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smackenzie"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."
"You really saw someone turn into a hedgehog?" Kona asks. "Why that?"
"I don't know," I tell him. "Why not, I guess."
"Weird. Was this before or after you had your coffee?" He looks up enough to grin at me. I roll my eyes. The barista saw him too, and I'm sure she was caffeinated.
I'm booked solid from now until seven, and while I'm still curious about the young man who turned into a hedgehog at The Drip and Donut, I have things to do. Cleaning, for one. Prepping, for another. Inking, a lot, for a third.
During the course of my day I act as therapist for a girl who's getting her ex-boyfriend's name covered up, I correct the runes that a couple wants me to ink over their hearts (they want charms so they'll be steadfast in their love and true to each other, but what they bring me is more likely to encourage heartburn and the possibility that they'll just get tired of each other), I refrain from yelling at the pizza delivery boy when he's an hour late, and I try to talk a woman out of getting a Holocaust tattoo on her inner arm.
"My grandpa was a survivor," she explains.
"Was this his number?" I ask, incredulous. My personal experience with the Holocaust is zero, but I know enough about history to be respectful of what the number represents, and I know enough about magic to be wary of putting it on someone.
Numbers can be a language like anything else - not just binary code, but any string of any numbers that's supposed to say something in particular, that's supposed to tell a story - and the numbers that the Nazis tattooed on people speak a language I don't want to understand. I don't like to tell clients no - I am after all in the service business - but I don't want to borrow trouble for this woman. I don't want to be responsible if some thread of free-floating magic is attracted to the meaning attached to her tattoo and brings something bad into her life.
Maybe if I didn't genuinely believe she wanted me to put her grandfather's actual number on her arm, if I thought she'd just picked enough numbers at random to look like one of those tattoos, I'd be more willing to do it. There has to be another way for her to honor her grandfather's memory.
"That's what I want," she insists, when I suggest that she think of something else to get. "I've given it a lot of though. I want to honor his memory and remember his loss. His generation is dying. Soon there won't be anyone left who was there, and we'll all forget what happened. I want that" - she points to the piece of paper in my hand, on which she's drawn the design she wants - "to remind me and everyone else."
"You're metaphysically casting yourself in the role of Holocaust survivor. I don't want to do anything that will draw any evil magic to you."
I realize how superstitious I sound. I sound much more like my teenage self, who believed every theory about magic she heard and who had an earnest, almost spiritual relationship with the idea that magic was everywhere in the world, that it could be good or evil, and that it was liable to affect anyone's life in pretty much any way possible. I grew out of that phase - I was so serious and so earnest and in retrospect so twee - and I no longer think magic can be good or evil by itself (it's a neutral force like so much else in nature), but I do still believe that people's lives can be affected in small ways by small random bits of it.
The numbers this woman wants tattooed on her arm can be a conduit, given time and talent, and while the force of magic is neutral, the meaning of the tattoo is not. She can draw good or ill to herself, depending on whether the numbers become a charm for survival or a magnet for the kind of belief that makes someone treat people like cattle and gas them to death.
I might be overthinking it. The woman certainly thinks so. Kona is concentrating on his own client and is staying out of my business until I ask. It's actually one of the vague rules I have for the artists at Suzume Tattoos - no unsolicited opinions about another tattoo artist's client while the client is here. It just seems polite to not butt in.
"My motives are pure," she says. "I don't believe in that kind of thing anyway."
"I'll do it if you're absolutely sure, but I want the record to show that I think it's a bad idea."
"Noted," she says dryly. "I can always go somewhere else."
"You're here. You came to me." I wish I'd asked her what exactly she wanted when she made the appointment. All she said was "Just numbers, about this long, nothing fancy." I don't know what I thought she had in mind, but clearly this wasn't it. But I don't have time to argue. Her tattoo won't take long, but I can't start running late.
So I take the piece of paper with her grandfather's number into the office and make a stencil, and go back to my station and prep her arm and give her the tattoo she wants.
By the time my last client leaves, I'm tired and hungry, although at least I kept stretching and standing and walking around whenever possible, so I'm not stiff. Kona has gone for the day, but Maya has a late client, so I ask her to close up and I go home.
I love my house. When Grandpa Harb died he left me some money (and, inexplicably, if I wanted them and Grandma Dolly didn't, the three eighteenth-century botanical prints hanging in his office), and because I'd recently managed to secure a loan to open Suzume Tattoos, I used his inheritance to buy a house. It's painted white with green shutters and trim, and I have a big yard in front and a small yard in back and a garden on the side. It has two bedrooms and a wide front porch and a crawl-space-sized attic. I don't have a garage, but I don't think I need one. It's furnished with mostly secondhand furniture, some things I found at estate sales, and the occasional piece from Ikea. There are a number of prints of Japanese brush paintings from when I went through a phase, and because I went to art school and know a lot of artists, there's a lot of weird original art that I got either for free or for very cheap.
I majored in painting and illustration, and I've done the same thing for my friends. When you don't have a lot of money but you do have a certain amount of training and talent, your friends end up with paintings for gift-giving occasions.
(No one who knew my parents before they knew me ever believes that I was a poor twenty-something, but I was. My parents supported me, more or less, while I was in school, but after I graduated they - or rather my mother - told me in no uncertain terms that I was on my own. Grandpa Harb was still alive, and so was my dad's mother, my Grandma Enna, and they'd occasionally send me some money so I didn't starve, but I was otherwise pretty self-sufficient. Part of me really enjoyed being a poor artist, especially because I was apprenticing with Jonatha, so most of the time I didn't care that my parents had effectively cut me off. I was getting to live the life I wanted, free of any of their economic restraints. If I took their money, you see, I'd have to follow at least some of their rules for how I spent it. And the last thing I ever wanted to do, then or now, was have someone else dictate what I did with what I had.)
Grandpa Harb grew orchids as a hobby, and I must have picked up my green thumb from him. I grow vegetables in my garden, and I have two container gardens of herbs on my back deck, and I used to have a stand of raspberry bushes until they started to take over the back yard. Raspberries are very determined colonizers, and I didn't want to wake up one morning and discover my lot had been completely covered in fruit bushes. I did however plant a couple of pear trees in my front yard last year, but pears aren't as ambitious as raspberries and I'm not worried they'll invade.
By the time I get home from the studio, all I want to do is eat dinner and watch TV for a couple of hours before bed. I'm sitting on the couch watching some crime drama and going through seed catalogues when someone rings my doorbell. It's after nine and I'm not expecting anyone, but it could still be someone I know, or it could be Alicia, my across-the-street neighbor, so I push myself off the sofa to see who it is.
It is indeed Alicia, wearing a Spelman College t-shirt and jeans and holding a cookie tin with daisies on it. I open the door.
"My kitchen is full of cookies," she says by way of hello. She hands me the tin. "I hope you're not allergic to peanutbutter."
"I wasn't yesterday. Why are you baking? Do you want to come in?" Alicia is a professor at the university - her particular specialty is twentieth-century black history, with an emphasis on food and women's history. She has a boyfriend I've met exactly once, because he travels a lot for his job and lives in Louisiana anyway, and when she gets stressed out, she bakes. I met her not long after I moved in, when her cat managed to get out and took up residence under my front porch. She's very smart and very generous, and even though she sometimes gives me a hard time because I have a neck tattoo - "You must not have wanted an office job" - I like her a lot. Not just because she brings me cookies and quickbread and the occasional pie when she's in a baking mood, although that helps.
"I've had some news I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about. My Monday classes are going to love me. Enjoy the cookies. You can keep the tin."
"You sure you don't want to come in?"
"I'm sure, thank you. I need to sit with my news, and in the meantime I can give those bakeries in town a run for their money. You have a good night." And she waves at me and walks off the porch and back to her own house.
I take the cookie tin inside. The perfect snack right now would be a glass of milk and a couple of homemade peanutbutter cookies.
words: 1861
total words: 8824
"You really saw someone turn into a hedgehog?" Kona asks. "Why that?"
"I don't know," I tell him. "Why not, I guess."
"Weird. Was this before or after you had your coffee?" He looks up enough to grin at me. I roll my eyes. The barista saw him too, and I'm sure she was caffeinated.
I'm booked solid from now until seven, and while I'm still curious about the young man who turned into a hedgehog at The Drip and Donut, I have things to do. Cleaning, for one. Prepping, for another. Inking, a lot, for a third.
During the course of my day I act as therapist for a girl who's getting her ex-boyfriend's name covered up, I correct the runes that a couple wants me to ink over their hearts (they want charms so they'll be steadfast in their love and true to each other, but what they bring me is more likely to encourage heartburn and the possibility that they'll just get tired of each other), I refrain from yelling at the pizza delivery boy when he's an hour late, and I try to talk a woman out of getting a Holocaust tattoo on her inner arm.
"My grandpa was a survivor," she explains.
"Was this his number?" I ask, incredulous. My personal experience with the Holocaust is zero, but I know enough about history to be respectful of what the number represents, and I know enough about magic to be wary of putting it on someone.
Numbers can be a language like anything else - not just binary code, but any string of any numbers that's supposed to say something in particular, that's supposed to tell a story - and the numbers that the Nazis tattooed on people speak a language I don't want to understand. I don't like to tell clients no - I am after all in the service business - but I don't want to borrow trouble for this woman. I don't want to be responsible if some thread of free-floating magic is attracted to the meaning attached to her tattoo and brings something bad into her life.
Maybe if I didn't genuinely believe she wanted me to put her grandfather's actual number on her arm, if I thought she'd just picked enough numbers at random to look like one of those tattoos, I'd be more willing to do it. There has to be another way for her to honor her grandfather's memory.
"That's what I want," she insists, when I suggest that she think of something else to get. "I've given it a lot of though. I want to honor his memory and remember his loss. His generation is dying. Soon there won't be anyone left who was there, and we'll all forget what happened. I want that" - she points to the piece of paper in my hand, on which she's drawn the design she wants - "to remind me and everyone else."
"You're metaphysically casting yourself in the role of Holocaust survivor. I don't want to do anything that will draw any evil magic to you."
I realize how superstitious I sound. I sound much more like my teenage self, who believed every theory about magic she heard and who had an earnest, almost spiritual relationship with the idea that magic was everywhere in the world, that it could be good or evil, and that it was liable to affect anyone's life in pretty much any way possible. I grew out of that phase - I was so serious and so earnest and in retrospect so twee - and I no longer think magic can be good or evil by itself (it's a neutral force like so much else in nature), but I do still believe that people's lives can be affected in small ways by small random bits of it.
The numbers this woman wants tattooed on her arm can be a conduit, given time and talent, and while the force of magic is neutral, the meaning of the tattoo is not. She can draw good or ill to herself, depending on whether the numbers become a charm for survival or a magnet for the kind of belief that makes someone treat people like cattle and gas them to death.
I might be overthinking it. The woman certainly thinks so. Kona is concentrating on his own client and is staying out of my business until I ask. It's actually one of the vague rules I have for the artists at Suzume Tattoos - no unsolicited opinions about another tattoo artist's client while the client is here. It just seems polite to not butt in.
"My motives are pure," she says. "I don't believe in that kind of thing anyway."
"I'll do it if you're absolutely sure, but I want the record to show that I think it's a bad idea."
"Noted," she says dryly. "I can always go somewhere else."
"You're here. You came to me." I wish I'd asked her what exactly she wanted when she made the appointment. All she said was "Just numbers, about this long, nothing fancy." I don't know what I thought she had in mind, but clearly this wasn't it. But I don't have time to argue. Her tattoo won't take long, but I can't start running late.
So I take the piece of paper with her grandfather's number into the office and make a stencil, and go back to my station and prep her arm and give her the tattoo she wants.
By the time my last client leaves, I'm tired and hungry, although at least I kept stretching and standing and walking around whenever possible, so I'm not stiff. Kona has gone for the day, but Maya has a late client, so I ask her to close up and I go home.
I love my house. When Grandpa Harb died he left me some money (and, inexplicably, if I wanted them and Grandma Dolly didn't, the three eighteenth-century botanical prints hanging in his office), and because I'd recently managed to secure a loan to open Suzume Tattoos, I used his inheritance to buy a house. It's painted white with green shutters and trim, and I have a big yard in front and a small yard in back and a garden on the side. It has two bedrooms and a wide front porch and a crawl-space-sized attic. I don't have a garage, but I don't think I need one. It's furnished with mostly secondhand furniture, some things I found at estate sales, and the occasional piece from Ikea. There are a number of prints of Japanese brush paintings from when I went through a phase, and because I went to art school and know a lot of artists, there's a lot of weird original art that I got either for free or for very cheap.
I majored in painting and illustration, and I've done the same thing for my friends. When you don't have a lot of money but you do have a certain amount of training and talent, your friends end up with paintings for gift-giving occasions.
(No one who knew my parents before they knew me ever believes that I was a poor twenty-something, but I was. My parents supported me, more or less, while I was in school, but after I graduated they - or rather my mother - told me in no uncertain terms that I was on my own. Grandpa Harb was still alive, and so was my dad's mother, my Grandma Enna, and they'd occasionally send me some money so I didn't starve, but I was otherwise pretty self-sufficient. Part of me really enjoyed being a poor artist, especially because I was apprenticing with Jonatha, so most of the time I didn't care that my parents had effectively cut me off. I was getting to live the life I wanted, free of any of their economic restraints. If I took their money, you see, I'd have to follow at least some of their rules for how I spent it. And the last thing I ever wanted to do, then or now, was have someone else dictate what I did with what I had.)
Grandpa Harb grew orchids as a hobby, and I must have picked up my green thumb from him. I grow vegetables in my garden, and I have two container gardens of herbs on my back deck, and I used to have a stand of raspberry bushes until they started to take over the back yard. Raspberries are very determined colonizers, and I didn't want to wake up one morning and discover my lot had been completely covered in fruit bushes. I did however plant a couple of pear trees in my front yard last year, but pears aren't as ambitious as raspberries and I'm not worried they'll invade.
By the time I get home from the studio, all I want to do is eat dinner and watch TV for a couple of hours before bed. I'm sitting on the couch watching some crime drama and going through seed catalogues when someone rings my doorbell. It's after nine and I'm not expecting anyone, but it could still be someone I know, or it could be Alicia, my across-the-street neighbor, so I push myself off the sofa to see who it is.
It is indeed Alicia, wearing a Spelman College t-shirt and jeans and holding a cookie tin with daisies on it. I open the door.
"My kitchen is full of cookies," she says by way of hello. She hands me the tin. "I hope you're not allergic to peanutbutter."
"I wasn't yesterday. Why are you baking? Do you want to come in?" Alicia is a professor at the university - her particular specialty is twentieth-century black history, with an emphasis on food and women's history. She has a boyfriend I've met exactly once, because he travels a lot for his job and lives in Louisiana anyway, and when she gets stressed out, she bakes. I met her not long after I moved in, when her cat managed to get out and took up residence under my front porch. She's very smart and very generous, and even though she sometimes gives me a hard time because I have a neck tattoo - "You must not have wanted an office job" - I like her a lot. Not just because she brings me cookies and quickbread and the occasional pie when she's in a baking mood, although that helps.
"I've had some news I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about. My Monday classes are going to love me. Enjoy the cookies. You can keep the tin."
"You sure you don't want to come in?"
"I'm sure, thank you. I need to sit with my news, and in the meantime I can give those bakeries in town a run for their money. You have a good night." And she waves at me and walks off the porch and back to her own house.
I take the cookie tin inside. The perfect snack right now would be a glass of milk and a couple of homemade peanutbutter cookies.
words: 1861
total words: 8824
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Date: 2015-11-07 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-07 11:05 pm (UTC)