Skunk:
Something eh I wanted to talk about tonight was... On my way to work this
morning... At some point, I don’t know it must have been about... I don’t know,
maybe, quarter of a mile from work, on the pavement I started noticing some
spots of blood, eh, well, I thought it was blood and ehm, it it seemed to be,
because it... it wasn’t just, you know, it it obviously happened last night and
it had been raining last night so the blood had kind of diffused and the,
because the pavement’s on a slope... it had drifted with the the way the water
had drained off the pavement. And u- usually whenever I’ve seen blood on the
pavement before it’s just been a couple of spots, you know, maybe the person
who’s been bleeding has moved round a little and you can tell where, you know,
whatever. I mean, I have seen, I have seen a lot of blood before
in, you know, in... One time down south there was eh, a shop window which had a
h-, I mean it wasn’t eh, it was the kind of thing you look at and think nobody
could survive, to lose that much there was an awful lot there, from quite high
up on the window as well and right down to a pool on the pavement. But this
morning the, you know I followed it and it, it was, there was a lot of
it, and it was almost like a constant... thing right the way up the road, all
the way up the road was this, you know, somebody had bled as they were
walking or staggering... up the street, and it horrified me. I was terrified
of... the fact that I was walking over someone’s blood. It’s a strange
thing to think about... and you you know my my cutting, I don’t lose, I don’t
lose, it’s not like I lose blood, some some comes up, and scabs, but I
don’t lose it, it’s there, but whoever received some, whatever injury it
was they received last night, their blood is all the way up the street, and the
bookshop’s near a hospital, there’s a hospital just over, a couple of roads
away, and I can only assume that that’s what they were doing they were heading
for the hospital but I was thinking all, you know, how quickly were they
moving, were they on their own, how much pain were they in... and in my
breaktime, part of me really wanted to come out of the bookshop and follow the
trail on and see where it went to, but I didn’t do it. And... I didn’t do it, I
suppose, because there were, I suppose the other things I had to do I felt were
more important but also I didn’t, I think I didn’t really want to know, I
didn’t want to involve myself with it any more than I already had. But
it distressed me a lot to see it, and some of the other people in the bookshop
who saw it too, you know, we only spoke about it briefly but... that’s one of
the things about living in a city, there’s always an element of threat, or
something. I wish I could think about something else.
