Their
breaths are out of synch, come in relay, a never-absent fog of visible
exhalations dissipating up toward the cube of orange lamplight overhead.
Leaving
Brother Skunk asquat over the pavement’s tiny pock, ache1 begins
again a gentle running around him to crack temperature back into her legs, the
while breathing heat into her mittened fingers.
ache1
(growling): Rrrrrrrrrrr, Skunk!
Skunk it’s fucking arctic. Why are we doing this? Skunk?
each
emphasised word bright in its own freezing steam.
Skunk
yawns hard enough to stop sound.
Skunk: How does ice ehm, you know when
you see a puddle that has ice over it, over a, you know like, it has a skin of ice on
the water
ache1: Uh-huh.
Skunk: and that’s, that makes perfect
sense, but when the puddle is just, when there’s not actually any water at all
in there, like a hollow puddle, how on earth does the ice
ache1: Like ahm, like just
ice?
Skunk: yeah yeah, but on, over a gap, or
across... There’s this little ehm, it’s a, there’s a bit been gouged out of the
pavement, and every morning when I’m, as I’m walking to work I’ve, I see this thing,
and I crack the ice with the toe of my boot, and then each, you know, the
following morning, the ice is covering the thing again, there’s ice across the
hole.
She’s never considered it, and they sit
awhile silent.
ache1: Maybe it’s like a
mould ah, like when, no that wouldn’t... You think maybe it grows in from the
outside, until it all meets in the middle? But then, how does, how would it
support itself in the air?
Skunk: I have no idea, but I’m,
laughing
Skunk: we should set up a time-lapse
camera one of these nights.
He
stands and stamps his feet. The red fingers of his mother’s gloves hang limp
from his fists as his own grind amongst themselves inside, attempting with this
friction to instil some warmth in each other. Inhaling to the capacity of his
numb lungs, Skunk cants back slack at the ankles to breathe out long into the
light, inferring from the exhaust’s illuminated ascent some physics of
undertow, watching as the heel of his breath crawls on up through its refluent
ebb.
ache1
(yawning): Fuck it’s cold. Skunk, can
we just cap this? Please? Please
please please?
and
there in place, she starts a tentative jumping.
Skunk
(smiling): Shouldn’t you... not be
doing that?
ache1:
Shouldn’t I not be doing it? Skunk
I’m fucking freezing. I’m freezing my
breasts off
trying
to yank up her coat and clothing, but they wad and stop and she compromises the
illustration with just her naked belly.
ache1:
Hah?
Skunk
(reaching into his back pocket): Here
and
puts the hipflask into her hands.
Having
unscrewed the top, she holds the whiskey just below her nose, sniffing hard as
at decongestant and then her head drops back quick for the shot, and held there
as the heat of Jack Daniel’s seeps into her oesophagus’ length. Her face comes
upright, aflush with blood and a pantomimic twitch of the whiskey novitiate she
is not.
ache1
(replacing the tiny metal cap with some difficulty): And plus, now I need the toilet.
while
inside her too, something, in whose own tiny and passive bowel takes form that
inchoate meconial movement, something with toenails and fingernails and gender,
opens its eyes at last upon the fluid geography of her womb.
