Pulse

was about to do.
    Faith felt the sting of the needle touching the tender skin at her hairline but didn’t move. She absorbed it like a sponge and settled in for the long haul. She curled harder into a ball, touching the other side of her neck where another tattoo lay hidden.
    “You know,” Glory said over the electric hum of the tools she used. “We go together like salt and pepper, you and me. Faith and Glory. Like we were fated to find each other.”
    “Sure, I guess.” Faith was still nursing a headache, but it was rapidly going away in the shadow of the fire on her neck.
    “Might make a pretty tattoo—Faith and Glory—all swirly and nice.”
    Faith could see the image clearly. She was already drawing it out in her mind, but it wasn’t swirly and nice. The word Glory was surrounded in bright-green ivy, Faith was tangled in barbed wire. And for once there was color—red—bleeding in lines off Faith’s name.
    When it was over, Glory offered to show it to Faith using two mirrors, one in front and one behind; but Faith didn’t want to look at it until at least a little bit of the gross swelling had gone down. It would be days before it would calm down for good, and she had a feeling she wouldn’t have the strength to look at it until it stopped hurting. She’d nurse the pain, imagine the image; and when finally she did look at it, her pain would be smaller.
    “Thank you, Glory. I don’t think I’ll be back.”
    “Never say never. These things are addicting.” Glory held out her arms, in part to show off all the tattoos that covered her skin, but also to invite Faith into an embrace. Faith didn’t put out her arms; she just moved a step closer and let Glory enfold her.
    “Faith and Glory,” she said. “You remember that. We’re bound for both you and me.”
    Faith wasn’t so sure, but she liked the way Glory’s dark skin smelled sweet and gentle, the way her embrace was firm but soft.
    An hour later Faith was back home, standing in her bathroom. She was staring into a mirror and holding a smaller one in her hand, thinking about looking. She was not thinking of the new tattoo but the old one, an image she only allowed herself to look at once in a while. It had been a month or more since she’d let herself look there; and for some unknown reason, she began this exercise by lifting the wrong side of her hair. Was it an accident, or did she really want to see the work Glory had done and hadn’t been able to help herself? Either way, once she’d started to see the new tattoo, she couldn’t stop. Faith pulled her hair all the way up and saw the damaged, swollen skin. Tattoos never looked good on the first day. They looked more like the result of an inky, self-inflicted cutting session. But the image was there, and it brought her to tears all over again. It was a pair of holding hands, the wrists disappearing up into her blond hair. The lines were fierce, but the result was powerful, like two people who would never let go of each other. And Glory had been unable to help herself. She’d added a tiny thread of green ivy wrapped around the wrists. She’d added a small presence of hope in a composition of grief, like a white dove against an endless black sky.
    “Thank you, Glory,” Faith whispered, because she liked it. It made her feel better.
    Faith took a deep breath and let her waves of hair fall against her shoulder. She looked at her Tablet and remembered that she was supposed to go and get the cheese and the flour, because that’s what her parents had told her to do.
    Or had they?
    As Faith pulled her long hair into a knot behind her head and turned slightly in the mirror, she let herself hold the truth completely. She’d set those messages to come in herself, the reminders from her parents, which had originally been sent months and months before. Faith had copied them and put them on a rotation. And for a stinging moment every day or two, the alerts would appear like her mom and her dad had both reminded her to get the cheese and get the flour, to get home after dark. A split second later she would understand it wasn’t really them. But the brief moment before that was like the electric hum of a tattoo needle marking her soul.
    She took a good long look at the image on the side of her neck. It was small and well hidden, tucked secretly against the line of her hair, opposite the new tattoo she’d just gotten. There was a branch of a tree in winter, leafless and cracked. On the branch