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smackenzieBut first, a cup of Maya's chai, and then tattoos. Today's work includes a couple of hours on a Japanese-woodcut-inspired sleeve, an Alice in Wonderland based on John Tenniel's illustrations, a shoulder full of bat silhouettes, and a protection charm in French wound around the client's arm.
I'm halfway through the Japanese woodcut sleeve – and from the way the boy in my chair is breathing, I think I might need to give him a quick break – when someone comes out of the bathroom and announces that the sink is running.
"Do you need help catching it?" Maya asks, and snickers.
"It won't turn off," the person continues. I glance up as the person ambles over to Maya's chair and sits down. She's a woman probably in her late twenties or early thirties, dressed in rockabilly fashion with a poof of hair and a ponytail and a full skirt. Maya cranks her chair all the way back so the client can lie down and pull her skirt up and over, exposing an olive-skinned thigh.
"Can you go look really quick?" I ask Maya, nodding at my hands and tattoo machine and my client's partially-inked arm. "Before you get started."
Maya heaves a sigh and goes off to look at the sink.
"Actually," I start to say, changing my mind and trying to stop her. Then, "Do you need a break?" I ask my client, who nods. Today is the second session for an elaborate seascape, with a giant octopus and a giant fish and a ship in peril, and there's a lot of shading and filling in, and he's not handling it as well as he did when it was a lot of outlining. At least he hasn't passed out yet. I'm always worried about that.
I shut off my tattoo machine, pat the client on the shoulder, hoping my little soothing talent kicks in, and pull off my gloves. I have a feeling I know what the problem is, but it could just be a plumbing issue. Sometimes it's hard to know.
Maya is relieved to get back to her work. I spin the taps in the bathroom sink, turn them as hard as I can to try and turn them off, and fail miserably. The water keeps dripping, and then turns into a thin stream. Now I notice the toilet is making a slight bubbling noise.
"Did you move into the kitchen too?" I ask the air. "My guess is you did." So I go look, but fortunately the kitchen sink looks and sounds fine. I listen to the fridge, which is humming quietly the way it always is. The little spirit occasionally haunting my studio has never done anything to the oven or the stove, although when the microwave shorted out I was convinced it was why. It likes sinks for some reason.
"I'll bring you cookies tomorrow," I tell it. "Promise."
I've done what I can. By now my client has hopefully gotten a grip on himself. We have anesthetic spray we can use – it doesn't do much but sometimes the placebo effect kicks in and the client feels more numb than they really should – we all have signs at our stations saying we have it and if people feel the need for it they should ask, but I don't normally offer. But maybe I should mention it.
But the client says he's ok, so I wash my hands again and put on fresh gloves and go back to work.
I can tell he's feeling an endorphin rush when I finish the session. He still has one or possibly two to go, so he makes an appointment and I send him on his way. Maya's rockabilly client has paid and left – she got a WW2-style pinup girl on her thigh – and Maya is cleaning up and humming to herself. I ask her to straighten up the waiting area when she's finished, because I have just enough time to clean my own station and take a quick pee break before my next client.
I get two calls while I'm working – one from Nila, my ex, asking if I can come over and keep her company, because she broke her ankle and her girlfriend is out of town and she just needs a little assistance, and one from Liliana, my friend from art school who could make the tiny flame dance in her palm. She's a jewelry maker who somehow ended up working for an animation studio, modeling things for stop-animation videos and ads. She and her husband are in town and want to meet me for dinner. She knows it's last minute, but she wants to see me.
I call her back when I have a break and invite them over. I explain I have to make cookies, but I can wait until after we've eaten. I should be home by seven-thirty, so if they can come around eight....
"We can meet you at work!" Liliana exclaims. "Kelly wants to see your studio. He's been thinking about getting some ink."
"I have to stop at the store on the way home," I tell her. "I need to get more cheese and some crackers." I always have cheese, enough so that I can usually put out a cheese plate for visitors, but I'm always running out of crackers. If I didn't know better I'd say the brownies were getting into my house and eating them, "I was going to make Indian food. Is that ok?"
"Kelly's going vegan, so you don't need a lot of cheese. Indian's good. Why do you need to make cookies?"
"My studio's haunted." It's not entirely true, but it's the easiest explanation. This isn't New Orleans – no one expects every third house to be haunted – but Liliana is familiar with the weird things that free-floating magic can do. She puts out bread and milk for the local brownies too.
"Really! Kelly's going to want to hear all about it. Should we come by at seven?"
"That's good, yes. I'll show you the place."
At seven I'm closing out the register and making a mental list of what I have to do tomorrow. Liliana and Kelly are right on time, which is impressive, because Liliana spent all four years of college running late for things. That they're at Suzume Tattoos right on time is no douby Kelly's influence.
Kelly is tall and lanky and has long brown hair in a ponytail. He builds furniture, and while he doesn't have any innate magic himself, he's well versed in the many charms and superstitions and placating spells one can learn in order to keep one's products from falling apart, or to keep the mischievous spirits out of one's equipment. People in the building trades tend to be pretty superstitious. Mechanics and civil engineers are as well. I've never been to or seen or even heard of a garage that didn't have a horseshoe nailed over each door, ends up. Bridge engineers bury charms written on strips of paper in the concrete of the pylons. If you crawl underneath your car, you might find a couple of tiny symbols scratched into the steel of the undercarriage.
Automotive technomancers are in high demand and the cars they work on are hideously expensive, but your average mechanic can learn a few effective charms and make a couple of tiny concessions to ensure your car will run as well as human (and occasionally magical) efforts can make it.
Dinner is aloo gobi (potatoes and cauliflower), gobi matar (cauliflower and peas), saag paneer (cheese and spinach) for me and Liliana, basmati rice with peas and tiny bits of carrot, and store-bought naan. Diego is very interested in what we're doing, but when I offer him a pea, some rice, a cube of cheese, or a little piece of cauliflower, he turns his head away. He just wants to sniff everything and be part of it, he doesn't want to eat our dinner. We don't sit down to eat until almost nine, but we've had cheese and crackers and wine, so we're not starving. Kelly has some of Liliana's saag paneer, so he's clearly not entirely vegan yet.
"I'm getting there in stages," he explains. "I gave up butter and eggs first, that was easy."
"Not for me," Liliana says. "You try explaining to your very middle-class brother and sister-in-law that you can't bring your famous deviled eggs to their Memorial Day picnic because your husband won't let you have eggs or conventional mayonnaise in your kitchen. My sister-in-law finally told me to just bring everything to her house and make them there. Even worse was trying to tell people why Kelly wouldn't eat the mac&cheese. They don't believe in lactose intolerance.” She rolls her eyes. “My aunt makes excellent mac&cheese."
"I just started telling people that dairy gave me explosive diarrhea." Kelly grins wickedly. "It worked."
"Except my nephew started saying 'Explosive diarrhea!' at every opportunity," Liliana sighs. "He's just learning how to talk. My brother and I both thought it was really cute. My sister-in-law did not agree with us. I'm surprised we weren't banished from future family gatherings."
"It's because your mom loves me." Kelly smiles brightly at Liliana, then leans over and kisses her on the cheek.
"I don't know why, but she does."
"Lili said you have a ghost in your studio," Kelly says, as we're cleaning up. "That's why you have to make cookies now. How did you get a ghost?"
"It's not a ghost," I say. "It's just a little spirit. It's like putting milk and bread out for the brownies, or leaving coins in your garden." Those are for magpies, who will take the shiny things you leave out for them as payment for not letting rabbits and raccoons and (depending on where you live) deer from getting into the garden. "It likes jam, so every few weeks I make a batch of thumbprint cookies and leave them out for it. They have to be homemade, though – even bakery cookies won't cut it. Otherwise my sinks leak. The toilet started making weird noises today and the bathroom sink wouldn't turn off, so I know it's time."
"Interesting." Kelly finishes loading the dishwasher and shuts it. "Has it ever manifested?"
"Do you mean have I ever seen it? No. I don't know what it looks like and to be honest I don't want to know. I don't need to see it, and I'd guess it doesn't need me to see it either."
The same way I don't need to see a squonk to know it exists, I don't need to see the little spirit hanging around my studio. The only thing that has ever worked to get the sinks to stop leaking is to leave out some thumbprint cookies. The first time it happened in the kitchen, I called a plumber, and she told me when she couldn't fix it that it might be magical, and had I considered it could be a disruptive creature? We'd never had brownies or gremlins or anything of that ilk, but I tried leaving out milk and bread. When that didn't work, I remembered my friend Fern from high school, whose uncle owned a bakery and who'd been leaving pieces of cake or leftover pie crusts or cookies on the windowsill from the day the place opened. When he started, it was just a silly folk superstition he'd learned from his great-grandmother when he was a boy, but as magic grew in the world, it became more of a homegrown security system.
After some trial and error the little spirit in my studio settled on thumbprint cookies, especially if they were made with raspberry jam. I don't have any raspberry now, but strawberry should work just as well.
Liliana and Kelly (and Diego) help me make the cookies, although Kelly's contribution is limited to washing the dishes and helping spoon jam into the thumbprints, because he doesn't want to handle anything made with butter and eggs. I'm too glad to have help to care. Besides, I'm a vegetarian and have been since I was a senior in high school, so how can I give him a hard time for his dietary preferences? My mother gave me so much grief for mine, even after I'd graduated from art school and was well and truly living on my own, that I can't do the same to someone else.
(I'm a vegetarian 99.44% of the time, until I get it into my head that I really want some fried catfish, or a good scoop of tuna salad.)
words: 2089
total words: 12,622
I'm halfway through the Japanese woodcut sleeve – and from the way the boy in my chair is breathing, I think I might need to give him a quick break – when someone comes out of the bathroom and announces that the sink is running.
"Do you need help catching it?" Maya asks, and snickers.
"It won't turn off," the person continues. I glance up as the person ambles over to Maya's chair and sits down. She's a woman probably in her late twenties or early thirties, dressed in rockabilly fashion with a poof of hair and a ponytail and a full skirt. Maya cranks her chair all the way back so the client can lie down and pull her skirt up and over, exposing an olive-skinned thigh.
"Can you go look really quick?" I ask Maya, nodding at my hands and tattoo machine and my client's partially-inked arm. "Before you get started."
Maya heaves a sigh and goes off to look at the sink.
"Actually," I start to say, changing my mind and trying to stop her. Then, "Do you need a break?" I ask my client, who nods. Today is the second session for an elaborate seascape, with a giant octopus and a giant fish and a ship in peril, and there's a lot of shading and filling in, and he's not handling it as well as he did when it was a lot of outlining. At least he hasn't passed out yet. I'm always worried about that.
I shut off my tattoo machine, pat the client on the shoulder, hoping my little soothing talent kicks in, and pull off my gloves. I have a feeling I know what the problem is, but it could just be a plumbing issue. Sometimes it's hard to know.
Maya is relieved to get back to her work. I spin the taps in the bathroom sink, turn them as hard as I can to try and turn them off, and fail miserably. The water keeps dripping, and then turns into a thin stream. Now I notice the toilet is making a slight bubbling noise.
"Did you move into the kitchen too?" I ask the air. "My guess is you did." So I go look, but fortunately the kitchen sink looks and sounds fine. I listen to the fridge, which is humming quietly the way it always is. The little spirit occasionally haunting my studio has never done anything to the oven or the stove, although when the microwave shorted out I was convinced it was why. It likes sinks for some reason.
"I'll bring you cookies tomorrow," I tell it. "Promise."
I've done what I can. By now my client has hopefully gotten a grip on himself. We have anesthetic spray we can use – it doesn't do much but sometimes the placebo effect kicks in and the client feels more numb than they really should – we all have signs at our stations saying we have it and if people feel the need for it they should ask, but I don't normally offer. But maybe I should mention it.
But the client says he's ok, so I wash my hands again and put on fresh gloves and go back to work.
I can tell he's feeling an endorphin rush when I finish the session. He still has one or possibly two to go, so he makes an appointment and I send him on his way. Maya's rockabilly client has paid and left – she got a WW2-style pinup girl on her thigh – and Maya is cleaning up and humming to herself. I ask her to straighten up the waiting area when she's finished, because I have just enough time to clean my own station and take a quick pee break before my next client.
I get two calls while I'm working – one from Nila, my ex, asking if I can come over and keep her company, because she broke her ankle and her girlfriend is out of town and she just needs a little assistance, and one from Liliana, my friend from art school who could make the tiny flame dance in her palm. She's a jewelry maker who somehow ended up working for an animation studio, modeling things for stop-animation videos and ads. She and her husband are in town and want to meet me for dinner. She knows it's last minute, but she wants to see me.
I call her back when I have a break and invite them over. I explain I have to make cookies, but I can wait until after we've eaten. I should be home by seven-thirty, so if they can come around eight....
"We can meet you at work!" Liliana exclaims. "Kelly wants to see your studio. He's been thinking about getting some ink."
"I have to stop at the store on the way home," I tell her. "I need to get more cheese and some crackers." I always have cheese, enough so that I can usually put out a cheese plate for visitors, but I'm always running out of crackers. If I didn't know better I'd say the brownies were getting into my house and eating them, "I was going to make Indian food. Is that ok?"
"Kelly's going vegan, so you don't need a lot of cheese. Indian's good. Why do you need to make cookies?"
"My studio's haunted." It's not entirely true, but it's the easiest explanation. This isn't New Orleans – no one expects every third house to be haunted – but Liliana is familiar with the weird things that free-floating magic can do. She puts out bread and milk for the local brownies too.
"Really! Kelly's going to want to hear all about it. Should we come by at seven?"
"That's good, yes. I'll show you the place."
At seven I'm closing out the register and making a mental list of what I have to do tomorrow. Liliana and Kelly are right on time, which is impressive, because Liliana spent all four years of college running late for things. That they're at Suzume Tattoos right on time is no douby Kelly's influence.
Kelly is tall and lanky and has long brown hair in a ponytail. He builds furniture, and while he doesn't have any innate magic himself, he's well versed in the many charms and superstitions and placating spells one can learn in order to keep one's products from falling apart, or to keep the mischievous spirits out of one's equipment. People in the building trades tend to be pretty superstitious. Mechanics and civil engineers are as well. I've never been to or seen or even heard of a garage that didn't have a horseshoe nailed over each door, ends up. Bridge engineers bury charms written on strips of paper in the concrete of the pylons. If you crawl underneath your car, you might find a couple of tiny symbols scratched into the steel of the undercarriage.
Automotive technomancers are in high demand and the cars they work on are hideously expensive, but your average mechanic can learn a few effective charms and make a couple of tiny concessions to ensure your car will run as well as human (and occasionally magical) efforts can make it.
Dinner is aloo gobi (potatoes and cauliflower), gobi matar (cauliflower and peas), saag paneer (cheese and spinach) for me and Liliana, basmati rice with peas and tiny bits of carrot, and store-bought naan. Diego is very interested in what we're doing, but when I offer him a pea, some rice, a cube of cheese, or a little piece of cauliflower, he turns his head away. He just wants to sniff everything and be part of it, he doesn't want to eat our dinner. We don't sit down to eat until almost nine, but we've had cheese and crackers and wine, so we're not starving. Kelly has some of Liliana's saag paneer, so he's clearly not entirely vegan yet.
"I'm getting there in stages," he explains. "I gave up butter and eggs first, that was easy."
"Not for me," Liliana says. "You try explaining to your very middle-class brother and sister-in-law that you can't bring your famous deviled eggs to their Memorial Day picnic because your husband won't let you have eggs or conventional mayonnaise in your kitchen. My sister-in-law finally told me to just bring everything to her house and make them there. Even worse was trying to tell people why Kelly wouldn't eat the mac&cheese. They don't believe in lactose intolerance.” She rolls her eyes. “My aunt makes excellent mac&cheese."
"I just started telling people that dairy gave me explosive diarrhea." Kelly grins wickedly. "It worked."
"Except my nephew started saying 'Explosive diarrhea!' at every opportunity," Liliana sighs. "He's just learning how to talk. My brother and I both thought it was really cute. My sister-in-law did not agree with us. I'm surprised we weren't banished from future family gatherings."
"It's because your mom loves me." Kelly smiles brightly at Liliana, then leans over and kisses her on the cheek.
"I don't know why, but she does."
"Lili said you have a ghost in your studio," Kelly says, as we're cleaning up. "That's why you have to make cookies now. How did you get a ghost?"
"It's not a ghost," I say. "It's just a little spirit. It's like putting milk and bread out for the brownies, or leaving coins in your garden." Those are for magpies, who will take the shiny things you leave out for them as payment for not letting rabbits and raccoons and (depending on where you live) deer from getting into the garden. "It likes jam, so every few weeks I make a batch of thumbprint cookies and leave them out for it. They have to be homemade, though – even bakery cookies won't cut it. Otherwise my sinks leak. The toilet started making weird noises today and the bathroom sink wouldn't turn off, so I know it's time."
"Interesting." Kelly finishes loading the dishwasher and shuts it. "Has it ever manifested?"
"Do you mean have I ever seen it? No. I don't know what it looks like and to be honest I don't want to know. I don't need to see it, and I'd guess it doesn't need me to see it either."
The same way I don't need to see a squonk to know it exists, I don't need to see the little spirit hanging around my studio. The only thing that has ever worked to get the sinks to stop leaking is to leave out some thumbprint cookies. The first time it happened in the kitchen, I called a plumber, and she told me when she couldn't fix it that it might be magical, and had I considered it could be a disruptive creature? We'd never had brownies or gremlins or anything of that ilk, but I tried leaving out milk and bread. When that didn't work, I remembered my friend Fern from high school, whose uncle owned a bakery and who'd been leaving pieces of cake or leftover pie crusts or cookies on the windowsill from the day the place opened. When he started, it was just a silly folk superstition he'd learned from his great-grandmother when he was a boy, but as magic grew in the world, it became more of a homegrown security system.
After some trial and error the little spirit in my studio settled on thumbprint cookies, especially if they were made with raspberry jam. I don't have any raspberry now, but strawberry should work just as well.
Liliana and Kelly (and Diego) help me make the cookies, although Kelly's contribution is limited to washing the dishes and helping spoon jam into the thumbprints, because he doesn't want to handle anything made with butter and eggs. I'm too glad to have help to care. Besides, I'm a vegetarian and have been since I was a senior in high school, so how can I give him a hard time for his dietary preferences? My mother gave me so much grief for mine, even after I'd graduated from art school and was well and truly living on my own, that I can't do the same to someone else.
(I'm a vegetarian 99.44% of the time, until I get it into my head that I really want some fried catfish, or a good scoop of tuna salad.)
words: 2089
total words: 12,622
