All the writing on the front page is fabulous, and I feel really bad for not checking this blog more often (or at all). I was just in a creative writing class, so I do have some writing to share. They're all short stories (the only poem I'm proud of that I wrote in that class is currently being made into a movie [by me], so I'll just place a link to the movie on YouTube and you can watch it in all its glory--or not glory--when I finish it in June-ish). I won't post them all at once though. Just this first magical-realism piece to start.
Touched By God by Renata Gerecke
He doesn’t expect to hear bells ring as he enters the tattoo parlor, but ring they do. They ring like the high-pitched voice of his sister, singing at home or in elementary chorus or in college a capella or now, on Broadway. He shudders, as the sound continues to resonate.
“Have you ever heard the saying?” a woman then says. She enters from a back room, separated from the parlor by a heavy black velvet curtain. When she pushes it aside, the room becomes illuminated. He now sees the blood-red walls, covered in possible tattoo designs, and the maple wood counter top, buried under fliers for “indie” movie premiers he already has VIP invitations to.
“The saying about the bells–have you heard it?” she repeats. He shakes his head and looks up to finally face her. Her apron, a stunningly clean white, catches his eye. He wonders briefly if it is the apron and not the back room that illuminates the store, but it is a silly thought, one which he tries to abandon. But how does he see the apron if she is standing in the shadows–in such a way that her facial features are not defined?
“You have heard it, I bet that you have. Every time a bell rings, another angel gets its wings? Everyone has,” she says, and she’s right. He has heard the saying, every Christmas with his family watching It’s A Wonderful Life. He hates that saying. His brother, though, he was a sucker for it. Wore wings to school every day for a week after watching that movie.
“Well that is why we have those bells in here. We like our angels,” she says, and he thinks that she’s looking up at the bells just above his head but he can’t be sure. “Now take off those shades and tell me what I can do for you.”
“Lightening bolt. Here.” He points his stomach, just beneath and to the right of his belly-button. He has been thinking about this for weeks, ever since his girlfriend mentioned casually during intercourse that she thought it would be attractive. He did not disagree; to him, a lightening bolt holds the allusion of power and control that had always been missing from his life.
“Fine choice,” she says, and she gets to work. The needle does not hurt like he expects it to–he almost cannot feel a thing. Her hand on his stomach alleviates the pain. It glows against his toned abdomen and its presence on his stomach, just sitting there, makes him feel as though he is lighter than air–as if, if he wanted to, he could do anything. She hums as she works, a tune he does not recognize but reminds him of his mother, humming over the sound of his sister’s beautiful voice throwing insults left and right, humming over the sound of his nose breaking after his effeminate brother throws a punch, humming over the sound of her own affairs in his father’s absence.
He stops thinking about them, his family only upsets him, and before he knows it, the tattoo is finished. A long lightening bolt along his pelvic bone, with an inscription just above it that he did not ask for and can barely read.
“Would you like to see it magnified?” she asks, as if she knows what he is thinking. She hands him a mirror and he can see it clearly now:
Touched By God
He doesn’t understand right then, and he doesn’t question. He thanks the woman and pays her and leaves the store, ringing the bells but refusing to listen to their harsh criticisms. He refuses to listen to his sister call him an outcast and his brother say he’s adopted and his mother’s goddamn humming–and then, as he enters his car, he feels for the first time a stabbing pain on his stomach, just beneath and to the right of the belly-button: a delayed reaction that bothers him for a minute and then goes away. He takes his keys out of his pocket and jams them into the ignition and starts his car, wondering what his girlfriend is doing right then, and where he should take her for dinner.
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