And West Is West by Ron Childress

oxygen.
    â€œHey. Be with you in a minute,” Miss Shelly says to Jessica in an accent that is not West Coast. And then she turns her attention to the clicking curtain. “
Harvey
, get your hairy butt on out here.”
    A hulk parts the curtain. He is covering his mouth.
    â€œI swear, you big ones are the wussiest. Now show us what you got.”
    The man lowers the covering hand and Jessica is surprised to see that his mouth, chin, and cheeks display no art. Then Harvey pulls his lower lip inside out and a tattooed ROSALYNN appears right side up. His upper lip is grinning.
    â€œHarvey, know what you ought to have did before you came to me?” Miss Shelly asks. “Shacked up with a girl named Sue.”
    LEANING FORWARD IN a masseur’s chair, Jessica cannot see Miss Shelly at work.
    â€œSkin fresh peeled from a sunburn makes a good canvas,” Shelly comments. “The ink goes deep. But it don’t tickle.”
    They are behind the beaded curtain, in a back room more the size of a closet. Jessica’s top is down and a rotating table fan intermittently chills her. Miss Shelly’s vibrating needle pricks over the bone of her shoulder blade and she clenches a fist.
    â€œThere’s not much meat on you so it’s gonna hurt extra,” Miss Shelly says. “I’d pour you a tequila if I could, but we ain’t allowed to serve drinks or drunks. Let me know when you want a break.”
    â€œI’m good,” Jessica says. “As long as we can finish today.”
    â€œThis’ll take a couple few hours. Never done one of these. A lot of phoenixes. Never a sphinx.”
    Jessica has picked the image from a book on Greek urns in Miss Shelly’s limited but odd library—which includes volumes on Disney cartoons, Maori sculpture, Balinese ceremonial masks, fractal geometry, Chinese astrological symbols, scarification in Ghana, ancient Egyptian writing, whatever might inspire a customer. The sphinx will incorporate her eagle’s wings and turn the claw-clutched USAF banner into hieroglyphs. “Ever heard of a palimpsest?” Miss Shelly asks her. “That’s writing on top of writing. We fix a lot of tats that way. Keeps a part of your history while changing it.”
    â€œFine,” Jessica says and drifts.
    Jessica had always charted out her long-term future like a psychic predicting happiness: a disciplined twenty years that would culminate in a military pension and return her to her beachside hometown in Florida. There she would invest her savings in a small apartment building, which she would paint pink and manage alone. Sure, she would meet a few men . . . yet she would not marry—her marriage to the Air Force having been sufficient. This life to come had appeared as solid as a monument cast in bronze.
    Attuned to the vibrating needle, Jessica comprehends that her new philosophy is to be adrift. She will keep on the move for the same reason she is undoing her tattoo, and for the same reason she had slipped away from the hospital: to be no longer what she was. In order to start again, she must now not do
anything
with military deliberation. She must drift and even in this drifting she must let herself drift.
    Under the music of Miss Shelly’s needle, time passes. Is it moving forward or jumping backward? Through the curtain seeps a smell that Jessica recognizes. She had avoided proximity to this odor after her enlistment.
    Miss Shelly quiets the needle. “How about that break?”
    â€œOkay,” Jessica says and, rising stiffly, rolls her shoulders. A mirror displays Shelly’s work in progress. Jessica’s USAF has been transformed into hieroglyphs representing a woman, a serpent, a hill, a lamp wick—because those ancient symbols have shapes similar to the letters Miss Shelly is burying. Above them, Jessica’s American eagle is but half metamorphosed into the stony female sphinx it will become and Jessica does