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Being Real
cc&d (v264) (the July/August 2016 issue, v26)




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Screwed, Glued, and Tattooed

Edward Michael O’Durr Supranowicz

Cereal Boxes


    Alright, I do not like tattoos. Never did, or mostly never did.
    When I see a tattoo, I want to wash it off, which is sort of a problem since the tattoo is on somebody else and they probably prefer to do their own cleansing and scrubbing. And, anyway, they probably want to keep it.
    I guess the ablution urge stems from when I was a kid and washable cartoon character tattoos came in cereal boxes. Those things would dry and feel creepy on your skin, plus I usually got bored with them by the middle of the day.
    Another facet of my dislike or disinterest involves going to the circus and seeing the tattooed lady. She was kind of wrinkled, and when she pulled up the folds of her skin these crazy and scary looking creatures popped up.
    Then there was Sadie, who worked at a truckstop. She seemed polite, and everybody says she was nice, so be nice to her. And she always wore sparklingly clean button-down white shirts with long sleeves.
    So I ask Sadie out, and she turns up at the construction site I was working at. She’s wearing a tank top, and both arms are covered in jailhouse tattoos. The guys ask if I was going to break my date with her, but that would not have been cool, so we go out to dinner.
    Sadie indicates she is up for anything, which probably meant anything, but somehow that makes me pause. And then I find out Sadie has been turning tricks with truckers for kicks and extra money.
    Guess you can’t say the tattoos made her do it. Neither can you likely rightly say she had the tattoos because she tended to do stuff like hooking. But let’s just say I did not want to see any more tattoos for a while.

A Little Unicorn


    First time I saw Annie she was standing in the middle of the street looking lost and terrified.
    And it turned out she was looking that way because crossing the street sometimes did make her feel lost and terrified. Not always, but just sometimes.
    That day, that time, I took her hand gently and walked her across the intersection before the light turned green. Not then, but several weeks later she told me that when she gets paralyzed like that it was because she suddenly feels she is in the middle of an ocean that keeps spreading outwards from her.
    Annie said her unicorn usually protects her, and she couldn’t understand the times it didn’t. Since unicorns are mythical (far as I know), I just put her remarks down as jabber. It wasn’t until we slept together that I realized the unicorn she talked about was a small tattoo nestled next to her belly button.
    As I said, I don’t like tattoos. But I figured the unicorn was not likely to multiply or get much bigger. And I doubted it made much noise or ate very much. As long as it stayed in its belly corral and I got the rest of her, I wasn’t going to get angry or jealous.
    So, after an appropriate interval, or maybe just when it happened to happen, the three of us moved in together. First thing Annie did was throw some straw on the front yard. She said that was so the new grass would grow.

The Mural


    Annie wanted a space to express herself, so she started painting images on the walls of a spare room. At first she just duplicated her unicorn. Then, dragons began to chase Lilliputians, Dante’s Hell gained several extra levels and various new forms of torture, and oceans became seas on fire.
    I came back from work one day, and she was standing naked in the center of the room. All the walls, the ceiling and even the floor had been painted. A sea of images surrounded her and seemed to stretch outward to infinity.
    She spoke little, but was visibly tired. She looked satisfied, but not necessarily in a happy way. I ask her no questions. She would speak when she wanted to, which ended up being several days later.

Darkness Descending


    Then the next week, I once again found her in the middle of the room. The entire room had been painted black, and Annie was covered in tattoos from her head to her toes. All the images that had been on the walls, ceiling, and floor were now on her.
    Even her long dark hour seemed to glisten with writhing monsters and swirling seas. Only her clear blue eyes seemed the same. Touching her belly, she spoke and said she could not find her unicorn. Darkness swirled around her like an endless sea.
    And so did the quiet.

Getting By


    Of course it bothered me that the Annie I looked at now did not look the same. Alright, it did creep me out at times. I may not have been thrilled about what happened, but neither was Annie.
    But we tried to go about our daily business, not altering our basic plans and hopes. However, Annie had gained a bit of celebrity that made us both uncomfortable: several tattoo magazines wanted to feature her on their covers.
    We talked to Annie’s doctor, then a shrink, then a gypsy fortune teller, but nobody had a clue - not about Annie’s condition, nor it seems things in general. An internet search turned up nothing even remotely similar.

The Morning


    It was a chilly morning, and I started to put a cover over Annie’s sleeping form, but I stopped abruptly. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. At first, I wasn’t quite sure what.
    But then I noticed that Annie was preternaturally still, as was the air in the room. Annie’s blue eyes were now completely white as if they had rolled back inside her head. Her body and her hair were translucent, seemed only to be composed of tattooes, not skin and bones.
    I called 911. The cops threatened to arrest me for a false report, that a tattooed life-size doll was no excuse to call them and EMS. When I insisted that was Annie, or some version of her, they threatened to put me in the looney bin. They laughed at my suggestion they file a missing person report.

Other Options


    I called Annie’s parents, but they would not claim her remains. They insisted it was not their daughter, and besides, their rabbi would not bury anyone/anything with so many tattooes.
    I decided to pay for her burial myself. However, no funeral home would take her remains. I was called a variety of names, none of them nice.
    The tattoo magazines heard about the situation and offered to buy her for display. That was just too degrading, disgusting, and inhuman to give even a second’s thought to.

Final Option


    I checked with a lawyer and the health department and was told there was nothing illegal with burning Annie’s remains, as long as it was done outside city limits.
    I made a pyre and lit the fire. Smoke began to rise and swirl around me and her remains. Shapes and shadows drifted in and out of each other and spread outwards like an endless sea.
    And in the middle of it all, there seemed to be a unicorn, running, running towards the setting sun, laughing at the rising moon.



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