Page 2 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
I'm already reaching for saline when something catches my eye along his right side, just below the ribcage.
Ink.
Not just any ink.
A lion with an olive branch between its teeth.
Fine lines.
Old work.
The lion looks like it has never once lost a fight.
My hand pauses for a heartbeat.
My mother’s voice arrives as if it has been waiting in the ceiling vents for a chance to come down.
At Christmas, she would wrap the lights around the banister and tell stories the way other mothers told bedtime tales.
On our street, the Riccaris did not live in books.
They lived above pastry shops and behind black sedans.
They decided who got to open a bakery and who went out to the Bronx to find a new start.
They brought lasagna and sympathy to wakes.
They returned favors on Christmas Eve.
If you saw their crest, you pretended you didn’t.
I blink and it's only a tattoo again.
The lion does not move.
The man under my hands does not groan.
He watches me, not the cut, as if my face is the part that hurts.
“Let’s get this clean,” I say to no one in particular, to the room, to the beating of his pulse under my fingers.
I irrigate with methodical care.
Blood and brownish debris swirl into the basin.
“You got any allergies?” I ask him, because the form wants me to ask even when the form will be blank.
He breathes out. “No.”
His voice is gravelly and low.
It contains something heavy I can't name.
Authority, maybe.
The kind of tone that makes other men listen and makes me straighten without meaning to.
He has an accent that belongs to the corners of Mulberry Street that never gentrified.
