With
the first a scar and the second yet a hot and scabbing itch, the appearance of
the third cut (which came up like dot-to-dot completing itself in rich red ink)
confirmed the motif to be embellished in perpetuity.
“Ideal for extermination of vermin” and “Ball
bearings or smooth round stones make for the most accurate ammunition” from
the box of soft cardboard that contained his slingshot, a purchase made with
groundscore coin and pennies siphoned from off his daily lunch-money in secret
and against his mother’s wish.
Brother
Skunk had pulled himself away early from school to murder tin cans, trees, and
bottles, to hole even the sky itself, watching small stones shot to an instant
nothing in the air, believing those whose return he did not hear to have escaped
the very forces as held him buckled awkward to the earth.
Heading
home, he found himself in an area of controlled forestation adjacent to some
empty playing fields owned by a school for children older than himself. An
unbroken row of birds filled the rugby goalpost crossbar and Skunk, confused
and excited by his first potential targets having breath, instinctively felt
for the smoothest stone in his jacket pocket.
His
raw and redchapped fingers folded it into the leather pouch as his breath moved
in and out and still out across a pulse that seemed to pull back from his open
mouth across his head.
The
reverberating echo of rubber denied him whatever sound was forced from out the
burst of feathers, and something falling, and even those hours before he would
again scratch his skin to let it out, Skunk could feel the burn forming inside
his arm. The other birds had silently, immediately dispersed save two, that
rose and then dropped into the rough grass as Skunk’s breath gathered and
gathered in his lungs until all three rose and scattered and were gone.
He
crossed and knelt at the scraps of grey debris, the tiny feathers’ fluff alive
with breath he could not keep from coming.
Later
that evening, with the fresh blood newly risen upon his forearm, Brother Skunk
would swallow and drink these same feathers down inside himself, with toothmug
after toothmug of bathroom tapwater.
