This is
unwilled, but a dream over hallucination, though at any queried point across
the summer he would be tried to locate any difference between them, the
patterns of his sleep and the strange visions of his hours awake.
The three of them enter the cemetery,
ache1 with antler riding high upon her shoulders, the first trip to
her grandmother’s grave with enough to understand. Skunk himself is only now
beginning to comprehend the distance, and there is some distance
between here and the funeral, his understanding recognising here, and here too the dream’s own ambience, and within that and its own odd logic he
is confident of his ability to allow antler some knowledge of death, the
process of breath being cancelled absolutely from the living to leave a body mere
boxed landfill waste.
ache1 lowers her daughter to
the moist grass as Skunk kneels at the known grave of a family friend, confused
by the wreaths and fresh flowers. His initial notion of some annual remembrance
gone upon the sudden recall of this man having died in the same season as his
mother, albeit some years before, and that season not being this. Then beneath
the tributes and the diffused ink scripts upon their cards, the cut turf tells
its tale.
antler runs herself a slalom between the
headstones.
Skunk replaces the damp-soft card to its
flowers, his demeanour now one more of annoyance than grief at this
unexpectance, appreciating at some level of his dreaming subconscious that his
next visit to the site will find this gravestone absent, returned to the
stonecutters for the additional name and dates.
Standing now, he calls his daughter from
her running about the vacant grass.
There is a gentle depression in the
ground, a soft meniscal dip in the earth above his mother’s coffin, or its
present remnant. ache1 stands quietly by, both hands in her hair and
with antler’s spine rubbing against her knees, while Skunk understands for the
first time his mother’s spirit to be of finite capacity, this sum and abstract
expression of her entire existence, this final distillation of all breath drawn
and exhaled to be limited, and to be not here; the decay beneath their feet now
transcended, abandoned to its own crude definition. He can retrieve no adoption
of thought to render this either good or no, and then
antler (jumping about in the sunken
grass): Is this where her tummy is Daddy? Am I jumping on Granny’s tummy now?
and again with her breaths pulsed to
each landing
antler: Is this her knees now? Is this
where her knees would be, that I’m jumping on, is this Granny’s knees?
Skunk laughs aloud and turns to ache1,
who is also laughing, her arms fully extended, her both hands reaching high
into the air.
Their child continues jumping.
