Carrying Skin
 

There were grins at dawn. But not pure grins. The sun was frequently an open orange mouth as it emerged from the sea’s rim of night, at first revealing a downturned grin, but then as the whole mouth inched into view, its otherwise pure upturned grin became the bottom of the whole mouth, perhaps not a grin at all.


Of course, continued to think the man in the boat, the sun itself was not quite as pure as an orange mouth during previous dawns he had experienced at sea. Often, clouds curdled it and made it appear full of something it was regurgitating from earth’s belly. Sometimes, it was barely visible at all but veiled in a mist that made it seem a ghost of itself. Tomorrow, it may be completely invisible given a thick fog or a failure of inductive reasoning.


He laughed. He tried to think of the people he was fleeing by rowing out here each morning. There was his current girl Louise who often made him cry with her infidelities he suspected. There was also his mother. Who made him cry when he was young and now made him cry because she was dead. And there was his boss in the skinning factory. He didn’t cry because of his boss. Our dawn-watcher had some dignity.


This morning, as the night slowly began to fade into light, he expected the grins at dawn to be differentiated, almost visible as pure grins with a smudge of cloud separating the mouth in that way. Yet only one grin would be a proper grin. The other grin being upside down.


But, no, he was to be disappointed yet again. The sun was pushed out of shape by some unseen force and stripes of a stronger colour than orange made it a painter’s dream.


Soon, the day had established itself and sun just another common thing that nobody hardly noticed whether it was hidden by cloud or not. Or dared not notice for fear of blinding themselves. And the man rowed back to the shore intent on getting ready for work. In the distance he thought he saw Louise in company with another man on the wharf. But, no, it was not her. Some other girl who helped with the nets, no doubt. He then glimpsed his mother seated behind a barrel into which she was flinging shells. It could not be his mother, he knew, only her ghost.


He grinned to himself. An inward crease of the stomach lining rather than anything created by a mouth. A grin that he could only describe as a cringe, as he saw his boss walking to the factory just beyond the wharf – flanked by two other men covered, as they seemed, in the skins they carried. He too would be carrying skins when his shift started, thought our dawn-watcher, as he moored his boat quite close to the shell-barrel.


By now, the sun was relatively high in a clear blue sky. And he squinted up at it. Listening to the rattling shells, he recalled that St Bartholomew had carried his own skin, or that was the legend.


He tried to hide his tears as he saw Louise approaching him with a grin.


Never a smile.


Tomorrow, he would row out again towards another dawn, a dawn that never failed to arrive whatever amorphous form it took.


Unless there was some hiatus in the scheme of things.


One day, no doubt, there would be.

And not simply a painter’s dream.

He walked hand-in-hand with Louise towards catching a quick breakfast before work.
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Written today and first published above.
Possibly inspired by: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=50689#post50689