Short Story
“Sugar”
by Bridget Hoida
(Published in Faultline Journal of Art & Literature. UC Irvine, CA v.14 (2005).
Iowa Review Fiction Prize, Finalist.)
When they take your tattoo off they give you yellow plastic goggles and a foam ball, you know, to squeeze in case it hurts too much. And it hurts like a motherfucker. Forget what they say about bee stings and rubber band snaps. This is a fucking laser burning your flesh and it smells about the same, though you can't exactly be sure because you've never smelled burning skin up close before, but from now on one thing's a fact: if ever you smell it again you will know.
And you will smell it again. In five to six weeks because taking off a tattoo is slow work. It takes ages and aloe-wraps and repeated trips to the clinic—which is located in a strip mall between a Hallmark and a K-Mart—and even with five trips under your blouse it still doesn't really disappear, but rather it fades into a sickly blue tattoo, like the kind guys give themselves in prison, but not as sloppy around the edges. The craftsmanship remains, it’s just that the color goes fainter.
Janice—she’s the certified dermatological laser consultant, there's a plaque above the door—insists on the foam ball. It doesn’t have cooties, she says pointing to a jar filled with clear liquid and five or six other balls bobbing around inside. We disinfect them after each patient. It's okay, you tell her. I want it to hurt. And then she says something strange, something you didn't expect her to say. She says, Yeah, most usually do.
The tattoo was a five-year-old dare. You were in bed but not in bed. It had been stated (by him) that there would be three more visits and then he was calling the whole thing off. You itch your ankle and wonder where he came up with such an arbitrary number. Why three and not five, or fifteen or five hundred? you asked. He said, because there are rules.
Poem
Kid The Valley
by Bridget HoidaWhen you're a kid in the valley you find
nothing remarkable about the heat,
nothing remarkable about the fact that somedays
when it gets too hot, the valley floor bursts into flame.
To people who are perhaps not from the valley,
this could seem unsettling,
but as a kid growing up in the San Joaquin
it's an annoyance because, inevitably soon, your mother
will call you out of the water and into the house, as before long,
the ash will fold like walnuts into the swimming pool.
When you imagine leaving the valley
because all kids growing up in the valley imagine the leaving;
when you imagine leaving the valley you imagine yourself windblown,
with large black glasses and wool scarves,
looped and then through; the French way.
You imagine yourself glad, contented,
"That is the what it means to come into my own,"
When you do leave the valley
in favor of someplace that doesn't smell
like overripe asparagus and flies,
you will go like you always said you would,
without a lick of French in the dead heat of June.
And when you lean on your rented window,
and strain to see the Eiffel Tower
from beneath the sooty rooftops, in the rain,
you will hope you won't remember that sometimes, in the valley,
sometimes it gets so hot the freeways buckle,
sliding like table leaves after Thanksgiving,
and when the sun sets the breeze blows off the delta
and quiets the heat.