Power Trio

Thekla’s next client isn’t for an hour, truth be told, and she’s a five-minute walk from the shop. But she feels strange around the human, not ready to be alone and aimless with him. Going from Evan the Interloper to Evan the Tragedy was odd enough, and now she’s dealing with his gratitude, which is so unalloyed it gives her an unidentifiable twist in her chest. When she gave him her shitty, cracked phone, five years out-of-date, he held it with a reverence usually reserved for saints’ knucklebones.

With the extra time she changes into all black (not exactly her shop’s uniform, but not not a uniform), hits a head shop—a legal, open one, that hasn’t had its rear gutted for a practice space—and grabs some of her sleepy time favorites. And why the hell not, she detours to pick up a bag of Sarford’s curried crickets for the team.

“What’s good, everyone,” she calls, stepping through the swing door of Labyrinth Tattoos. “I brought some Sarfies if anyone’s feeling hoppy.” A murmured chorus of thanks rises from her coworkers, most of them bent over clients.

The sound of buzzing is omnipresent in Labyrinth’s dim space, like a swarm of malcontent bees, fighting for aural space with the strains of Grotesquerian’s latest playing over the PA (Thekla isn’t a fan—why is everyone going metalcore these days?). It’s an open floor plan, high ceilinged, with framed flash and heavy-metal inspiration hanging everywhere a hammer could reach.

“Thek!” an ecstatic voice cries. “I thought you weren’t on yet!”

Kell is sitting with Hockham, the bugbear owner of the place, as he works on her thigh piece. It’s a blackwork Chariot arcana splashed across her upper left flank, the widest expanse she had left on her limbs. Instead of horses, she’s got a pair of war rhinos, the kind they say orcish knights used to ride. The whole shop basically pitched in to design it; Kell doesn’t work here, but she’s in often enough that she’s become the unofficial mascot.

Labyrinth is where Kell got her first tattoo, a ceremonial orcish mace on her bicep, talking her artist’s ear off the whole time about the problems with her boyfriend and the music they were trying to make and the flakiness of the punk recruit set. By the end of the session, she’d asked for Thekla’s number. The first two texts buzzed her phone a day later:

im breaking up w/ my shitass guitarist

u want to see if we fit?

“Kell!” Thekla tosses the crickets onto her workstation chair and hurries over. Hockham scoots over to show off the piece, pulling up the delicate loupe he places incongruously over his big hairy face when he’s working.

“Doing the horses today,” he says. “Clean, neh?” Kell has pulled her pants down to her knees to allow Hockham access to the work-in-progress. Thekla admires the filled-in rhino, the way it’s aligned to the strong line of Kell’s quadriceps so it won’t deform, the motion its silhouette implies, the way her muscle curves, smooth and strong under her amethyst skin, up below her cotton underwear to the prow of her hipbone, where her body gets soft and pliant, pressed against the tattoo chair—

Thekla snaps the fuck out of it. She has learned how not to think these thoughts anymore. Why is it that this human dude showed up and suddenly she’s lost her calluses? It’s because of what you saw them doing, her treacherous little slice of mind whispers. The way they got too close. And how she looked at him.

“Very clean,” Thekla says, and grins at Kell. “You hanging in there, girl? We’re getting kind of close to the knee on that hoof.”

“This? This shit is nothing,” Kell says. “Hockey’s a gentle giant. Now this,” she flips Thekla off, displaying the arrowhead running up her middle finger, “was put on me by a psycho sadist who loves my pain.”

“Hands hurt,” Hockham says, flipping his loupe back down.

“Which I do remember warning you,” Thekla says, pulling a stool up by Kell’s feet and perching. “But when do you listen to me?”

“Listen to her. You are my life coach, babe. I still do that breathing thing you taught me every night.” Kell pokes Thekla’s knee with the toe of her boot. “Thekla is sore cause we have a new bassist, and she didn’t get to do an interview and reference check on him first.”

“Mmm,” the eternally loquacious Hockham offers.

“So check it out,” Kell says. “I’ve been thinking about the master plan now that we’ve got a solid bassist.”

“Lay it on me,” Thekla says. She’s their lead songwriter, but Kell has always been the one with the big dream.

“OK.” Kell taps Hockham’s shoulder to get him to pause, wriggles a bit to get comfortable, and then gives the bugbear the thumbs-up. “So step one, and this is just my thought because you’re the music lord and you have the final say. We scrap the parts that the last bassist laid down and start Evan off with a clean slate.”

“Agreed,” Thekla says. “The intro on Geriatric might be salvageable, but the rest we cut. Evan’s got a much different style.”

“Step two, we get our name figured out.”

“That’s the responsible move at this point, yes.”

“Step three, I get in touch with the booker at Glorie’s and confirm that we’re in to open for Shrike.”

Thekla frowns. “We said that date was too soon.”

“Yeah, we did, but look: you, me, and Sion are all close to solid on these, and Evan’s picking up fast. Like I would not be disappointed if we’d done that last Fossil Fuel live. And that was the second time he ever played it. We’ve got a month. We’ll jam it and the rest of them out. I’m down to take extra days in the shed if you are. I think we’ll get the set figured out. It might not be 100% album perfect, but we gotta start playing out, and opening for Shrike means we’ll have at least a bit of an audience.”

“All right, all right. I’m convinced.” Thekla raises her hands in mock surrender. “But only because Glorie’s comps your food and drinks.”

“Step four, we record. Sion’s friend at Warcry Records has a couple dates open at the end of June. We got time for a single and a b-side at least, maybe an EP if we really step our pussies up. And then we carpetbomb it.” Kell plants her fist in her open palm. “Get that shit out everywhere, get every date we can, maybe finally hire Dalma to do our social media. Sweaty, sweaty summer. No fucking around.”

“No fucking around,” echoes Thekla.

“Step five, we’re rock gods. We get signed to a record deal, maybe by Warcry I’m thinking, step six we get invited to Vail. And step seven, we play Samhain in front of 400,000 people and the Kamiyon clan crowns you matriarch.”

“I love it. I’m going through my closet tonight and picking my outfit.”

“Your steps are I think turning into long jumps.” Muriel remarks as she wanders past, popping a cricket into her mouth. She’s a gnome with a talent for tribal tattoos and an accent as thick as her straw-colored beard.

“You’re only allowed to eat those if you fuck with the vision,” Thekla says.

“Okay,” Muriel says around her Sarfie. “I fuck.”

Thekla needs to set up for her first client of the afternoon. She and Kell jabber on about nothing in particular as she runs down her checklist, discussing the finer points of goblin matriarch dress codes, bandying sexually explicit band name ideas back and forth, razzing Hockham over the photos he’d posted on a fishing boat yesterday. She avoids the Evan subject.

And she feels pretty good. And when Kell does a breathy little groan while Hockey fills the rhino hoof in, Thekla excuses her full-body reaction as concern for her friend.

They have a plan. And she’s going to stick to it.