Outside the
bookshop a rain is falling hard enough to bounce right off the road and halfway
back up into itself, as if in such it might fracture surface elements of the
actual tarmac to move around.
September is
ending, each day in itself that much more definitively autumnal with the
novelty of the new term wearing off for both the bookstore cogs and the
students, the latter more and more visiting the shop each day to purchase with
real seriousness and application those texts requisite to their studies,
lifting them from off the heaps of stock piled literally feet high into the air
upon the shopfloor.
During a late
afternoon lull, Skunk stands looking out through one of the shop windows,
hypnotised by the quick and dissipating rhythms of the rain’s interference. It
is enough to have left summer behind. He knows they could already, if so
inclined, have their unborn antler’s gender confirmed; they are not, finding
his reverie interrupted by the peripheral approach of one of the
agency-supplied security guards, rota’d on shifts at this time of year,
deployed to manage the sheer customer mass, and deter theft with questionable
efficacy.
Skunk: I thought he was just coming over to say hello and then he stands
right next to me and we’re just watching the rain battering away
picking at the plastic seal of a fresh 70 cl. bottle of Jack Daniel’s,
Skunk: and he has this, I don’t know if he’s actually bald or if he
shaves his head, but I would have thought... I mean his head actually comes to
a point
both laugh
Skunk: I’m not kidding though, seriously; if your head looked like that
and you could grow hair to cover it, grow hair! It it it, eh, it looks like
when he was being born his mum had second thoughts and tried to close her legs.
ache1: Oh don’t be
cruel, Skunk.
cradling the barely perceptible swell of her own pregnancy.
laughter
Skunk: Seriously though, it was like this
holding each hand up to the side of his head, the steepling fingers not
touching, angled acutely over his own choppy black hair.
ache1: You’re basically mocking a disabled person.
Skunk (ignoring her): and then out of nowhere he tells me
ache1: Uh-oh, that in itself sounds
Skunk: his dream, his his ultimate goal
ache1 (shaking her head): No no, please
Skunk: is to punch a man in the back so hard his whole fist breaks
through the flesh, at which point he can then grab the spinal column and just
rip it right out.
ache1 (laughing): Fuck off.
Skunk: But ehm, understand that at no point was this funny, though. I
mean, there was never an indication from his, that’s just exactly what he said,
how much he’d love to just rip a man’s spine out,
ache1 (shocked): Oh my God, there’s an image with a deep root.
Skunk: but, and here’s the weirdest part,
ache1 (laughing): Oh here’s
the weirdest part? There’s a weirdest part?
Skunk: as he was telling me this he’d sort of leaned back and eh, he
was running a finger up and down the back of my t-shirt
ache1: No.
Skunk: as if he was tracing where he imagined my backbone to be.
ache1: Oh my God, but he didn’t mean...
pause
ache1: Wait, why was he even telling you this? Why was he
telling you this?
Skunk: Right right, exactly
right, why me? Because I was there?
Or maybe because he thought I’d be responsive to it, because I’m so obviously
afraid of everything, he felt he’d pour just a little more anxiety into an
already overflowing vessel? Jesus
tearing viciously now at the unforgiving black plastic with his teeth.
deleted name (writing): Infirmity
attracts the predator, they scent it as perfume.
Skunk: Look I have no idea what he was, I don’t know if he actually
really meant it, or if he was trying to... intimidate me, maybe, or impress me?
ache1: Was he flirting?
laughing
ache1: Oh my God, Skunk,
I think you might have finally found someone!
Skunk: It was truly, it was just horrible.
ache1: Did you tell your manager?
Skunk: Yeah but not in a, I didn’t, I mean I told her more as a, as a
sort of joke. Really I just wanted to come here and tell you.
crossing her room to drop the discarded plastic in the wastebin.
Skunk: And it was funny and it wasn’t. I mean, I don’t think physically
anyone could actually even do that,
could they? It’s a, a cartoon, and I don’t even know, I wonder if he’d ever
actually thought about it before he came over to talk.
ache1: Well I mean it’s true that you do have an attractive back.
Skunk: But not one you’d want to rip out, right?
pause
Skunk: Right? It’s the fact that he would say, not only say it but say it to someone he didn’t
actually even know. Jesus.
and this and more of this chasing him on forever through the years,
until now, and now, and even after
now, after all that will arrive upon him, that same unheard echo of each of his
father’s gunshots as had deafened his mother, to be made not deaf in its actual
sense, rather to annihilate in absolute her any sense of established self until
that time, and until such time after as she would be completely erased clean
even from within herself.
Skunk: Anyway...
finally opening the bottle
Skunk: ..how was your day?
