Good morning. Feeling a little stuffy today and thinking this should have been a three day weekend just so I could have caught up on sleep and done my weekend chores, but that can’t really be helped I suppose. So we start another week with a fresh new writing prompt. Are you ready? Fabulous. Let’s begin.
I fumbled a bit with this one. I think I came up with a character I liked but the situation is sort of iffy. I do like Kevin though, this just isn’t his story.
Monday March 21st: He stared at Owen’s new tattoo.
He stared at Owen’s new tattoo. The twenty three year old held his arm out proudly showing it off. His friends admired it and complemented it’s design. Kevin stared at it and murmured the appropriate comments. As his enthusiasm was somewhat lacking, Owen quickly shifted to someone else.
Kevin wondered if any of them noticed anything off about the tattoo or if it was just him. He was new to the group and at the moment the only one drinking water instead of some other alcoholic concoction, so it might not have struck anyone else.
The design was an elaborate swirl of curls and twists that looked nice on his own and reminded Kevin of the decorative border one would see on a framed certificate. In fact he was pretty sure the pattern was almost identical to the certificate he was awarded for perfect attendance in the seventh grade. As all of his other brothers had trophies, certificates and awards galore, his mother framed it so that it would not look as though he was left out of the wall of pride as she referred to it. Seeing it there made him feel bad in ways it took him years to understand.
The others were awarded for their efforts, he was praised because no matter what, he kept showing up.
While the designs were linked to a sour memory in his past they were only the frame for the real tattoo in the center. It was a bible verse, and not one that Kevin was familiar with. He suspected when he left he would look it up, because something about it looked off, almost as though the verse had been truncated to fit in the space, the missing words somehow changing the meaning. In addition, no fewer than three words were misspelled.
Kevin circled around the room and wondered if anyone would ever point that out to Owen. He also wondered what the recourse was. If the spelling was off on your tattoo, did you complain? Did you get a refund or a discount on an additional tattoo? Did you have them draw a line through the word and then add the correct spelling above in red ink, as though your skin was an essay for an English class?
The last thought made him smile. It was the most entertainment he had gotten out of this group this far and looked around wondering how long he had to stay. He was told that he needed to make more of an effort to blend in, to socialize and get to know the others. He tried. It usually ended badly.
His one skill when socializing seemed to be the ability to say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. It usually ended in disaster and, truth be told, the occasional fist fight. This night, hadn’t gone too badly. He concentrated on mostly saying nothing and offering politely noncommittal responses to anything asked of him. He smiled and made sure to drink nothing but water on the off chance his lessening up caused him to say something unfortunate.
He was actually quite proud of himself for managing to not comment on Owen’s inked misspellings. The thought of them though sat in the back of his mind like grains of sand in a damp sock. He could feel them pressing and rubbing away and suspected that if his path ended up circling back to Owen’s he would say something. He was certain that something would end up being unfortunate. When he saw Owen heading in his direction, Keven decided that perhaps now was the time to go.
‘Best to leave on a high note,’ he thought. ‘Even if the high note isn’t that high.’
Ten til Midnight 