Instalment Fifty One

You know those cut along the dotted line lines? With tiny silhouette scissors working their way down the dots? He had those tattooed on his wrists. His girlfriend had stocking seams tattooed on the back of her legs from heel to buttock. An odd choice really. That’s something women did during the war when they couldn’t get nylons due to rationing, when stockings had seams, laying claim to a suffering she didn’t endure. But it looked fantastic. It had started when her mother had ‘P.T.O.’ tattooed on her back and ‘Please Do Not Resuscitate’ on her chest. She wasn’t trying to be cool, it was a legitimate medical concern of hers. But it set them off. He got a tombstone with his name on it, she upped that with a tombstone with her date of birth and date of death, provoking him to add the same date and a cause of death to his, the trump card being he wrote ‘Murder/ Suicide.’ By the time they had registration and calibration makes tattooed on their chests, the kind you get for lining up radiation treatment for lung cancer, it was all over. False and Faux no longer even fooled each other.