Page 45 of This Life and All the Rest
Macon takes a step back quickly, so I don’t slam into him, but I don’t take my eyes off the tattoo.
“What is this?” I whisper, narrowing my eyes and trying to make sense of the changes that have been made to the tattoo.
They feel important, they have to be, and it’s making my brain fuzzy.
“What is this?” I say again.
“A tattoo, Lennon,” Macon states, his tone dry as he walks backward toward the door. “The tattoo artist inked it up, so it fit in with the sleeve.”
“No.” I shake my head. “No way.”
“Whatever you think it is,” he says, stopping just at the doorframe, “it’s not. Get some sleep.”
With that, he turns and walks out, shutting the door behind him.
I stay frozen to the spot and stare at the doorway, running that tattoo through my mind.
The clock is still there. So is the script.
We are homesick most for the places we have never known.
It’s a Carson McCullers quote, from a short essay she wrote in 1940. I learned that years ago on a drunken night when I was missing Macon and googled it.
But where the clock used to be on naked skin, it’s now surrounded by a night sky with a random constellation, hovering just above, and partially behind it, stretching up to his shoulder and around the left side of his upper chest.
It’s a rough rectangle with a line of stars connected to each of the four corners.
Virgo, probably.
I didn’t think Macon would be into astrology, but he was born in September, so it would make the most sense.
The constellation and night sky are beautiful, but they’re not what caught my attention. It’s the actual clock tattoo that has given me pause.
The clock used to be broken. I remember it vividly. I’ve painted it an obsessive number of times. It was handless with a giant crack down the middle of it.
But now, where it was broken, it’s been mended, touched up, so the crack resembles a reflection on the glass of a watch face.
And where it used to be handless, there are now hands. One long and one shorter, just like you’d expect on a traditional clock.
But instead of being just regular lines, they’re paint brushes. Two of them.
Macon is an artist, yes, but his medium has always been pencil on paper. Or clay. Sometimes charcoal, sometimes pastels. He draws, he sketches, or he throws.
Macon doesn’t paint. I do.
Whatever you think it is, it’s not,he said.Get some sleep.
I stay awake the rest of the night. He’s lying. I know he is. Those paint brushes mean something. I just don’t know what.
I don’t know if I could handle it if I did.
FIFTEEN
As usual,I’m up with the dawn.
I tiptoe out of the bedroom, not wanting to wake Macon, but he’s nowhere to be found. The blanket and pillow he used last night are folded and stacked neatly on the couch, and the apartment is silent.
Almost.
