Photo by Dynamic Wang on Unsplash
by Kate Horsley
Every time something big happens, the sisters get tattoos, beginning with that constellation eulogising their virginity, twin Scorpios hich later blur to shooting stars, and their jobs at Vic’s Vinyls pay for Mackenzie to graduate with fireworks showering her right hip and for Carys to shoot a bottle rocket from her left, and Carys’s crush, the blue-haired chick in Symbolic Ink, fine-lines white angel wings into the girls’ ankles for college. Four years of separation are duly mourned in sleeves of interlocking puzzle pieces inked in orange and green, while blackwork notes freckle tender inner thighs every time a lover tries to read their bodies, because it doesn’t mean anything, groans Carys, rolling away from a French girl who calls herself a ‘deconstructionist’, except – Mackenzie whispers into her art history professor’s grizzled sideburns – that we really like tattoos.
‘Holidays’ are gaps in a tattoo’s colour where the artist missed a space, or the tattooee picked her skin when she shouldn’t have, and by the end of her manic thirties, Carys has no holidays, is crayoned toe to nape, smiling at the secrets veiled by tailored white linen and the green-tinged glass of her corner office. At the end of her second marriage, Mackenzie’s lying bastard ex tells the court her affairs are evidenced by notes on her inner thighs (but not that he slept with Carys), then comes Mom’s funeral, after which the sisters stop speaking, then alimony buys Mackenzie the burn of a tattoo removal laser, penitence more satisfying than needle pressing rib, fading blackwork to dark- mid- palest- grey.
Holidays are gaps Mackenzie flows through, reaching the hospital in a trickle of watercolours so Carys can cool feverish fingers on her sister’s arm which lasers have faded to a Venn diagram of intersecting smudges, a gesture Mackenzie mirrors, tracing the lines of a scarlet demon along her sister’s dwindling thigh as Herceptin marks each of Carys’s tumor cells for theoretical destruction, Mackenzie whispering, I’m sorry I broke our ritual, Carys turning her head in the pillows – I get why you needed to erase him, but how could you erase us? I kept this one, though, says Mackenzie, raising her ankle so Carys can feel angel wings flutter upwards, inked in white.
Kate’s first novel was shortlisted for the Saltire Award. Her second was published by William Morrow. Her short fiction has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Citron Review, Fictive Dream & BULL, and placed in Bath, Bridport and Oxford.
