“Charon toll.”
Every
existence is footnoted by an index of constituents of which that existence is
ignorant, this list and its history in perpetual flux and so, here,
these two words the awareness of which (plus that he had retrieved the coin
from out her mouth) might well have dissuaded Skunk from his crossing of the
ocean with her body; two words ache1’s sum knowledge of the
following morning in the hospital would be a vague and painful fatigue deep
within the musculature above her breasts, her brassiere (which by time of
waking already bagged and destroyed, stained as it was with the arrow’s chevron
point) having been forced up to allow them room, its underwiring leaving
impressioned crescents in the flesh, and the words themselves gone too,
absorbed from out the skin with medical solvent.
