Wednesday 19 June 2019









It is smell as provides his conduit between the two; every hospital he’d ever visited dulled with that exact same odour, a disinfected and sterile antiseptic registering more keenly in the senses than either room’s muted palette, or those fixtures common to both.
Today, he perceives the distance between that building from which he has just arrived to this as nothing more than a simple time-travel fingerclick, no matter the actual hours of train journey endured, enduring here again that time permitted as visitor in his habitual silence, prepared to acknowledge as reductive his ascribing to the chair in either room his any sense of discomfort retaining as he actually does no concrete memory of the chair in that other, as too he will forget this one upon which he currently sits the moment he leaves the room.
Skunk: She’s... well
suddenly surprised to hear that unbroken quiet broken now by a voice, his own no less, prompted by nothing more than the sight of his thumb wrapped in its grubby bandage, excited at last to relate these recent happenings out loud.
Skunk: I mean, ehm, just, just physically, she’s shorter than me, she’s slight, she has a sort of ehm... she has dyed red hair, like that henna stuff, and short, she has short hair. I think she might be a student at the university although she eh, her feat-, ehm, she has a young face, maybe too young to be a student, and I think she’s American. She sounded American. 
prompting him now to dig again from out the watch-pocket of his 501s the Canadian 25 cent silver coin, full minutes passing in its contemplation.
Skunk (as if considering this for the first time): I mean, I suppose it’s also entirely possible she’s Canadian.
Contrary to the nurses’ assertion, he knows her to be beyond his hearing, or suspects as much anyway, but even in such refuses to abandon the narrative.
Skunk: And she had a, an, it’s a sort of doll thing that, like E.T., but it had, it was... it was broken.
all his telling consciously edited of its every upsetting detail.
Skunk: That’s what happened to my thumb,
holding it up to pick at a loose thread on the bandage and, finding it tight attached, trying subsequently to bite it free,
Skunk: when I was looking for the doll’s arms I accidentally put my thumb through an old bottle and cut it, the glass had a
looking at the swell of fabric, trying to recall the wound he hoped healing underneath.
Skunk: It was, eh... Remember when I was a kid and I had that, ehm... It was a balloon kit, a sort of green... gel that you attached to the end of a, a straw, and you could blow it up to be a sort of balloon? A kind of, if you left them, if they actually stayed inflated, they’d get really... brittle, a...
his mind wandering across the past
Skunk: ..a membrane, that’s what the bottle was like, like a skinny membrane, that’s exactly how easily my thumb went through it, it was so old. Brittle glass.
a sympathetic pulse erupting fast now within his thumb.
Skunk: The little arms had come right off, it was all a bit... Anyway, I collected the various bits together and had it repaired for her, took it to the shoe repair place and they did it for me, and it looked pretty good, to be honest. Not... It didn’t look like new, but it was, it was pretty good, better than it had been anyway.
with something to this of an inverted glass underwater holding air.
Skunk (quoting): “Red-haired women are bad luck.”
in the speaking of which he notices the thinning out of his mother’s own, as if the scalp had simply relinquished it, had come to understand it as something of which there was no further want, and how this lessening in particular changed her appearance more than the madness itself.
Removing the new and still pristine pewter hipflask from the inner pocket of his denim jacket, he taps at it with the same hand’s fingers to ascertain its charge.
Skunk: I just got this,
unscrewing the squeaky cap
Skunk: Jesus, who needs that?
swallows
Skunk: and I ehm, I went to a, it was a play based on the life of the Elephant Man.
chuckles to himself, sighs
Skunk: I had, I, basically what happened was I’d had way too much to drink
tapping again at the hipflask, then drinking
Skunk: but that itself wouldn’t have been a problem, it was the play, it was, God a’mighty... They threw me out, anyway, like actually practically lifted me up physically from out my seat and took me to the street. For ehm, I was... misbehaving is about the kindest way of phrasing it.
Sighs.
Skunk: Jesus.
his eyes suddenly wettening,
Skunk: I’m sorry. Mum I’m so sorry.
And here now with both of them gone, with the three of them gone, his first attempt at clearing out seems much less that than a burrowing further in, discovering as he does lying in her bureau in an inverted box lid, and beneath a variety of pamphlets such as might be collected from a doctor’s waiting room, her hairbrush, from out the still matted bristles of which he succeeds in disnetangling, intact, a single brittle hair he then, subject to no recognisable or comprehensible impulse, tongues on into his mouth, before dragging toward him the nearest whiskey bottle, the house at this time being littered with multiples of same in their varying degrees of emptiness.
It has no taste, the hair, a texture too of so near nothing as to initially confound his every repeated attempt at its swallowing, applying himself alongside the liquor’s consumption to the methodical separation of each, of such colour variance as to suggest its having been brushed from off two individual scalps, at least, and to the swallowing of each subsequent, long drunk enough not to gag upon this engaging with the sacrament.
Exalted to some grotesque ecstasy he buries his fingers in the black mass of his own hair and begins to pull, his eyes watering with the pain, the skin of his scalp stretched to the absolute extent of its finite elasticity before each individual hair in his grip is ripped from out its own follicle, the torn flesh colouring now with its myriad risen dots of blood.
Skunk: “Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father."
and in such accomplishment creates for himself an itch that even if he could never scratch he might yet still over and again entirely remove, over and again.
Skunk’s eyes roll up inside their sockets as if in such he might access and thus subvert the workings of his mind, himself so very clearly lost in the increasing and accumulant dust of himself.