by Rune Skelley
Amid much flailing and swearing, her drunken limbs conveyed her into her uncle’s embrace. She straddled him and tried to keep her gaze averted from his missing hand. He chuckled as he entered her, then grabbed her left hand and put her thumb in his mouth. Melissa shuddered as he sucked it and shoved his salty thumb into her own mouth.
No matter how much she resented Brad, at least he never did anything like this.
Severin rested his stump on her hip. Melissa’s stomach clenched, but she had to see this through or face suicide. She couldn’t take a life full of the patterns again.
Her uncle seemed intent on bringing her to orgasm. Melissa did her best to accommodate so he wouldn’t start prodding her with his stump. She’d passed out midway through her first time with him, and now she was grudgingly impressed at his staying power. Once she divorced her mind from the proceedings and only allowed herself to experience physical sensations, she felt surprisingly strong stirrings and her climax built.
When she came, Severin popped his thumb out of her mouth and pulled her down to kiss her, sucking the air from her lungs.
Melissa snagged the wine bottle and drained it to wash away the taste of Severin. He grabbed her hip to hold her in place.
Ages later he came too, and allowed Melissa to sleep.
When she woke, a fresh bottle of wine stood beside the hammock, uncorked and waiting.
Melissa struggled to her feet, ready for a trip to the bathroom. Severin looked up from his book. “I thank you for your assistance, Melissa, and I trust you found your lesson instructive.”
“That was no ‘lesson.’”
He held up his left arm, displaying the unbandaged stump. Instead of exposed bones, there was now shiny scar tissue.
“How the hell?”
Severin’s lips did something smug. “The powers of the Elsewhere are marvelously useful. Do you understand now how to use them?” He sounded amused.
“You know I don’t.”
“Let me know when you’re ready for your next lesson. I am at your beck and call.” He returned his attention to his book.
*** *** ***
The prophecy reverberated in the alien spiders’ collective mind. It spoke of a Divided Man, a being tragically split apart from itself. Prophecy also assured that this figure would be put whole through the Completer, restoring light upon the Earth.
The Tanner brothers were the Divided Man, although that image was best seen allegorically. The entire species was sintered into tiny, confused individuals. Fin and Kyle were archetypes, imbued with elemental separateness. In their fusion, all separation would be overcome for everyone.
Subconsciously Fin knew this. The art on his skin reflected the prophecy, the eclipse on his forearm most strikingly. It depicted the fusion of opposites necessary for the Completion of the Divided Man.
The spiders basked in the beauty of that vision of total unity. Their bliss didn’t last, though, as they contemplated the cruel twist that connected them with, perhaps, the wrong brother.
Fin knew about the prophecy, but never told them.
Kyle was wreathed in it, stamping it onto everything he touched.
Fin rejected the prophecy, resisted his part in it.
Kyle embraced it, and possessed the will to act.
Rather than battling each other, these men should have been cooperating as agents of the Collective Id.
Now, it was too late. One of the brothers had been destroyed.
Or, had he?
Kyle’s mind was pulverized, reduced to a gritty plume and flung across the whole collective. But he was alive. If his countless tiny granules could be coaxed back together, he might be repaired. He might still fulfill his preordained role.
Just as Fin might be persuaded to abandon his radical individualism.
The spiders were conflicted about talking to Fin since being touched by Kyle and suddenly understanding so much more. But it would be wrong to give up on Fin, whatever his past mistakes. To do so would be contrary to the prophecy.
*** *** ***
Fin trailed his fingers along the length of Rook’s torso and over the rise of her hip, tracing the flight of the hundred or so bird tattoos speckling her pale skin. She was a Rook made of rooks, like the large tattoo on her right shoulder blade.
Sometimes that eight-inch tower, composed of a densely packed flock, was Fin’s favorite, but his favorite was often whichever he was looking at. They were all strong and sexy, like the woman who bore them. His wife.
The twin bed they shared meant they spent their nights spooning under the pile of blankets, naked. Fin wasn’t used to sharing, but he didn’t mind too much since it meant waking up to this, a beautiful woman’s bare bottom pressed into his crotch. Fin leaned forward and kissed his wife’s shoulder right where it started to curve into her neck.
Rook’s hair was black again, and smelled flowery, with a hint of ammonia. Her mood improved after dyeing it and taking a long shower, but she still seemed fragile. Fin understood. She’d been through a lot.
He kissed her neck and ran his hand up to cup her breast where a couple of the braver birds swooped close to her nipple.
She jerked awake and turned to look at him in the soft amber glow from Vesuvius.
“Morning,” he murmured and kissed her shoulder.
She smiled and relaxed back onto the pillow, facing him, her signal a gentle purr at the base of his skull.
Fin pulled her in for a kiss, ready to lose himself in her.
On his mini-fridge was one last condom. It supposedly glowed in the dark, but Fin couldn’t be bothered to let it charge up before putting it to use.
***
When Rook returned from the bathroom, Fin was lounging in bed. He was scheduled to look for a job today and wanted to procrastinate as long as possible. It would feel more satisfyingly slackerish with a smoke, but they were broke so he had effectively quit. Rook wouldn’t get her first paycheck from her new university library job for another two weeks.
“I need you to go somewhere with me today,” she said.
“The employment office?” Fin asked with marked unenthusiasm.
“Something you’ll like even less,” she promised. “The employment office will be like dessert after our errand.”
“Do tell,” Fin said, his interest piqued.
“I want to get my stuff from Marcus’s apartment.”
The statement hung there between them, and Fin waited for it to resolve into something more palatable. Like résumé writing. Or syphilis.
Rook soldiered on. “I want to get everything before the eviction notice goes up and they sell it at auction or something.”
Fin didn’t like the idea of her having to pay Marcus’s bills. She’d already paid enough on that asshole’s behalf.
“I’d like you to come with me,” she continued. “The memories…” She cleared her throat. “The memories might, uh…”
“Okay,” Fin said so she wouldn’t have to keep searching for the words. He’d already seen her upset enough in the past few days. “What do you think, Vesuvius? Does she just want me along to lug the heavy boxes?”
“That or she has a pickle jar she can’t open.”
Rook smiled with relief. Fin liked to make her smile.
He dragged himself out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a well-worn Nicotine tee over a thermal undershirt. He’d designed his band’s logo himself.
Rook upended her trash bag of clothes onto the floor and chose a gray minidress and a pair of thick black stockings.
The temperature was a balmy 20 Fahrenheit. Fin buttoned his Red Army trench and shoved his hands in the pockets. Rook wore her leather jacket, and wrapped a plaid scarf around her neck three times.
At the liquor store they scored a couple of boxes. Rook led the way around to the alley, heading toward Talisman Tattoo.
“I thought you wanted to go to the apartment.”
“After this. This should be easier. I need my certification papers, my portfo
lio, and my equipment. I paid for it, I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave it in there. I’ll sell it myself.”
Fin took her by the arm. “You don’t want to go in there.”
“Of course I don’t, but I need to get my stuff.” She was getting frustrated with him again.
“Hang on. Let me explain. I went in when I was looking for you. There’s puke everywhere.”
Rook wrinkled her nose. “Peyote.”
Fin nodded. “Plus, he was kinda crazy. There’s stuff you don’t need to see.” Specifically her blood-coated effigy. “You wait here. I’ll get your things.”
She told him what she wanted and where to find it. Fin hurried in, skirting the dried vomit lakes, and collected everything in under ten minutes. He checked the cash register for extra funds, but came up empty.
With Fin lugging the box of piercing supplies they walked to Marcus’s apartment. The building was a former motel, converted in the 80s, its U-shape surrounding a parking lot full of ratty cars and oil stains. The exposed staircase took them to the second floor’s open walkway.
Rook hesitated outside the door to #211, key at the ready. She looked up at Fin, her blue eyes frightened and glistening.
“You can wait out here,” Fin said.
She shook her head. “Just help me, okay?”
“Okay.”
She stuck the key in the lock and turned the knob. The apartment looked like it had when Fin came to collect her clothes: larger and nicer than his own. The unit used to be two motel rooms with a connecting door. One of the bathrooms had been ripped out and its plumbing cannibalized for the kitchenette.
A private bathroom and a stove? Luxury!
Rook took a deep breath and let it out, then stepped into the living room. Fin followed. Seeing her here made him uncomfortable. She lived here with Marcus for two years. This was her home much more than the boarding house was.
“I want to do this quickly.” Her voice was tight. “Gather up any books that aren’t Native American themed.”
Fin scouted around while Rook rifled through CDs and DVDs, adding about half to the Stoli box she held.
The bedroom stank of stale pot smoke. Fin eyed the double bed with a pinch of jealousy and wondered if Rook missed having room to stretch out.
Moments later Rook darted into the room and over to a TV/VCR combo on the dresser. She stabbed the eject button and snatched the tape. After glancing at the handwritten label, she dropped it and stomped on it, sending her heel through the casing.
Fin raised his eyebrows and she said, “You don’t want to know.”
Fin tried not to think about what was surely on that tape.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Almost.” She added the dead videotape to her box, and walked into the white tile bathroom.
Fin tagged along.
From the shower she retrieved shampoo, conditioner, and a purple razor. She opened the medicine cabinet and tossed him a pink plastic case. “Now we don’t have to waste money on condoms.”
Fin opened the case while Rook grabbed her toothbrush and a stick of deodorant. A small dome of rubber sat in the box.
“I never trusted condoms on Marcus,” Rook explained in a falsely cheerful tone, “because of how... ornamented Li’l Coyote was.”
“I didn’t need to know that,” Fin grumbled, then realized, “It’s a diaphragm.”
“Yep.” Rook tossed two boxes of tampons and a handful of panty liners into the Stoli box.
Fin closed the case while Rook rummaged through a laundry basket, sorting her silky undergarments from Marcus’s BVDs and flannel shirts. Finally she positioned the vodka box at the edge of the counter and used her forearm to sweep everything in: hairspray, lipsticks, nail polish, and about fifty other mysterious tubes. Where would they put it all?
Back in the bedroom, Rook went to the desk against the end wall and unplugged an inkjet printer. As she flipped through a pile of papers her hands began to shake. By the time Fin set his box down and gathered her into a hug her cheeks were wet with sudden tears, her lips trembling.
I should never have let her come here!
Her whole body quaked, and so did her signal. She whispered something he couldn’t hear.
“Shh,” Fin soothed. “Let’s get out you out of here.”
She whispered again and this time Fin caught it. “I had to kill him.”
“I know.” He felt impotent, had no way of knowing how this felt for her, didn’t know how to help her. He sat on the floor with her in his lap and held her as she sobbed.
“He was going to rape me,” she said into his chest. “And then he was going to kill me.”
Fin squeezed her. “It’s all over now.”
“I screamed so loud.” She shuddered. “I was so scared, Fin.”
“I wish I could have helped you. But you were brave, Rook. Really fucking brave.”
“I shot him in the throat,” she whispered.
He hadn’t heard these details before. The image of her terror and desperation filled Fin’s head and brought tears to his own eyes.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep you safe,” he said. “I love you more than anything and it kills me that you had to go through that.”
She clung to him and wept, her tears soaking through his shirts to wet his skin. Many minutes later she said, her voice thick, “Will you still love me when I’m in prison?”
Fin held her tighter. “I would, but you’re not going to prison. I promise.”
“Someone will find his body.”
“No. I know you don’t want to talk about Kyle, but that’s the one thing he did right. His toadies took care of the van and everything in it. Nobody will ever find him.”
A long time later she shifted, breaking their embrace. With the bitterest smile she uncrumpled a wad of paper and showed it to him. A page from a large sketchpad, covered with a detailed pen and ink illustration.
“He was always working on the ultimate tattoo, to mark me as his. This was meant to cover my whole back.”
Fin studied the sketch. The spread-winged rook from her lower back spanned the bottom of the design, supporting a hodgepodge of tribal symbols and power animals.
“I didn’t want this, for obvious reasons. So I let him give me the other ink.”
Fin thought of all the birds and towers across her body. It never occurred to him she might not have wanted them.
“Every tattoo I have he gave me, and every time I see them they remind me…”
If Fin didn’t find a way to fix this, they would forever live in Marcus’s shadow. “Hey,” he said, but she didn’t respond. “Rook.” It took a couple more attempts before she looked at him. The pain in her eyes broke his heart.
Fin indicated the graceful braid of black ink encircling his left ring finger.
“Marcus was a deplorable human being, and what he did to you was vile, but he gave me this tattoo, and it’s beautiful.”
He positioned his hand on hers, lining up their wedding rings.
“It’s beautiful because it binds me to you. Forever. When I look at it I think of you, not him. I think of how much I love you and how amazingly lucky I am to have you.”
Her lips twitched in a tiny smile, but her eyes were sad. Such a delicate color, the ghost of the color blue, they now looked flat and tired. Fin knew it was up to him to bring them back to life.
“You chose to have your wedding ring, right?” said Fin.
Rook nodded.
“Did you choose any of the others?”
Another nod.
“Which one was first?”
She pointed to her right arm where she had a long black quill in an inkwell shaped like a chess rook.
“You were playing with the dual meaning of your name, weren’t you?” He smiled. He hoped to get her talking again, hoped he could salvage things.
“I wanted my mom to stop calling me Brook, to cement my chosen identity.”
“You did it brilliantly.”
�
��Then Marcus put the feather on my clavicle, then the birds on my ankle. After a while I had to balance them out with another tower, so I got this.” She indicated the solid black rook on her left wrist.
“You showed him you were the boss.” Fin hoped she’d see it that way.
Another tiny smile, this one briefly reaching her eyes. “I guess so.” She sighed. “After that it was a tug of war. He’d doodle ravens, I’d insist on a tower. Back and forth.”
“You kept him in his place,” asserted Fin.
“The one back here,” she pretzeled her arm around to pat her shoulder blade, “I thought by making the tower out of birds I could get him to stop calling them ravens and call them rooks, but it didn’t work. He still called them ravens. Called me Raven, too.”
“But they’re rooks. And you’re Rook. Any fool can see that.”
“I ended up with more birds than towers.”
“You never let him give you this monstrosity.” Fin waved the paper. “You won.”
“Did I?” She sounded so small and afraid.
“Of course you did. When I see your tattoos they tell me you’re a strong woman. You spent two years with the devil and you’re the one who came out alive. Even if you didn’t choose them all, your tattoos represent who you are. You are Rook. It’s the name you chose, and it’s who you are. You have the strength of the castle battlements and the grace and freedom of the bird. I love your tattoos because they’re part of you and I love you.”
“Really?”
“Really.” He kissed her forehead.
“When you look at them you don’t see him?”
“Absolutely not. I see my beautiful wife. But,” he conceded, “if you want to remove them, I’ll support you. I don’t know how we’ll afford it, but we’ll find a way. I like them but it’s more important that you like them.”
“You promise me they don’t bother you?”
“I promise.”
“And you really think they make me look strong?”
“I do.”
“And you really love me, even after everything?”
It wounded Fin that she had to ask, but she needed the reassurance right now. “Always, Rook. I love you always.”
Now her eyes smiled. “I love you, too.”
