The fast passing summer traffic, if it registered
him at all, would take him for the portrait of frustration, parked up roadside
and red-faced in the noonday sun, the car rocking as he shakes the steering
wheel and thrashes at it, roaring, the sheer volume of his outrage mute behind
the windows rolled up tight into the roof.
Anything moving more slowly might remark that in
this fury’s midst he is biting at his teeth with such ferocity it is a wonder
they aren’t levered from out their own gums, his rage so engaging not one
witness would recall the vehicle’s colour if questioned.
Inside, the car is airless, all heat and stink and
volume, and there invisible from the outside, the black-skulled baby Brother
Skunk sprawled loose upon the backseat in stinking soiled cloths, his breath
negligible in the indescribable reek of cumulative infant faeces, and though
his face bears no visible discomfort the stain upon his ankle glows incandescent
to a near-white, as if engorged upon the man’s anger and about to combust.
His father, in forcing himself to endure this small,
enclosed, airless box of metal and glass, boils on and on into insanity as
the stationary car becomes hotter and hotter, sweat coaxing the bay rum down from
out his hair and into his smarting eyes, the residual vomit smeared across his
jaw like warpaint, as he bellows
Father: WHY ARE YOU ALIVE? WHY ARE YOU EVEN ALIVE?
WHY? WHY? WHY ARE YOU ALIVE? WHY ARE YOU STILL
ALIVE? WHY ARE YOU STILL ALIVE?
over and over, his voice audibly disintegrating from
the brutal pressure of each expression it is forced to freight.
Behind him and in absolute contrast, the little boy
lies quiet and gazing out, not so much oblivious as impassive, that barely
latent violence so perpetually, relentlessly impending become only background noise
to which he is as deaf.
And then suddenly the screaming ceases, the father
silenced only by such sustained exertion’s loss of consciousness, head slumped
to his chest, a thick liquid distending from off his lower lip, and both hands now simply propped slack upon the steering wheel in pantomime of driving.
The infant Skunk, with nothing manifest in his tiny
features to register this difference, stares on out the side window, watching
clouds passing white
deleted name (writing): ..passing white in the overhead blue.
And the man’s wife, the boy’s mother, where is she?
Where is she?
deleted name (writing): Absent.
