skonen_blades

Auditions. They ruin your sense of individuality. Sometimes in a good way.

There are one hundred and sixty-eight talent agencies in this city. They all have a stable of actors that suit most occasions. The call goes out for ‘handsome African-American male, mid-fifties, glasses and a suit’ and the agencies rush to supply the need.

This time, the call was for ‘extremely tall white male, very skinny, missing right arm, eyepatch, scarring, tattoos and a pronounced speech impediment’.

That’s me.

I got a job with the talent agency in the hopes that I could possibly play some hideous mutants or circus freaks and make some extra cash. This is a movie town, after all. I’ve heard it said “If you can’t hide it, decorate it.” and that’s what I’ve done. I have tattoos. I stand up straight. I take my shirt off at rock concerts regardless of my scars and prosthetic arm.

It was a logging accident when I was a teenager. A petrol can exploded and threw me against the bucket of a bulldozer, slicing off my arm. I lay there burning while my co-workers tried to beat out the gasoline fire with blankets. They didn’t realize that they were only fanning the flames. It took one of the older guys to realize that wrapping me in the blankets was the only way to put them out. We were out in the deep forest. There was no way anyone could get me to a hospital quickly.

I also lost my right eye and part of my jaw as well which gives me a lisp that I still haven’t been able to get rid of, even with speech therapy.

Mostly, I get by with a smile. I look terrifying which is pretty cool in most situations. It’s not too cool when I’m trying to pick up a girl or make a new friend. A lot of people say hi to me and invite me to parties because I’m local colour. I’m a freaky feather in the cap of most popular people.

They don’t hang out with me, though, and that’s the rub. I’m a bartender in a dingy bar and for the most part, I like it that way. I chat to most of the regulars and my ‘right hook’ pours the pints just fine. It leaves my days free for auditions and watching movies. I don’t go out in daylight unless I have to.

So I figure I’m pretty unique. This is a big city, though, and I know there are a lot of freaks.

Even knowing that, it didn’t lessen my shock to see the waiting room for the audition.

There must have been around eighty versions of me there. Eighty tall, skinny guys missing their right arms. They all had scarring. Some from burns, some from blades. They were all tattooed. Some with full-body sleeves, some with just a little ink on their arms. It was like a pirate convention there with the eye patches. There were a lot of glass eyes as well. The whir of servomotors in the arms was a constant insectile buzz.

It was a little like heaven. I was prepared to be the only one. I was prepared for the audition to be a formality.

Instead, I made eighty new friends. We talked about the pros and cons of the different prosthetic arms on the market. We talked about the pain of skin grafts. We admired each other’s tattoos. There was a lot of phone-number swapping and promises of future meetings.

We’re thinking of forming a club that meets once a month at my bar. I can’t wait.





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The spells were tattooed onto the magician in small print. He was a living book.

There were different languages etched across him, many different typefaces. Some of them were small beads pushed under the skin to form Braille.

Some of the spells were transcribed from other magicians in the prison cells, magicians that were to be put to death but wanted their spells to survive. Their crooked jailhouse hot-pin-and-ink block printing faded over time.

The magician ran his fingertips across the appropriate spell when the occasion called for it. Touching the spell activated it. A quick brush of his fingertips and whatever spell he tickled was set in motion. He was naked so that he had constant access to his own bare skin.

The magician studied yoga and the art of contortion so that every part of his body could be reached by his hands.

The magician was old now, and dangerous, but he remembered his schooling. He cast his mind back.

To create as much skin as possible, the magician was fed in the magery. He was force-fed the fattiest foods the kingdom could provide. At the age of eighteen, the boy-mage weighed over five hundred pounds, a veritable sphere of flesh.

When he celebrated his twentieth birthday, he tipped the scales at seven hundred pounds. The limits of his own body were pushed by the magic of his teachers. It was agony

On the eve of his twenty-first birthday, he was put in a cell and the starvation began. Water and a small amount of meat of vegetables every two days were all that were allowed him. He could not move his bulk without the magic to support it. Moving like a walrus, he had to position his mouth by the food slot at the door.

His body shriveled without the food to keep the skin taut. His screams and begging echoed through the stone prisons, much to the delight and jeering of his fellow inmates. They were familiar with the tortures that magic could provide. They had no sympathy for a magician.

After six months, driven nearly insane, the young mage was brought out of the cell. The skin hung off of him in folds and aprons. Stretch marks fissured his entire body.

In the months that followed, the skin was stretched even more by the infernal machines in the bowels of the torturers domain. Pincers designed to grasp but not pierce the flesh were used to pull the skin one more notch each day. The pain drove even the most dedicated magicians over the edge sometimes.

But not this one. He survived the gluttony, starvation, and stretching.

So began the tattooing. The six hundred base spells were laid out on him by the mages in charge of the school. His skin pinned up and back like elaborate hairstyles to give the artisans access to the deeper crevasses and folds available.

Over time, the magician had travelled by means both mundane and mystical to the far reaches of the globe. He bartered, pilfered, stole, and bought all of the magic he could seek out.

That was the game of magic. Each magician tried to amass the most spells during his or her life.

Now, this magician was old. Artificially prolonged life had given him the ability to serve four kings and an emperor, outlasting them all. He was crafty and sharp. His quickness and flexibility weren’t what they used to be but with the art of magic dying, he was the most powerful man alive.

The ink competed with flesh for space. The skin, wrinkled now and translucent in places with age, made him look like he was clad in a strange, flowing dress cut from thick, densely scribbled material. It was not material. He was naked.

A naked, ancient man in a stone room. He’d traveled the world and seen the most amazing things anyone had ever seen.

He wept.



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Coal tattoos. That’s what it was called when coal dust got into a miner’s wound. The cut darkened and it became a permanent black line.

Coal miners ate their sandwiches daintily, pinching one corner between each thumb and forefinger. The rest of their black-encrusted fingers were raised like old British ladies, far away from the sandwich. The part that they were holding onto got thrown away. The dark poisons had seeped into the bread from their fingertips.

Life expectancy down there used to be around forty-five or so. That was before humans unlocked the genes. The cure for the plague that killed half of the planet’s population forced mankind’s biology to outgrow what was previously defined as human.

We skipped ahead six chapters in our evolution, overachieving little tryhards that we are. Those scientists were bloody savants without the idiot. The vaccines were rushed to the city centers. Riots followed. Governments were reinstated. It was a long ten years. Giant ‘dead pits’ burned at the centers of most cities for years.

Half of the planet was suddenly vacant. Room for everyone now. It was a new dawn.

The vaccine let us be groomed for our jobs. If a job was dangerous, the body could be adapted to endure and even thrive in hazardous environments. No longer did we have to destroy the environment around us to suit our needs. We could, when the occasion called for it, become different to suit where we worked.

The coal miners were a pale breed. Their lungs were changed. They still needed oxygen but they could also gain nutrients from the coal dust as well as the previously poisonous gasses miles down beneath the earth. Their nostrils were very wide.

They had small, green-white, night-vision eyes that glinted in the darkness like sharks in an ocean at evening.

These were bodies that could take punishment. Bodies with solid fat on them coating muscles borne of pure endurance.

The ones that had been there the longest had the most detailed coal tattoos on their broad backs and huge arms. The workers looked like pot-bellied, albino, hairless gorillas wrapped in the black-ridged whorls, initials, and high-contrast designs of their mates. Memorials for those crushed in cave-ins, crude portraits of departed friend’s faces, and cultural swirls from Celts, Maoris, Africa and the Orient.

They didn’t need many lights to work in the depths and they didn’t need to come for fresh air. They’d do six-month stretches down there. They don’t call it the bowels of the earth for nothing. They’d come up stinking.

They needed respirators filled with coal dust and special sunglasses when they were above ground.



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This is a playground.

Ganesh and Shiva are skateboarding, sporting ripped jeans and body piercings as they carom around the swells and hollows of the concrete park.

Ganesh’s skateboard is strong enough to support his weight and wide enough to support his feet. It’s a monster-truck version of an ironing board. He goes up off the lip of the park’s rim, supporting his weight on one tusk for a time-stretching second before arcing back to earth.

Shiva gathers speed down into the valley before pumping into the vertical that leads straight up into summer afternoon sky. Her wallet chain scrapes the concrete. A shower of sparks chases her up out of the park into the air.

She hangs there for a second, all of her arms splayed out like an asterisk, like DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man drawing come to life, like a throwing star, before gravity coaxes her back down the well.

She’s quick at getting the board back under her taloned feet before meeting the wall again in a speed-ridden kiss. Her sandals hold on tight to the turns she’s taking. She stretched out the armholes of the wife-beater she’s wearing to be wide enough for all of her arms. Her handplants are a staccato triple-slap that echo around the park.

She turns a many-spoked cartwheel that would make a bicycle tire jealous.

Ganesh’s hoodie flaps in the wind as he punishes the bounds with which gravity shackles him. Momentum becomes his ally as he crashes into turns with the sound of a locomotive turning into a roller coaster. He trumpets his joy through his trunk as he leans low.

On his grey-blue skin, three tattooed tears creep out from behind his Oakleys. The dozens of hoops he has through each of his massive ears ring like jingle bells in the wind. Graffiti wraps each thick tusk. Tags from friends. They’re like ‘get well’ scribbles on a cast only these ones say ‘get better’ and they never go away. They’re there in front of him all day, every day, telling him to keep going.

The tattooed tears say that it’s hard, mama. It’s hard.

They both have tribal whorls, celtic curls, and ancient symbols wrapped in ink around their bodies. These tattoos embrace them in the symbols of their new culture.

Jesus sits back from the edge, an orange beard on his chin. He smokes, sitting on an amp, the elbows fraying on his loose, green cardigan. He’s Kurt Cobain come back to watch.

Bast is beside him, boobs swollen with implants, thong rising high out of tight and fraying jeans; a porn hopeful. Her giant eyes trace every movement of the skaters. Her ears swivel like radar dishes, seeking out the sounds of tiny prey.

Mohammed is beside them, rocking the IPod, listening to the old Beasties concept album about 911 and nodding his head.

These three and dozens of others ring the lip of the park, waiting for their turn to skate or just congregating to watch because there’s nothing else to do on a school day.




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The procedure would be virtually painless, they said.

I’d set up an appointment two days ago. The shop itself was in a dingy part of town that I hadn’t been to very often. I was a little afraid. There were quite a lot of people that looked like they were on drugs or homeless. Not that I have a problem with that. I just sort of don’t like to be around it. It reminds me that people can fall hard and not get back up. I don’t like being reminded of that.

The price was right, though, and Tracey was crazy about guys who did this. I parked my car and walked into the dingy shop and looked around. A red leather couch spilled stuffing onto an ancient green linoleum floor. A ceiling fan hung motionless from the dark wood of the roof.

The bored receptionist sitting beside the cash register blended into the surroundings. I didn’t even realize that I wasn’t alone until she cleared her throat. She was paused in mid gum-chew, her nail file hovering an inch away from her bright red nails, and she was staring at me.

“Usual or something special?” she asked.

A man came out from the back wearing an eyepatch, sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. The blatant illegal activity of that cigarette shocked me. The man had tattoos covering the entire flesh of each beefy arm.

“Uh, the usual.” I managed to stammer out.

With a disgusted grunt, the tattooed man went back into his room.

“Didja bring a pitcher?” she asked.

I fished out the print I had made of my boy’s whitewater rafting trip when he was six. That was the most fun we’d had as father and son so far.

I passed it across to her and she fed it into the scanner.

I ran my wrist across the grey plastic reader on the counter and the light charged green. I became a few hundred dollars poorer in a millisecond but it would be worth it. I couldn’t wait to see my family's reaction.

“Now, since this is just the usual, it’ll all be handled by robot.” She droned on in a voice that had repeated this over and over a thousand times. “You’ll be strapped to the table and immobilized so that you don’t move while the spider starts to its work.”

I moved into the tiny cubicle and took off my shirt.

”Where do you want it?” she asked with a playful raise of the eyebrow.

“Uh, my back.” I answered. With a sigh that said, ‘yeah, you and everyone else’, she left.

Both of them looked like they were both old enough to remember when tattoos were only done by humans. Probably both Artists who hated the technological invention of the spider-armed skin printer.

I layed down on the table and let the girl strap me in. It didn’t occur to me until she closed the door as she left and I heard the whir of machinery on the ceiling behind me that I didn’t even know her name.

I heard the eight-armed machine clatter to life and take posession. I knew that in it's tiny brain, the picture was being torn into pixels and organized into lines.

That first laser-burned colour line across my back stung a little but the clamps keep me from moving a muscle. The snapshot of me and boy in the rapids would be tattooed on my back for life.

I couldn’t wait to show Tracey. I smiled into the headrest as dotted line after dotted line of colour was etched beneath the skin of my back.



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Investigating crime scenes with One Faithers always made it a hard day. They didn’t drink, they didn’t joke, and most of all, they liked to take their time. They made great detectives but boring company.

This one’s rustle of black hair etched back like a broom around the semi-circular metal implants she had in her temples to keep her hormonal impulses in line. We outsiders called them ‘blinders’. If pushed too far into a mood of lust or rage, they’d put her into a seizure. During prayer, they gave her a dose of peace.

She had one red dot on the back of each hand. I knew that underneath the tongues of her shoes she’d have matching dots on the top of each foot. Stigmata tats. Faithful to the core whether she wanted to be or not.

Methodical and loyal. I didn’t even need to be here.

She walked carefully over the dead couple that we’d found in the living room after responding to the domestic disturbance call.

“This looks like an entry wound here. I think that’s a defense wound on the hand. It looks the woman was stabbed but shot the guy and called us before bleeding to death. We should have gotten here sooner.” She said.

I sighed and reached to my back pocket for my whiskey but remembered that I’d left it in my desk at the station in my rush to get here. This was going to be a long day.




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I was at the Cat Power concert at Richard's on Richard's last Sunday. Boy it was good. I saw her when I was over in Scotland and she was drunk as a skunk before her third song. She never managed to complete a single song and always drifted off into some incoherent story. The audience got really abusive.

So I was looking forward to this concert with trepidation.

Luckily here in Vancouver she was totally on form and it rocked. Rumour has it she quit drinking a while back. All of her classics were represented plus quite a few covers. She did a haunting rendition of Blue Moon that led into All I Have To Do is Dream. She did a cover of Satisfaction and a few lines of White Stripes song. Almost all of the tracks on You Are Free got played plus a bunch I'd never heard before. A rare talent with a haunting voice. The set kind of devolved in a few improvised tunes before she left at the very end.

While I was there, I saw a girl who had, I think, the coolest tattoo I've ever seen on her shoulder. Here is it here. She walked in front of me. I went after her and told her how cool I thought her tattoo was but I think I scared her. It was dark and I'm tall. I didn't get a picture but this is what it was.



If I understand it correctly, it means 1) rest 2) how long is up to you 3) go back to the beginning and repeat. Lovely.


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