With
time yet until the departure of his train, Brother Skunk browsed the station
chemist shelves. Attracted first to the quiet dissonance of its antiquated
label, he was startled to recognise the product, if not the particular brand.
He
tipped a little into his open palm, the palm then quick to his scalp, fingering
it back through his hair before inhaling the bay rum from both hands as if
narcotised.
All
their chatter about skipping stones and memory, about the potency of certain
smells and the way they could instantly remove you to times and places past and
otherwise forgotten, so it was only now that he remembered as a child he had so
often had this liquid amber spice combed through his hair, his mother pouring
it from an unmarked glass bottle whose irregular and bulbous stopper he was
allowed to play with throughout, a bottle salted away in a secret place he
never did find.
Mother (turning his newly-groomed head
to face her): How’s that for you, sir? That’s the way a man should
smell. Th-
Skunk (laughing): Paawww! Stinky!
flapping his hands wildly about his head
and trying to fan the smell from himself, finally clipping his nose with thumb
and forefinger.
Mother: No, Skunk no. No come here,
SKUNK!
and laughing
Mother: Don’t you want to smell like a
man? Mmm?
Skunk: Not like that, not all stinky.
until,
with the bottle damn near empty, she had stopped.
Skunk
(accidentally spoken): This isn’t ri-
before
shutting his mouth in recognition of context and, pulling both palms dry upon
his shirt, made his way to the trains.
There
was a faint trace of it yet upon his fingers when he arrived hours later at the
station still more familiar to him than the one departed, and now the scent
began to work a new magic, its effectiveness strengthened by the realisation of
apposite surroundings, conjuring up a parade of daylight ghosts filing past
Skunk on station corner: numberless, unstoppable, each at their remembered age,
and there at the back, hand-in-hand with the husband whose face and build came
from only hint and vague memory and no known photograph, the still-remembered
mother she had been, the slide into vegetative aphasia yet to render
unrecognisable her sole surviving own.
The
vision had intensity enough that when he saw her from the entrance to the ward,
pillow-propped immobile in her bed, he saw the other too, the sharp and
pristine ditto allowing him the measure of then minus now, and finally he knew
that difference to be not the debilitating lunacy offered up in
explanation, but fear; she was simply petrified.
He
crossed to her bed and straightway took her hand between his own. Habitually he
would not touch her, and lately had even passed entire visits without regarding
her face, preferring the other unknown damage on the ward to any indication
however slight, that his mother’s protracted blank had broken free of its
postponement and begun its decelerating slide toward her death.
Her
hand began to warm between his, and looking at her face he saw the thick string
of saliva pulling off from her mouth start to whip as a spasm broke across her
head. Her hands flew to her ears in a vain attempt to defend herself against
the internal explosion of noise.
Again.
Skunk:
NURSE!
The
third would have wrenched her from the bed had she not been tightly anchored by
the sheets.
Skunk
(screaming): NURSE! NURSE!
then
suddenly outside of the engulfing blur around her, and lost.
