Skunk: It’s cold
enough for my lungs to feel each short reflex of breath burn its way into and
out of my body, and nothing in my vision is holding colour, an omnipresent
monotony of bright and violent white akin to blindness, until now the existence
of which I have always perceived as impenetrable and depthless black. I am
moving through the snow with difficulty, and I begin to understand some
abstract rhythm of detail punctuating the extreme edge of what I can actually see, this before I am aware become
a wall of rock directly in my path, and from this do I surmise my context, that I am on the edge of a mountain, and high
up too.
I persist. My
senses are rarefied, gulfy; I don’t know that these are the right words, but I must think something as I move, turning my head and in so
doing realising the perimeter of vision described by the furred edge of my
parka hood, and within that the sudden dotted colour of my pursuers, less and
less distant. I am aware they have been closing in for some time now; my breathing,
for one.
Between the
mass of snow upon which I stand and the rock-face ahead exists a crack of ten
or twelve inches, and I watch my hands excavate this, see the textured stone
loom out as I fill this widened gap with my own body and organise some attempt
at survival and deceit with what I’ve managed to dislodge, pulling it down
around my head. Even in this performance, I acknowledge the tracks that run
from out the surface above me to the very feet of those on my trail, that
itself less to their having watched me burrow down here. And I wait.
Brother Skunk awakens bent double in the sheets, his
chest and groin moist with sweat, damp as his mouth is dry, and his whole head
burning; awakens into a momentary sensation of uneasiness, the experienced fear
abrogated by a quick dismissal of the dream as
dream, this realisation itself having even broken the membrane of previous
dreams’ emotional flow. His frustration located within the all too recognisable
synopsis played and played out to the same pre-climactic point, the variations
between these interesting him not at all, and wanting now nothing more than to
abandon once and for all this state of ignorant waking, to back up into the
unconscious and secure conclusion just once, hoping that such might render
finite this strain of dreaming, years recurrent.
He
lies without movement, waiting, but in his subsequent re-awaking finds he has
been elsewhere.
