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Aurnia
When my JLO gave me the address for the stupid mentee program, I thought at first that he was trying to kill me. What better way for the government to deal with dead-end children, dangerous, drugged up, depressed children? Who was ever going to notice if a few never returned from “a chance to better themselves”? What was another missing file folder in a stack of thousands?
Mr Brennan had apparently seen the confusion (and dread) on my face because he laughed and assured me it was safe. “The guys”, whoever the hell they were, were safe.
As I stepped down from the 27 bus, I was starting to not believe him. This part of town wasn’t so different from mine, but at least in mine I knew where to run if I was being chased.
The bus left with a cough of black exhaust. It didn’t so much dissipate as blend in with the tendrils of grey smog that twisted overhead. I checked the address once more: I was only a block or two away. The streets weren’t going to sprout rose bushes and clean white picket fences, that was for sure.
In my black jean jacket pocket (the one without a hole in it), I gripped my fingers tightly over the mace. In close quarters my knife was better. But I wasn’t going to allow anyone into close quarters. The knife was only required in one place and one place only: my own fucking house.
The short walk to the address I was supposed to report to ended up being pleasant enough. I could handle a little fresh vomit, a broken needle or two, and a junkie passed out between two rat-torn bags of trash.
I found the door to the tattoo parlour, though I wasn’t quite sure they wanted me to. There wasn’t any sign out front. The door was covered in newspaper, the glass probably gone from a recent break-in. And if you were to press your face against the big front window and cup your hands to spy inside, you’d jump back and hurry on for fear that you just snooped on a poor little granny who was quilting or baking cookies or doing whatever in the hell grannies do. I wouldn’t know.
A little bell announced my entrance, echoed up the old faded wood stairs. I stuck my head inside and glanced around. It was dim, the only light coming from a mostly broken neon on the far wall and a few frilly lamps casting soft, hazy glows. It was light enough to see, though, that the place was empty. Maybe even abandoned.
I stepped inside with a soft, “Hello?”
The door clicked shut behind me, but I didn’t release the maze canister still gripped in my pocket. If this place shut down recently, say, in the two weeks it took for me to be assigned and processed after the robbery, then who knew how many squatters had already claimed their warm night’s sleep.
“Hello?” I tried a little louder when I heard nothing from upstairs, nothing from the dim back rooms.
I wandered curiously through a mix of antique furniture and new equipment: highly polished leather tattooing chairs; metal trays laden with tools that shined like they were straight out of the box; tall, sleek mirrors that kept making me jump stupidly at my own reflection. The two styles clashed violently, mixed as well as water and oil, and yet there was a strange, undeniable charm to the place. A misfit, it seemed, like me.
“Honey,” I cupped my hands to call out, “I’m home!”
I stood in the centre of the room, my shadow long and thin across the antique rug woven with dusty pale flowers. I stood and I waited.
The only sound was the brittle scrape of dead leaves against the big window half concealed by thick marigold-velvet drapes. I drummed my fingers against my black jeans, rocked back and forth on my heels. At least there were no squatters. Or, at least, no conscious ones.
What now? The bus wasn’t returning for at least another thirty minutes; trips to this part of town weren’t exactly in high demand, especially this close to nightfall. It was cold outside, the wind biting, the sky ominous, and it was warm inside with the heat of the old furnace, its pipe stretching up to the tin-panelled ceiling. The bus stop was nothing more than a plywood board nailed down to four metal posts. There were more chances to be snuck up on standing out there in the open than, say, by the big black metal cash register, a relic of the past, perhaps holding cash of the day.
My fingers walked along the back of the couch, brass rivet by brass rivet. I moved slowly toward the silver-lined, turquoise Formica counter and checked over my shoulder once more. The front door remained closed. The stairs, half hidden in a murky dusk, remained empty. No moans came from the floorboards upstairs. No sound of opening doors.Of chairs rolled back. Of bathroom sinks turned off.
I was, I was certain, alone.
There shouldn’t have been anything stopping me from dashing to the cash register, pounding whatever button sent the tray springing out with a victorious ding!, swooping up whatever lay hidden within, and sprinting for the door with it all stashed away in the inner pockets of my jacket. In a dog-eat-dog world you do whatever is necessary for your survival. Why didn’t I seize upon the opportunity right then and there to provide for myself at literally no cost? For all I knew there was a week’s worth of food in that cash register, a month’s even. I shouldn’t have hesitated at all. I shouldn’t have let anything slow me down. I shouldn’t have lingered, not even for a second.
Maybe if I hadn’t, things would have turned out differently. Maybe everything would have turned out differently.
An open sketchbook caught my eye. I recognised it as the same stirring in my soul that made me stop outside the jewellery store, the same foolish pursuit of beauty in an ugly world. The moment I recognised it, I should have pushed aside the feeling; it was, after all, the reason I was in this legal mess.
And yet, I found my determined footsteps slowing. My fingers stretching as if the thick pulped page of soft ivory was a fraying rope. My eyes drawn in like there was more gold in there than the cash register.
The rough sketch, drawn as if in a hurry, or, I thought with a shiver, a rage, was hauntingly beautiful. A flower, lovely and tender, but dead.
The rustling of paper as I turned the page sounded as loud to me as if I had been hammering at the uncooperative cash register. And yet I didn’t stop. I didn’t pause to check for noise, for signs of life in the parlour that was darkening with the dusk. I skimmed my finger over a sketch of a butterfly trapped in amber, the black of the pencil somehow catching light. I turned past a frozen waterfall, all jagged knives and sharp icicles. I lost myself in an eye that reflected in its blackened pupil a wide chasm. They all stabbed at my heart, but it wasn’t until I flipped to the very last page that I felt a real sort of pain.
The drawing was of a woman. Her beauty made me feel like a child. She was all heavily hooded, seductive eyes, deeply painted lips with a cupid’s bow that could cut, and intelligently arched eyebrows.
I was quite the opposite: large eyes, the more to fill with fear it seemed, pale lips more likely to be coloured with blood from chewing on them too often than lipstick, eyebrows hidden beneath a sweep of dark hair that I let fall where it may, a silly freedom in a world of ugly walls.
I knew at once that this woman, whoever she was, was real. Real to someone. To whom, I had no idea, but to someone, I was sure. What I mean is that she was not the figment of an imagination; she was not brought to life by the charcoal of the pencil alone. She lived and breathed and gazed with those cat-like eyes at the person who drew her, touched their cheek, ran her finger down their chest, broke, I saw, their heart.
For across the woman’s face, drawn realistically as if the paper were actually torn although it wasn’t, were five long slashes. And it was in those slashes that I felt the artist’s pain. I could feel the building of anger and hurt and disappointment, building and building, till it burst. The artist had wanted to destroy her, but they couldn’t, couldn’t bring themselves to it. So they destroyed her on the page, in the art, the only way they knew how. I understood turning to art for that kind of anger, for that kind of outlet.
It was embarrassment that finally sent me fleeing from the sketchbook to the comfort of the cash register, cold and hard and reassuring beneath my slightly shaking fingers. My cheeks reddened as if I had been caught, though I was still dreadfully alone. I felt certain I had peeked at someone’s secret, at someone’s heart. I had taken what wasn’t mine to take, what I hoped no one would ever take from me.
It was a relief to grab ahold of the cash, small stacks of small bills, but still. Cash. Something safe.
Maybe it was my pounding heart that prevented me from hearing the door open. Maybe I hadn’t yet escaped from the siren song of the mysterious woman and her scarred face. Maybe I was still preoccupied searching for the artist’s face in her lovely eyes.
Whatever the reason, I was completely and utterly helpless. I didn’t stand a chance. With my back to the front of the tattoo parlour, I had no idea anyone else was in the room with me, let alone looming like a monster’s shadow across my back.
A tattooed hand was locked in an iron grip around my wrist before I could even let loose a shriek. I twisted around, pain blossoming like the flower before it withered in that damned sketchbook. The man, whoever he was, blocked out the light from the windows. His face was in shadow, high above me. He said not a word, as if he was made of stone. I yanked my wrist with a whimper, but he only tightened his grip.
I cursed whoever drew those sketches. I cursed whoever left it open for me to fall into like a well-laid trap. I cursed whatever it was inside me that insisted on seeing beauty where there was none.
Because I was caught once more. There was nothing left to do but fight and curse my own bleedin’ self.
