1993, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, 1994), as well as in a very-limited collection of my own work published in 2007 (2008 by the time the book was actually printed, but the copyright date says 2007) which is by now out-of-print and—since I was thoroughly displeased with both the collection and certain things and people connected with it—unlikely to see publication again, so I’m not bothering to even name it here. Originally, the story was titled “Strength,” and under that title it was almost published by two different magazines, one a tattoo-oriented publication, and the other, a now defunct magazine run by two of the most unprofessional and reprehensible individuals who ever ran a self-owned publishing house...the story was dumped (along with many other contracted works) after I dared to complain about the editor’s writer/editor wife writing a review of my first novel The Amulet which not only contained many falsehoods and instances of misinformation, but several outright lies (including the assertion that she had never spoken to me, when I had the phone bill which listed a call I’d made to her a couple of years before which ran for over half an hour; and some statements about me and my book which were totally 180º out from what I’d both told and written to her about said novel)—rather than admit that Mrs. Perfect had written something in error, he negated all the contracts and wrote a vicious letter saying I was the one who’d somehow “slandered” his wife by even claiming she had done something wrong. Their little publishing empire in the Pacific Northwest is now long-gone, and after a brief burst of literary acclaim (but some negative reviews along the way), both of them have been more or less off the radar for a while. I’ve spoken to and written to several other writers who were similarly burned by these two; one person said she thought their publishing house resembled a cult with two leaders. Others also had their work dumped after long periods of holding onto the material with no kill fees or even apologies in the offing.
At least the publisher who did take this piece, George Hatch, was a decent, honorable person—all he had was one small request in regard to this piece...a name change. He thought “Tattoo” was a better title, and since he was the one buying the piece, I had no objection.
As one can guess, this was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man,” with a reverse twist. I hadn’t read it in many years, but when I started to write this afterword, I gave it another look, and it holds up fairly well. I’ve read up on tattooing since then, and now that I know more about it, the thought of doing what this un-named woman does is cringe-inducing. The pain would have to be unbearable, but probably therapeutic, too. But since I referenced her in a couple of later, published pieces (never actually giving her name; I felt she should always remain an Everywoman), I felt that her tale was worth another printing, in that it brings her story into context within the greater body of work which follows—and also spares the reader from having to either look through his or her personal library for a story which he or she might vaguely recall reading, or go out and borrow or buy the other source anthologies.
Besides, this is the only work in this collection which was ever honored in a “Year’s Best” anthology—not much of my work has been honored in that way, and since this story was chosen, I figured it was worth another look....
FROM THE WALLS OF IREZUMI
“So, why with the tattooing, all over you like that? What you do that for? That any way for a girl to look?”
Mr. Beniamino had asked her one time too many, and before Gwynn realized that she’d even answered him, she’d said in reply, “So why you want to stay canvas? All blank and vanilla? Nothing you wanted to say about yourself, on yourself?”
“I got nothing to say that I can’t say for myself. So, there on your arm, what’s that you’re sayin’? You say...what? That you got a line of little pictures running along your forearm? And none of them bigger than a sneeze? What’s that say, huh? Buncha little thoughts?”
Moving deliberately, while a feeling of biting down hard on a mouthful of dry, shifting hair passed through her body, Gwynn placed the breakfast tray on the short-legged bed table before Mr. Beniamino, and said evenly as she lifted one cover after another off the individual shallow bowls, “No, ‘bunch’ deliveries. Every flash-scrap I bring to the subtropolis, I get a new tattoo. Based on what flash-scrap I’ve brought down. ’Course, if it’s a full Irezumi, all I do is get one detail from it. From the back, that’s where all Irezumi designs grow from. But I don’t do it traditional-style. Electric all the way. None of that pounding the ink in—”
“You kids, you’re all sick. Full body tattoos, coloring in your faces, for what. I hear what them nurses call youse kids. Know what they call this here ward?”
She waited until he’d slid his spoon into a gelatinous mound of poached eggs, the rounded silvery bowl of the utensil cleaving the rancid yellow center like a surgical scalpel removing a cataract from an aged eye, before saying simply, “‘Pigment ghettoes.’ And ’this here ward’ isn’t the only p.g. to be had. But the way I figure it is, I’m one of the lucky ones. I get the privilege of witnessing my own inevitable physical deterioration first-hand. One sagging tattooed wrinkle at a time. ’Cept for you. You’re so...canvas.”
He’d slid the bowlful of soft egg into his dry-lipped mouth, and swallowed with a phlegmy gurgle, before saying to her, his watery eyes trained, unblinking, on her pigment flushed face, “I ain’t ‘canvas’...you think I don’t know your lingo. There ain’t a lot of me, but it ain’t all canvas—”
* * * *
The bus seemed to float above the highway for a second, as it descended from the latest hilly section. To Gwynn’s left, just through the grimy window, she saw yet another yellow and black sign warning motorists to be aware of hunters in the surrounding wooded hillsides. Do they dart onto the highway, like deer? Or do they just shoot cars and busses?
She’d been riding this bus for too long; the constant rocking motion of the seat as it compensated for each rise and dip in the road was starting to give her a headache. Under the dark folds of her abaya, she pressed her foil-wrapped flash-scrap against her bare midriff. A learned response to fatigue or a break in her concentration; while it wasn’t exactly illegal to transport medically harvested flash-scrap, there were a lot of people who didn’t want to see it, and never mind know about it.
Three seats ahead of her, a couple of real Muslim ladies were seated side by side, neither of them looking out the side windows, their black-draped heads unmoving as the bus continued to roll further and further from Pittsburg, moving deeper and deeper into the hills of yellow ocher, vermillion and bronze-orange clustered trees.
No chance of the driver seeing a blaze-orange-suited hunter before he shot out the tires, she found herself thinking; when she was tired, her mind tended to fuzz off, go random and surreal. The way it did whenever she’d get a tattoo. Concentrate on nothing, just let anything filter up, as long as thoughts of pain were repelled. Scratching her right forearm beneath the shielding yards of black fabric, while staring at the draped heads of the Muslim women ahead of her, Gwynn was briefly grateful for the large Muslim enclaves common to virtually every city across America—she could avoid the stares and barely-whispered comments from all the canvas who found her markings offensive, and, albeit fleetingly, physically lose herself in a different human tribe, merely by donning that heavy tent of black cotton. Looking at the canvas walking past her on the street wasn’t as...vanilla when she had to look at them through the abaya’s screen-like eye-hole mesh.
This time of the year was the best time to wear the abaya, Gwynn realized—while the autumn sun was bright, bottled-water clear, it was also weak, the rays barely penetrating the confines of her robe. Ironic, how summer—the time her tattoos alone most needed protection—was also the worst time to wear the thing. Black cotton absorbed the sunlight; how the real Muslim women could stand it was beyond Gwynn’s ability to comprehend such a problem. Although it sort of gave her insight into some of the taunts passing canvas
