Kylie's Tattos (standard:other, 2714 words)
Author: Penny Matthews	Added: Jun 04 2008	Views/Reads: 3091/2101	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Reflections of the meanings behind a young woman's tattoos.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

awe of the apparent opportunity for normalcy that she refused to see 
how miserable she was. But he stayed with her. She gave him plenty of 
chances to escape if he'd wanted to, but still he stayed, convinced 
she'd come to her senses eventually. It took her six months, but she 
finally did. 

He stood in the middle of the sidewalk and waited for her to catch up. 

* 

Kylie was experiencing an odd sense of déjà vu. It was the second time
in her life that she had rejected middle class values and run away with 
a mangy animal. When she was sixteen she hopped on the back of an angry 
Harley, wrapped her arms around a guy named Rob and left a twenty foot 
burn on her parents' driveway. Her father watched them from the front 
porch and her mother cried gracefully in the living room. 

She threw her arms above her head, laughing while Rob shouted, “Hold on,
you crazy bitch!” She ignored him because she was gone, free, fuck 
everyone because she didn't need them. But she was still more of a 
follower than a leader, and would later realize that she never would 
have left if Rob hadn't been there. 

Kylie had met him three months earlier when she walked into his tattoo
parlor. He had created the Blood Red fundraiser, which meant every time 
he used a certain type of red ink, he gave a portion of the money to 
local organizations that dealt with preventing HIV transmission. When 
Kylie heard about Blood Red, it was like someone speaking directly to 
her. Her uncle's partner had died of AIDS and no one wanted to talk 
about it; no one acknowledged the pain her uncle was going through 
having lost the man he'd been with for twenty years. When she told Rob 
the story he had said something like I'm sorry you guys had to be 
affected by this miserable disease and so she fell in love with him on 
the spot. It was the first reaction she had received that wasn't soaked 
with judgment or self-righteousness or indifference or vindication 
because the faggot got what he deserved. 

Rob inked her without checking her ID. She stared in wonder at the red
ribbon. It was as if the soft flesh on her wrist had always contained 
this image, but it took a man like Rob to help it surface. After that, 
she just stayed. They talked about everything and nothing, with 
beautiful silences in between. She browsed through his portfolio while 
he sketched her in pencil, spending most of his time on her neck and 
collarbones, exaggerating them with dark shadows and creating delicate 
bright motion. She cupped her chin in her hand as he tattooed a dragon 
on another woman's body. The beast's tail flicked her hipbone, crawled 
across her waist and breathed fire against her spine. Rob was gentle 
and intense; Kylie wondered if he had forgotten she was there. It 
wouldn't have upset her too much—she didn't plan on trying to compete 
with what was obviously the love of his life. And then he looked up at 
her and smiled. 

The woman admired herself in the mirror for a long time before she left.
Rob locked the door behind her. He took Kylie's hand and wordlessly led 
her up the stairs. She sat down on the single bed. He poured a can of 
beer into a glass. 

* 

Kylie and Blue walked down the street. The noise of the city comforted
her. Blue was glad they were both back in their element and he wondered 
if she would buy him a hot dog. He looked at her face and saw she was 
afraid; no one else would have seen it, but it was obvious to him. He 
pushed against her and she grinned at him. 

They stopped in the park and laid down in the grass. She ran her hands
through his hair and kissed him. “You're so damn lucky to have me,” she 
said, but he knew she felt like the lucky one. 

A few feet away a woman sat, leaning against a tree, reading a paperback
novel with no cover. She glanced over at Kylie. She put down her book. 
Blue saw this before Kylie did, so he leaped over her and started 
shouting at her. He had found that he could basically say anything he 
wanted to her, and as long as he was loud enough, she'd follow him 
anywhere. He was normally silent, so she took his outbursts very 
seriously. 

She ran after him, away from the woman, and he kept on, not knowing
where he was going, until a familiar scent intoxicated him. He took a 
sharp right, missing a stroller by inches. He could hear her behind him 
and was thankful because he was starving and couldn't make himself slow 
down. Close, he thought. Very close. 

* 

Rob opened her mind. He showed her a world that was dripping wet and on
fire. He taught her to embrace the silence within her; those quiet 
moments when her soul wanted her to just be. There is beauty in 
ambiguity, he said. Not everything is meant to be solved. He pulled her 
back into bed in the morning and held her tightly. At night they read 
Anaïs Nin and Alan Ginsberg. He told her she was beautiful. He told her 
that he loved her. But he never did the dishes, so she left him. 

He liked to draw elaborate Egyptian eyes with thick lashes and twinkling
irises. His sketching was subconscious and almost every paper substance 
they owned had at least one forever unblinking eye scrawled somewhere 
on it. She saw it as a form of meditation for him; he was literally 
focusing on the sense that he valued the most because, to him, sight 
was perspective. The day before she left him, she let him ink one of 
the eyes on her foot. The lashes fanned out over her toes and swirled 
around her ankle. He didn't want her to pay him, but she put some money 
in the register when he wasn't looking. 

* 

Blue's heart was pumping frantically. The hot dog stand was close, he
could tell. Morris...Maurice... Blue couldn't remember the guy's name 
who owned it... He usually set it up on Fulton by the university. The 
foot traffic there was great, Maury said, tonguing the sweat off his 
upper lip. The guys would always buy a couple apiece and the girls 
would, too, if they were alone. If they were in a group they waited 
until one decided to get one, and then they all would. If I had a 
degree, Maury always said, I'd analyze that. But ahh fuck it, I'll 
leave it to those sociologists who'd get paid to sit and think about 
all that nonsense. 

* 

Kylie was walking down Cherry the day she left Rob when a collection of
papers literally fell out of the sky. It smacked on the pavement right 
in front of her. She looked around hesitantly, wondered for a moment if 
she could possibly be the target of some kind of sophisticated literary 
terrorist attack, then picked up the stack. It was a fifty page thesis 
by ‘M. Jones,' in which the virtues of objectivism were extolled and 
used to show how religion hinders society, and somehow tied it all in 
to a case for bringing Latin back from the dead. 

She walked around the neighborhood, asking anyone if they knew an ‘M.
Jones.' No one did, and there were no apartments from which the papers 
could have fallen. So she took it as a sign from something and started 
reading it. 'Our society's values have come into conflict; we do not 
know how to be capitalist altruists. We want to help our fellow man, 
yet our reward for success is measured in dollars. This is 
unreasonable; this is illogical. We have learned from Aristotle that 
when confronted with a contradiction, we must check our premises, 
because logically one of them is wrong. After thoroughly checking all 
premises, I have come to the conclusion that the unreasonable fallacies 
presented by religion are the source of this apparent contradiction.' 

Kylie looked up. The sun was gone and she was alone on the street. She
walked quickly towards downtown. It was exam week for the university 
and the library was open all night. It was easier than trying to find 
someone to stay with this late at night, and it seemed fitting that she 
should read this paper in the campus library. There was a girl just 
packing up her things. She saw Kylie and glanced at her watch. She 
winced, but approached her and said, “This may sound odd... I'm in a 
hurry and would normally do this more properly, but would you like to 
meet for coffee sometime?” Kylie agreed to meet her the next day 
outside her studio. 

'Does this rejection of religious altruism need to be a detrimental
conclusion? Or will it allow a truly capitalist society to emerge, one 
which values life and logic, because the means of these two are justice 
and truth? Religion gives us values without substance, arbitrary rules 
with which we are supposed to identify, on the threat of eternally 
burning in some imaginary naughty corner. This is illogical. This does 
not teach us to battle injustice or search for truth.  This does not 
benefit society.' 

Kylie opened her eyes. The sun was rising. Her back was stiff but her
mind was awake. She left the thesis on the table; she'd finished the 
last words as her body had drifted off to sleep only a few hours ago. 
She didn't know how she felt about objectivism...it was like the first 
time she heard about white privilege; it seemed to make sense, but 
she'd have to do a lot of self-reeducation to internalize it, and if 
she could manage all that, she didn't know what she'd do about it 
anyway. Still, it seemed to her that she'd come into contact with the 
thesis for a reason, although M. Jones would most decidedly disagree. 

She climbed on the bus to head back downtown. 'The birthplace of this
philosophy, and indeed, the homeland and touchstone for all 
intellectual discourse, is ancient Greece.' She jumped down onto 
Division, just south of 44th Street. 'The language of the fathers of 
thought, our ancestors whose work inspires us still today, is of 
course, Latin.' She strolled into Hole in the Wall and they were happy 
to see her. 'And so I will end with two words because they sum up 
everything I have tried to convey and they represent what our society 
lacks: veritas et æquitas.' 

They are written on the back of her neck. 

* 

Blue spotted the old man, Maury, scooping relish onto a bun for a few
frat boys. They wore Polo shirts with up-turned collars. He could still 
hear Kylie behind him, panting, calling out his name, trying to get him 
to slow down. And then she screamed something he didn't understand, and 
he was worried for a moment that she was talking to the woman from the 
park, because he could never understand her when she wasn't talking to 
him. Just as he decided to turn around, he was airborne and all his 
thoughts were gone. He closed his eyes and was dead before he hit the 
ground. 

* 

She threw her body over his and screamed. 

“Get out of the road, you crazy bitch! It's just a goddamned dog!” 

She tore herself off of him. 

* 

June was sitting on the counter, talking to Rob when a girl burst into
the shop. She tore open her shirt. June couldn't make out what she was 
saying, but Rob seemed to understand. His eyes glazed over with an 
obscure haze but he dove to grab his needle as she jumped into a chair. 
“Over my heart,” she sobbed, “A blue clover right over my heart.” 


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