Its
impact subsided, was forgotten, for three years to a child, to children, is so
much more than that, and though there was always that-line-there, pale and
linear Braille that would grow relative to his own development, no-one could
have perceived it to be anything other than an isolated incident, a freak
occurrence lacking attributable precedent or future; no-one could have foreseen
the arm aged, its flesh tightly-lined as Old Testament text.
Long-sleeved
shirts to school and an excuse his mother gave him:
Mother: Okay? No, no say... Hold
on, would a cat... No, no, say you, say I’d left a pin in your new pyjamas,
okay? Skunk?
and
time passed, and all wounds are healed in that passing of time: his own, and
those between them, and then again.
It
is getting late on a Saturday afternoon.
Brother
Skunk sits by the edge of a skinny river, on a rock and the wrong side of ten
years old and dwarfed by more than age; high above him an aqueduct shoulders a
sealed and stagnant canal going nowhere.
Between
his thumb and forefinger he delicately clasps a badge with its pin pulled out
perpendicular to the back, and upon his arm a fresh weal issues fruit, a
periodic string of tiny crimson berries that grow for his smarting eyes, grow
and spread each to its coagulate adjacent on the cutting, forming another line
to scab and parallel the first.
He
keeps from turning now to the yellow plastic bag some twenty feet behind him,
innocuous amongst the other detritus in the shallow overgrowth, its mouth he
knows now to be alive with a shifting film of insects.
His
afternoon had been planned: to walk that canal up there to the old rusting
flatboat which lay an easy running jump from the towpath even he could manage, and then the flies and
crawling lice had fled his fingers as the yellow plastic parted.
His
arm throbs and he pulls his shirt-sleeve down across the blood that burns him,
gathers his coat to himself, himself into the fat little waterproof.
The
bag, its content, will not leave him: its only half-fleshed muzzle and for eyes
a thick and floating cream.
Skunk
(unspoken):
He
wonders how death got the dog, how life might leave a body. He envisions the
bagged and struggling and still-living dog thrown from off the bridge, its
tongue bitten through on impact, the teeth themselves breaking in its mouth,
exploding into gums and throat both.
Skunk
swallows hard and something gives in his ears.
Skunk:
Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus
Even
in leaving the carcass behind, in passing the yellow plastic bag on the long
steep climb to the canal above, he knows this can never be unseen, the empty
socket stare pushing deeper than even his mother’s distress on his finally
gaining home.
Skunk:
I cut myself. I cut myself
and
somewhere central to her tears that wet and shone a spread of his black hair,
he heard the words “your daddy”.
In
full:
Mother:
Oh son oh son, you could cut your own throat
and you’d never bleed your daddy out from in you.
