Brother
Skunk felt rather than heard the siren drop into his stomach as the ambulance
pulled away, its rearlights rounding the corner out into the main street and
gone. He finally opened his fist and watched as rain beat bloody matter from
the silver coin only now granted occasion to allow respite the flesh beneath, a
circle pressed so darkly in his palm as would take several minutes to
disappear.
A
Canadian twenty-five cent piece embossed with a moose head, dug from out the
choking girl’s mouth where it had been cutting into the gum behind her lower
teeth, sawing the tongue’s underside root.
It
occurred to him now that the coin’s worth might exceed its ascribed monetary
value, that she had tried to hide or even swallow it on recognising the
perilous nature of her circumstance.
He looked again to the corner around which the
ambulance had gone, its siren drowned out in the continuous volume rising from
bags of trash spattered by the rain through which he had first heard her voice
ache1: E.T.
his
initial presumption of American contradicted by the subsequent discovery of
this coin.
She
had asked forced the word through visible pain from every movement of her jaw,
repeating
ache1: E.T.
and
again
ache1: E.T.
and
even here, squatting in a dark cobbled sidestreet with rain hard upon his
inebriate head and the badly beaten figure of a young woman in obvious need of
his help, had come pure blue images of a bicycle taking the moon, a momentary
abstraction overwhelming all else.
He
felt his sobriety tidal and made to control it in further contemplation of the
coin, tilting his hand so that the little silver circle slid down across his
wet fingers to be flipped, seeing only a brief glimpse of its reverse before it
bounced off thin across the cobbles, rolled into the trash and sacks of refuse
stacked dark against the light-walled buildings.
He
found the quarter with little difficulty, found also what he thought a puffy
toy cigar, incongruous fingers stitched into one end.
Retrieved
nearby, the doll itself was more an interpretation than a direct replica of
E.T., and in its current limbless condition bore closer resemblance to a
distended boxing glove: both arms ripped away, the head held on at one side
only, and the vinyl across its back stripped leaving visible an expanse of
nylon matting underneath.
Fragments
and minutes shifted, moved against each other and around and fit.
With
one of the doll’s arms still missing, Brother Skunk began a frantic search
through the surrounding litter, pulling aside plastic bags and moving boxes
with his feet until finally upon his knees, sifting damp miscellanea, one of
his hands located the missing limb while with a sound skinny and oddly plastic
the other’s thumb broke through the brittle glass of some withered bottle.
Gathering
the sum pieces of E.T. to his breast he stood up in the streetlight to watch
blood flowering quickly out of the wound across his rain-soaked hand, covering
his wrist and running down inside the sleeve of his coat.
The
fragments and minutes now began to drift; he knelt back down on the street with
the side of his face flat and cool against the cobbled stones, willing back
weight into his head, his hair separating to spread amongst the little pools of
water.
Skunk:
I shall not faint. I shall not faint. I shall not faint. I shall
not faint.
