She’s all teat.
Skunk: It’s... I suppose you’re right.
Her grace, if you can call it that, is sort of... bovine. Still... I
mean, isn’t there, don’t you find anything aspirational about
ache1: Fuck off.
He
pulls the cold curve of green glass close to his face and the characters on
screen distort and disappear in part behind the slow foam moving back down
inside the bottle’s short throat.
deleted
name (resigned to his own half-laughter): She’s all teat.
Unable
to remember if he ever saw in her what they do, still he knows it to be gone
beyond retrieval now, wincing as he does at her every forced and overtly
breathy utterance. He understands as lost his ability to view her as a
repository for the combined and corralled lust of her audience, that same lust
the ache of his own grieving refuses transcendence, and the alcohol too, in
part at least, anaesthetic to deaden any urge even in germ.
Her
sexuality he recognises as something commercially potent and demonstrative, but
behind that mask its history to this visible point is one of abortion,
miscarriage, and ectopic pregnancy, and in the film beyond the bottle is only
just into those double-figure months counting it down to death. In that there
is something of his own, interrupted by the limited and decelerating momentum
of bereavement.
He
is conscious of his memory defaulting to such change.
The
empty bottle extends the line along the floor. His hands find and hold
themselves in the room’s incipient sunlight.
Unable
to assimilate his loss, the young woman dead in her attempt to birth a vessel
for the spirit remnant of that aborted at his will, he is approaching the
endpoint where the whole endeavour must be abandoned, suffering in such the
abnegation of his every responsibility to the dead and living both.
