Out beyond the window the nearest tree’s long-dead branches scratch upon spring’s twilight at the wind’s caprice.
Reflected in this side of the glass and at dinner, two men of variant age; the tabletop between them patterned with their randomly abandoned bottles of Moosehead lager, each at its various level of being emptied. The food is Iranian, if he is to take deleted name at his word, which he must since Brother Skunk does not recognise a single element upon his plate, neither can he place the taste of the meal’s any individual ingredient, its eating mere background activity to his role as listener.
deleted name: This is something I thought about a whole heap after my, well, long after my father died actually: the keeping of things, the curating of things, the ongoing curation of... everything. There were dozens of cards pinned up on a board in the hospital room where he died, and when he died the nurses offered to get rid of them all for me but uh
swallowing
deleted name: but I wanted to keep hold of them, of all of them, as if...
shrugs
deleted name: ..something, I I really don’t know. There was... there was a reasoning for it, lost now. A number of them were from me anyway, not uh, not that that...
With their intoxication opening up room enough for its furtherance, every bottle becomes its own interstitial punctuation and respite.
deleted name: And I put them in a bag, not, there were so many of them it took a garbage bag to hold them all,
overcome within the sudden immersion of his recall
deleted name: and Christ actually, the actual time it took! That’s something I do remember now, the sheer amount of time and effort involved in unpinning each of these fucking cards, cards pinned on top of cards even, and that sense of having so much other stuff to do, suddenly, and here I am doing this instead...
bottle
deleted name: ..and then I put the bag under a bed in one of the rooms, and they stayed there for... actually ever.
bottle
deleted name: And then it was years and years later, and I mean really literally actual years, I was, in fact I was getting a new bed, and so in getting rid of the old one I also had to confront all this
frowning
deleted name: vestigial stuff I’d salted away underneath of it, and here was this bag of get well cards. Well, some of them had been get well cards, and then some had... There was that pivot point where it became clear he wouldn’t get well, and then when he died... but the sympathy cards wouldn’t have been in there...
as if both questioning and confirming his own memories
deleted name: In fact, when I think about it now, I don’t know that I even remember what happened to the sympathy cards. Where did they go?
bottle
deleted name: But here was this big bag of cards, and in truth I didn’t even look at them. I knew if I looked at them at all, if I even so much as eh as glanced at them it, I’d have to keep on curating them, and I really...
bottle
deleted name: One thing that did... facilitate their disposal, it occurred to me that many, if in fact not most, of those people who had sent my father these cards would themselves now be dead.
Skunk (feeling he should in some manner contribute): I don’t think... In all the time she was in the hospital I don’t think my mother received a single card, ever.
bottle
Skunk (repeating, unsure if he has actually spoken aloud, the texture of his ruined voice so alien outside his own hearing): There wasn’t a single card in the room where my mother died, when she died.
consumed by that sudden sense of shame and regret at something he should, like his older host, perhaps himself have actually done, no matter she lacked the means to comprehend the sentiment.
His face colours in retrospective remorse, consolidating an unceasing and endless regret so intense as will in future months become incapacitating.
He takes the bottle opener up from the table and prises the cap from off still another Moosehead.
bottle
All that unmentioned tissue as connects them burnt, her represented potential rendered ash unidentifiable.
bottle
bottle
bottle
bottle
