I wanted to post this section because I'm always insecure about writing dialogue and these couple of scenes are almost all dialogue. As always, commentary - good or bad - is not only welcomed but encouraged.
The first scene I wrote a couple weeks back, the second one I just revised and expanded on this afternoon.
Enjoy!
* * * * *
Why, I thought, my toes curling involuntarily, didn’t I do this sooner? The tattoo gun hummed, pounded and punctured along the greased expanse of skin. Mallory had presented the design to me once she pulled up to the tattoo parlor, picking up on my growing skepticism.
“One of the benefits of art school.” She had said, unrolling the vellum on the hood of the car.
Highly stylized black lines – almost oriental – slithered down the page, accented with only the barest hints of brown, green, white, and purple. I didn’t know what to say, and I reached out to run my fingers over the fine and sensuous brushstrokes. I loved it completely.
“Jaboticaba branches.” I said softly.
“I knew you’d like it.” She said, preening, and eminently pleased with herself. “And you doubted me, silly girl. Here – ” She said, hiking down the corner of my jeans and tucking the bottom of my shirt into the underwire of my bra.
“Umm… Mallory?”
“Hush, you.” Grabbing a sharpie from the dash, she placed a dot under the top hem of my panties, close to the hip. “This is the base, see? And it curves around your bellybutton in a dusting of those little white flowers.” She indicated on the paper which part of the piece she was talking about. “And it snakes around your ribs, a few branches hugging the perimeter of your breast,” More dots… “ – before curving under your arm and into the final spray along the back of your shoulder. A bit should bleed over onto your arm and onto the back of your neck, but not too much.” She capped the marker, grinning like an idiot.
“Wow…” I tried to picture it done, suppressed a surge of excitement.
“How expensive is this going to be?” I asked, cringing inwardly. I wasn’t exactly sure how the cost of a tattoo was calculated but I had the distinct impression that it wasn’t cheap.
“Free.”
“Free?” I repeated stupidly, not really processing it. “Wait, I mean… no. You can’t pay for this. It’s beautiful, but – ”
“No, Sidonie. Free. As in ‘we’re not being charged’.”
“What?”
She grabbed my hands and pulled me toward the door. “Just come inside. Jesus, you’re difficult.”
As it turned out the tattoo artist who owned the place was Mallory’s husband, which was more than a little bit strange to wrap my brain around.
“Sidonie, right?” In spite of the industrial piercings, neon red faux hawk, sleeve and facial tattoos I got good vibes off him. That didn’t help the awkwardness any, but still…
“Yeah. Hi.” I shook his hand, glancing at Mallory who was loving this.
“I’m Sialk. Mallory’s said a lot of good things about you.” His coloring reminded me of Yousef, but his features were softer, more open. Amerasian, I thought, probably from somewhere like the Philippines.
Pause. Fidget.
“So, umm… what’s that?” I asked, indicating the domino mask of reddish orange feathers around his eyes.
He touched his face. “Phoenix feathers.”
“Oh… I guess that should have been obvious.” The name of the shop was ‘Industrial Phoenix’. He laughed, devious but free of malice.
“Mal already showed me the design. Want me to sketch it out on you, see how you like it?”
“Sure, but… I mean…” I didn’t get this, like there was some subtext I was missing. “Why the charity case?”
Sialk grabbed what looked like a joint from his back pocket and lit up, giving me a long appraising look. “Mal told me what that shit monkey did. The way I figure it, any chick who fucks up her rapist as thoroughly as you did deserves a big shiny prize.”
For a minute I didn’t know how to respond, just stared. Then I started to giggle.
“Shit monkey? Really?” I laughed harder, laughed until my face hurt and Mallory and Sialk were looking at me like I’d completely lost it, and then they were laughing too. All the tension in the room evaporated, and I decided that even if I didn’t get it that was OK. It was good to see Mallory again, and I liked Sialk. I could feel my eyes sparkling under the fluorescent lights. This could be… fun.
And it was.
Mallory hung around while he marked it out, offering helpful suggestions, touching where he touched and generally making an adorable nuisance of herself. She was so distracting, and I spent a lot of time blushing while her husband played connect the dots.
“Want to see mine?” She asked as Sialk finished the outline and started to set up the needles and gun. I eyed the contraption warily – the thing looked like a Borg probing device.
“Uhh… sure.”
“This was the first one he did for me.” She said as she hiked up her skirt. On the outer curve of her thigh, starting at the hip and scrolling all the way to the knee was a phrase.
We say with our hands that which we cannot give voice.
“That’s beautiful.”
“Yeah.” Her pretty teal gaze caught his and held. There was a tenderness between them that I shied away from. It wasn’t mine, the expression fundamentally extrinsic to me somehow. I thought of Salem and my heart gave a painful squeeze, remembering the delicious scratch of his stubble across my throat. The way he bit and tore at my lips even as he kissed them…
“And this one,” She pulled the sleeve of her blouse down, revealing what looked like a Pocket Dragon sleeping on a fading bed of maple leaves in the hollow just below her collarbone. “Sialk did that one when my dad died.”
“Geez, Mallory. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s OK. It was a couple years ago, but you know how much he liked Real Musgrave’s work. This way I’ve always got a little piece of him with me, right? And this one,” She pulled the shirt off entirely and turned around. “I’m getting finished today.”
Wings covered the whole of her back, trailing down below the hem on her skirt. I looked away, my mouth going dry.
“Butterfly?” Brilliantly detailed, golden yellow and russet, she looked like a pixie courtesan.
“Cosmic moth.” She laughed. “My uncle’s been trying to breed them at the Shreveport Zoo. Sometimes he lets me help. Hey, Sialk?” She plopped down in one of the tattoo chairs. “Where’s Irena anyway?”
“She’s supposed to clock in at around two. We’re all set over here, Sidonie. Go ahead and lie down. I’m going to start at your bikini line and work my way around.”
I scooted my jeans further down around my hips and tried to get comfortable. “Who’s Irena?”
“The other artist here. She also does most of the piercings.”
“She’s going to finish coloring in my wings while Sialk works on you.”
Sialk dipped the needle into a well of black ink, turned it on, sucked the color into the gun. “If you feel faint or need to take a break, let me know, OK?” He managed to be intimate yet impersonal at the same time. I felt… safe.
I nodded, caught somewhere between fascination and apprehension as the hollow point drilled into my skin for the first time.
It was glorious.
* * * * *
About ten hours later Sialk helped me off the work table and led me over to the floor length mirror. I was so sore I could barely walk straight but I felt calmer than I had in weeks.
“What do you think?”
The fresh ink positively glowed under the golden spun incandescent lighting. I gently fingered the flesh skirting one of the branches, understanding why people throughout the vast network of history had found some greater connection to enchantment transcendent through such otherwise mundane tools: pigment, a filament receptacle, and to lay agony willingly on the shrine of universal humanity and say, “I am perfect in my suffering as I can never be elsewise.”
Purged and permanent and beautiful beyond boundaries, the tattoo stood out against my skin like a benediction.
“I think she likes it, yeah?” Irena threw a tie-dye Grateful Dead bear in my general direction, glancing off my shoulder. Irena was from Pietermaritzburg, South Africa and her accent was liquid ear-sex. I’d been drowsing under the gun and listening to her and Mallory talk for the last eight hours on and off.
I laughed, feigning a pout. “Yeah… And ow.” Irena had a long-limbed burnt umber symmetry that owed less to conventional ideals of beauty and more to cocksure charisma. I liked looking at her: cheekbones cutting across her face like razorblades, small fierce eyes, and a perpetually sardonic quirk on her too-full lips.
“Stare at me all you want, Savuri, yeah? I have no taste for that.” She’d been calling me that all afternoon and I had no clue what it meant. It was nice to listen to her say it, though.
Mallory leaned over, affecting secrecy. “I think she likes you.”
“Next time I work on your color I slip with the needle, hmm? Muss up Master Red’s fine penmanship?”
“A dire threat indeed.” Sialk tossed her a cigarette, smiling good-naturedly. “You can be replaced, wench.”
“Racist or sexist, I can pick which one, yes?” Irena straddled her chair, taking a long drag.
“Only if I was white. Or straight.”
Mallory massaged his shoulders. “Honey – you’re half white. And half straight come to think of it.”
Sialk brought a finger to his lips, his face severe, signaling for quiet. “Shhh… nobody has to know that.”
I giggled behind my hand, my eyes sparkling.
“Irena?”
“Yes, what?”
“What’s Savuri mean?”
“What? You don’t have internet? You look it up if you want to know, ey!”
“Yep.” Mallory said. “She definitely likes you.”
* * * * *
"Paindancer,” By Lineia Corell
Copyright © 2010
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