Untouched, the door seems to open of its own accord, whatever force behind its movement already backed up into the house itself.
Mid-summer, mid-afternoon, there is the sense of her entering into an actual lack of air, a vacuum of nothing but a smell so intense as to be not actually recognisable as alcohol yet understood as alcohol nonetheless, alcohol and its physical host, the body as filter.
(Too the knowing this would remain on her clothes and hair, a cloying stench which even after repeated attempts at removal, its memory alone would prove enough to pervade her senses until she became senseless to it); whatever here passes for air almost visibly ridden with it and muted, as if even with the curtains open, or at least partially so as they are, everything is just that degree less apparent, less there.
Instinctively she opens the first window to hand.
When finally she discerns the spectral Brother Skunk standing in one corner she at first thinks him naked, the pallor of his skin matching that of his only clothing, a pair of undershorts repeat-branded with the word LEVI’S circling their elasticated waist, his flesh exhibiting a pale off-yellow nimbus itself less a radiance than the pulling of the body’s all too emaciate flesh tight back in upon the actual protruding jaundice of its bones, against which and thus that much more evident, the brutal lacerations upon his arms.
It seems the skull’s integrity has completely gone, collapsed in upon itself as if the structure had simply crumbled away, his face appears to be devouring itself even as she watches in sad disbelief, actively trying to control that emotion her features manifest as what he has become registers, blanching at the bald patches of his bloodied scalp, and the actuality of how such might have come about.
Stepping tentatively closer toward him she perceives in his full ruin the eyes curdled into their sockets, emotionless behind some obscurity, or protecting whatever remnant of whoever he had been, some prior iteration of Brother Skunk she might yet recognise lurking barely visible at some reachless depth within this carapace, and perhaps imploring her help.
cog: This is more than a case of acute alcoholism. It is a complete disintegration of a man.*
She can feel his collective bereavement emanating from off him in waves, a sick complement to the all-enveloping smell of the house, and though she herself has yet to speak, still she finds Skunk’s silence a frustration, who will remain incapable of speech for the duration of her short visit.
But to call the doctor or social care, the police even.
Finally
cog (pleading): You’re killing yourself. You’re killing yourself.
picking up an empty bottle, brandishing it at him
cog: This is... clearly killing you. It’s killing you
before tossing it back onto the filthy carpet,
cog: but you know that, right?
imagining this might well be the last time she ever spends with him, these the last words she ever speaks in his presence, if such it could even be defined.
cog: You know there’s a reason they call this stuff “spirits”?
backing out of the room,
cog:You need to stop this, Skunk. You have to stop this.
The door, closed.
And then eventually
Skunk (his words, even before having sound, already dead upon their feral breath): I can’t.
*-Saxe Commins
-Letter to his wife Dorothy, describing alcoholic collapse of William Faulkner
-Oxford, Mississippi
-October 8, 1952
