There is this every day, or at least, there is this on the
days between his running out of and his bothering to fulfil the repeat
prescription for the hydrocortisone cream that will contain it, albeit
momentarily: that after waking and having his eyes adjust to the light of the
day in which he finds himself, he will brush from off the sheet a small pool of
skinflake dust, a pool which began in infancy perhaps a third and then later
halfway down the bed and which has, with his growing, removed itself from him
incrementally toward its end.
These times when he is irritated worst and unable to procure
some form of remedy, he will grow the nails of his other foot purposefully
long, reminded perhaps of the confusion visited upon him in childhood when, in
order to relieve the itch he felt there he would reach down even in his sleep
with frantic scratching, only to wake fully turned round in the bed, his often
bleeding ankle now where his head might have been expected, upon the pillow.
It is not until the day his mother dies, the spent
bullet casings he has brought especial from their house and now clapped tight
inside her dry vagina, that he begins to understand the actual depth of stain upon his calf.
