Cody Van Sant

You are eating lunch off a firehouse table in a body that has been going bald since the Clinton administration, and it is a Monday, and Kevin Marchetti's knees ache the way they have ached for two years now, a dull tenant that never pays rent and never leaves. Somebody down the hall is watching a rerun of a game nobody won. You have been him less than a minute in your own accounting — thirty-some seconds since the last spin dropped you into this kitchen chair with his coffee going cold in his hand — and already you know you are not staying. It isn't the knees. It's that you have done this math six hundred and twenty-three times before and you know the tell in your own chest, the way wanting sits differently than needing, restless and a little ashamed of itself. You set his mug down on his napkin like you are doing him a courtesy. You are already gone before you are gone.

The site loads the way it always loads, patient, low-lit, a wheel that does not care what you feed it. You pay. You spin. Somewhere the color runs and the names blur and stop.

The lights in the shop go out for two full seconds — the sign, the overheads, the little desk fan by the register, all of it — and when they come back on you are sitting in a tattoo chair with your forearm strapped into a padded rest and a stranger's gloved hand steadying a machine an inch above your skin. The arm does not flinch. A moment ago it must have been flinching — you can feel the ghost of that in the muscle, a held tension going soft under you like a fist opening — and now you watch the needle dip into green soap and blood-pink skin with the mild interest of someone watching rain hit a window. The jaw that was clenched a breath ago hangs loose. Somewhere under the buzz of the machine a radio is playing something with a fiddle in it.

The shirt is what gives him to you first — not this shirt, a black t-shirt with a tag that itches, but the one under it in memory, a black button-down with the sleeves rolled twice, the one he wears behind the bar four nights a week, and touching this shirt's twin wakes the whole rack of them: the smell of citrus rinse water, the particular ache across the shoulders after hauling a case of well vodka up from the walk-in, the way he ties the same half-apron every single shift without looking at the knot because his hands already know it. He is twenty. He has been pouring drinks since he was eighteen and lying about being nineteen, and the owner has never once asked, because the owner likes him and the regulars like him and nobody out here on the gravel road much minds a fact bent a little if the boy shows up on time.

The stool under you is the tattoo chair, vinyl worn pale at the seat, and it gives you the whole shop before it gives you anything else — the mirror wall, the smell of green soap and antiseptic, the fluorescent hum, an artist named Deb who has done three of the six he's thought about getting and talked him out of two more. Then the forearm itself, bare and stretched, opens like a door: the name in careful script, ELEANOR, and under it a date, and holding that skin brings back not the tattoo but her — his mother, who is not dead, who lives forty minutes east past the water tower, who had him at nineteen and raised him on double shifts of her own, waitressing a truck stop off the highway till her feet gave out on her. The date isn't a death. It's her birthday. He got it because she cried the good kind of cry when the sonogram of his baby sister came back healthy last spring, and because for one whole afternoon in a hospital waiting room he looked at his mother and thought, plainly, I got lucky, this is who raised me, and wanted it where he'd see it pulling bottles off a shelf for the rest of his life.

More comes, unbidden, riding the touch of denim on his thighs, the chair's arm rest under his palm: mornings behind the bar before opening, restocking the well in the grey hour when the highway outside is empty and the water tower catches the first light like a coin standing on its edge. The asthma that makes him keep an inhaler in the same drawer as the bar rags, used twice a summer when the heat and the dust off the road gang up on him. A night two months back with a man from out of town, a woman the month before that, nothing that stuck, nothing he's chasing — he likes people well enough as they come and doesn't mind much which door they walk in through. The studs in his ears he put in himself at sixteen with a lighter and a sewing needle and his mother nearly killed him for it. The crew cut he keeps tight because the humidity out here does what it wants with anything longer.

His hand — small studs glinting faintly where the overhead light catches his ear in the mirror across the room — sits still on the padded rest, palm up, while a stranger's gloved fingers trace the last letter of his mother's name into his skin with a needle that does not, right now, hurt him at all, because he is not the one feeling it anymore.

You turn your wrist over and look at the hand like it belongs to a photograph. The tattoo artist glances up, machine still buzzing, waiting on him to wince or joke the way he must have been doing thirty seconds ago.

"Almost feels good," you say, and let your eyes come up off your own arm and hold steady on nothing in particular — on whatever is watching.