In order to clear the requisite space in what had been his mother’s back garden, Brother Skunk had first to tear away in fistfuls brittle thickets of grass, long overgrown and unmanaged in her protracted absence.
His tiny pyre he crafted from whatever he could collect of the apple tree’s discarded twigs and fallen leaves, kindling this with fragments of the paper labels clawed from off the glass surface of so many emptied Jack Daniel’s bottles. There remain of these minute traces still buried in deep beneath the bloodied nailbeds of his fingers, creating a localised tenderness at which he cannot help but worry to remind himself of its ongoing existence, and thus subsequently his own.
Next, a flat card match broken from off its grubby souvenir matchbook, a keepsake from some Nevada hotel whose logo incorporates the bowed and interlocking legs of twin cowboys, and Skunk here lost enough to be less concerned as to how such might have ever come to be in her possession than in the willing of their combustible efficacy to suit his immediate requirement.
The first, having failed to ignite and leaving just a red smear of its bead across the striking surface, is discarded into the pyre; the second he fumbles to fold back upon itself and, held flat beneath his thumb and forced across the sandpaper, comes alive to its purpose, the whole book now carefully placed in amongst the gathered debris as each adjacent match flares to succeed its previous with an audible exhalation.
Skunk (singing quietly, coaxing the little flames on into existence): “Oh Peggy Gordon, you are my darling...”
his voice barely more than a whisper, and at such low volume the lyric seeming that degree less inclined to adhere any too much with its intended melody.
He moves about his work with a deliberate and intense care and focus; shirtless, shoeless, while fragments of the torn dead grass cling to the soles of his feet, and the stained denim hem of his Levi’s.
With such little fare to consume the fire soon begins to starve itself out, but for those few minutes of its duration he sings on, and then as if in obeisance to some otherwise unperceived portent, he stamps hard and quick at the embers with his bare foot, kicking the still smouldering fragments about the dangerously dry grass, before returning indoors.
The sacrament now brought to its close, and with it the understanding this remnant ash marking his flesh is become consubstantial with all ash,
Skunk (closing the back door behind him, and with an involuntary resignation): All my byself.
And too his Uncle Jesus... oh his Uncle Jesus...
Skunk (again singing quietly, his head pressed hard against the door’s glass panel, with this time his intonation and cadence following exactly that of Marilyn Monroe’s for JFK): “Happy... birthday, to you.”
