With the book’s envelope discarded on the step below,
Brother Skunk had been reading, naked, upon the stairs for an hour or damn near
before any specifics of the mentioned coin were mentioned, and though perhaps
the coin itself should have been
enough, it was not, for his morning’s perception did not form itself upon that this morning.
Skunk (reading aloud): “The crow flew down to where the
father and son lay on the ice, and there he saw the coin that Frog had dropped.
He flipped it up with one foot, caught it in his beak, removed it with a
flourish, and held it out at leg’s length to look at it. The coin had been
gold-plated when Frog had found it at the bottom of a pond, but now it was worn
down to the original brass. YOU WILL SUCCEED, said the lettering around the
rim, and in the centre was a four-leaf clover.
'Well, you’ve got nothing to worry about,' said Crow
to the mouse and his child. 'You will succeed. Says so right here.'
'When?' asked the child.
Crow looked at the other side of the coin, on which a
horseshoe appeared, and the partial message YOUR LUCKY DAY IS... The rest had
been obliterated by the hole drilled for the string. 'When your lucky day
arrives,' he said, and hung the coin from the mouse child’s neck, where it
clinked against the drum.”
Brother Skunk, with his thumb to mark the page,
flattened the book against his chest and lay back upon the stairs, the landing
light ablaze above.
Skunk: Aww Jesus, you remember when I had that, when I
had that eh, when I was working at the restaurant and I had that coin, not a
coin a... the medal, what was it it
was something like a, it was an Eastern, it was an Eastern campaign medal, a Nazi medal, I forget, what it
sniffs
Skunk: it was, it was, uh I forget, I don’t even know
the, I can’t even remember the date. I remember buying it down south in a, a
medal and coin shop thinking
Long pause.
Skunk: I don’t even know, it was a, I just saw it and
I thought I would buy it. It didn’t have a ribbon on it or anything, it was
just the actual metal disc, and I’m wondering whether that would, you know,
having this bad luck totem, well that’s what I thought, that’s, when I bought
it that’s what I thought it would be, you know people always have good luck eh,
charms, you know, they have something
like that, or rituals that they go through because they think that’ll bring
them luck, and I was keen to have... something, I just wanted something a
little different. I wanted to see if having a Nazi medal in my pocket everyday
would queer my luck, see if, if bad things would happen to me, which was pretty
stupid given the state of my life anyway. Maybe I thought there was some kind
of negative process involved in carrying something like that, that it would
mean, I don’t know, maybe I thought it was pointless having a good luck charm.
I don’t, there was nothing, I didn’t recognise, I didn’t recognise anything
that had been, that there was anything beyond myself acting upon my own...
long pause
Skunk: ..life. But certainly, and anything that went
wrong was nothing to do with having the stupid, with carrying something like
that around. It’s kind of a, I think I whoever had had it had painted it grey
or something, I don’t know but why would you do that? Why would you paint a
medal? I carried it around for a few months anyway, but I think it got stuck in
my workbox, remember that? I don’t, I don’t even know, maybe it’s still there I
don’t know. I used to use it to open up gluepots and paintpots and things like
that... Anyway anyway,
straightening up again with the book back in his lap.
Skunk: Where are we?
In
registering and processing the absence of alcohol, there was no question his
body would suffer on its route back to normalcy, but for now Jesus issued his
comfort with an arm about the boy’s bare shoulder, the hand’s index and central
fingers held tight one upon the other, the fast and inseparable cross.
