Butcher’s Tie

On Dani Compose

I remember the day tattoos stopped being cool

The whole thing happened over there: Christmas. November 20 through Dec. 24.

The previous decade hadn’t been kind to we few with low income.

That very same past decade saw the literal expulsion of checks and balances holding the holiday season back.

Christmas was out of control and nobody screamed “shut it down!”

But we were poor and we had other things to think about all through November and even – even – through the first half of December where we wondered aloud if it was still November.

Now let me tell you about my father.

He looked like a dad cause he looked like Santa cause life is cyclical.

One night, when I was so young, he called me into the living room by the tree.

Little things that he did would later blow the façade out, like how he had this nasty habit of flicking his upper arm as if he was preparing to put a needle in. In my cynical teens I would remark about how it looked like Santa Clause was about to shoot up with heroin. Then one day being a teenager stopped being cool.

I must have asked him what he was doing there.

He chuckled to himself. It all worked.

“I don’t …toys… everyone. M’of … parents … them the toys.”

I must have asked him what he meant. Maybe he paused.

“Well,” he continued, “I’ll tell ya. See, I’mean …to a lot of people. But … can’t …and get it all done. Nobody … that, child.”

I objected. As a child it only mattered what everyone else said.

“Well,grownups … because … important.”

Whywhy why, daddy?

“Well, like I … I mean something ...everyone. But’n … perfect.”

I must have hung my head; beaten down. It was reality painted like an animal.

“Hey,” he whispered reassuringly, “… someone isn’t perfect doesn’t … can’t work … him that way.”

Maybe I said something. Maybe I didn’t.

He turned his mouth up like a slanted line. I remember that much.

“You know, if enough people … make great things. But …come from a good place.”

I don’t know if I looked up at him or what, but from what I’m told, I asked “can you even fly?”

And he said “of course I can. I just can’t fly fast enough.”

The day tattoos stopped being cool:

No longer content to buy absent-minded presents for those special people in their lives, they stopped shopping and startedquesting.

Most domestic stores fell ditchdeep.

The thing that happened was people started travelling around the world to find presents worth their sweat comma love comma worth.

What signaled the approach of the season was the migration out of every Halved World nation. Symptoms included empty streets and scary nights. Those who remained in these lands of plenty were insane or desperate.

All those who remained were butchers or meat.

The onset of cold allowed things – not of flesh, not of this dimension- to creep up on you.

On December the third my friends already had creative voicemail messages.

On the off chance you wanted to feel a sinking feeling, you could always call 911 and hear a recording explaining lack of service; a string of words and numbers that don’t even mean anything.

And I wanted that sinking feeling so I called them and by that evening I was good and low. Halfway through the floor I reminded myself that my friends had left me all alone with the cold and the murderers. My second family, the purer iteration, went the way of the prototype. They were making me turn to god.

So I started talking to myself.

I started getting angry. Swallowing venom.

“If you get out of this,” I told the carpet, “you’re gonna sing a different tune.”

So that night of the third, when I pulled the blinds up with nonmeasured mania and I saw someone across the street chewing on an arm, I had nobody to talk me down from doing something epic. Neither families nor god were there.

I kicked open the front door with a bucket of water in my arms. I walked-with-a-purpose over to the guy and threw the water right in his bald, dirty, fat, mangy head.

Now I have something to say about the law.

This didn’t start way back then when Christmas started taking hostages, but it was close enough to get we few piquing eyebrows.

They many criticized us, as they rightly should have. Our paranoia came from an insecure place.

The thing was prisons.

Rehabilitation fell out of public favour, and in its place they planted supreme revenge.

Judges whom I had never seen, yet will defend rights not to be seen, decided that putting them in a different, darker world wasn’t enough- that world they’d created with the properties of a black hole, sucking in anything that got within existing distance.

They arrived to this decision upon a crest of bloody prison riots to bury it in.

So what they went ahead and did was establish an intricate system wherein criminals had everything in their life ruined upon conviction. A highly personalized system where all they loved was stripped from them by the state.

Family fortunes would be seized, relatives relocated, names blacklisted, reputations tarnished, and all property destroyed. Lives would be ruined.

In essence, any criminal within the family would curse the family. And then the law would change to the hands to the family – the peoples.

The transference of responsibility was wildly disregarded.

Nobody said the judges had more pressing matters, but that was a possible defense.

Back to the scat

The water hit his face like a big flat foot.

He dropped the arm and it didn’t even make a sound. There was a fever in his eyes that went parabolic.

I told him “I’m making a citizen’s arrest.”

Bold step in my direction.

I hesitated, but then didn’t.

Brokenly, “I’m… making a citizen’s arrest, sir!” but he wouldn’t stop.

“Wagon…” I said, chocolatey with woe.

Then I darted back inside like a smarty pants. He gave chase and it went downhill the further I got up the stairs.

We both burst into the apartment, myself like a maniac and himself like a lunatic. He was breathing sharply through his teeth.

It was his confidence that let the crowbar connect with his forehead. That’s as close as I can figure.

I keep weapons within panic distance because I’m a cynic at heart.

He hit the ground like a sack of swimming pools.

I didn’t take a break between the defense, justifiable by informed linguists, and the capture, justifiable by the police’s miscarriage of justice.

I bound his legs and arms with whatever I could find. When he awoke I closed the closet in his face, promising “trapdoor time you nerd!”

I kept him in there a week until 911 was back up and that baowshit about “condition five” was quietly swept under the rug what looks like a tent.

They came and hauled the bitter, malnourished son-of-a-bitch off. No questions were asked; what happens in December disappears in December.

Or so they promised- the citizens. Nobody with any warm blood coursing through their veins could promise that. It was common commentary; something that united we few with them many.

So when they took him off I thought it was curtains close on the whole thing.

There I am, washing my hands.

Days later, while I was at work constructing presents with mine bare, washed hands, I received a phone call. It was the police calling to let me know that this fine democracy wasn’t done with me.

An example was to be made. Or so they didn’t say, per se.

Now let me tell you about what lies to the East.

This is a really short story using pretty much the same words as the last one: revenge, loyalty, and wicked sniggerin’.

The world’s judges got up to something. Our guys worked hard to have us be allowed to pursue sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll in foreign lands. The guys on our side defended the Christmas migration and pleaded that host countries allow us out little comforts. The other side agreed, but only if it was a 2 way street. And then we agreed. Everyone was agreeing.

The alarmingly buried law had people carrying the laws of their native countries with their passports. It worked for anyone and everyone. It was the closest thing to peace.

Our guys didn’t know that everyone everywhere else hated us and that handshake came with half an obituary and a giggle.

Most of the countries were bitter about our folk clawing at their treasures like unexorcized orphans.

Judges holed up in Egypt, fed up with all of us doing our thing, legalized murder from November through December.

On the surface this would sound like a simple, just technique to disappear the tourists. Nobody really caused a fuss.

And then after word got out, other countries followed suit, and then any chance of reprimand was destroyed.

So let me tell you about my brother.

My brother was one of the many who hungered for the dark, and one of the few actually approached by tall, leath’ry silhouettes to be employed as a glorified puppet. But what a glorious puppet he was.

He trafficked passports from countries of legalized murder and decriminalized taxidermy for those 2 months when it counted to miserable criminals.

So that’s why when I see someone outside my house chewing on an arm, part of me knows he’s got the paperwork, but another part of me is ballsy.

My balls; my just, principled, brilliant balls.

And that brings us back to me stepping into the court.

I had invited my brother to sit in attendance so I could gesture something rude to him as I walked past. I’d called him days before promising a cake or he wouldn’t have come. All he got was my most offensive fingers.

But he couldn’t walk out. Then he’d be weird. So he had to sit there and deal with it.

Something wonderful hit my face. I saw the judge.

It was Santa Clause.

He was like a pillar of glorious nuclear smoke.

And it only exploded for this guy, and as such it was all over me. I had atomic bomb painted all up and down my suit. I was dripping with the reality of this guy.

But the whole thing was a circus anyway so how I acted didn’t really matter.

The more I talked to myself the more horrified I was at the visions of Father Christmas handing down words that may lead to damning, the ruining of innocent lives, the punishing of uninvolved persons, or war on Egypt. Or all of them.

War on Belgium.

War on Christmas, sir.

The case would blow the holiday fiasco wide open.

My brother had smuggled himself into the town inside a crate three sizes too small, and upon arriving I had him smuggle in a cell phone three sizes too big so he could record the thing.

The accused never broke eye contact with the side of my head.

My lawyer was appointed to me by the state, but it might as well have been a mannequin. It wasn’t about words. It was enough that this thing was happening.

I looked back at my brother periodically to give him reassuring man-nods. He crept the camera up over peoples’ shoulders every now and again. Every time he did it he went coughed decisively. Like a sicko.

I’d forgotten my father until that day in the courtroom. That night kept running through my head in a loop that tilted the passage of time.

The judge hurled toy trains at whomever he deemed unfit. Despite the media’s portrayal of the thing, Mr. Clause was in charge and he wasn’t in town to give a hand out.

Unless the hand out was justice.

We were waist deep in the thing when a dusty Egyptian man kicked his way into the courtroom with machine guns strapped to his body. His eyes were fixed ahead but not on anything in particular. If he believed in what he was doing he would have just showed up with a bomb. While I was hateful of the Egyptian Government’s unquenchable bloodlust, I was thankful for their lack of conviction. I gave my brother another stern man nod. Gave Santa one too.

He nodded back. Everyone else was freaking out.

The militant took charge of the place by waving the guns wildly at eye level. As per usual ad nauseum en mobb his demands were uncertain. He fired haphazardly into the air to unsilence his non demands.

Thankfully people began to duck down and pray so I had time to compose my thoughts. While everyone collapsed into hostage-mode, a mode sketched deep into the collective unconscious, I remained where I was. I carried myself like I knew what I was doing. I was ignored.

The first thought I had was: there’s one person in this room who wants murder.

“And it’s not the gun wielding militant.”

I jerked my head rightways as if someone did it to kill me. The criminal was coming at me with his fingers like meathooks.

In my peripheral vision I saw Santa’s ghostly frame leap onto the podium table.

I did the same; I hopped up on top of the table before me just as the cannibal made a grab. His whole bit reeked metabolic.

I began stomping and kicking at his hands. He swaggered hard, waving to and fro like a boxer, and me kicking like a child throwing a tantrum. He swung with his entire body weight on his hands.

I ran to the back of the room, leaping onto the pews what shielded the hostages from the gunman. I jumped from one to the other like a master platformer, making my way to the back of the room, with the cannibal in pursuit. With the half of my brain not fixated on my survival – the half reserved for breasts and complaining – I noticed a calendar snapsot of Santa Clause dressed in Judge’s garbage leaping onto an Egyptian Militant like a pro wrestler.

Then I quickly thought of breasts.

Then I didn’t.

Without breaking speed or rhythm I made my way to the fight and kicked the terrorist in the spine. The weight of the Father came crashing down on him.

And then, alarum; from the other side of the room- it was my brother!

“Hey jerkfuck! Catch!”

He pitched the cell phone at me with the majesty of a swan’s neck. I caught the thing with my left hand like everything was going according to plan. With that same swooshing momentum I smashed it onto the maniac’s face. His head snapped back, so I hit him again, and again, and again. He collapsed to the ground, twisting and convulsing. I straddled his bloated belly and raised the thing high in the air.

“It’s for you, you piece of bitch!” and cracked it on his forehead again.

When I rose to my feet it was all over. All the necessary people had done their part.

Santa Clause released his deathgrip from the terrorist’s neck. We shared another stern man-nod as the rest of the court composed themselves.

After the police came the crowd began to file out. Myself and the judge shared a word, far removed from the tension of post-traumatic stress. We spoke as if it was all part of the same plan.

“You could end all of this,” I told him.

He guffawed politely and looked upwards.

“I don’t run the world, you know. None of us do. Noone does.”

“I know what all of you do. Everyone knows about the passports, and the laws and the hatred.. People disappear while everyone else isglobetrotting. And… and it doesn’t have to be that way! You guys are the-”

“I know, I know. Listen, just…”

He put a hand upon my shoulder. It was more reassuring than it should have been.

“You’re preaching to the choir here, son.”

I hung my head low and fixed my eyes to the floor.
“I don’t get it,” I told him.

He patted my shoulder .

“I speak for the people. Like it or not, this is what they want.”

He paused to let me deal with it, patted my shoulder again and started to walk away. I turned to catch him before he was too far-gone.

“Peoplewant a change though! That’s what this whole thing was about!”

He stopped and held position. He was thinking. He turned back.

“People...” he started, “People are well enough with this sickness. They just need medicine every once in awhile.”

He smiled as if he’d just told a joke.

“If they wanted change bad enough they’d do it themselves!”

And then he melted into the crowd.

Under my breath I cursed him because it was so small. He knew exactly what he was saying, without having said it before.

My brother would soon later sever his connections to the criminal underworld having nearly been killed by the government he was supposed to be assisting.

The cannibal didn’t die. He was deported to Egypt because the paperwork said so. Upon returning he was crucified then hung by the neck until dead.

The judges over there were clever in their own right. Everyone felt good about themselves with all parties revenged and the story concluded.

Christmas Eve came shortly after court, carried on the fingertips of the feel good story of the year.

The nation had given itself a present.

The only thing that changed was me.

But I’m a pretty big deal.

That’s why my friends love their presents made out of popsicle sticks.

Nothing’s cool over here.