The accumulant age of his reflected face both confuses and disturbs him; Brother Skunk cannot recognise himself in its features: the skin around his eyes still swollen with the weeping grief even this amount of time had failed to quiet; the thin flesh stretched at his temples grown textured as old paper; his ungreyed still-black hair serving only to emphasise the ongoing pale collapse of that flesh from out which it grew.
And this too, unseen by the glass: a fatigue in himself, that tiredness carried within his bones, and the ongoing void that is his ankle, these full decades now faithless in its support.
He grows old, catching up to and then passing by in the number of his years his father, his mother, then that age ascribed deleted name when they had met, a man even then whose demeanour carried increments of its own death, or whom perhaps Death was momentarily trying on for size before negotiating a final purchase price.
He is disappearing, come so far adrift that his sense of self is a much distant thing, and though understood as memory is itself become now unremembered.
He undertsands this reflected exterior to exist outwith his comprehension, a creation long outliving that creative impulse as had willed it into being,
Skunk: Neither children,
and
Skunk: nor grandchildren.
finding himself forced by age into a state of involuntary surrender, never actually to realise he has forgotten what he had for so long strived to remember.
There were ever no mirrors in his mother’s house.
