ache1: Are you, will you be
okay ‘til I get there?
Skunk: Yeah. Yeah. I mean
sighs
Skunk: There’s something so, there’s a
weird bit to this, but I’ll tell you later, it’s...
So
when she arrives for what is only the second ever time at that house in which
he grew up, it is not surprising for this unrevealed weirdness still to be
itching her mind.
They
embrace upon the doorstep, the house’s thin warmth creeping out past them both
and on into the night’s November chill.
ache1:
Oh Skunk I’m so sorry.
holding
him that hard to herself his little skunk ear-ring begins to bite at her
temple.
Skunk
(speaking into her hair): It’s okay. It’s okay. This is
coughs
Skunk:
This is eh, this is where we are. This is where we are now.
His
mother will be buried in four days, and unspoken between them the notion of
having bartered that life created for that now extinguished, almost as if those
last of her breaths had been surrendered into this nascent vessel like the
uncoiling of one spring into another.
ache1:
Look, I wrote it down, “Forgive all men their sins”.
holding
up her palm, the ink now almost completely washed away.
ache1:
I wasn’t sure I’d remember.
Skunk
(clearing throat): That’s... I don’t think I’ll be forgetting that any
too soon.
He
closes the front door as she dumps her long black coat, her satchel, and the
little rolling case in the hallway. Before she can even ask, Brother Skunk is
already removing from a small plastic bag a tissue-covered oblong that bears
evidence of having been repeatedly unwrapped and wrapped back, crumpled by the
incessant worrying of his fingers yet still cleaner than that in which its
content had been located only yesterday, the original wrapper already by now
incinerated medical waste, dispersed across the city as little more than particles
of the day’s aggregate soot.
Into
his hand he rolls out the two silver bullet cases, holding them up for her to
pick from off his palm.
ache1:
What, this uh, these are bullets?
Skunk:
Shot bullets, yes. Cases,
rubbing
at his nose
Skunk:
shells, whatever you call them.
ache1
(completely bewildered): Yes? And the significance of them is what, exactly?
Skunk:
Well...
clearing
his throat
Skunk:
Remember I told you there was something weird. This
and
again
Skunk:
There was a doctor at the hospital this morning, after Mum, after she died, the
doctor gave me these and told me they’d found them inside her vagina.
ache1
ceases to inspect the bullet, looking instead at Skunk’s face.
Skunk:
This is what she asked me to get. This, these are what she’d hidden up in the
attic.
indicating
the ceiling with his eyes, a minimal tilt of his head.
ache1
returns to her examination of the bullet: an empty thin silver cylinder with a
flat end, which she holds now to catch the light, reading “S & W” stamped
around the top, and then in an arc below “.357 MAG”. Looking closer, she
notices the bullet’s curved surface bears other markings, a lettering vicious
and illegible.
ache1:
You know there’s some writing on this one, right?
Skunk:
I know, this one too,
rolling
its twin around between his thumb and first two fingers so that the inscription
comes visible.
Skunk:
Different names, same date.
The
etchings are barely decipherable, appear as though the result of multiple
goings over of each individual character with a pin, or nail, or some other
equally hard, fine, sharp point, every scratch the brutal legacy of sheer will,
and too that aggregate time of its execution. And then, having been brought
into being with such force, worried almost smooth by persistent fingers.
Too
crudely realised to retain the features of any individual’s handwriting, it is
impossible to ascribe responsibility, or ownership, still
ache1:
She wrote this?
Skunk:
Or my dad, maybe? Or neither of them, I mean, that’s equally possible,
plausible.
ache1:
Skunk, what did the doctor say, exactly?
Skunk:
Nothing, well, other than where they were found.
ache1:
But she didn’t die fr-, I mean, this isn’t what she died from?
Skunk
(laughing): No, God no.
ache1
reads out what she believes to be the date.
ache1:
What age would that make you?
Skunk:
Five? Five. No, four.
ache1
(joining those dots she knows): When your dad died?
Skunk
(actually scratching at his head): Yes. Yes, but...
whatever
words whatever thought requires all perish upon his every attempt at their
retrieval, until
ache1:
I should have come up last night. Didn’t I say, I should have come up last
night. Fuck, I knew it. I knew it. Tell me what she said on the phone,
what did she say when she asked for them?
Skunk:
But she didn’t ask for them specifically, she just said there was a
package in the attic, and for me to bring it to the hospital.
ache1:
And then what, at the hospital? What, she
Skunk:
When I got there she was really dopey from the drugs, but she was actually there,
you know, not like, she was, they were ehm, she was wired up to these little
boxes that were feeding her some heavy-duty sedative, or painkiller.
ache1:
But she wasn’t, when we saw her it’s not like she, or at least she
didn’t seem to be in any pain.
Skunk:
Yeah when she was out of it, but when she came back I think she was, she was in
an agony, some sort of agony anyway. They said they knew she was going, she
knew she was going, and this... So I left the little wrap by the, on the
bedside table, and... Like I said, I didn’t know what to be doing, I
didn’t know if that was her, or if she was, if that was just a temporary thing,
and then when I came back she seemed to focus only briefly, and she was still
on the drugs, “Forgive all men their sins”, and then she just seemed to start
sliding out. And then she was gone, and it was quick then, it was so quick. I
was still trying to, it was almost like I was still trying to even hear what
she’d actually said and she was already gone.
He
clears his throat again.
Skunk:
It’s weird because I knew she wouldn’t get better, I knew that. I
knew that all this time, but then there’s still that, you still sort of, even
though you know you cannot help but to have some hope.
Both
his hands locate his head, bury themselves beneath the too black hair.
Skunk:
It’s almost as if she forced, she wi-, she was somehow able to will herself
back into life for the sole purpose of leaving it.
In
this he seems to acknowledge perhaps one conclusion of some debate he might be
engaged in with himself alone, almost as if she were yet to arrive.
Skunk:
Well, I waited on you
entering
the living room to retrieve from out his Levi’s denim jacket the battered
pewter hipflask.
Skunk
(unscrewing the squeaking cap): I waited on you, I can say that at least.
and
after swallowing hard over and again at the whiskey,
Skunk:
I waited on you.
