He
had fallen again.
It
had become far too frequent an occurrence, the sensation of his ankle
disappearing inside itself to create a void that could in no way support him,
and leaving no option then but to begin relying more and more upon the walking
stick, even there inside the house; an auxiliary to bear the weight of his own
body when he himself could not.
But
the stick upstairs, at the foot of which Brother Skunk now lay with odd angles
bent about his limbs, considering time mere weeks ago when this had not been
happening, and time at the outset of life, his infancy, when this had happened
too with the same disquieting regularity, almost as if the period of his
relatively unhindered movement between these two nothing more than a
sympathetic parenthesis placed by the avuncular Christ, and that state of grace
now ended.
He
had been on his way to bed when he felt the gap in his leg again create itself,
an immediate idea of the time passed from the last to this, the times this
would happen again and again in what remained of his life as his body had
snapped out a hand to the bannister, missed and delivered the whole of him into
the opposite wall before he had fallen directly back, his spine shrunk to a
tight crescent within the flesh prepared for impact, and with this impact the
queer high ammoniac taste somewhere there just above the brow as he folded back
down toward the hallway.
Skunk:
Jesus
his
breath filtered in and out and in
Skunk:
Jesus
and
out.
He
blinked rapidly, creasing areas of his face for nothing more than the knowledge
of response, and then lying there otherwise immobile, manoeuvered the process
around what parts of the body he knew how, tensing and relaxing whatever he
could to ascertain locations for the worst of the damage, wishing the long-dead
mother’s rush from her coffee to scoop him up into her arms and carry him to
bed.
