Tat

“Please tell me those are sex toys.” Lys jerked her chin at the collection mysterious objects scattered across the frosted glass cafe table in between Renée’s mimosa and the one mercifully awaiting her.

“It’s brunch, Lys.” Renée flickered her fingers in a cheerful wave at the two women at the next table over who whipped around to glare quickly enough that they nearly sent their twin red hats sailing into the mild April breeze. “Would I bring sex toys to brunch?” 

“Let’s see.” Lys thunked her immense shoulder bag on to the sidewalk beside the clear lucite patio chair that turned out to be ten times more uncomfortable even than it looked. “I recall kettle bells, an auto-harp, a pair of fencing foils, a falcon hood, plus jesses, bewits and gauntlets—“ 

“Didn’t you tell me that you rocked those falconry gauntlets at one of your underground goth–punk art thing?” Renée’s hand unconsciously fluttered to the strand of actual pearls resting comfortably against her picturesque collar bones.  

“Bo-tai’s opening.” Lys tossed back an ill-advised amount of mimosa and hid a scowl behind her menu. Bo-tai was technically a friend and actually a shockingly dim-witted bore whose success baffled her. If Lys couldn’t land an opening of her own—and long dry months unfurling into a long, dry year suggested that after her early and easy success, just out of her MFA program, she no longer could—showing up at Bo-tai’s with her head held high and dressed to kill was the next best thing. “And, yes, I wore the hell out of those gauntlets. But my point, Reneé, is that sex toys on the brunch table is definitely on the table with you.” 

The third mention of sex toys in roughly as many minutes had their fans at the next table risking whiplash again. Lys flashed an acid smile their way, which prompted a pair of disgusted tsks and a furious gesture for the waiter. She retreated once again behind her menu, her cheeks burning with a mix of irritation and guilt that she’d probably managed to sabotage the poor guy’s tip with her sour mood 

“They’re tatting shuttles.” Renée whispered conspiratorially across the practically imaginary space between the tables. She scooped up the brass, lozenge-shaped thing nearest her and dropped it into her turned up palm. “My Great Aunt Meredith’s, I think.” 

In seconds, Renée had the two bitter biddies next store smiling and reminiscing about every kind of needlework under the sun as she recounted her own struggles to make even the simplest design.

“Of course, Lys is the real artist,” she confided. “I just dabble.”  

She said it with absolute sincerity—with conviction and the kind of smile that had Biddie number one absent-mindedly counting out cash for a tip that had to be well north of generous and both biddies together nodding, if not actually smiling, in Lys’s direction as they gathered up their grandma purses and headed out. 

“Do you have a Great Aunt Meredith?” Lys asked, deadpan. “Does anyone have a Great Aunt Meredith?” 

“I do. In the shimmering images in my mind I do.” Renée hoisted her mimosa and clinked it against Lys’s. “I have the whole kit and caboodle for you, you know.” 

She set the shuttle back with its fellows in the middle of the table. Lys counted fourteen as Renée chattered on about what the whole kit and caboodle would be this time around in between ordering for the the two of them and flirting with the waiter whose tip she’d managed to pull back from the brink. 

Some were pastels colored in pearlescent bakelite. Others looked older and more intricate, like that brass one Renée had chosen for show and tell. These were filigreed or engraved. They were carved ivory and tortoiseshell with mother-of-pearl inlay. They were works of art in and of themselves, as were the array of needles Renée could not long resist clattering down between them. 

“Are these—“ Lys snatched one up as it rolled toward her. “Is this bone?” 

She knew the answer before the question was out of her mouth. The needle itself was about the length of her hand, from wrist to fingertip, with an intricately engraved death’s head design at the top, its gaping mouth the eye of the needle. 

“Cow, I think.” Renée had the decency to cringe a little and think twice about the chunk of star fruit she’d been just about to pop in her mouth. “Or maybe deer? I forget. But they’re beautiful aren’t they? I couldn’t resist.” 

Renée was on to the thread she’d amassed in the early frenzied days of the latest hobby she’d given up on, forever and ever, Amen. Lys shuddered to contemplate the mish mash of fiber quality that was no doubt assembled inside the rosewood box at her friend’s feet. Money was something Renée never had to think about, and every clerk in every kitschy, every vintage, every garbage dump of a store realized. 

“So do you think . . .” Renée’s inevitable question, her eternal question, had rolled around sooner than Lys was expecting. Or maybe she’d been preoccupied with the array of needles and shuttles before her. “Hon, do you think this might get you making again?” 

Making. Lys wanted to throttle her for the one art school word Renée had seemed to pick up before inevitably dropping out seven months deep into the program she fully acknowledged her family’s money had gotten her into. But she also wanted to hug her. She wanted to throw her arms around her friend—Renée, the absolute soul of hand-me-down generosity. Renée, the well-heeled dabbler with the attention span of a mayfly. Renée, the true believer in Lys’s talent. Renée, the congregation of one. 

“It’s beautiful. They’re beautiful,” she said, tracing the lover’s-knot filigree of the brass shuttle. “I don’t know. Maybe.” 

“Definitely maybe,” Renée smiled as she handed off the check along with, no doubt, another tip well north of generous.

********************

Lyss knew she should wait for the next train. The one just chugging into the station was packed, inexplicably for a Sunday afternoon, and she was laden down with rosewood box, her own shoulder bag, and another far more expansive bag Renée had insisted she take along with her burden of surprisingly heavy shuttles and needles. She knew she should wait, but the stink of the station was mixing poorly with her several mimosas. That, paired with the burning sensation just starting between her shoulders propelled her through the doors just as they were closing. 

A teenager even more tatted up and pierced than Lys herself jumped up to offer his seat. It made her feel a million years old, but she offered the kid a jerk of the chin in gratitude, which he returned in kind, and sank down. The clattering sway of the train conspired with the alcohol just hitting her to practically lull Lys to sleep. As it was, she zoned out to the point of nearly missing her stop. 

“Shit,” she muttered under her breath as the muddy station name crackling overhead sent a jolt up her spine. 

The tatted-up, pierced kid, realizing her predicament, took pity on her and took the handoff of the box so she could struggle out of her seat and through the doors, only just managing to bundle the damned thing under one arm as the doors bumped violently closed, open, closed on one corner of it. As the train pulled away, she and the kid once more exchanged the official chin jerk of the disaffected—he through the thick, scratched-up plexiglass of the window, she from the platform. 

The elevator was out, because of course the elevator was out. The elevator, for Lys, had been comprehensively out for going on a year now. She struggled up the ill-lit, perilous stairs, internally cursing Renée for her short-attention-span generosity, externally—albeit under her breath—cursing herself for being enough of a failure that she’d needed to move to this shitty, elevator-out neighborhood. 

At the exact moment she really hit her stride with her sotto voce self loathing, a violent tug at the bag over her right shoulder—Renée’s expensive bag, of course, spun her in a near one-eighty. Her body flooded with warring emotions: Irritation with herself that she’d gotten in her head enough to fail the most basic test of urban life and absolute rage. 

The latter won out. She gave the rosewood box over to gravity and calculated the swing of the leather bag with its contents rattling like pick-up-stix. She caught the heavy, smoothly functioning zipper at the top of its arc. Her hand found the needle with predestined certainty. She wrapped her fist around it—the death’s head. She drew it out in one fluid motion and in the next, plunged it into the meat of her would-be mugger’s left biceps. 

His scream rang off the fractured tile. He let go the bag and would have toppled backward down the stairs if Lys hadn’t yanked the needle free and managed to catch a fistful of his tank top with her other hand. 

“What the hell are you doing, you crazy bitch?” He was junky thin with a scraggly beard and lank hair to match. 

“Right now?” She leaned toward him, teeth bared in her trademark acid grin. “Looking at complete shit heel.” She held up bone needle with his blood glistening on its tip. “Later? Making. Making something.”