Their
first days in the new house and this now too seemed to fill with his effluvium
as with any fluid, rising from the ground floor up so that even that first
bitter winter his mother would sleep with her window wide as if in such she
might ventilate and drain off the building’s every room through her own.
Nights
the infant Skunk would stand frozen in her doorway as she slept, lured and
repelled both by the sound emanating as if from off the very surface of her
face, fearing each dry and violent shriek of her grating teeth, the air barely
alive with a perfume of hair tonic so faintly redolent as to suggest its
attempted intrusion from without counter to the ebb of Skunk’s every foetid
exhalation.
Returned
to his own room he would enclose himself entirely within a wrap of sheets and
blankets, their collected navel tight in the grip of one hot little fist with
the fingers of the other scouring his ankle that its immutable flaw might be
eradicated, and still even here in the quick and suffocating heat and over the
volume of himself and his heart came the ceaseless rhythmic squealing of his
mother’s abrading enamel, each successive extinguishing his hope that each
would be the last.
