screes which only hid the speaker’s fear and awe, allowed them to hide behind jibes, rather than simply ask about her tattoos.
Sliding her free hand along her torso and neck under the abaya, hoping that her movement wasn’t visible through the fabric, Gwynn stroked her right cheek, the one with the ombré flow of deepest azure down to water-color-delicate sunrise-sky-blue. Her “plain” cheek, compared to the Celtic knots which adorned her chin, left cheek and part of her forehead.
This side of my face is for my father’s people...somewhere back ages ago, my great-great-to-I-don’t-know-what-power grandfather fought with William Wallace. The guy Mel Gibson plated in that movie decades ago, she imagined herself saying to any canvas brave enough to actually ask her why she’d done what she did to her face. They painted themselves blue to scare their enemies. For strength. For unity. The other half of my face, that’s for my mother’s people. For the Irish. Them and the Scots, they were both screwed over by the British. Tried to take away their right to dance, to play bagpipes, to speak their languages. I say, let them try to take this off of me. Let them try. My face sings. My face dances. It speaks.
Another sudden rise, followed by the corresponding elevator-like decent. The abayas of the two women ahead of her puffed up around them, then settled down in predetermined folds on their shoulders.
Gwynn felt as if the trees flanking the road were spreading, ready to engulf the bus as it moved northeast of the city they’d left behind over half an hour ago. One of the guys who’d done some of the work on her back, the huge Celtic cross whose base rested just above the cleft in her behind, used to say basically the same thing about tattoos.
“I think they spread, y’know, under the epidermis. Color goes migrating away from the lines, meets up with the colors from the other side, and next thing you know, you got less canvas. Just does it in places you can’t look at too easy. So’s you can’t stop it.”
She’d wondered if the bees-trapped-in-a-jar drone of the tattoo needle had begun to shake the guy’s brain cells loose. Too much repetitive motion—hold the needle, let it secrete color under the flesh, wipe away the excess ink and blood with the other hand, then do it over again.
But now, as she rode, nearly motionless, on the rising and falling bus, the press of trees surrounding the highway did resemble loose pigment migrating under unsuspecting unpigmented canvas. Overhanging branches thick with freshly-ground-bright pigment spread closer and closer to the highway’s shoulders, as if seeking that thin tire-stained ribbon of flat chrome yellow in the center of the road. Pigment calling to pigment.
Definitely like the way tattooed people sought each other out, not merely for company, but for empathy. In remembrance of that shared bond of temporary pain, as the canvas became artwork; partly for the fellowship, perhaps more so for the individuality within the flesh-tribe.
Those women up front, swaying slightly under their abayas as the bus rounded a slight curve in the highway, their tribe depended more on adherence, on uniformity, of sameness of purpose and faith. The more you looked like your brethren, the closer you’d come to your life’s goal. Everyone pray at the same time, while facing the same direction. All women smothered in black robes, or head-wrapped in a hijab. The men, mostly bearded. Not all that different, really, than the Amish and the Mennonites originally more common to the state.
When she was younger, Gwynn would ask the women in the Amish and Mennonite communities why they wore those filmy white hats on their bunned hair. The answer was usually the same, a reference to Corinthians, about women covering their heads in prayer. But for some reason, none of them ever asked Gwynn about her facial art. As if they didn’t want to know, or simply wanted to forget they’d seen her.
Once, during a flash-scrap run she’d taken to the Records Center of Kansas City (the previous wearer of the flash-scrap she was carrying had specifically willed his body art to that city, why she’d had no earthly idea), the place where all the original episodes of M*A*S*H and some show she’d never heard of before called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea were stored—as the travel brochure for the city had proudly noted—she’d been sharing her bus seat with a Muslim woman, who wore the more common hijab rather than an abaya. Gwynn wasn’t wearing much more than a tee shirt with holes cut out over her best bits of tattooing and a pair of shorts—it was early August, and almost too hot to wear her skin. For a second, she’d felt ashamed of herself; she knew her seatmate instinctively frowned not only on the skimpy clothes, but on the tattoos. But the woman was actually nice about it.
“Those must have been rather painful,” was all she’d said, and politely at that, as she tacitly pointed at Gwynn’s face.
“Not too bad...not worse than the rest of my body. It doesn’t last, though—”
“So these are temporary, like henna ones?”
“Oh no, no...they’re on for good. Really, I should wear more clothing, ’cause the sun can fade these, but sun-block works, too.”
“And it is cooler,” the woman had smiled, before noticing the small cooler perched on Gwynn’s knees. “At least your knees are cool—”
The flash-scrap was inside the cooler, loosely folded, packed in sterile ice and protected with some sort of surgical gauze the person who’d removed it from the donor had layered between the folds. She didn’t know if a doctor had done it, or one of those nurses trained to extract donor eyes for cornea transplants. Some of them had learned to diversify, once flash-scrap donations became the norm. But Gwynn couldn’t bring herself to tell this stranger about the contents of the cooler, even as she feared that the woman might think something edible was inside, and hope that Gwynn might offer her whatever it was—
“Yeah, real cool. Glacial. Is this the first time you’ve been to Kansas City?”
Gwynn couldn’t really recall what the woman had said to her after that; she did remember being grateful that the hijab-swathed stranger hadn’t lectured her on her tattoos, or her lack of clothing.
She hadn’t seen the woman again once they got off the bus, and Gwynn made her way to the Record Center, but in ways, she wished that the woman had been headed that way, too. Having her for a traveling companion would have been good. Gwynn could have told herself that the canvas was making remarks about the woman, instead of her.
On the road an hour now, half an hour to go before they reached the Iron Mountain National Underground Storage facility. Where the guards stood before those steel gates, ready to request that all visitors surrender their weapons, drugs and explosives, despite the inherent inanity of their assumption that anyone bearing such items would first admit that they had them on his or her person in the first place. As if carrying a gun, a needle and a stick of dynamite was so commonplace as toting a pocket comb, a pager and a half-empty box of breath mints.
There was a rectangle of hot flesh on her midriff—the flash-scrap stored in that folded-over square of heavy-duty cooking foil was pressing uncomfortably into her skin. Gwynn imagined how her flesh must look—all alligator-wrinkled over one of her favorite tattoos, the blackwork dragon with the pearl in its mouth. The one that could be easily seen through her uniform—
* * * *
“What that you got there, on your belly?” Mr. Beniamino pointed one knobbed finger at Gwynn’s midsection as she bent over him, prior to rolling him over onto one side of the bed. At a hundred-plus years, the old man barely weighed more than a laundry sack filled with soiled sheets, but his mind was dismayingly sharp. Always with the questions—
“A dragon. Blackwork...no shading, all black ink.
