Finally
it was a child’s hair, a sole pale thread that when he discovered it curled
between the pages of a second-hand book pulled the morning’s hunger within to a
width beyond all tolerance, precipitating his passage into the hauling vacuum
of his final hours.
Something
to the vague and scratchy illustrations of the eponymous mouse and his child
upon the pages of his protracted reading, in their search for family and
territory and destiny and happy-ever-after, elevated him from out himself until
he noticed the hair.
With
neither name nor date inside its cover still he conjured a tiny girl, filled
with simple relief to be home from her first day of school and back in bed at
last, her father’s welcome performance of this episodic tale accompanied by her
own perusal of these same little drawings; his Hell to watch without end or
alteration this perfect tableau from the far bank of a river boiling thick with
his lifetime’s semen waste.
Finished
at home, his tension dilute knowing himself already subject to an unhurried
timetable counting off each breath until his last, mere hours away.
