My short story, “Butterflies on Barbed Wire,” has been accepted by Analog for an upcoming issue!
I wrote the story the last week of Clarion, after I’d had my week six story critiqued. It felt strange to suddenly not be frantically writing a story for next week, so I went ahead and did one. The first draft was pure stream-of-consciousness. My inspiration was an article I had read in Wired about LED tattoos and a note I’d jotted in class, “A story about a character who isn’t there.”
The main character is mourning the death of his aunt, with whom he had an illicit affair. His family runs a tattoo parlor, and the aunt was the best artist, after Grandpa. Our hero feels everything as surrounding the empty space where she once stood. And then a salesperson comes with free samples of a new 3d tattoo technology…
As a child, I spent what felt to me (in my child’s way) eons waiting in the tattoo parlor my mother frequented, embarrassed by her small cries of pain and gazing longingly across the street at the ice-cream parlor. Absorbing all the entertainment possibility of the pasted-up tattoo images and photo-albums of past tattoos. High up on one wall, one of the pictures had a piece of paper over it saying “Must be 18 to view. This tattoo free.”
Grace and I contrived to move the waiting area’s single chair under it when no one was noticing. It was a picture of a man’s penis with a tiger on it. THAT was entertaining. After we were yelled at and kicked out to wait on the front step, Grace and I had hours of discussion on the subject. Was it real? Would it look very different when hard? Why would a man do that?
I digress. I’ve always loved tattoos and tattoo parlors. Most of the adults in my life had tattoos. The only reason I never got one was a bizarre fear that I might some day commit a felony and I didn’t want “distinguishing marks” for the APB.
For the revision, I owe the most to Geoff Landis, whose suggestions I am sure made this more of an “Analog” story than it was.
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