The Ram (25 page)
Authors: Erica Crockett
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mythology & Folk Tales, #Mythology, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Suspense, #Occult, #Nonfiction
The tattooist checks out her bare head from where he stands in the doorway. Then he nods slightly and turns his body aside so she can enter.
Old Peach tells her not to do it. Not to go inside. But Perfect Peach, the future Peach, the one who current Peach fears, picks up her feet and moves her forward.
When she crosses the threshold of the door, the man closes the glass behind them and walks around a counter with a cash register. He pulls out a clipboard of papers.
“You’ll have to sign this shit,” he says. “And you better not be drunk.”
She takes the board from him, time seeming to move slowly. “I’m not,” she promises.
He must be able to hear the soberness in her voice because he starts in on a story about a client, one who never showed up for his appointment tonight, and how he was drunk when he came in the first time looking to get tattooed.
“The dude bled everywhere. And then he begs for another appointment, says I’m the only one can tat the design he wants and then blows me off.”
Peach signs all the papers and hands them back to the tattooist. He flips through the pages and skews his nose up at her signature.
“Weird name,” he says and then puts the clipboard down on the counter. “I thought only rock stars went by one name?”
She doesn’t reply, instead takes in the shop. There are a few chairs spread over an open room. What looks like a massage table is unfolded in a corner and the walls are lined with framed examples of tattoos that can be delivered to uninspired clients.
“Which one is your setup?”
He nods at a giant barber chair near the front counter and Peach approaches it cautiously. She wonders if she’s alone with the man in the quiet of the shop.
“I’ve got to shave a little bit of your head,” he says and spends some time gathering his supplies and tools and a disposable razor in navy blue. He snaps on a pair of black gloves the same color as the ink ready to tint her flesh. “Where’s this thing going on your skull?”
Peach takes a seat and places her hand on the back of her head, where her neck flares up to her skull.
“Here,” she says, “but it doesn’t have to be too big. Just postage stamp-sized is fine. I would have done it myself, but if I don’t have to, I might as well not screw it up.”
“So you ink?” the man asks as he swabs her skin with a shock of cool rubbing alcohol. The smell transports her back to her bloody knees, back to trauma.
“No,” she answers.
The tattooist takes her shoulders and tilts her away from him in the chair so he can access her scalp while seated on his rolling stool. He uses the razor in short, tight strokes to clean the new growth of hair off of her scalp. “Okay, so what are we doing?”
“The zodiac sign for Aries. The ram. It’s like a V with curls at the top.”
“Yeah, I know it. You want any fill, color, fading?”
“No, just simple black. Smallish.”
He clicks his tattoo needle to life and braces one hand on Peach’s back. “This is going to hurt, with all those tendons and nerves on your head. But it’s only a few lines, so it’ll be over quick. You ever get tattooed before?”
“No, but I plan on getting more. So I’ll get through the pain.”
The needle touches down and Peach tries her best not to jump. She feels every nerve ending down the length of her spine protest. She clutches the padded arm of the chair and grits her teeth.
The artist talks to her as he puts the black ink under her epidermis. “Isn’t Ares the Greek god of war or something?”
“Yes,” Peach replies, “but it isn’t that Aries. The zodiac Aries is a ram. Though Ares the god is related to Mars. And Mars is the planet associated with this zodiac month. So I suppose there are two different entities, Aries and Ares, who have meaning right now.”
“So it’s some sheep? That’s fucking lame,” he says and then clicks off his needle. He’s done quickly with the tattoo and the waves of pricking fire that inundated Peach dissipate and change to a sore aching.
“It’s a ram,” she says and turns in the chair to watch the tattooist unplug his needle and rest it on the tray with the other supplies. She can feel her scalp shimmer with power. She wishes she were outside, under the stars.
“You know a bunch about it,” he says, looking down at his clean up, “you must be an Aries.”
“No,” she says, her voice strong.
He snorts a bit and unbuttons his high collar. “Lady, I didn’t know all that and I should. I’m an Aries. Had a birthday twenty-four hours ago.”
“I know,” is all Peach says before whipping back her head and bringing it forward to butt the man soundly between his eyes.
The collision isn’t the damaging blow she was looking for. The stool is on rollers and the force moves him backwards, absorbing most of the impact. He reaches up to his face and squints.
“Fuck!” he says and tries to stand.
Peach gets to her feet first and snatches the tattooing needle up, sending the tray flying, flipping over as it falls to the floor. While the man tries to pry open his watering eyes, Peach fits the contraption tightly in her hand and then plants it deep inside the man’s left ear canal.
His scream is a piercing jab to her ears as he falls to the floor. His head narrowly misses the metal footrest of the barber chair. Peach rushes to silence him. Though she’s light in frame and middling in height, she holds onto the chair arms and uses the strong leverage to bring her foot down on the tattooist’s face, stomping hard with her heel until he goes quiet.
She forces herself to look at him then, to take in what she’s done. She’s dislodged a few teeth and his nose is sunken into a divot she’s placed in his face with her high-heeled shoe. She doesn’t think of him as a man any longer, but as a shell devoid of energy. His energy flows to her body. That essence now resides within her.
She bends down over his slack form and snaps on an extra pair of surgical gloves which went spiraling to the floor when the tray tipped over during the attack. Depressing her fingers on his neck, she’s relieved to find his pulse completely gone. She lifts her fingers away and sees she’d been pushing down on the tattoo of a warrior, a man clothed in leather, a sword slung over his back.
Dipping her fingers into the warm blood trickling out of the man’s ear, she takes the blood, the life force of the man and reaches around to the new tattoo on her scalp. She massages the blood into her open pores, lets it mingle with her own blood. She thinks back to something she’s thought of often during her transformation. Something she thought of when she was considering sacrificial rams and gods and energy exchange. She feels this is only right, she repeats in her mind; when a blood offering is made, your own blood is spilt as well. For her, right now, she bonds to the idea of not only spilt blood, but of a mark. A trophy, a sacred tattoo, consecrated with the life force of a sacred sacrifice.
She shoots upwards from where she crouches. In her pelvis, her nucleus of power, she feels a deeper thrum than before. Flares of sensation pour into each of her limbs from that epicenter and she knows she has unbolted the energy hidden there, buried deep for thirty-one years. She has added to it the power that once coursed through the sacrifice at her feet.
Perfect Peach would be, will be, is so proud.
“To beginnings!” she shouts down at the face of the dead man.
“To beginnings!” she shouts up through the ceiling and roof of Crucible Tattoo
.
Up and out to the universe.
THE END
Thank you for reading
The Ram
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Cycle 2 of
The Blood Zodiac
Continues with
The Bull
…
Read on for a preview of the first two chapters of
The Bull
.
01 Peach
She can’t get the blood out of her blond wig.
The natural hair must have been tinted the hue of honey by the wig-makers, because the blood seems to cling to it, color it. She convinces herself that hair exposed to peroxide might be subject to discoloring. Whether or not she’s correct in her assumption, the locks appear ruddier now. If this is simply her imagination and the hair is unchanged, she cannot see clearly. Perhaps she witnesses some mysterious afterimage of the red liquid instead, a specter of that glorious act.
The wig in her hands meant to hide away her shorn scalp, the new tattoo at the base of her skull, these are potent, physical reminders of what she did to the tattooist just an hour ago. She had killed him. And she doesn’t think of her action as wanton murder.
It had been a premier sacrifice.
While most of his blood—Roman Saucedo’s blood—ended up on the vinyl floor of the tattoo parlor, some of it splashed onto the seat of the barber chair where she’d cast off her hairpiece, leaving it an insentient witness to the violent thrusts of Peach’s heel on the face of the man who had inked her with the sign of Aries. She scours the strands with a nail brush in the shape of a hedgehog and generous dollops of liquid dish soap. Her hands are white and puckered from the water and friction. A pool of pink liquid sloshes over the side of the kitchen sink, escapes the tub of dyed hair and suds, and plunks in steady drops on her bare toes. Twenty minutes into her task, she wonders why she doesn’t use shampoo.
The young ram bleats from the living room, his cries a plea for milk and attention.
“Wait, baby,” she coos to him.
After a few more minutes of scrubbing at the blotches of light strawberry marring her wig, she gives up, leaves it to soak, and pulls out a chrome-legged chair at her little mid-century dining table. Her body feels heavy, the adrenaline nearly spent. It’s only now she’ll allow herself to think of what she’s done from the perspective of a common human, one taught to consider all the unsavory realities of homicide. She’s killed someone, a man who had a family, debts, a car. And she’s taken his energy in the process. The rituals had guaranteed it. She places a hand over her pelvis, the spot near her belly button which flared with sensation as the man’s life left his form and some of his vigor zipped into her. All her work for the masters of Aries culminated in taking the man’s life. His death was the capstone, the bookend, the maraschino cherry. Necessary. The work incomplete without it.
Though she tries to feel sorrow, she possesses no remorse, no fear of retribution or punishment. Peach still understands killing indiscriminately is wrong. If she allows herself to think of killing other people—those not vetted and sanctioned for sacrifice—the emotions of regret and disgust bubble within. But not with the replay in her mind of Roman’s demise: the tattoo gun shoved in his left ear canal, the hole she stomped in the center of his face. She intuits the man had his part to play in her story. He was the first human sacrificed to bring Perfect Peach to life. He’ll always hold that distinction and Peach figures his death, aiding her in ways she has yet to ferret out, was the very pinnacle of his existence.
She looks at the shriveled flesh on her fingers in the dim light of the kitchen, the still of deep evening all around, and promises to make the tattooist a saint for the part he’s played. Not a saint for the god of the Christians and Jews and Muslims, but for her. When it’s all over, when her work is complete, she thinks she will decorate a wooden panel with his sacrosanct visage in rich dollops of vivid, oily paint. Sacramental robes exchanged for a high-buttoned plaid shirt, his hands lifted to preach her glory, tattoo gun in one fist, ink pot in the other. Roman Saucedo will be a transcendent idol. He will stand as an example for the others.
A bag sits on the table across from her. It’s a beige plastic sack with a green alien logo printed on it. The creature’s eyes are black almonds. She meets its gaze and knows it cannot see her, cannot see the special contents within the bag. Peach is too tired to do anything with it right now other than note it’s something necessary to deal with. And deal with soon.
Another weak cry and she remembers the lamb still waits. She pushes herself up from the table and goes to the refrigerator. She heats up some of the unpasteurized goat milk she gives the lamb and closes her eyes, listens to the whir of the microwave plate spinning the liquid around and around with the occasional clunking sound as it catches on the revolving base. There’s no need to test it on her wrist anymore. She has the heating down to a science. The scent of cream hits her nose.