Skunk
held the earpiece away from his head as the voice on the other end of the line
began to lose patience,
cog:
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THEY’RE
CALLED BRAND NAMES, YOU DUMB FUCK?
followed
by the sound not of the other receiver slamming hard into the main body of the
telephone, but of the whole unit being violently swept or thrown or even kicked
from the small table whereon it rested, and now a distant
cog:
FUCK! FUCK! FUCK YOU!
on
and on until the line did indeed go dead.
With
the receiver resting in his lap, Brother Skunk blotted the tears with the backs
of both hands, whimpering to himself in small drunken sounds, sounds muffled by
his arms now dragging across his face, his mouth pulled and distorted, his skin
feeling thick and dull in the grip of his fingers.
Skunk:
Branded.
He
let the saliva gather and spill from his mouth, creating a spot on his bare leg
that allowed him to pattern the hairs into a dark spiral at the circling of a
finger. After these months of abuse, there were moments when he could simply
look at his watch and, whether he had been drinking or not, generate
inebriation through some curious Pavlovian response. This was not one of those
moments. As his friend had mentioned on the telephone, right now Brother Skunk
was
cog: so fucking loaded you can barely
fucking talk to me.
He
rose and went back upstairs to the bedroom to pull on some clothes, taking
comfort from the protective grace he wrongly felt bestowed upon him by this
shirt, these shorts and jeans, as if thus clothed he were immune to the notion
that his friends viewed him as a problem, a risk more to himself than to them.
The
hipflask was still there upon the windowsill, its pewter screw-on cap lying
alongside, and he went to it.
cog: You don’t know, how the fuck could you know? That’s
not going to save you, it’s going to fail. What? No, no...
sighs through clenched teeth
cog: There is nothing you can... Because
there’s nothing outside of the self that won’t
be broken upon the walls of what you call home, you should know that
and now through tears
cog: What about us? Is that... are we...
I mean, me, don’t I have some
Skunk
(after drinking from the flask): Damn
you. Damn you to hell!
his
voice rising
Skunk:
I CAN SLEEP! I CAN SLEEP WITH THIS!
and
filling his mouth with whiskey spat it out hard against the window-pane before
falling back heavily onto the bed, and drinking again.
Skunk:
Branded.
His
whiskey, his jeans, his arm, his ankle.
