This is the seventh installment of the short story "Ink" by Steve Metcalf as it first appeared in the second Event collection "Iron Bay."
INK
Steve Metcalf
Chapter Six
Yantra
It was eight o’clock in the evening and 3rd Ave. Ink was a hotbed of activity. There were three artists in the front room with two more in their private spaces in the back. The waiting area was full of people who had shown up early for their appointments.
Jones absently reached up and ran his fingertips across the skin at the top of his chest. Then, he used his fingernails and scratched at it for just a second. Like peeling a scab, the action hurt him and felt good in the same instant. He yawned and pulled open the door.
The entry bell sounded and Kira looked up. She was standing behind the counter making notes in a ledger. She smiled briefly and went back to her work. No one else in the room looked at him.
Jones was wearing a pair of khaki pants and a white button-down shirt, long-sleeved and bloused at the waist to keep it loose around his chest. After the disaster that was Monday, he had pulled himself together and completed a normal work week. And everything was normal to a point. Often, he would find himself re-living moments from that oddly realistic dream. He was driving a bus both during the day and night. He had met a book publisher, but had no recollection of having written a book. And the name. He couldn’t remember the name, but, for some reason, believed that he should be able to. Also, there was something about a van. A white van.
At odd times he would find himself standing in the restroom in his office building with his shirt off staring at the reflection of The Three Deaths in the wall-sized mirror. The image, even only one-third completed, was intoxicating. The skin around it, however, continued to look red and irritated. He had kept slathering his chest with the various creams Kira had provided, but it seemed to help only a little. He had planned on getting her professional opinion tonight, and then visit a dermatologist the following week.
He stood just inside the door, listening to the smattering of conversations going on around him and hearing the street noise just eight feet away. The glass door had a huge poster for an indie band called Lightning Kills Todd taking up the entire space. It was a dark, cartoonish drawing of a man running across a landscape being chased by lightning bolts coming from a single, dark cloud. Parts of the drawing reminded him of the Lies God Told painting. Parts of the drawing reminded him of The Three Deaths tattoo.
“Jones.”
He looked away from the band’s poster and turned to see Kira smiling across the room at him.
“You ready?”
He nodded and walked toward her.
* *
They were back in her private office, the black widow room. Jones was shirtless and Kira was applying a thin layer of cream to his chest.
“We did the first session and then talked a bit, then, all the sudden it’s Monday morning,” Jones said. “Care to shed some light on that?”
“It’s all of a sudden,” Kira said, not looking up from her task.
Jones went silent and shook his head comically as if trying to clear invisible cobwebs.
“What?”
“The phrase is all of a sudden,” Kira said, squirting some lotion onto the gloved fingers of her right hand.
“What did I say?”
“You said all the sudden. All of the sudden is also wrong,” finally, she looked up at him and smiled. “There’s a right way to say it and a wrong way. Like for all intents and purposes and so to speak. You get a word wrong and it loses all meaning.”
Jones leaned back in the leather chair and closed his eyes. He had busied himself watching Kira work. Now, he just closed his eyes.
“Oh, so you’re that kind of person,” he said, grinning.
Kira nodded, put the cap on the bottle of cream and rolled back over to her small storage area.
“Yep,” she said.
“You can probably spell apropos correctly without double-checking and always use the word myriad properly.”
“Yep,” she said. “If you say a myriad of, you’re likely to get punched in the dick.”
“Right, sure,” Jones said. He hesitated for a moment. “But I think I’ve got you on this one.”
“How so?” Kira asked, selecting her tools and rolling back over to Jones.
“I wrote a piece on this about a year ago,” he said, eyes still closed. “The dictionaries generally list all of a sudden as the officially accepted phrase, but that’s only because they could trace it to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Strangely, what is now considered a variant … an idiom … all of the sudden can actually be found in print six years before Shrew. Which flips the script and makes all of a sudden the variant.”
Kira, who had been unscrewing the cap of a bottle of ink, stopped and looked up.
“Really?”
Jones nodded, the grin never leaving his face.
“Yeah,” he said. “Grammatically speaking, there’s little difference between the article a or the in the phrase anyway. Nerds, however, side with Shakespeare. They get half the story in their heads and refuse to let go. Like a dog with a hamburger. Like prepositions.”
“What about prepositions?”
“People always cite Strunk and White as some sort of rule about never ending a sentence with a preposition. That’s simply not the case. What Strunk said was to never end a sentence with an unnecessary preposition. You should never say where did you buy that shirt at. The at is superfluous. Where did you buy that shirt? Mangling a sentence to rearrange the final word does nothing to enhance the clarity of the language. A nugget of knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
“Huh,” Kira said, slowly getting back to work. “How about that?”
“Winston Churchill once said Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put to highlight the absurdity of it all.”
“Yep,” she said, grabbing a set of tools from the storage bin. “You got me. You ready for application number two?”
Jones, at first, nodded, but then stopped himself. Kira, sensing his question, held up her hand – showing him the ominous black widow tattoo.
“If you’d like, I won’t give you any pain killers this time around. That is. Outside of what you’ve already taken.” She paused as Jones shot a glance at the bottle of water she had given him from her small refrigerator. “Honestly, Jones, I’m just trying to help. It’s a fairly painful procedure and, while the skin on your chest isn’t exactly sensitive, I’ve had customers with similar pigmentation complain of pain. I must have just got the dosage wrong.”
She paused as she rolled her chair another inch closer.
“Plus, there’s a big difference between an infection and an irritation,” she continued. “I can give you a different type of cream. On the house. If that doesn’t clear it up, I’d recommend you see a doctor. Just in case. Okay? All on the same team, here?”
Jones, wary, nodded. He could feel his eyelids getting heavy.
“Okay. Fine,” he said, leaning his head back in the chair.
“Great,” she said, picking up a leather pouch and unwrapping the cloth cord that secured the package together. Inside were several bamboo sticks, eight inches long, and sharpened to a deadly point. She slid one out of the holder. “The second application utilizes another ancient form – Yantra. It’s a technique developed in Southeast Asia.”
Jones’s eyes fluttered. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the bamboo tool and then leaned his head back against the rest. He reached up his right hand to rub a small string of drool from the corner of his mouth.
“I’ll add more of the detail to The Three Deaths by tapping the ink into your skin with these sharpened bamboo sticks.”
She hit a button on her cell phone and placed it into a small charger/speaker set. Gentle jazz music started playing. A rhythmic piano filled the small office.
Kira turned to look back at Jones. He licked his lips, moments from sleep.
“Are you going to tell me your name?” she asked him.
He nodded.
“You know my name,” he slurred.
“Tell me your name.”
He shook his head.
“Jones.”
Kira shook her head in response.
“Tell me your first name.”
Jones could only mumble before starting to snore.
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