He came into the Parlor on his own.  Rain slid off a leather jacket that had never seen the weather before.  He stood in the entrance, his body propping the door open, and let the neon and night noise in. He stared at me for a second or two, then turned and let the door close behind him.  I turned a page in my sketchbook and began another drawing.  A web.

When he returned, he’d brought a woman with him.  She was just this side of gorgeous, and interested enough in the work to have a look around at the designs on the walls without prompting.  He came over to me, and tried his charm.

“My girlfriend’s interested in a tattoo.”  I looked up from the sketchbook, but it didn’t stop his gaze from slipping down my shirt.

“What’s her name?”

He blinked, and the question shocked him enough to bring his attention back up to my face.  He opened his mouth to say something, and then saw the scars. 

I had to prompt him.  “Her name.”

“Faith.”

“Let me know when she picks one.”

“How much?”

“Depends.”

“On what?” 

I find that men like this have never been made to wait for anything, so I set down my pencil and took my time answering.  “It depends on what she wants, and where, and how big, and if it’s custom.  There isn’t anything on the wall you can’t afford.”

He grinned.  They always like it when you acknowledge their wealth.

To her credit, Faith ignored us and studiously inspected the walls.  She did three laps before she shrugged and flashed him a quick smile, blind to what he was.  I couldn’t hold it against her, though.  Blind to him meant blind to me.

He gave her a wink and she went back to the artwork.  The easy grin faded as soon as she turned away.

I pushed my sketchbook aside and pitched my voice low.  “Listen, here’s the deal, okay.  First and foremost, you don’t get to watch.”  I didn’t give him a chance to pretend innocence, just kept right on talking.  I know the type.  “You didn’t look at the ink when you came in, just at me.  You’re here because I’m a chick, and you’re hoping your girl there will get a tat someplace naughty.  And you’re hoping you get to watch.  You don’t.”

He dropped the act as fast as he’d dropped the grin.  “I’ll pay for the privilege.” 

“Not interested.  If you don’t like the way I work, go somewhere else.  I’m the best, but you don’t care about that.  What you do care about, though, is your property.  And I don’t think you could handle some other guy pawing her while he inked her up.  Am I right?”

His mouth worked, but nothing came out.  Then he sighed.

“Good.  Then go home.  Leave her with me and she’ll call you when we’re done.”

He went to her.  They whispered a bit, he with his fake encouragement, her with a light in her eyes as she gazed up at him.  Then she watched him go out the door, a half-smile still on her lips.

I waved her over.  “What’s your name, darlin’?”

“Faith.”  Give me credit, I didn’t so much as smile.

“Listen, Faith.  Do you want this done for yourself, or for him?”

She was a sweet girl, not ready for any of this.  Somewhere in Kansas, or maybe Nebraska, I was sure she had a mother who still rang her a couple of times a week, waiting for the moment this big bad world grew teeth. “I want it for me.” 

“Are you certain?”

“Yes,” she said, trying hard to mean it.  “He’ll love it.”

I shrugged and glanced at the walls.  “So, does anything speak to you yet?”

It was her turn to shrug now.  “I like a few of them, but I don’t love anything yet.  Nothing I’d want to put on my body at least.  Did I hear you right when you said you did custom stuff?”

“Custom is expensive.”

“He can pay.  He won’t care.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She looked at me, and it was her turn to trace the silver scars that etched my face.  “I can take it.  Do you have any photos?”

I smiled.  There are rules to these things.  They have to ask, and be offered a refusal.  I’ve been accused of being a stickler before, and rightly so.  “What you’ve seen so far is the usual stuff, the things people expect to see.” 

I heard his car start, the engine rev, and then it pulled away and the night went quiet.

“Let me see what else you do.”  Music to my ears.

The leather cover of the album was damp with sweat.  I’d had trouble keeping my hand off it ever since she walked in.  One hand had sketched while the other had reached under the desk to stroke the album on its shelf.

I put the album on the table and Faith leaned forward.

“These are the special ones.” I said, holding the cover closed.  Sometimes people try and open it before I can explain the rest.  Before they’re ready.  “Most of these pictures were taken just after the work was done.  A few I had to take during, though.  They change, you see.  People leave, lose their tan, gain weight, fall in love with someone else, lose their passion or succumb to it.”  I sucked in air and repeated myself as clearly as I could.  “These are special.  And what you see here is exactly what they wanted.”

I removed my hand and she opened the book like a set of jaws.

The album is not something I have seen anyone flip through.  The pictures force you to take your time, to study them.  Here, a man’s chest has been scarred in a thick line from the sternum.  The surrounding flesh is angry and red, but the scar itself is wide and translucent.  Days to work, that one, but it was worth it.  Through the scar you can see the shadows of organs, lurking within.  Another picture, and in this one the woman has been rearranged.  A third photo, this one of a figure, sexless from behind, whose skin has been sliced to expose the white shine of shoulder blades, like the stumps of once-wings.  Picture after picture, page after page.  Scars that have been coaxed to grow over implants and bony plates, forcing the skin into rippled relief maps.  Brands, cooked into flesh or seared silver with liquid nitrogen. 

Faith ran her fingers along a few of the pictures.  After a little while, she turned a page and saw only empty pages beyond it.  Some of that blank space was hers, and we both knew it.

“He’s already left two women,” she said as if I were a friend, because it was clear I had to be.  She wouldn’t let someone she didn’t trust cut her or ink her, after all.  “He can’t leave me, too.”

“And how is getting a tattoo going to keep him?”

“It’ll be proof enough for him, I think.  He said the ones he left, the ones I know about, at least, were prudes.  They’d never even dare to set foot in a place like this.  Maybe this will show him I’m the one.”

I must have raised an eyebrow or something.  She got flustered and broke into a backstory I knew already, almost verbatim.  This stuff goes along the same lines, you know.  The ley lines of abuse.

“He met me when I was waiting tables.  It was busy, and his table was on the other side of the room from the ones I was serving.  He told me later, after, that he looked right past his girlfriend, looked right through her, and saw me.”

“Not the best start.”

She shook her head.  “I thought it was sweet at the time, and flattering.  But now I can’t help but worry that he’s going to look past me one day at someone else. 

“Get a simple one, then.  One of those silly hearts on your breast, or a wavy ivy thing at the base of your back.  Custom isn’t what you need.  Not yet.”

She shook her head.  “No.  This, this is what I want.”  She swallowed hard.  “These, the work you’ve done here, are special somehow.  Like those manuscripts the monks did, or calligraphy.  Every line exactly where it should be, like it was already there, and you just brought it out.  Sounds stupid, I know.”

“It doesn’t.”

“It’s like they’re wishes carved right into the skin.”

I hadn’t heard it put that way before.  “They’re closer to prayers, I’d say.  Prayers said through pain, sung through suffering.”

Faith didn’t even blink.  “That’s what I need.”

“Is it worth it, Faith?  Is he worth it?”

“Yes.”  I could tell I wasn’t going to change her mind, which was fine.

“Alright, then.  There are ways to make him stay with you, if that’s what you want.  Ways to be absolutely certain he never strays.  It will require a few things.”

“Like what?”

“Call him, in a second.  He won’t have gone farther then a few blocks.  Tell him you’ve talked it over with me, that you’ve decided on something and that I need time to work on the design.”

“He’ll be angry if I go back without one.”

“You’ve already agreed to it.  I’m sure that will be enough for tonight.  Tell him I’m giving you a custom one, tell him you’ve paid a down payment, and don’t tell him anything else.”

“Is that what you’ll be doing?  Designing one for me?”

I turned the sketchbook around so she could see it.  Dense spider webs crisscrossed the page.  I’d drawn thumbtacks at the ends of the web, supporting it, as if several layers of web had been collected, stacked and pinned to a wall.  Or to a body.

“Come back tomorrow night, and bring his wallet.  And a lock of his hair and his birth certificate.  Do you two use condoms?”

“Yes.”

“Good.  Fuck him and tie one off and bring it too.  Got it?”

She nodded.

“Call him.”  Faith pulled out her cell and I shook my head.  “From outside.  You two’ll give me a headache if I have to listen in.”

When she turned to the door I caught her hand.  She jumped when the light caught the scars on my arm.  They glimmered like scales.  Her nostrils flared.  “Faith.  Don’t come back tomorrow with questions, okay?  Find your answers elsewhere.  We won’t be able to undo anything that happens tomorrow.”

She left.  I locked the door behind her and went upstairs to bed.

When she came back the next night, I’d already closed up the Parlor and turned off the lights in the front room.  She knocked once, then opened the door.  Faith found me in the back room.  She wore a halter that tied in the back and a pair of faded jeans.  She looked ready.  Her eyes widened a little at the sight of the surgical table, with its tray of tools and a low burning brazier, but she stood her ground just the same.  Good girl.

“Tie your hair up out of the way.  Did you bring everything?”

She wound her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck.  “It’s all here,” she said, handing me a plastic bag after she’d finished with her hair.  She’d put everything into individual zip-lock bags.  I gave them each a glance before setting them on the table next to the instruments.

The back room we used is well lit, lit from enough directions that shadows are rare.  The skin can’t hide back here.  The chair that dominates the room has been specially designed.  I removed the cushion in the headrest, exposing a padded gap for her face.

“Are you ready?”

She was getting scared.  I could smell it on her.  I waited a long time for an answer.  I’d almost given up on her, but then she trembled, and said, “Yes.”

“Take off your shirt and lay face down on the table.  Line your head up with the gap, just like a massage.”

She did.

I let her settle and snapped the cuffs down around her wrists.  She didn’t flinch.  She wiggled a little when I looped the doubled coils of Velcro around her ankles and made them tight, then passed a strap through the belt buckle of her jeans and pulled that tight as well.  She was stuck now, spread out like a moth pinned to a specimen board.

I grabbed her by the knot she’d made of her hair and yanked her head back.  She whimpered.  I yanked a length of duct tape from the roll and pressed it smooth across her mouth.  We had nothing left to talk about.

Faith moaned a little.  I used her halter to wipe the sweat from her skin and tossed it aside.  The table was wide enough for both of us, and I climbed up and straddled her, perched like a mantis. 

She froze.

My hands traced her skin.  Muscle and bone and something else tugged at the tips of my fingers, calling from within.

“Alright, Faith, we are almost ready.”  I reached over and wheeled the table closer, then pulled the credit cards from his wallet.  I took a pair of surgical scissors and cut the cards into as many pieces as I could.  After that, I lay his birth certificate flat and then dropped the pieces and the tangle of his hair in the middle.  When I’d dribbled the sperm over the top of it all, I set the whole thing into the brazier.

While it burnt, I began.

I’d chosen needles that were thick and sharp, closer to metallic knitting needles then anything else.  I poked one through her skin, then turned its length parallel with the flesh and slid it under the skin, alongside her spine.  I ran it shallow, plowing her flesh into a raised line as the needle passed beneath it.  Needle after needle, and I spun the web.  She was quiet, but it is slow work, and over the course of the next hour or two she passed out at least twice.  By then there were only a few needles left on the table and the fire had turned her man’s life to ash.  Now, so near the end, Faith made noises.  Some were grunts of pleasure, some of pain, but most were a cruel Minotaur of something in-between.

I ignored her.

Saliva and sobs and sharp intakes of breath bubbled around the tape.

When the pattern was done, the end of each needle rested alongside the end of another.  I climbed off her and stretched my back.  I’d done well, so far.  I wiped the smear of blood from her with a handful of swabs.

“It is an old art, Faith.  The first art.  Religion, sex, property, they all stained our flesh even in the earliest of times.  You know that caveman they thawed out a little while ago?  Even he had tattoos.”

The tattoo needle buzzed in my hand as I inked in the thumbtacks at each end of the web.  When the needle struck the buried metal, it jarred her whole body.  She got a lot of noise out past the tape, but that was fine.

“The tools are new now, of course, but the intent can still be the same.  And that’s all that matters.  With practice, with purpose, even the crudest tattoos people grind into their flesh can be as powerful as the best of the Japanese artists.”

The stink of burnt plastic and human hair finally stuck in my lungs and I hit the exhaust fans. 

“There are tribes who used to burn their dead, then slice their own flesh and rubbed the ashes into the wounds, planting their ancestors like a crop.  Taking them into themselves.  But the consequences, Faith.  The consequences!”  I heard my voice grow ragged, and slowed down.  “If they were a person, a whole person, prior, they were no longer.  They became a vessel.”

I took the scalpel and climbed back onto her.  When I ran the blade along her flesh, above the thin bulge of the needles, her skin parted eagerly.  Faith found her voice again, but screams are a part of it as much as the rest.  Pain is part of the purchase. 

Blood welled, and the needle rose to the surface, the muscle beneath expelling it.  I cut the needles free.

“If they were vessels, Faith, so are you now.  So will you always be.”  She thrashed, but it was weak.  Her body wanted it to stop, but the thing inside of Faith that had known that empty page was for her fought the movement even as it began.

I shook the cold ashes from the brazier and pushed them under her skin with my fingertips, up to the first knuckle.  I packed her tight, then swung the instrument table out of the way and pulled the sheet off the vat of liquid nitrogen I’d hidden from her.  The seal hissed and the vapor rolled over the side when I removed the lid. 

I held a new scalpel blade in the chill of it.  Closing is easier than opening.  Pinch the wound tight, and drag the back of the frozen blade along the neat edges.  It took more than an hour, but I zipped her up until she was whole. 

When I unlocked the cuffs and freed the rest of her, she quivered but didn’t move.

“What did you do to me?”

I didn’t answer.  It took her a few minutes to sit up, and I nodded to the bathroom.  She tried to get there, staggered, and I caught her.

“I feel heavy,” she said.

I helped her to the bathroom and watched her try and dab at the edges of the web with a towel.

I took the towel from her and wiped the blood away.  Her puckered flesh felt raw beneath my fingers.  She touched it too, her hand next to mine.

“Is there a spider?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“She weaves the web, and leaves it.”

Faith’s eyes rolled so high that for a moment all I saw of them was white.  She was trying hard not to pass out.  “Are there flies?”

“Not yet.”

“Are you going to take pictures?”

“It isn’t ready.”

“I like it.”

I didn’t say anything, just brought her back to the table and gave her some juice to drink while I wrapped her in coils of bandages, sheer as webbing.  I was gentle.

When she was strong enough to leave, she didn’t offer to pay me, and I didn’t name a price.  We’d moved beyond such things.

It was five a.m. when she left in a cab, and I went to bed.  A half an hour later, the phone rang, and I ignored it.   When it was clear she wasn’t going to stop, I knocked the damn thing off the hook.  Her voice, thin and too soft to make out words, drifted from the handset, but it didn’t matter.  She couldn’t say anything that would change it now.  I went back to sleep.

The car outside wouldn’t stop honking.  I rolled over and looked at the clock.  Six a.m.  The phone was beeping the dead-line mantra, and when I put it back on the hook it rang beneath my hand.  Fucking cell phones.

“I’m in a cab outside.”

“I figured.”

“Let me in.  He left me.  He’s gone.”  She sounded like someone had knocked the wind out of her.

“Didn’t he like it?”

“He was gone when I got back.  Fucking let me in.”

“Fine.” 

I did.

She hadn’t changed her clothes. 

“He won’t have left for good, Faith.”  I used her name like a leash, used it to stop her whining.

“He’s gone.”

“So he went out for a bit.  He’s not going anywhere, Faith, I promise.”

“I did all this for him, damn it.  Why did he leave?  It hurts so bad.”

“He could just be staying at a friend’s—”

She waved me silent.  “My back.  It burns.  My skin crawls.  I think it’s infected.”

I favored her with my most professionally doubtful smile.  “I don’t think it could be infected this fast.”

“Take a look at least.  Please?  It feels tight.”

“Fine.”

I led her to the back room once again.  I’d cleaned up after she left this morning.  It was as if last night had never come.  Only the chair remained.  She and I could have been standing in another room altogether.

She removed her halter and I unwound her bandages.  “It is a spell, you know.  Part of what you’re feeling is power, Faith, and that’s a truth you’ll learn to love.”  I let the bandages fall to the floor. 

I was impressed at how fast the whole thing had come together.  “Faith?”

“Yes?”

I patted the chair.  “Get up here again, same as last night, okay?”

She did as I asked, and I climbed up on her once more.

He writhed beneath the skin, caught in the web.  His skull made her skin roll like the sea, pressed outward from inside, trying to get out.  His mouth worked so hard I could see his teeth marks bruise her.  The flesh pulled taut, stretching across hollow eye sockets, rising to sharp ridges along his jaw line. 

He sensed me, and I saw the head flail in a silent scream.

“Is there something wrong with it?”

“No.”                                                                                       

“It burns.  Why does it burn?”

I took a camera from a peg, and a scalpel from a shelf. 

“Are you taking pictures of it? 

I let the flashbulb answer her, and then drew the knife across her skin, across his mouth, so he could answer the rest of her questions himself.

END