It
is no softer than he remembered, the little pink brick of gum as initially
brittle as those through which they’d persisted almost a full year ago. He
mashes it methodically between his teeth without pleasure, the thick surge of
saliva bearing an emergent taste from out those ambient to its storage, and the
taste quickly gone, leaving an unswallowable cud Brother Skunk continues to
chew, wondering if perhaps he has made a mistake.
ache1: I used to drive my mum
nuts with bubble gum
exaggerating wet echoes chewed from out
her open mouth.
ache1: it would drive her
crazy, and she’d tell me, she’d make this, a kind of ahm, all this bullshit
trying to get me to surrender it, telling me it’d stick to my ribs if I
swallowed it, like somehow my ahm, my gut had ah, you know what I mean though?,
as if anything passing down my throat might come in contact with the bones in
there. Jesus.
She
is currently exercising down in the hotel’s leisure complex, describing widths
across the pool’s shallow end, surrounded by splashing children with her own
afloat in its amnion and the while Skunk’s jawbones work on with furious and
metronomic constancy, the gum a malleable and hardening and now flavourless
pulp.
That
the meddling in secrets, even those of whom you love, can fulfil itself is
beyond question. Suspicion and mistrust birth a seed, and that seed in the
jelly of doubt becomes solid, its eventual harvest both confirmation and
reward, but there is no solace, nothing at all in the simple remnant emptiness
equalling the cancellation of triumph by its incurred accompanying loss.
Thus
caught up in the momentum of a search for some unfound something else, this:
secreted in a sweater too small to have been worn for months now, a little lump
of brightly-wrapped Bazooka gum, the arrogance of his suspicion dictating hidden
above all else, hidden from him, an emotional souvenir of her life
before his having entered into it, given the source of donor. Thus the actual
mass of his upset and reaction, to peel this thing from out its wrap and
sustain its osmosis in his own throat.
Witness
the cast, such a passing cavalcade of damage: his mother, and her husband, and
all three children; the surviving stink and clum of himself; the elephant
Merrick; her, her abortion and its unborn namesake; and the one-eyed boy here
in this final greasy film of comic strip between his fingers, its bilingual
three-panel gag crumpled and flicked away unread in either language, the
unwrapped gum hard in his mouth, broken down of necessity in half-bites, and
still being worked, now, making manifest the root of each individual tooth in
his head.
He
blows bubbles, breaking a promise to the self, and must smear from off the face
around his mouth each residue of these skinny pink membranes.
deleted name (writing):
There might well be less damage done you
in the random hostility of a violent passerby, than in the suffering of a
lover’s simple neglect.
Lying
back across the width of bed, Skunk finds himself suddenly impelled to spit the
gum hard up into the air above his face, is only after the fact allowed an
amazement at its effortless and damn near exact relocation. He acknowledges
some new and inexplicable mandate that the gum remain in his mouth, does not
try this again.
It
is the same in minutes upon biting himself; his tongue, champed so hard and so
unable to absorb the application of such vicious force, bursts, his jaws crack
wide apart in shock and its sudden well of unrequited nausea, in which he only after
comes to comprehend the occurrence.
Skunk:
Jesus!
pressing
to his tongue tissues pulled quick from the bedside box, to which he feels the
whole of his mouth dehydrate. He sits, regulating the depth of each breath
filtered across the wound until the yaws in his stomach die, and then the
bathroom mirror offers his face behind the smears of her fingerprints, onto
which he fits his own, and he can see everything.
The
sound of her keycard slipping the lock
ache1:
Skunk? Hey?
the
bloodied tissues left wadded by the sink, he walks out into an envelope of
radiant body heat, damp bangs, and a smile for him that fades on sight.
It’s
quick, the ineluctable confrontation gestated in the ad hoc weary fatigue of
his jaws.
Skunk
(before she can even query his face): Give me your hand.
ache1
(bewildered): What? You want to marry me?
Skunk
(now gently, a voice dwarfed by its tongue): Just give me your hand. Please
proffering
his.
He
stabilises her extended palm by taking the tips of her fingers in his own, then
moves his face above it as if to spit.
ache1
(withdrawing): What the fuck
Skunk:
Trust me.
ache1:
Yeah but
Skunk:
You have to trust me, okay?
ache1
(unsure, again extending hand): Okaaay. Do I have to close my eyes?
He
spits the gum which bounces off her fingers, rolls and rests in the cradle of
her palm, a pale and bitten amorphousness, incongruously hot.
In
her knowing what it is, still asks
ache1:
What the fuck is that?
Skunk
(finally angry): The head of the Baptist.
leaving,
unaware he acts as he does at the delta of days that will define themselves
only by her absence, downstairs and out the building, across the car park in
the first of summer’s rains to beat the blossom from the trees.
