Ink - Flash Fiction

Ink had become a rare commodity. As precious in value as pearls. With e-readers, the market wouldn't sustain for continued ink manufacture, while trees were being preserved through the lack of demand for paper. As alternatives, squid and octopi proved a short-term fill-in, but we'd hunted and fished them to extinction, just as we had with oysters.

E-reader titles were produced by computer programmes, Linguistic algorithms and rapid speed digital analysis of word and plot patterns in best sellers churned out the next big thing. Human authors were nearing the endangered status of the humble biro pen. Yet they still resisted, still sought to publish their writing wares. Samizdat made a comeback, mainly written in charcoal from barbecue briquettes. which made its publication rather seasonal in the Northern Hemisphere. If you were caught asking for barbecue stuff in winter, you could be arrested. Some authors shortcut the whole process and composed in their own blood and other bodily fluids, despite the disreputable echoes with certain performance art of the previous century. They wrote on toilet paper which tore easily beneath even their blunted nibs.

In time even toilet paper disappeared from circulation. Authors took to writing on stones and pebbles. returning to the prehistoric dawn of art. They took to the forests where they could forge their own supply of charcoal by burning wood. They decided to further reach back and commune with their ancient brethren, and took to caves. They cast stencils of the alphabet and then holding them against the rock to spell the words they were compounding, they chewed charcoal and breathed its fine powder over the stencil to form the text. Their very breath giving life to and preserving their art. Their expression. Samizdat was eclipsed for artefact and unlike the memory capacity of e-readers which demanded periodic purges, these books remained permanently in print.

Semiotinks - Flash Fiction

Synaesthesia

• I want to lick you all over
• Be my guest
• I said I want to… but I can’t
• Why ever not?
• There’s a part of you that forever remains apart from you
• What part? What are you talking about?
• Your shoulder blade. It’s been colonised by someone else
• The tattoo? That’s more a part of me than any other part. That… is the ultimate expression of me, who I am
• That… is your signature under another artist’s work
• Oh no no no no no. That’s all my own design. Utterly unique to me, you won’t see this in any tattooist’s window or catalogue
• Did you take the tattooist in a drawing?
• Well no. I knew what I wanted and described it to him. He sketched it out, but only to my specification
• But he still put his own vision on it. The final rendering was all his and his alone
• Not a bit of it. I determined the dimensions, the colour, every nib stroke…
• But he is the artist that has to work with the marble
• What marble?
• The marble of your body. The contour of your muscle, the grain of your skin, the flow of your veins just beneath the surface. That is the true you
• The sculpted me, yes, and I worked damn hard for this. But not as hard as you’re making me work now
• That is what I want to possess in every topographical detail. But someone else has been in that quadrant before me and planted their flag
• I’ve had other lovers, they’ve been in every ‘quadrant’ of me before you as well
• But they have relinquished you. To me. The indelible ink has not and never will
• Are you seriously expecting me to have it removed? I’m telling you, that is my own stamp of who I am
• Cogito ergo sum? 
• Say the sum of what now? 
• ‘I think therefore I am’. You credit that with this branding, somehow you link up your physical body with how you conceive yourself mentally? 
• That’s about the size of it yes
• That how you are in the world, how you think and feel with your physical body is insufficient, you have to exteriorise it, put the construction of your inner life on permanent display
• It’s not on permanent display. Most of the time it’s submerged beneath clothing
• So what’s the point of it then?
• I know it’s there. Radiating like a second heartbeat
• Precisely. Two hearts beating. Both of them yours. Mine would make it three and three’s a dissonant crowd
• It’s not a real person!
• You posited it was your golem. Your spirit at large
• What that ugly wee fellah in “Lord Of The Rings”? 
• No… It’s only the two of us get to strip you of your raiment to reveal your skin. And you have tainted it with this… doodle
• Doodle?
• Alright, this self-rendered stigmata 
• Stigmata? That’s proper over the top!
• You’re quite right of course. More like a… palimpsest. To suggest there’s something hidden underneath. When there’s actually nothing. You could have let me circumnavigate you. All of you. Through taste and smell. Mapping my version of you over time. Instead you have predetermined yourself as to what I, or any future explorer of your flesh, will discover. You have already declared your mappa incognito in the name of your own King and unfurled your standard there
• Well just don’t lick that part then, unlock the unknown parts of the rest of me
• I can’t. When I taste I see pictures. When I smell I hear sounds. Your daub interferes with all of that. If I lick it, I would only taste the granular ink, while the picture has already been filled in for me
• Just turn out the lights then. We can do it in the dark!
• I don’t have to. The darkness of your soul eclipses all light
• No Babe, come back… It’s me wants to lick you all over… 

*

Gematria

Mosaic Law forbids the application of ink to the skin (Leviticus 19:28). Were the Germans at Auschwitz aware of this proscription, seeing it as yet further tribulation to wreak on the prisoners if they thought they might be denied entry to heaven through an ink profaned body? More likely it was merely part of the Nazi bureaucratic system of processing humans. Inventories and job lots and serial numbers. Cattle brands for the human kine who emerged from the cattle trucks.

The prohibition on marking the body in any way, stems from the human form being a gift from G-d that must not be altered in any way, shape or form, for to do so would be to criticise the perfection, genius and beneficence of G-d. Or more pertinently, to downright disobey Him and turn from his righteous way. For burial, the Jewish body must be unspoiled, well as much as death can leave a body in mint condition. Of course, these bodies were not in receipt of Jewish funeral rites.

Jewish faith works in three ways. Things are truth because it is the word of G-d. They are true because through study and exegesis they can be proven to be true through human ratiocination. And finally through the gematria, whereby the mathematical values ascribed to letters of the Hebrew alphabet provide mathematical proof by ‘adding up’ to the correct answer. But stare at them as they might, the Auschwitz inmates could not make the numbers on their wrists add up to a demonstration of G-d’s love.

*

Parade

They met at the Edinburgh Tattoo, having unwittingly landed there during their European tour on the day of the military parade. They proceeded to compare their inks, the imagery telling its own story since the deafening beat of the military drums drowned out any verbal communication they might essay. As they discovered a myriad of mutualities expressed in pictograms, a love blossomed (perhaps already foretold by both having inked efflorescence, she lilies and orchids, he an hibiscus). As the soldiers marched past their faraway eyes, they were unable to see that most of these men too shared their predilection for marking the skin. Although formal dress uniforms did their best to cover up what was still seen as unsightly and ill-disciplined by the top brass, but which they had caved into permitting through the sheer preponderance among those queuing up for recruitment. While many of the soldiers’ designs involved skulls, the young lovers-to-be both eschewed such morbid imagery. Who wants to make love only to get an eyeful of memento mori plastered on your soul mate’s flesh? An indication that one day they will be snatched away from you.

*

Angelina Jolie’s Tattoo

The water buffalo pulled the harrow to prick the earth, while in its turned wake the farmer disseminated the rice seedlings. When the Khmer Rouge came, they unyoked the buffalo and attached their enemies to the harrow. They chose anyone who wore glasses, possessed books among their meagre positions hauled with them from the cities, or bore tattoos. Anything that suggested literacy which unutterably betrayed their bourgeoise nature. The buffalo stood around the fields redundant, until it too, like the bourgeois Khmer people, disappeared. The cadres said it had seized its freedom under Angkar and wandered off. We suspected they had under cover of night killed it and cut it up for a luxuriant meal denied the rest of us. 

A few of us managed to escape into the borderland mountains. We formed resistance battalions, secured hold of some guns and swore an oath to free our nation benighted by the godless. Monks had not even been put into the fields to work until they dropped, they were taken away and slaughtered from the very outset. Fortunately one had made it to the mountains with us and he was versed in the knowledge of protective tattoos. He didn’t have access to ink, so he improvised using battery fluid, mixed with the sap of some mountain tree unknown to me as a species. As long as our hearts were pure, his tattoos would deflect bullets and prevent landmines from being tripped under our feet. We couldn’t read our skin’s texts, not because we were illiterates, but because they weren’t written in Khmer but in scriptural Pali. We knew we had to trigger their magic by reciting the mantras each time we went out in the field. Neither the clean skinned Khmer Rouge nor the filthy criminal Vietnamese would stand a chance in the face of the peaceful Buddha’s loving protection of us. 

*

Blood Ink

My self-styled stylus isn’t disposed with its own reservoir of ink. Instead it relies on its incised strokes to be infilled by the upsurge of blood. My improvised fountain pen spraying the gist of me. But it’s impossible to control such red ink swell. The blood blotter smear of self. So it is only once the flow has clotted and the skin cicatrised, that such graphic calligraphy can be anatomised. The straight edge of the razor makes it hard to curlicue any flesh inscription (made worse when the unhanded side has to grave the more favoured limb, ‘favoured’ in the sense of bias, not in my affections, for I don’t favour a single cell of my body). So inevitably my chirography resembles little more than cuneiform. The Rosetta Stone of me. The medium, the chalky, cracked parchment of my skin, is the message. Can’t you decipher it you illiterates? Why, it’s not as if I hide my verbiage encased behind dust jacket sleeves. Here, I’ll re-carve it. A palimpsest whose abiding runes are imperishable, but the surface scar tissue is recast once again. I aim for a blue vein, but the ink still emerges the unsparing red of the hyper-critical inner-editor. I have no words, but I do have profuse red ink flow to share with you.

Squid Ink - Flash Fiction

The sea was a perpetual whirring roil of motion. Shoals and schools of corybantic choreography. Treasure hunts for shiny stones on the seabed, or the come hither siren tease of pearly mothers. Spawns and other pregnable culch-ures. Procreation and the anti-creation of predation, rapturous raptors going about their annihilating antics. Squid-I took my place in this tumultuous orchestration. Staking my mood from the ambiance of my surroundings. Cooling my blood to blend in with the sandy bottom, or raising my temperature to bouquet the riot of colour of the underwater flora. Else I fire my ink-jet heels to make good my escape, nebulising the senses of my would-be consumers. But then my nervous system was struck by a notion, what is it about this world that constantly makes me need to escape? Why cannot I just reside contentedly within it? Why do I have to cast small simulacra of myself to stymie my foes, when each exudation only weakens me, dilutes my being? They munch me in effigy anyway.  A sudden impulse made me fire my ink when no pelagic guzzler needed blotting. I watched the chromatic mucus shape and form my feelings, but not just through the usual matching pigmentation, rather they agglomerated into words. Until they diluted and dissipated on the gentle sway of the underwater swell. I fired them again. Different words coagulated before again dispersing on the undertow. I watched the iotas of my verbiage diffuse further afield and I saw it brought discomfort and unease to the marine life who encountered it. Mildly toxic it seemed to perfectly encapsulate my temper. I used some of my appendages and appurtenances to inscribe into the sand and grit of the seabed, before inking in my words there and passing rocks over to hold the type in place beneath. No fish prey or predator dared disturb my reverie of penmanship. Amid all the pother and bustle, I had discovered the peace that lies at the heart of the ocean.  The ink concentrated, the thoughts magnified, my blessings countable against each one of my tentacles, finally I had come into my own against the backdrop of the eternally teeming crowd.