Ink & Bridgit

My friend long ago told me a story idea about a world where people's fears manifest as tattoos. I promptly stole it and wrote these little jobbies. 

Ink

Pretty girls hiding deep burgundy secrets

Sequestered away in midnight corners of the soul.

Girls with fears like tumors

Terrors growingengulfingconsuming body and spirit.

Fears of inky blackness, polluting a white porcelain soul.

Droplets of deep sea dark

Leaking

Pouring

Rushing into the morning

Secret witching-hour fears.

Things that should stay buried, bubbling to the surface,

Ink stains spreading.

Girls who can’t hide their souls –

Can’t hide their terrors –

The same difference in the end.

Girls whose India-ink fears gushed out of them,

Blue-black stains like bruises

Spiders and snakes and phantoms,

Cliffs and falling and strangers and alone

Inked across floors

Written on bodies

Smearing spider terrors.

Drowning girls, suffocated,

Souls scribbled in the daylight for all to see.

Bridgit

She hoped to conquer her fear – in all other things she was strong; she was triangles and diamonds. Granite. She had looked a gorgon in the eye and not been transformed, searched out and fought the minotaur, strangled a hydra: unafraid, untouched, unchanged. But the fear of the ocean consumed her, brought her to her knees with fright, woke her screaming in the middle of the night,  wrenched awake with terrors of drowning, of creatures with tentacles and legs and suckers and poisons. Being adrift, abandoned by humanity, slowly going mad. Miles and miles of undrinkable water – of ceaseless, killing blue.

With a grim determination and with inky waves spreading over her body away she went to the seashore. Her legs were encircled with tentacles, the heads of giant squid tattooed across her feet. Starfish covered her hands. Dark seaweed climbed up her neck and tiny barnacles attached  above her eyebrows and along her cheekbones. But on she went, even as the tattoos grew and stretched, even when her skin was no longer skin but only ink-dark fears. As she reached the water’s edge, where the waves became land and things were transformed, she began to weep – dark tears, ink tears. Tears in the spirit. Fear and soul leaking out, combined in the ink. One girl, standing by the ocean, ink tears streaming down her face feet beginning to dissolve.

I see this from my balcony. By the time I could run down the stairs and onto the beach, she would already be dead. It happens quickly, this drowning. So all I can do is sit, enraptured by the toxic lethal beauty that is the girl on the beach turning into an ink stain disappearing into the sand.

xo, 

Devo