TNT,
Words by Ali
The Picnic
The music was louder than it needed
to be. Jakob turned the volume up
whenever ‘Ante’s songs began playing. I
spun around on one of the picnic tables, the sun glaring in my eyes. Marcus was on the phone with his partner. Cas
would be there in about five minutes, but they were still talking about their
current case.
Marcus held
his cell phone between his right shoulder and his ear. In his right hand was a hot dog and in the
left was a bottle of beer. He took a
bite of his hotdog and a mixture of ketchup and mustard dripped onto the
concert Tee he was wearing. It was black
with cartoon versions of the band members on the front. The black material was starting to fade from
all the years in the wash. The image on
the front, and tour dates on back, were cracking and pulling apart from
use.
There was a
small burn hole on the left side, high up showing the pale skin of his
back. The burn got there four years
earlier when a drunken idiot in a bar threw an ashtray at the wall; scattering
several still smoldering cigarettes around the room. Marcus decided the best response was to throw
the drunken idiot in jail for the night.
The short
sleeves of his shirt showed off the three-quarter sleeves of tattoos on both of
his arms. Only long-sleeved button ups
on the job. I still remember the first
tattoo Marcus got. I was four, and we
had moved out to California only about two or three months before. His first one was on his arm and it included
my first name, Symphony. I went by
Ellie, my middle name. I remember
sitting there watching. He had his arm
resting on the chair’s armrest with his palm facing upward. The buzzing of the needles started and I
flinched, Marcus was stoic. As the
needles touched his arm his brows scrunched together, his lips flattened into a
straight line, and his jaw was so tight I’m now sure his teeth were grinding
together painfully. The thing with
Marcus was that he was in pain but he didn’t want people to know it. I could still tell though. His shorts came to mid-calf showing the
tattoos that started at the knees and worked their way downward. They were black Dickies that were nearly as
old as the concert shirt he was wearing.
They were
fraying at the bottom, so that when he would pull out a loose thread it would
unravel ever so slightly each time. He
could get new pants; actually he has much newer ones in his closet. He continues to wear these ones because he was
wearing them at the first gig he played with his old band, 'Ante'.
He shoved the
last bit of his hotdog into his mouth, turned off his cell phone, shoved it into
his pocket, and downed the last of his beer.
He tossed the empty beer bottle into the trash as he came my way. He jumped up onto the table next to me, and
danced me around to the music.
