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smackenzieI fetch my technomancer client's design from the office, and there he is, sitting in my desk chair, scrolling through pictures of landscapes on my computer.
"Boo," I say. I snicker when he startles, and then I feel bad. "Thanks for cleaning up. What are you looking at?"
"I'm sorry," Kay says, closing the browser window in a hurry, as if he's looking at something embarrassing. "Beaches."
"I have a client in a few minutes. If he doesn't mind, do you want to watch?" I don't care if Kay wants to sit in my office and search for photos of beaches online, and I could always give him a broom and the Windex and a roll of paper towels and ask him to make sure the studio is clean, but I know that if I were him, I'd have more fun watching someone actually get tattooed. He has zero interest in doing it himself - he'd never want to be an apprentice - but my clients can be a friendly, chatty bunch, and I highly doubt the technomancer will mind talking to him. And while Kay himself is not the most talkative person I know, he knows how to look interested in other people.
He doesn't answer, so I take advantage of his silence to make a stencil from the tattoo design and check to be sure I'm not running out of toner or transfer paper. I need to remind Kona and Maya to take inventory of their stations and let me know if they need anything.
"Or you can hang out here," I tell Kay. "I have to go set up."
I can hear him slide off the desk chair and follow me as I leave the office.
Maya's college girl seems to be finished - Maya is giving her the aftercare lecture - and if I wait long enough I'll be treated to the sight of Maya cleaning her station and then setting up for the second girl, but I have my own work to do. One of the reasons I like having tattoo artists like Maya and Kona at Suzume Tattoos is because they're very self-sufficient, and they know what they're doing.
Kay sits on my stool and pushes himself out of the way so he can watch me set up. I can hear Maya and the college girls chattering away. I wash my hands, pop on a pair of gloves, and get to work. When I was still an apprentice, before I ever got to tattoo anything on anyone, I was what Jonatha called her little shop monkey. (Since I was taller than she was, this always made both of us giggle.) I cleaned and sterilized. A lot. Jonatha tested me frequently on how clean everything was and what should I do if this happened, or if that happened, and did I wash my hands? And I should change my gloves. And that goes in the sharps container, not the trash. She yelled at me once for sneezing. So I learned to be very thorough and very careful.
I remind Kay not to touch anything. He makes a point of sitting on his hands. I wipe everything down and cover the rolling tray I use to hold my ink and water bottles and everything with plastic wrap and then a sterile cloth like the kind doctors and dentists use. Practically everything is either wrapped with plastic wrap or taped inside a plastic bag. I lay out my spray bottle, paper towels, little cups for the ink, needles in their sterile wrapping, ointment, and a disposable razor.
I'm wiping down the chair one last time when I hear the doorbell ring and Kay saying "I think your client's here."
"Come on back," I call, pulling off my gloves and dropping them in the trash. The technomancer walks through the studio to my station. "This is my friend Kay." I gesture to where Kay is still sitting on my stool. He lifts his hand in a tiny wave. "Do you mind if he watches?"
"Not at all," the technomancer says. He shrugs out of his jacket and the t-shirt he's wearing underneath it and hangs them on the hook on the wall near my station. "I'm Craig," he says to Kay. "Nice to meet you."
"I need my stool back," I tell Kay. "You can borrow Kona's." Out of the corner of my eye I can see him wander over to Maya's station to watch her start on the second college girl. Craig sits in my chair backwards, so I can work on him without making him lie down, and I wash my hands again, pour ink into the waiting cups, put on gloves, shave Craig's back - fortunately he's not very hairy, because having to remind your hairy clients to please shave before showing up for their tattoo is kind of a pain, and even though I know it saves time it still feels intrusive to me - rinse, sanitize, and lay the stencil over the work I've already done. It's been a month since his first session, so his half-done tattoo is nice and healed and beautifully crisp.
More hand-washing, just in case, a new pair of gloves, new needle in my tattoo machine, and I get to work.
Kay eventually drags over Kona's stool, probably having gotten bored with watching Maya, and sits on Craig's other side so he's not in my way. He stares at Craig's back in a way that I recognize - it's the look he gets when he's seeing something that isn't there.
"What do you see?" I ask.
"Numbers."
"Are you familiar with binary code?" Craig asks curiously. His breathing is very even. I'm impressed. The last time he was here he spent a lot of time trying not to complain about the pain, and trying very hard to just keep breathing.
"No. Not just that. Everything. They're glowing. Kind of."
Then he blinks, and the image is probably gone.
"You want some UV ink?" I ask Craig, only half kidding. We don't do a lot of glow-in-the-dark tattoos at the studio, for the simple reason that not a lot of people ask, but if that's what you want, we can oblige. And while I don't know much about the binary code or the diagram design on Craig's back, I do think that it would look especially magical with UV ink.
But he shakes his head. Black is just fine.
"You see stuff a lot?" he asks Kay. "What else have you seen?"
Kay shrugs. "Maya was pink today." He points over his shoulder at Maya and the college girls. I glance up to see if they're done, and it looks like they are. I very clearly hear one of the girls protest "That hurt" and smile to myself. Of course it hurt. It's supposed to. It's a tattoo.
"Pink," Craig repeats, and I can hear the skepticism in his voice. Craig himself has fair skin and light brown hair, but he told me at his first tattoo session that his wife is Hispanic. Maya's dad is from Colombia and she claims to have some Native American ancestry mixed in with the random Europeans on her mom's side, and because physically she takes after her dad, she'll never be confused for white. I know what Kay means when he says she was pink earlier today, but Craig won't, and he might be sensitive about some random kid possibly saying something offensive about the half South American girl.
Or he could just be skeptical because nothing about Maya is pink except the cartoon elephants marching in a circle around her ankle.
"Like I was looking at her through pink glasses," Kay explains. "Like everything was tinted. I don't know what it meant."
"You usually know what it means?"
"Sometimes."
"The first time he met me," I interject, "he saw a needle threaded with yellow, and a few days later I cut my arm and needed stitches. They sewed me up with yellow sutures in the ER."
"Huh," Craig says. "And I'm covered with numbers."
"Not covered," Kay tells him. "They were kind of... waving, like strings. Long numbers."
"Project codes, maybe. Interesting."
I should have guessed that the technomancer would be curious but completely unimpressed with Kay's strange little talent. They do much more exotic things all the time.
After three hours Craig's back is much closer to being finished than it was. The design is nothing more than straight lines and dots and corners and the occasional squiggle - the squiggle has a name, referencing the thing it's supposed to symbolize - but it's very intricate and very precise and the strings of binary code threaded through it have to be accurate, and it's very hard to tattoo a long line and keep it perfectly straight.
I wipe off the blood and what remains of the transfer, smear ointment over the new parts of the tattoo, and let Craig get up so he can look at himself in the long mirror on the wall.
"Well, damn," he says. "One more session, you think?"
"That's what I think." I pull off my gloves, drop them in the trash, and crack first my back and then my neck. "How do you feel?"
"Sore. It's a good sore."
"Let me cover it and you can get dressed and we'll set the last appointment, ok?"
We make an appointment for exactly a month from today, Craig pays me, and I clean up after he leaves. Kay spins around on the stool while I wipe everything down and put everything away, and then I realize Maya has left. I check the appointment book and she has another couple of clients, one of whom should be here any minute, so she must have snuck out to run errands or find food or something.
I write "Take inventory of your station" on a Post-it and stick it to the headrest on her chair, then write another note and stick it on Kona's chair. Kay pushes the stool back into Kona's space.
"What are you up to?" I ask him.
"Not much. I don't know. I think I'm gonna go."
"Take some chocolate. There's a stash in the freezer."
"No, thanks. It hurts my teeth." He taps his front teeth to make his point. "Thanks for feeding me."
"Any time. Take care of yourself, ok?"
"I'll try."
He waves goodbye on his way out, almost colliding with Maya as he tries to get out the door and she tries to get in. She's carrying a white plastic bag that no doubt contains takeout.
"He's a strange boy," she tells me, after the door has shut behind her. "Cute, but really weird."
"Pretty much everyone I know is," I say. "What's for dinner?"
* * *
Three days later I'm standing in line at a coffeeshop called The Drip and Donut, trying to decide whether or not the pretty young man standing in front of me is someone I knew in college. He has more or less the same build, the same tanned skin, the same curly black hair, the same not-quite-paying-attention-to-the-world-around-him expression. He's wearing dark gray pants and a light pink Oxford and brown leather shoes, and he has a nice leather courier bag slung over his shoulder. I'm on the verge of tapping him on the shoulder and saying "Khalid?" when he turns into a hedgehog.
No one can tell at first, because one second he's right there, and the next second there's a pile of clothes where he was standing.
"The fuck?" the barista says.
The pile of clothes is shifting and as I'm about to lift the pink Oxford, the hedgehog that used to be maybe-Khalid trundles out from under the fabric. It twitches its nose, squinches up its face, and very clearly says "Sonofabitch!" in a high-pitched, frustrated voice.
"HOLY SHIT," the girl who was in front of him practically yells. She turned around at the barista's swearing and is now staring at the cranky-looking creature stomping (or at least trying to stomp) around the pink Oxford and dark gray pants and leather courier bag and brown leather shoes. "DID HE. WHAT."
"It's a full moon," the barista observes calmly. The Drip and Donut is decorated with an abundance of plaques and paintings and pieces of paper bearing an abundance of written charms in an abundance of languages, but even so, I can't imagine the employees are used to customers turning into animals before they've even gotten their coffee. I've heard of werewolves, because everyone has, but I don't believe they exist. A lot of people don't. Your neighbor's kid might claim to have caught a squonk last month, or to have seen a couple of brownies chasing a raccoon away from their bread and milk, and people will believe him, but if he says he's seen a werewolf? His parents will tell him to stop watching monster movies before bed. And I've never in my life heard of a were-hedgehog.
And yet I just saw someone turn into a hedgehog right in front of me.
The girl who was standing in front of the young man - hedgehog - in question is backing away. I notice her t-shirt is advertising a barbecue restaurant, and for some reason it makes me giggle. Barbecue - hogs - hedgehogs. Is this a stress reaction? I no longer think the were-hedgehog is someone I know. Khalid never showed even the slightest bit of magic, although he was always interested in people who did.
I get a grip on myself and just like that, the hedgehog is a young man again. A very pretty, very naked young man. The girl on the other side of him stares, her eyes half the size of her head and her mouth falling open. I can only blink. The young man huffs in a very cranky, fortunately very human fashion, gathers up his clothes and shoes and courier bag, and stomps off towards the restroom in the back of the coffeeshop.
"WHAT," the girl in the barbecue t-shirt repeats.
"That's new," the barista comments.
"That's the weirdest fucking thing I have ever seen," I tell her matter-of-factly. I'm as used to everyday magic as anyone, and I've seen and done some strange things, but that takes the cake.
The young man who is also apparently a hedgehog stomps out of the restroom and up to the counter. The girl in the t-shirt is waiting for her coffee and I could have ordered in the meantime, if I hadn't been so completely baffled by what I just saw, but because I'm just standing there, the young man takes the opportunity to pretty much bark his order - one double espresso, one soy latte, one cappuccino with a shot of vanilla and extra foam. He sounds more annoyed than anything else, and who can blame him? He just turned into a hedgehog in front of a coffeeshop's worth of people, and when he turned back into a person, he was naked. And while I enjoyed the quick view - an attractive human is an attractive human, whatever their gender and whatever my personal preferences - I wouldn't have wanted to be naked in public either.
I'm much less rattled and much more curious by the time I get to the tattoo studio. I drank my coffee in the car and I got a donut to go with it, so I'm fed and caffeinated, and I've decided I need to know more about the possibility of were-creatures. But I'm still not sure I believe in werewolves, because if I do that, I'll have to believe in vampires and goblins and who knows what else.
Maya won't be in until later but Kona's got a client in his chair, an older woman getting what looks like a flock of little birds on the back of her shoulder.
"Hey," Kona calls.
"I just saw a man turn into a hedgehog," I say in response.
"What?"
"A hedgehog?" the woman in his chair repeats.
"I was at The Drip and Donut. He was in line in front of me. I thought he was someone I know, and I was about to say something to him when he vanished. Except he hadn't vanished, he'd just turned into a hedgehog. All his clothes fell off him, of course, so when he returned to normal he was naked."
"Was he cute?"
"He was very pretty. He acted like it had happened before." I sit on the chair in my station. "He just sounded annoyed and frustrated, not surprised. Have you ever heard of a were-hedgehog? There's a full moon tonight."
"I've heard of werewolves," Kona says. He hasn't looked up once. One of the things I really like about him as a professional is his uncanny ability to multitask and act as if his entire focus is on three different things, all at the same time. His work has never suffered for his ability to carry on a detailed conversation while he's tattooing an intricate design on someone. "My gram used to tell me stories about shapeshifters who could turn into tigers and panthers, but those were just stories. I never thought they really existed."
"My neighbor was just telling me she thinks she has were-chickens in her yard," his client says. She snorts. "Were-chickens. I told her she has a fox."
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"Boo," I say. I snicker when he startles, and then I feel bad. "Thanks for cleaning up. What are you looking at?"
"I'm sorry," Kay says, closing the browser window in a hurry, as if he's looking at something embarrassing. "Beaches."
"I have a client in a few minutes. If he doesn't mind, do you want to watch?" I don't care if Kay wants to sit in my office and search for photos of beaches online, and I could always give him a broom and the Windex and a roll of paper towels and ask him to make sure the studio is clean, but I know that if I were him, I'd have more fun watching someone actually get tattooed. He has zero interest in doing it himself - he'd never want to be an apprentice - but my clients can be a friendly, chatty bunch, and I highly doubt the technomancer will mind talking to him. And while Kay himself is not the most talkative person I know, he knows how to look interested in other people.
He doesn't answer, so I take advantage of his silence to make a stencil from the tattoo design and check to be sure I'm not running out of toner or transfer paper. I need to remind Kona and Maya to take inventory of their stations and let me know if they need anything.
"Or you can hang out here," I tell Kay. "I have to go set up."
I can hear him slide off the desk chair and follow me as I leave the office.
Maya's college girl seems to be finished - Maya is giving her the aftercare lecture - and if I wait long enough I'll be treated to the sight of Maya cleaning her station and then setting up for the second girl, but I have my own work to do. One of the reasons I like having tattoo artists like Maya and Kona at Suzume Tattoos is because they're very self-sufficient, and they know what they're doing.
Kay sits on my stool and pushes himself out of the way so he can watch me set up. I can hear Maya and the college girls chattering away. I wash my hands, pop on a pair of gloves, and get to work. When I was still an apprentice, before I ever got to tattoo anything on anyone, I was what Jonatha called her little shop monkey. (Since I was taller than she was, this always made both of us giggle.) I cleaned and sterilized. A lot. Jonatha tested me frequently on how clean everything was and what should I do if this happened, or if that happened, and did I wash my hands? And I should change my gloves. And that goes in the sharps container, not the trash. She yelled at me once for sneezing. So I learned to be very thorough and very careful.
I remind Kay not to touch anything. He makes a point of sitting on his hands. I wipe everything down and cover the rolling tray I use to hold my ink and water bottles and everything with plastic wrap and then a sterile cloth like the kind doctors and dentists use. Practically everything is either wrapped with plastic wrap or taped inside a plastic bag. I lay out my spray bottle, paper towels, little cups for the ink, needles in their sterile wrapping, ointment, and a disposable razor.
I'm wiping down the chair one last time when I hear the doorbell ring and Kay saying "I think your client's here."
"Come on back," I call, pulling off my gloves and dropping them in the trash. The technomancer walks through the studio to my station. "This is my friend Kay." I gesture to where Kay is still sitting on my stool. He lifts his hand in a tiny wave. "Do you mind if he watches?"
"Not at all," the technomancer says. He shrugs out of his jacket and the t-shirt he's wearing underneath it and hangs them on the hook on the wall near my station. "I'm Craig," he says to Kay. "Nice to meet you."
"I need my stool back," I tell Kay. "You can borrow Kona's." Out of the corner of my eye I can see him wander over to Maya's station to watch her start on the second college girl. Craig sits in my chair backwards, so I can work on him without making him lie down, and I wash my hands again, pour ink into the waiting cups, put on gloves, shave Craig's back - fortunately he's not very hairy, because having to remind your hairy clients to please shave before showing up for their tattoo is kind of a pain, and even though I know it saves time it still feels intrusive to me - rinse, sanitize, and lay the stencil over the work I've already done. It's been a month since his first session, so his half-done tattoo is nice and healed and beautifully crisp.
More hand-washing, just in case, a new pair of gloves, new needle in my tattoo machine, and I get to work.
Kay eventually drags over Kona's stool, probably having gotten bored with watching Maya, and sits on Craig's other side so he's not in my way. He stares at Craig's back in a way that I recognize - it's the look he gets when he's seeing something that isn't there.
"What do you see?" I ask.
"Numbers."
"Are you familiar with binary code?" Craig asks curiously. His breathing is very even. I'm impressed. The last time he was here he spent a lot of time trying not to complain about the pain, and trying very hard to just keep breathing.
"No. Not just that. Everything. They're glowing. Kind of."
Then he blinks, and the image is probably gone.
"You want some UV ink?" I ask Craig, only half kidding. We don't do a lot of glow-in-the-dark tattoos at the studio, for the simple reason that not a lot of people ask, but if that's what you want, we can oblige. And while I don't know much about the binary code or the diagram design on Craig's back, I do think that it would look especially magical with UV ink.
But he shakes his head. Black is just fine.
"You see stuff a lot?" he asks Kay. "What else have you seen?"
Kay shrugs. "Maya was pink today." He points over his shoulder at Maya and the college girls. I glance up to see if they're done, and it looks like they are. I very clearly hear one of the girls protest "That hurt" and smile to myself. Of course it hurt. It's supposed to. It's a tattoo.
"Pink," Craig repeats, and I can hear the skepticism in his voice. Craig himself has fair skin and light brown hair, but he told me at his first tattoo session that his wife is Hispanic. Maya's dad is from Colombia and she claims to have some Native American ancestry mixed in with the random Europeans on her mom's side, and because physically she takes after her dad, she'll never be confused for white. I know what Kay means when he says she was pink earlier today, but Craig won't, and he might be sensitive about some random kid possibly saying something offensive about the half South American girl.
Or he could just be skeptical because nothing about Maya is pink except the cartoon elephants marching in a circle around her ankle.
"Like I was looking at her through pink glasses," Kay explains. "Like everything was tinted. I don't know what it meant."
"You usually know what it means?"
"Sometimes."
"The first time he met me," I interject, "he saw a needle threaded with yellow, and a few days later I cut my arm and needed stitches. They sewed me up with yellow sutures in the ER."
"Huh," Craig says. "And I'm covered with numbers."
"Not covered," Kay tells him. "They were kind of... waving, like strings. Long numbers."
"Project codes, maybe. Interesting."
I should have guessed that the technomancer would be curious but completely unimpressed with Kay's strange little talent. They do much more exotic things all the time.
After three hours Craig's back is much closer to being finished than it was. The design is nothing more than straight lines and dots and corners and the occasional squiggle - the squiggle has a name, referencing the thing it's supposed to symbolize - but it's very intricate and very precise and the strings of binary code threaded through it have to be accurate, and it's very hard to tattoo a long line and keep it perfectly straight.
I wipe off the blood and what remains of the transfer, smear ointment over the new parts of the tattoo, and let Craig get up so he can look at himself in the long mirror on the wall.
"Well, damn," he says. "One more session, you think?"
"That's what I think." I pull off my gloves, drop them in the trash, and crack first my back and then my neck. "How do you feel?"
"Sore. It's a good sore."
"Let me cover it and you can get dressed and we'll set the last appointment, ok?"
We make an appointment for exactly a month from today, Craig pays me, and I clean up after he leaves. Kay spins around on the stool while I wipe everything down and put everything away, and then I realize Maya has left. I check the appointment book and she has another couple of clients, one of whom should be here any minute, so she must have snuck out to run errands or find food or something.
I write "Take inventory of your station" on a Post-it and stick it to the headrest on her chair, then write another note and stick it on Kona's chair. Kay pushes the stool back into Kona's space.
"What are you up to?" I ask him.
"Not much. I don't know. I think I'm gonna go."
"Take some chocolate. There's a stash in the freezer."
"No, thanks. It hurts my teeth." He taps his front teeth to make his point. "Thanks for feeding me."
"Any time. Take care of yourself, ok?"
"I'll try."
He waves goodbye on his way out, almost colliding with Maya as he tries to get out the door and she tries to get in. She's carrying a white plastic bag that no doubt contains takeout.
"He's a strange boy," she tells me, after the door has shut behind her. "Cute, but really weird."
"Pretty much everyone I know is," I say. "What's for dinner?"
Three days later I'm standing in line at a coffeeshop called The Drip and Donut, trying to decide whether or not the pretty young man standing in front of me is someone I knew in college. He has more or less the same build, the same tanned skin, the same curly black hair, the same not-quite-paying-attention-to-the-world-around-him expression. He's wearing dark gray pants and a light pink Oxford and brown leather shoes, and he has a nice leather courier bag slung over his shoulder. I'm on the verge of tapping him on the shoulder and saying "Khalid?" when he turns into a hedgehog.
No one can tell at first, because one second he's right there, and the next second there's a pile of clothes where he was standing.
"The fuck?" the barista says.
The pile of clothes is shifting and as I'm about to lift the pink Oxford, the hedgehog that used to be maybe-Khalid trundles out from under the fabric. It twitches its nose, squinches up its face, and very clearly says "Sonofabitch!" in a high-pitched, frustrated voice.
"HOLY SHIT," the girl who was in front of him practically yells. She turned around at the barista's swearing and is now staring at the cranky-looking creature stomping (or at least trying to stomp) around the pink Oxford and dark gray pants and leather courier bag and brown leather shoes. "DID HE. WHAT."
"It's a full moon," the barista observes calmly. The Drip and Donut is decorated with an abundance of plaques and paintings and pieces of paper bearing an abundance of written charms in an abundance of languages, but even so, I can't imagine the employees are used to customers turning into animals before they've even gotten their coffee. I've heard of werewolves, because everyone has, but I don't believe they exist. A lot of people don't. Your neighbor's kid might claim to have caught a squonk last month, or to have seen a couple of brownies chasing a raccoon away from their bread and milk, and people will believe him, but if he says he's seen a werewolf? His parents will tell him to stop watching monster movies before bed. And I've never in my life heard of a were-hedgehog.
And yet I just saw someone turn into a hedgehog right in front of me.
The girl who was standing in front of the young man - hedgehog - in question is backing away. I notice her t-shirt is advertising a barbecue restaurant, and for some reason it makes me giggle. Barbecue - hogs - hedgehogs. Is this a stress reaction? I no longer think the were-hedgehog is someone I know. Khalid never showed even the slightest bit of magic, although he was always interested in people who did.
I get a grip on myself and just like that, the hedgehog is a young man again. A very pretty, very naked young man. The girl on the other side of him stares, her eyes half the size of her head and her mouth falling open. I can only blink. The young man huffs in a very cranky, fortunately very human fashion, gathers up his clothes and shoes and courier bag, and stomps off towards the restroom in the back of the coffeeshop.
"WHAT," the girl in the barbecue t-shirt repeats.
"That's new," the barista comments.
"That's the weirdest fucking thing I have ever seen," I tell her matter-of-factly. I'm as used to everyday magic as anyone, and I've seen and done some strange things, but that takes the cake.
The young man who is also apparently a hedgehog stomps out of the restroom and up to the counter. The girl in the t-shirt is waiting for her coffee and I could have ordered in the meantime, if I hadn't been so completely baffled by what I just saw, but because I'm just standing there, the young man takes the opportunity to pretty much bark his order - one double espresso, one soy latte, one cappuccino with a shot of vanilla and extra foam. He sounds more annoyed than anything else, and who can blame him? He just turned into a hedgehog in front of a coffeeshop's worth of people, and when he turned back into a person, he was naked. And while I enjoyed the quick view - an attractive human is an attractive human, whatever their gender and whatever my personal preferences - I wouldn't have wanted to be naked in public either.
I'm much less rattled and much more curious by the time I get to the tattoo studio. I drank my coffee in the car and I got a donut to go with it, so I'm fed and caffeinated, and I've decided I need to know more about the possibility of were-creatures. But I'm still not sure I believe in werewolves, because if I do that, I'll have to believe in vampires and goblins and who knows what else.
Maya won't be in until later but Kona's got a client in his chair, an older woman getting what looks like a flock of little birds on the back of her shoulder.
"Hey," Kona calls.
"I just saw a man turn into a hedgehog," I say in response.
"What?"
"A hedgehog?" the woman in his chair repeats.
"I was at The Drip and Donut. He was in line in front of me. I thought he was someone I know, and I was about to say something to him when he vanished. Except he hadn't vanished, he'd just turned into a hedgehog. All his clothes fell off him, of course, so when he returned to normal he was naked."
"Was he cute?"
"He was very pretty. He acted like it had happened before." I sit on the chair in my station. "He just sounded annoyed and frustrated, not surprised. Have you ever heard of a were-hedgehog? There's a full moon tonight."
"I've heard of werewolves," Kona says. He hasn't looked up once. One of the things I really like about him as a professional is his uncanny ability to multitask and act as if his entire focus is on three different things, all at the same time. His work has never suffered for his ability to carry on a detailed conversation while he's tattooing an intricate design on someone. "My gram used to tell me stories about shapeshifters who could turn into tigers and panthers, but those were just stories. I never thought they really existed."
"My neighbor was just telling me she thinks she has were-chickens in her yard," his client says. She snorts. "Were-chickens. I told her she has a fox."
words: 2882
total words: 6963
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Date: 2015-11-07 06:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-07 11:04 pm (UTC)