by Cat Rambo
His mother blinked back tears. “I can’t believe you’re five already. My little man.”
Bobby’s father had died in a mass shooting when he was three. Since then, the family hadn’t had anyone to protect them. He folded his concealed carry permit carefully and tucked it into a pocket inside of his coveralls, ignoring the tremble in his fingers. The paper was a temporary permit—once he passed his required proficiency tests, his right to carry would be tattooed on the inside of his left arm.
Bobby knew that feeling fear was girlish and wrong. He hoped the feeling would go away when he had a pistol at his waist.
The house dinged. “Your ride is almost here.” His mother wiped away her tears. “I’m so proud of you, sweetie. You’re not nervous, are you?”
“I’m fine,” Bobby said, then dashed outside as the automated car pulled up. The door opened automatically, and he dove into the safety of the interior. The door slid closed behind him with a soft click, and a panel flashed.
“Please verify your identity,” the car said in its smooth, electronic voice.
Bobby pressed his palm to the panel. It flashed green.
“Welcome, Citizen Robert Halley Jr. Please confirm that your destination is the Downtown Firearms Proficiency Center.”
“Yes, that is my destination,” Bobby said.
The panel flashed green again. The car accelerated away.
Bobby sat in the funeral home, eyes dry but head bowed. He’d told his mother a million times not to go to the grocery store. They could get groceries delivered. No one needed milk badly enough to die for it. But she’d wanted to bake him a cake for his birthday. Instead, she got caught in a crossfire. And now she was gone.
He hadn’t touched the bowl on the kitchen counter. The eggy mess inside was probably moldy by now, but he refused to throw it out. His girlfriend Libby had been the one to turn the oven off.
His uncle Jack sat down next to him, eyes red and puffy. Bobby felt a pang of embarrassment at the older man’s obvious emotions.
“How are you holding up, kiddo?”
“I’m fine,” Bobby said. He kept his voice flat. Controlled. Like a man’s voice was supposed to be.
Uncle Jack patted him on the shoulder, and Bobby stifled the impulse to shrug his hand away. “Your mother was a good woman,” he said. “We’re all going to miss her.”
Bobby wasn’t going to miss his mother. That wasn’t the right word for the aching emptiness in his soul anytime he walked through the front door.
“I know that you’re eighteen now, but if you wanted to move in with your aunt and me for a bit, you’d be more than welcome.”
The added security of another armed man in the house did have its appeal, but Bobby could take care of himself. He didn’t want to get used to depending on anyone else.
He shook his head. “Thanks, but I’ll be fine.”
“I love you, Bobby, but I can’t go on like this.” Libby stood in the entryway, a backpack slung over her shoulder. Her stealth armor was already powered up, so her face was a wavy blur. Only her eyes were clear. Deep brown and warm.
“I’m a good provider. I’ve kept you safe. What more do you need?”
“A friend. Emotional support. Casual conversation. Trying to talk to you is like trying to get blood out of a stone.”
“You’re leaving because I don’t talk enough? That’s insane.”
“It’s really not,” she said. Tears glistened in her eyes, and Bobby turned away. He hated it when she cried.
“Fine,” he said, his voice as hard as he could make it. “Get out, then.”
The tears slipped down her cheeks and blurred into nothing. Bobby’s hands curled into fists. How dare she cry, when she was the one leaving?
She slipped out the door, and he punched it behind her.
Bobby sat alone in his bedroom and cleaned his pistol. The house dinged. “It has been 36 hours since you have eaten. Would you like to order a meal?”
Bobby stared at his shaking hands. Of course. He hadn’t eaten. That was what was wrong. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”
“What food would you prefer?”
“I don’t care. Pizza, I guess.”
“Phoning in your preferred pizza order. Delivery is expected within 45 minutes.”
His preferred pizza order still contained a small vegan veggie pie for Libby.
His gun was heavy in his hand. Cleaned and loaded. The only thing in his life he could count on.
“You seem to be in some distress,” the house said. “Should I dial a medical professional?”
“I’m fine,” Bobby said. He put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
About the Author
Jamie Lackey lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and their cat. She has had over 130 short stories published in places like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine, and Escape Pod. Her debut novel, Left-Hand Gods, is available from Hadley Rille Books, and she has two short story collections available from Air and Nothingness Press. In addition to writing, she spends her time reading, playing tabletop RPGs, baking, and hiking. You can find her online at www.jamielackey.com.
Editor’s Note
Guns seem a recurring motif in American politics nowadays; here’s a more somber take on them than the sly humor of “Bulletproof Tattoos.” Deceptively simple prose make this fable seem like a child’s story gone mildly wrong, only to skew wildly even darker at the last moment.
Suicide rates in America have grown in recent decades, affecting men two to three times as much as women. Can we offer our young men and women a support network rather than a shotgun? When we speak of toxic masculinity, the subset of masculinity that is harmful to both the self and society, this is one of its manifestations.
Bullets don’t make good best friends.
Bulletproof Tattoos
Paul Crenshaw
Allen was watching news of the nearest shooting when he decided he needed a tattoo to cover his neck. He had one over his heart, and one on each eyelid. His forehead and cheeks were covered, and enough of his lungs that he might live if he got lucky. He didn’t have the money to ink his back or chest, but he had saved enough for the neck, where more and more people were getting shot these days, he explained to his wife.
“More and more people are not getting shot in the neck,” she said, lighting a joint, her eyes narrowing to slits as she dragged. He could just see the little islands on her eyelids. “People are going for the eyes now, and your eyes are uncovered.”
They were sitting in their apartment on the 29th floor, looking out the door of the balcony, where they never went. Allen had turned off the news. It had been a deli this time, three dead beneath the glass cases of capicola. The sound of gunshots, sporadic this early in the evening, drifted up from below. In the center of the city, the glass Gloch building caught the last sun.
Emily exhaled, counting off points on her fingers. “Most of your stomach is uncovered,” she said. “And your back. Your lower ribcage. Some of your chest.” She took another drag. “Besides, it’s safer to stay in.” She waved a hand. The gunshots were coming closer together now. “The air is all bullets out there.”
She found this so funny she was soon coughing, holding the joint up as if to save it. He took it from her and walked to the balcony door—bulletproof plexiglass—and looked down. He could see the brief white light of gunshots far below, like meteors falling on a summer night from his childhood.
“The air,” he said, laughing with her now as he exhaled, “is all bullets. That’s good. You should write that down.”
In the morning he went out to make an appointment. He disarmed the security and pushed the big steel door open and went down the stairwell. Most floors smelled like kerosene—some people had spent their electricity money on tattoos and were using lamps. He wanted to go back upstairs and crawl in bed besi
de Emily and watch her work. He loved to watch her work, even when he wondered why they were working so hard to make the world bulletproof.
There had been two shootings in the neighborhood this week. Other parts of the city were much worse. In their old neighborhood near the heights, the hearses were out every morning and he could not sleep for all the firing. Every time he drifted off, the crack of a gunshot would jerk him awake. Sometimes they could hear bullets hitting the walls. Emily would be sitting up beside him, covers pulled to her chin, face so frightened it hurt him. Back before they got covered, they were afraid of everything.
“I’m so tired of living like this,” she would say, and he would hold her until her breath evened out.
In their new apartment, the walls were bulletproof. And the doors and the windows and parts of their skin. Sometimes when Emily was high she would laugh, smoke leaking out of her mouth, her voice still down in her stomach. “My bulletproof ads got us a bulletproof apartment,” she’d say. “But we can’t go outside until we are.”
The air was not, in fact, made of bullets. But every night the news showed more shootings. At schools, at factories, at office buildings. In old apartment buildings that didn’t have security.
Emily did not have to go out. She could write her ads from home and send them electronically. Her paycheck was electronically deposited. Anything she wanted—food, marijuana, morphine—she could buy online.
He did have to go out. When the number of gun deaths per year had hit a hundred thousand, he’d started a small company installing bulletproof doors in old apartments. Sometimes, when the job ran too long and dark fell on him out in the world, he could hear the gunshots all over the city as he walked home. Not so bad during the day, but night smelled of cordite and fear. During the day everyone he saw had a few visible tattoos, enough vital areas covered by ink that stray bullets might bounce off. At night, everyone was covered, either by ink or old armor—Kevlar helmets, flak jackets, vests.
Emily was almost covered with ink now. They could not afford it themselves—ink was still far too expensive for most of the middle-class to be fully covered—but she had gotten hers gratis when she had come up with the “Bullets bounce off black babies” ad that showed a white child inked all black, bullets bouncing off its skin. That one had made lots of money.
She got paid in ink. Her eyelids were covered with scenes of blue sky and small islands, and her cheeks with ocean waves. On her chest swam a koi fish, bright orange, surrounded by seaweed. Her breasts looked like lily pads. When she had first come home, he had lain awake for hours looking at her. He was afraid to touch her. She looked more alive, and he did not know if that was because it was less likely she would die now, or because of the way the ink sat on her skin, like breathing art.
The tattoos had been invented out of necessity. Hamstrung by the gun lobbies, the government found itself unable to do anything about the dramatic rise in gun deaths—school shootings, workplace shootings, men shooting their wives for burning dinner. There was no way to stop the socioeconomic factors or the mental health issues that contributed to the growing epidemic, no way to get millions of guns off the streets.
Then military research into bulletproofing hit a breakthrough. Within a year the first ink was drying on the first soldier. The technology leaked into the private sector. Allen still remembered the first TV ad, a man with a small swallow inked over his heart being shot with a .357 Magnum at point blank. He went down in a heap but rose a moment later, the swallow unscathed, his heart intact.
The next morning the streets were full of people clamoring for ink, though it took a few years for the industry to make the new tattoos widely available, and even then only a few could afford them. The ink was costly and the new Laser Imagining and Engraving System even more so. But more and more shootings convinced people they needed more and more coverage, so people saved, or spent their savings for safety. They all got the small swallow over the heart, the heart being the first thing that got hit.
Those who could covered themselves. After the French ambassador was shot seven times outside the embassy in DC, even the politicians put themselves under the laser, engraving elaborate symbols of state on their skin: the Washington Monument, Capitol Hill, The Constitution.
The number of deaths did not go down far, but the streets seemed safer. People went to work more colorful and less afraid, at least the ones who could afford the privilege of ink. The bullets, Allen heard, left a bruise and sometimes broke ribs, but they bounced off.
Assuming, of course, they hit a protected area.
“Are You Fully Covered?” had been another of Emily’s ads. They appeared often on the slick pages of magazines and on digital billboards that also advertised the same guns that necessitated the tattoos. In her ads there was always a woman wearing almost nothing, her skin inked in bright red or sky-blue, some scene computer-designed to enhance the natural beauty of the body, to make one forget why the tattoos were needed in the first place.
The gun ads were much simpler, appealing to fear instead of fashion. The newest one had two images: a Beretta 11-mm automatic hand-rifle, and a naked woman with a tiny tattoo over her heart, so small you could hardly see it.
“When the bad guys come,” the copy read, “Which of these do you want to protect you?”
Outside, it was a fine day in late fall. The cars idling against the curb leaked exhaust like warm breath. The trees along the streets of their neighborhood—their good neighborhood, he reminded himself—had lost their leaves and leaves went skating down the sidewalk in the wind. Some people on the street had designs drawn on their faces, but he wasn’t sure if the designs were ink. People had started hand-drawing their own facial designs in the hope that a shooter might think their faces were bulletproof, and so shoot at their chests, where they actually were covered.
He went along looking into the wired windows of the shops, stopping occasionally to examine some item, a small hover-copter or handgun. He went past Medgar Evers Elementary, where the children’s voices were muted behind the walls and men on the roof watched the street with their rifles, and JFK Junior High, which looked like a concrete bunker.
By the time he made it to 20th, where the tattoo parlors were, Emily’s new advertisement was already up. There were digital billboards everywhere, shifting every few seconds so he saw several ads on each one. Many were throwbacks to older advertisements, updated now: “Got Ink?” one said. “Just Do It.”
On this billboard a long-limbed woman—her name was Netta, and she worked for Emily’s ad agency—struck a seductive pose. A great red heron poised in mid-flight across her chest, sea mist and waves in the background. Her neck was draped in white lace, only it wasn’t lace and it wasn’t draped. On her face, pale white stars stood in the shape of some constellation, the black backdrop of space shaded into her cheeks. Her ears had been inked to look like the rings of Saturn.
Beneath Netta, the ad read, “The Air Is All Bullets. Become Bulletproof.”
Below that was the name of one of the better tattoo shops. He wondered how much Emily had gotten paid, if she would get more of her skin covered as payment. He wanted her covered. Even the whites of her eyes, and even then he would tell her that anytime she went beyond the apartment walls she must keep her eyes shut.
There were far more people in front of the tattoo shops than there should be. There had always been tattoo parlors along 20th, but after bulletproofing, the number of shops multiplied by a hundred. Now, long lines spilled from all the doors up and down the street. Allen felt a fever go through him as he got in line beside a man wearing an old World War Two steel helmet and a coat hand-sewn with steel plates. The man’s son stood in front of him, fine blond hair lifting in the wind. He wore a stainless steel skillet on his head, tied by string beneath his chin.
“What is it?” Allen said. “Another one?”
The man nodded upward, where above the shops the
ad screens were now showing film footage instead of advertising. The same scene played again and again—a masked and armored gunman firing an M-7 into a crowd of people. It took Allen a minute to realize it was the playground of an elementary school, and the children had been lining up to come in from recess. Their bodies jerked when they were hit with bullets. The material of their coats puffed out. A girl’s head exploded.
Allen looked at the lines again, knowing that after every school shooting more and more parents got their children covered, even if they couldn’t afford it. Even if they had to take out second mortgages or sell their kidneys or turn to prostitution. Some of the people had their faces tattooed. Most of them wore coats festooned with steel: silverware, skillets, pots and pans. Most of them had children, hands clasped to their children’s’ shoulders to keep them close. Some of the children had their cheeks tattooed and some had their necks inked and their shaved heads shaded, and all of the parents were alternating between looking up and down the street wildly and watching the same scene play out on the screens again and again: the man closing in on the schoolyard, bringing his assault rifle to bear. The bullets burping out of the barrel, ejected so fast you could see only the empty shells and the exhalation of gas. The children falling and screaming, the wide eyes of the teachers and their uncovered faces as the children dropped. One teacher ran toward the shooter in an attempt to protect the children, but only made it a few steps before her body crumpled. The children’s mouths hung open like tomb doors until the SWAT teams closed in on the shooter, bullets shredding his skin, his face disappearing just like the little girl’s had. The camera swept the schoolyard to show dozens of bodies bleeding onto the sidewalks.
He had watched it 117 times by the time he made it to the door of the tattoo shop. More people came to stand in line behind him, talking of the newest shooting.
