The
park was close enough to his house that if the urge so took him he could walk
there, circle its perimeter track, and return home still defiant of the
crippled ankle bones fragmenting inside his skin. So routine had such physical
defiance become he now habitually expected any prayer offered up throughout to
be not only arbitrary, but also mired in its exact passive opposite, though he
could not say why.
This
particular morning was in no way unusual, its sole vagary extant in Brother
Skunk’s stopping at the park entrance to prod with his walking stick at a clump
of giftwrap bright amongst the other litter, the dew-damp paper disintegrating
beneath the wood. He was never able to think of his own birthday without also
including hers, the dates in such proximity that they and those between would
annually coalesce into a single indistinct whole during which his grief might
be more intensely felt.
Skunk:
More… More and more, I’m beginning to see life as like…
He
wiped off upon the grass the colourful pulp that still clung to the stick’s
end, heading then out along the first arc of his loop.
Skunk: I
mean, that’s such a, it’s such a cliché to think that, to reduce life to some
simple analogy but… when I think about it I think that it’s like a, a game of
musical chairs, or that’s the way I feel now anyway, that people I know are,
you know, the music stopped and everybody sat down, everybody sat down uh uh uh
in terms of… you know, their house or their job or their family or… partners or
whatever, and I’m still, I’m still running around, I’m still looking for a
chair to sit down on. Sometimes I, I think that… maybe
accompanied
with a bitter laugh
Skunk:
maybe there was a class at school where people were taught about, that maybe
one day when I was off school, unwell, poorly, that um, everybody was taught
about making chairs, because that was something that was going to save you
later on. And I missed that class, and nobody told me… about it. And so, you
know, late teens, twenties, early twenties, everybody was making chairs,
because they knew the music was going to stop. But I didn’t know, I had,
you know, how how how c- how could I know? And then all of a sudden eh, you
know, at some point, early twenties or mid twenties, late twenties, the music
stopped, and everybody pulled out these chairs they’d made, and sat down. And I
was running around in a panic, wondering where was, where was my chair?
How come I didn’t have a chair?
He
trod on round a while in silence, looking to the centre of the park and its
children’s fixtures consistently equidistant from his orbit.
Skunk:
There is that, when you really, when you’re a kid and you play this game,
there’s that horrible sense of panic when you run around looking for a chair
and, once you’ve made a lap of all the chairs you know there isn’t a chair for
you, and maybe you make another couple of laps simply off momentum, but you
know you’re out. For you the game is over. It’s game over. And maybe eh, maybe
that’s where I am now. I’m still running around, even though I know, I know
there’s no chair for me. But I’m still running around looking for it. I still
ex- I still expect it to be there, somehow.
He
stopped, being back where he began.
Skunk:
This is not a life. This is a goddamned epilogue.
