John closed his eyes tightly. He could feel water welling up in the corners of each, but his mind refused to recognize them as tears and marked them down as sweat instead.
“Geez it hot in here.”
“Calm down, we’re almost done.”
The tattoo artist’s tone was derisive and insulting in that way you talk to a child when your trying to be polite but you’re really annoyed. John knew the tone well. He heard it all day long from mothers at the end of their ropes who came to his teller window at the bank to deposit a check or turn in a few rolls of coins.
“There we are. That wasn’t so bad now was it?”
John could tell he said this to everyone. You could end the day on the table dead and he would still say it, scrawling his name on a bill and tossing it over his solder as the medics rushed into the room too late to make a difference. John felt like telling him off, but he knew he wouldn’t so he mustered a weak forced smile instead.
“There’s a mirror in the corner. Give it a good look over and then I’ll bandage it up.”
John stood up, and the fresh flush of blood and feeling to his arm sent a new shock of pain up his shoulder and through his neck. He winced, but quickly hid.
He stood up to the mirror and looked over his new addition. At first all he could see was the swollen redness of his battered skin, but as his eyes focused, he began to see the faint ink lines emerge and congeal into shapes and pictures. He continued to stare, at first lazily, but with increasing intent, as if his mind was slowly working out a math puzzle and the final operation just eluded him. Finally things suddenly snapped into focus.
“What is this?”
“Hmm”, mused the artist half listening as he prepared a gauze bandage.
“This, what is this on my arm?”
“It the brogan’s cross, for Brogan State Penn. And two roses. You were in for two years right?”
“Brog…Brogen State Penn? You mean the penitentiary? It’s supposed to be a book. John Brogen’s book ‘An English Rose’! What have you done to me?”
“Na mate, its right here in the invoice. One Brogen…” The artist stopped short as he squinted at his own inscrutable handwriting on the bill of sale.
John’s heart began to race. He looked back in the mirror, examining the new tattoo over and over, forcing his mind to actively identify each element and assure him that he was seeing what he had seen just moments before. Each time the same, a ghoulish gothic style cross, throned with jagged black spines and flanked on each side with a smiling skull holding a rose in its teeth.
“Here,” John’s voice shook as he spoke, “quick, wipe it up before the ink dries.”
“I ah, well, I can’t. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Of course it does, here,” John grabbed a sterile towel from the counter and pressed it hard to his flesh. His skin burned at this further indigence and he winced at the pain. Then, gritting his teeth he began to rub furiously.
“Wait, wait, you’ll tear your skin to shreds and get an infection. Look, the ink’s down deep, under the skin, you can’t just soak it up.”
“Well the get your erasing fluid or whatever you use. Just get it, hurry.”
“Look, I’m sorry. Tattoos are permanent. Only way to get them off is with a laser, and the…”
“So get the laser, what are you standing there for.” John was practically in tears now.
“Calm down. Like I was trying to tell you. Only a doctor can do that. And they can’t take it off until the skin’s healed up. Look, this happens every once and a while. It’s no big deal.”
“No big deal! I look like a hoodlum.”
The tattoo artist almost started laughing at John’s choice of words. “It’s cool, look, we’ve got a dermatologist we work with. I’ll give them a call and make you an appointment. The shop will cover everything. You’ll have to wait 6 weeks for the skin to heal up and then you can go to the office and have it off. It just takes an hour or so.”
John looked back in the mirror, purposlly blurring his gaze, but his two new osseous companions starred back at him with their wide grins intact.
Have you ever wondered why the stereotypical Anglo-Saxon style old English phrase replaces the word the with the word ye? OK, I admit that I never really wondered either, but it’s one of those little tidbits of information that, once you know it, makes you feel like a better English speaker.
It turns out that what we’ve all been pronouncing as /ji/ (rhymes with tree) is actually not originally a y, but instead the Anglo-Saxon letter thorn, written as a capitol Þ and lower case as þ, and pronounced as a dental fricative—a th sound.
Þ capitol letter thorn—UTF-8: 00DE
þlower case letter thorn—UTF-8: 00FE
According to Wikipedia, thorn (or þorn) once originally accounted for both voiced th sound, as in the, and the unvoiced, as in think, but was eventually replaced with the modern th combination—and example of a digraph—and by the letter Y in a few stock mems like ye olde. The letter thorn, þ, is still used in modern Icelandic to represent the unvoiced dental fricative, and even appears on the standard Icelandic keyboard layout.
Incedently, Icelandic also includes the letter eth, capitol Ð and lower case ð, representing a voiced dental fricative. Eth also derives from old (Anglo-Saxon) English, and was once used interchangeably with thorn.
Ð capitol letter eth—UTF-8: 00D0
ðlower case letter eth—UTF-8: 00F0
There now, don’t you feel better? Incendentally, if you’re now concrned that you don’t know where thorn and eth appear in the alphabet, fear not, Michael Everson and Baldur Sigurdhsson can help you out.
Tiny dogs, that all Sam was seeing lately, tiny designer dogs yipping and jumping on the end of ridiculously long thin leashes as their owners paid them little attention. When he was a kid Sam could remember lots of his neighbors and friends all up and down South Avenue having dogs, but none was smaller than a fire hydrant or stack of news papers, at least not after it was a puppy. Sam could never have a dog. He wanted one desperately and when he was about 5 or 6 went through a phase of asking his mom for one whenever he was asked a question himself.
“Sammy, would you like to have peas for dinner tonight, or broccoli?”
“I would like a dog mother, a brown dog.”
“Did you brush your teeth yet?”
“I want a dog with small teeth.”
It was a desperate ploy, more than Sam could have dreamed up on his own. He got the idea from one of the Saturday afternoon movies that he watched in the back room of the beauty parlor while his mom worked. In the movie a little girl—Sam thought one of the other characters had called her Sam and that’s what caught his attention away from coloring—desperately wanted her father back for christmas, and so started in on a similar campaign asking first every Santa Clause bell ringer she and her mother passed, and then eventually every bearded man.
The film played the whole incident up as sweet an endearing. Sam was too young to get the full effect at the time, but he was old enough to recognize the formula. The camera at eye level with the girl, the charming laughs and knowing smiles elicited from the Santas as they gave the girl’s mother a heartfelt look, and of course the music—soaring violins and warm horns.
Sam couldn’t wait to try this new method out, but for some reason things just didn’t seem right. The first time he tried it was right after his mother’s shift. She swept up the spent hair from around her station and then came into the back to get her purse from the row of lockers along the back wall.
“All done pumpkin. You ready to go?”
“I’m ready to get a dog mommy. A brown dog like Greg has.”
Several of the other hair dressers were in the room, also collecting their things, and like a wave Sam could see that same look he had seen in the movie wash over their faces. “Aww”, they all laughed, and Sam couldn’t hold back his smile. But somehow his mother had missed the wave. At first he though she hadn’t heard him. He tried again.
“Do you have all your things?”
“I don’t have a dog mom.”
Again the “Aww” from around the room, but this time with a little less feeling. There was no doubt she had heard it this time, but nothing registered on her face. Sam looked up at her expectantly, consciously trying to increase the level of wonder in his face but probably, he knew, affecting something more like queasiness or the look of someone about to sneeze. After a long silence his mother finally rolled her eyes and spoke.
“You know we can’t get a dog, you’re allergic. Remember when we went to visit grandma and grandpa on their farm in Vermont. All you had to do was pet their sheepdog for 5 minutes and you were sneezing and coughing and your hand got all red and puffy.”
“Yeah, but that won’t happen this time mom.”
“Oh yeah, and hows that?”
“Becuase I’m older now and I grew out of it.” It was the best he could come up with. Strangely it hadn’t occurred to him that he would have to defend his position. Surely the overwhelming power of his wonderment and the soaring violins would take care of that.
Sam was smart enough to see that the plan wasn’t working, but with little else in his bag of tricks, he stuck with it for the next few days.
“Sam, did you wash your hands, it’s time for dinner.”
“If I had a dog I could wash his hands before dinner.”