He
is outwith the requisite language for either of them and, at the grave these
minutes untouched by all grief’s mandatory conduct, guilty. It is the work of
other muscle as compels him to the standing tap on the cemetery’s back wall and
its complement of plastic containers, each anchored by their full weight of
water. The tap flows bright and cold, wets his fingers, fills his cupped palms
and this thrown about him, attempting to quieten the pulse burning beneath his
healing nakedness of scalp. It runs neutral to his tongue, and from his face.
Having
soaked the bandanna pulled from out his pocket, he cradles the awkward clump of
sodden cloth back to his mother’s grave, washing her black stone clean of its
accumulated dirts. His fingers run the golden fill of her name, the word
Mother.
Five
inches of his forearm itch in the absence of their stitches, the little
punctures fill out along the convalescent flesh as his skin knits itself back
together beneath the fault.
With
the damp bandanna crammed again inside the pocket of his trousers, both hands
he now pulls dry upon his shirt, hands to hold only each other the duration of
his remnant breath.
Language
absorbs him back; he levers from his coat the much-thumbed paperback and reads,
taking thus no responsibility for the words that come, and with his voice
having nothing of tonal variance, is simply making sounds.
Skunk
(reading introductory blurb): “In a toyshop at Christmas time, a clockwork
mouse and his father stood among the other toys: a fine clockwork elephant, a
seal which balanced a red and yellow ball on her nose, and a splendid dolls’
house. Next day they were sold into the wide world, and found themselves under
a Christmas tree. Then they got broken and were thrown on to the rubbish heap,
and the tramp found them and sent them off on their long search for
independence – while all the while their unrelenting enemy Manny Rat pursued
them to destroy them.”
standing
sorrowful, his collar cold with water, a deepening spread of wet descends his
leg.
He
prays his Jesus grant her back those comforts lost in life, and hopes too they
both of them acknowledge his continued returning crawl from the long lunatic
months of bereavement, these tiny achievements often imperceptible as the
lessening of each day’s measured light, or the slow black bloom of hair upon
his skull.
