Showtime
1
AUG/20
Joe sat under the starlight, his back to Oni’s, and waited…and listened. Oni was playing the drums Joe had only recently completed and Joe found the sounds soothing, rhythmic, and powerful. Soon the sounds would produce another effect and Joe looked forward to it a bit impatiently. It had been since before the landsharks that Joe had heard his brother play and he was eager for the show to begin.
It would be dawn soon and Joe knew he wouldn’t be able to enjoy the show for long. The tribe would rest during the day as they had been, or they would venture forth, perhaps with a better chance of determining the right direction. Either way, the sun would be out and Joe was modest. What he longed to see himself was something he was not eager to share and it would be all too visible to the tribe in the daylight. He had not made sense of what happens to him when Oni plays, but he thought it might be magical, and that scared him.
He also knew he liked it, and that scared him. He felt different when it started but he could not explain how, it just was different. But it felt good, it brought a smile to his face and made him laugh easier.
And that scared him more. “That’s how magic gets you I bet. It feels so great to use it that you just can’t help yourself.” Then he laughed a little.
“Oh yeah. Here it comes” he said as he relaxed and let the rhythmic drumming flow through him. His smile grew. His eyes began dilating. His heartrate increased. He removed his shirt and looked down at his chest in the darkness. He could see the lines of his tattoos beginning to move. It looked as if they raised up above themselves about an inch and then began to slide around. They did it for a few seconds and then snapped back into place only to resume rising and moving again just a second later. The lines raised and slide and snapped over and over, forming different patterns.
Joe giggled a little. He could feel the tattoos moving a little and they tickled. Oni kept playing and laughed a little because Joe was laughing. He was glad his brother liked his drumming so much. But Oni was also tired and quite ill from the spider attacks.
“Just a few more minutes, all right?” he asked.
“Yeah man, far out.” Joe answered in a way Oni found a bit odd.
Joe himself was lost in the tattoos watching the swirling patterns when the first images appeared.
“That’s cool.” Joe thought, normally the tattoos just swirled and made random patterns, but now Joe saw what the thought was 3 wagons pulled by lizards. “Oh that kind of looks like us,” he thought as he watched the caravan move across his chest. Then from underneath the caravan a tattoo landshark erupted, attacking the caravan.
“What the…” Joe mumbled. He kept watching as the tattoos seemed to be replaying part of his life. Absentmindedly he reached with his right hand to scratch his left forearm. As he did so he scratched from the wrist area back towards the elbow. When he did the tattoos stopped and then went backwards. He scratched back a little more and he saw in the tattoos the tribe packing up to leave their home at the bridge.
Joe scratched the other way a few times and he saw the group approach the oasis and the thri-kreen. A few more scratches and the saw them in the mines. A little more and he saw Kobra Kai getting swallowed up by those…things. “Yah,” thought Joe sadly, his smile slipping from his face.
A few more scratches and Joe saw himself sitting back to back with Oni, just as he was now. Joe looked down and saw that his right hand had moved all the way to the tip of his fingers on his left hand.
“That is the present,” he thought. He moved his hand all the way back to his left elbow and the tattoos showed Joe’s dad and mom, under the covers getting intimate.
“Back to birth it looks like,” and the image of his parents made him smile again.
On instinct Joe reached with his left hand to his right forearm and tried the same technique to see if it affected his tattoos. Nothing changed on his chest, but Joe laughed a little anyway. Someone was tickling his back.