He went back to Malibu Mark five times. Each time he had one new fly tattooed on a different part of his body.
On his fourth visit he contrived to accidentally brush Tink, the receptionist’s, arm with the backs of his fingers. His knuckles made the briefest contact with a tiny black and white semicolon. Owen mistook it for two small insect tattoos, but when they appeared on his arm later that evening he saw what the design really was. He was disappointed for nearly forty minutes.
Until the memories ignited like burning phosphor in his mind.
Instantly he was Tink—little Tinker Bell—at age eleven. A tiny waif of a girl cringing against the headboard of her bed, pillows and blankets pulled up to her chin as if they were armor enough against the monster who came into her room night after night. Uncle Harry. Big, fat, with a thin mustache and wet teeth that glistened as he smiled in the glow of the My Little Pony night-light. Teeth that glistened as he unbuckled and unzipped. Night after night after night.
Then he was Tink at fourteen. On the street, living in cars, in crack houses even though she didn’t use. Blowing strangers for food money. Fucking truckers for enough cash to buy the antibiotics that killed what they gave her. Living like a ghost that haunted her own life.
Tink at nineteen, standing on the wooden kitchen chair in a tiny apartment she shared with three other women. The chair wobbling as she fitted the electrical cord around her neck and then around the ceiling light. Smiling for the first time in years because there was no tomorrow, and that was a beautiful, beautiful thought.
Tink at twenty-two. Assisting now in the Survivors of Suicide that met Tuesdays and Fridays at the Methodist church.
Tink meeting Malibu Mark at the group. Comparing war stories. Comparing scars. Getting inked by him with the semicolon, the symbol used by people like her. Because that symbol was used when an author could have opted to end a sentence with a hard stop, but didn’t. Because now she was the author, and the sentence was her life … and she had finally come to the place where she understood there was more story to tell.
The memories burned through him. He screamed as he was raped, stifled her screams as he sold himself, wept for joy as he tightened the electrical cord, and shouted in triumph when he accepted life as the best next chapter. He. Not Tink. Owen. Because it was his story now, his life’s experience, his memory.
His ink.
When he went back to Malibu Mark for his fifth tattoo, there was another receptionist at the desk. A black woman with a shaved head. A stranger.
“Where’s Tink?” he asked, making it sound casual. The woman’s eyes shifted away, but as they did he saw how wet they suddenly got. How filled with grief.
“Tink left,” said the woman, and then changed the subject.
Inside the studio, as Malibu Mark worked, Owen asked the same question. The needle paused in its work, the buzz-saw sound filling the air. The artist looked away, just as the new receptionist had. Then he took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and exhaled slowly.
“Some people can’t swim all the way upstream,” was what he said. Only that, and nothing more.
Owen found the obituary online. It did not say suicide, but he’d read enough of those things to know. He’d taken her memories and she could not live without them.
Owen never went back to Malibu Mark for more flies.
He didn’t need to. Now he understood how it worked.
Like a fly following the scent of spoiled meat, Owen went elsewhere, and the flies went with him.