She
was not aware of it at her waking, had in fact showered and dressed,
breakfasted even and was preparing to leave the room when she first noticed the
words, “last of kin”, crawling across
the otherwise virgin page of her “Wild West” colouring-book folded open upon
the bedside table. (Later, when she finally understood, or assumed to
understand, what was taking place, she would admit to Brother Skunk that on this morning she had felt the lettering
might have manifested itself, that
the printing inks had seeped together within the paper, coagulated and risen to
the surface as the words now visible.)
ache1:
Last of kin
tracing
her fingers with their short clean nails across the page’s pulpy surface, the
trails of wax too faint to discern. In rotating the book to better view these
three words, it occurred to her that in the formlessness of their composite
lettering and in their vague suggested threat they resembled in no minor way
the handwriting of deleted
name’s notes, his own
miniscule script amplified to these childish marks. And then the thought that perhaps one of the hotel’s staff, having
discovered just such a stray or abandoned page, had decided to make of her some
mental amusement as she slept.
She
flipped through the book’s other images, those still blank and pristine, and
those she had crayonned in, these pages somewhat buckled from the built-up wax,
the colours applied with some vigour and without due regard for the actual
printed outlines.
ache1:
Last of kin
and
sat herself down upon the bed with the book open once again at these three
words, seeing only now the image upon which they had been written: a cowboy
tending to the embers of his dying campfire. There was no comfort to this, the
portentous scrawl and the empty template of flame left ache1 unsure
as to what was being referenced, if anything: her own status as the absent
family’s youngest member, of which she needed no souvenir, and that even moreso
regarding the too too recent abortion which had had her tearing at her stomach
in sleep, the nails’ hard manicure forcing her to dig more violently at her
belly’s flesh, digging as though the doctor had somehow not in fact removed from her all he might have, as if only her
subconscious state contained the knowledge of what remained, and that remnant
to be bodily dug from out her womb and purged before it gestated into who alone
knew what.
