The
curtains are not drawn and out beyond the panes the citylit clouds blot orange
on the surface of the night. The old cripple sits staring out, attempting sense
of pattern as a cow might watch a passing train, until a resurgent smarting in
his left fore-arm guides him again through the afternoon.
Heading home along a dirt track that
separates the back garden trees and fences of two parallel suburban streets,
his buckled shadow encroaches upon
perfection, moves onto the circle fingered in the summer dust and disappears
the gleam from the little coloured spheres within.
The two young girls look up from their
marbles to see him there, an old man with peculiarly black hair supporting
himself on a six and a half foot shaft of hazel, atop which broken antler makes
to scratch at clouds passing white in the overhead blue. With some difficulty
he hunkers down next to them and without asking picks up a ruby shooter to
thumbnail into the game. It passes between the others without connecting.
Skunk: Ah, shot the breeze. Heh heh, I
shot the breeze.
Pulling himself back up the staff he
tries to intimate something to them with a smile, to undo the confusion or
contempt or whatever it is he perceives to have left of himself in their
upturned faces.
Skunk:
but he is without words.
He
tears this final line down through the hairs remaining between the other pale
tracks covering his arm and the blood rises slowly, scarlet grapeshot waste.
