A Ghost in a Painted World (ORIGINAL)

Two opposing characters reflect a world in which criminals are tattooed for each crime.

In the mid-21^st century a radical new idea was instituted to curb crime: a physical manifestation of those acts permanently displayed in the form of tattoos. For every crime from adolescent vandalism to murder there was a tattoo template which would be altered to fit the specifics of the act. There was no longer incarceration, just humiliation and execution for those who could not be shamed by the aesthetic. 

In this future, at a window, in view of cavernous valleys carved between the buildings of New Utopia, sat Alex Dawes. She was a criminal. In modern times she would have been imprisoned in a cell 1/16^th the size of her apartment but what she gained in freedom of movement she lost in beauty. Alex was branded with several tattoos. The most prominent and most noticeable was a great curvature around her right eye. It spanned from the hairline to within a centimeter of her lips. It swept under her eye but short of her nose. It was a disfigurement imposed by a system she reviled.

            She would be considered beautiful by most accounts if not for the tattoos. At the window, she wore only a white bathrobe, planning a swim soon in her pool. The eyes of any observer could see a confident and fiery personality from the black and purple nail polish or sharp eye shadow. Her legs were swan-like but botched with violations. The v of the robe below her neck revealed the edges of another tattoo. With a body of violations both metaphorically and physically she felt without control over her own flesh. She was not alone in these feelings. A movement had begun to take control of the body and nullify the effect of the tattoos: face and body paint. She wore the former with straight and curved finger-pressed streaks of purple, yellow, green and blue in a collision. The deep, dark colors of her facial tattoo still stood out among the colorful mess.

Rain sprinkled the window, blurring the normally sharp neon colors that adorned the streets of the city. She imagined her walks along those cavernous valleys. She imagined the passing strangers and the air of shame that suffocated everyone. No one starred out of a collective embarrassment. Those with visible tattoos dare not risk horrified, judgmental eyes filling their nightmares. For everyone else it was the fear to see the crime. How vile and unsettling to have knowingly passed a rapist or murderer. How disgraceful to have only been within feet of villainy. She had broken this rule once and in synchronicity so did another. They caught eyes that day and the feeling was not that of embarrassment or disgust but sympathy. It was the only time in which she had felt humanity on those streets. Was any of that on the streets this rainy day, she wondered.

She was startled by the doorbell. She glided in reluctance to the door. She did not recognize the man on the other side but the identification card held in front of the electronic peephole gave him authority. He was a police officer and therefore capable of disfiguring her with another tattoo if she avoided him. So the door was opened. The electronic peephole was deceiving as her first impression was of tall, overconfident veteran of the force but what stood before her was barely a man and with a look of nervousness that hinted at inexperience. Already defensive, this misinterpretation calmed her slightly. He wore a charcoal black coat with an orange arm band signifying his position as a police officer. He was boyish, much less of a man than a boy, with a part in his hair and baby blue eyes.

“My name is detective Ethan Holmes. Name please.” He said with a nervous, childish stutter.

“Alex Dawes.”

“Are you in our system?”

“What is this about?” She said while her body stiffened in defense.

“Are you in our system? Miss, can you show me the other side of your face?” She turned to reveal her tattoo.  “You are registered then. Now, miss, I need you to keep still. Being in the system I will need a photo scan of one of your tattoo’s to verify your identity. Ten seconds, miss.”

“Fine.” She muttered with annoyance.

“Stay still for ten seconds as the device scans you. You are a painted face I see. Luckily for you it isn’t on your tattoo. Had it, I would have you scrub it off. In truth…you should scrub it off anyways. It is not illegal yet but it will be. It completely violates the spirit of the system. Plus you seem like a pretty face. You shouldn’t hide it under this silly mess.”

“Are you done yet?” She asked while beginning to pull away.

“Miss, please do not move. There, it is finished. I will need a minute for the database to search for you. …you know they used to think, the police and politicians that is, they thought the face painting was a fashion movement. They used to say it was a phase and nothing more.”

“How old are you?” She asked to assert some dominance over this intruder.

“What?”

“You seem nervous…like you haven’t done this much.”

“I am young but I am not nervous. And uh, hell what do you know.” He felt his authority slipping for a brief moment. “You are a criminal and a freak with a painted face. I am a police officer and you will respect me despite my age. Miss, I am going to have to ask you some questions and look around your apartment.”

“Why? What is this whole thing about?”

“Missing persons miss. Six criminals have gone missing in the last week. We are covering all our bases.”

“This is an invasion of privacy-” she snapped as Ethan walked through nearly toppling her as though she wasn’t there. Her swan-like legs kept her balance as the officer perused her home, her items and documented everything in his head.  The room was molded around a deep perfectly circular pool. The walls were painted in purple and blue. The reflection of the water made these walls rhythmic. It was a sanctuary free of judgment of her.

“Miss, with all due…” He paused, unable to truly finish the expression. “Miss, believe me that we are simply trying to ascertain the whereabouts of these individuals. Procedure suggests that we question other criminals to see if shelter is being given. You live alone then?”

“Yes-” she said while defensively eyeing his every act in the inspection.

“Anyone significant in your life? Romantically significant…or sexually significant considering your kind.”

“My kind? I live alone. My personal life is my own but if your investigation so needs it then no I have no one who spends much time here other than me.”

“Miss…Dawes, it is all part of the investigation. Say, do you ever smile?”

“Only to friends.”

“The police are not friends? …of course you probably wouldn’t feel that way but you should. Even now we are looking for these missing criminals. There is compassion in that, no? That is friendship, no?”

“Friends inspire the positive…, positive feelings, not fear-” she responded almost out of uncomfortable pity.

“It is not fear, it is respect-” he spit as though it were a slogan repeated a thousand times. He looked at her facial tattoo and asked, “How old were you?”

“You have your database. Why do you need to ask me?” She instantly knew what he meant.

“It only confirms your identity. Nothing more. You do not seem like the kind.”

“The kind? There you go again. ‘The kind’ Do you mean a criminal again? You of all people should know that in that case I am the kind-” she said with raised voice and mocking tone.

“A pretty face.”

“Earlier you said I was a freak with a painted face.”

“Beneath it though.”  He paused a few minutes while continuing to examine the apartment. “An officer learns how to read tattoos, you know.”

“Why did you ask then?” She quickly walked in front of him to end this intrusion of her home and past.

“The colors, purple and black, show it happened at night. The nearly 180 degree, very obtuse ‘v’ represents you did it out of self-defense. What did they do?” She glared at him as he began crossing the line of her limits. “So you murdered someone out of self-defense…at night. The thin, tall letter above your lips shows that you were well acquainted with them. Was it a family member? That is actually pretty common. A friend maybe? Also very common. Or…was it a lover? Before the tattoo, you were probably very beautiful. Maybe he found someone else. The state says criminals are far more likely to be unfaithful than everyone else. Was it jealous rage? Then again it was self-defense - was he the jealous one? Did he find out something he wasn’t supposed to? Did that drive you to kill them? To kill someone you loved?”

Alex snapped, driven to the brink of her patience by an authority who found it unsatisfactory to not only disfigure her but now intrude on her emotional struggle with it. Her equally brave and foolish soliloquy went as followed: “Even interrogating me in my bathrobe and saying degrading things in hanging barbs, I might find you charming if you hadn’t stared and if you hadn’t asked. Do you know what the worst thing about you people is? About your kind? You don’t look at us with embarrassment or judgment. You look at us with superiority and you see through us like there is not even a human being here anymore. You come in here and harass me because you can. You impose and violate, prick and prod like I were some lab experiment. And then…and then you have the audacity and sheer disrespect to ask me about my tattoos. I have killed, I have lied and I am now asking, no demanding, that an arrogant young police officer leaves my home immediately.”

Her rage and fury awoke something not only in her but also Ethan, the youthful and inexperienced police officer. For the first time he truly understood what the veteran officers had warned him of. He had lost his position of power but now his own anger rose. He grabbed a tall glass of water on a nearby table and thrust its contents into her face. With a swelling face and eyes vibrating he set out to regain the position of power in this situation. “You are a criminal. No one respects you. You were a pretty face and we took it from you. I earned that audacity. This position…I earned that audacity. Do you want to know what I think of you?”

He approached her quickly with her expression quickly turning to panic. His hands rose, grasped her bathrobe and tore it downward until Alex stood completely naked. He stepped back already having made his point. Even in her own home she deserved nothing in the eyes of the police. He had to go further though so his face turned to a mocking grin. He walked around getting a good look at every tattoo on her body. So filled with anger, he never even took measure of her beyond the tattoos.

“I see something. It has the features of a woman. Let me see. I see theft. I see lies to authority. I see murder. I see all these things trying to pass off as a human being. Is there anything else there? A little paint but nothing else. It must have been a trick of the light because for a little while I thought I saw something more. You are right. I am young. It showed when I had patience for you. There is nothing to find here. I might as well claim seven people missing, certainly just a ghostly presence.”

There was a still a childish stutter to his words by the words themselves were enough to degrade her. He did not even know if her eyes acknowledged him. He was nearly finished but the paint on her face still irritated him. In a sudden push forward he knocked her in her pool. It had been waiting for her even through these dehumanizing moments. Ethan had eased his fury, told her to wash the paint off and stormed out.

Alex floated alone. Her home was her sanctuary, that last battlement of a carrion call. The police had robbed her of that as well. Whether on the streets or in her former sanctuary she was secondary, subservient and worst of all subhuman in whatever humanity could mean in a world such as this. Ethan Holmes was a force of order in a world that he was just only beginning to understand. Ethan Holmes was also the reflection of a state, of a system, that took virtue in blindness. This thought brought a smile to Alex. She thought of what another criminal had once asked her: when a ghost is seen if only by its symbols then what is seen if nothing of the state remains upon it? Alex dove in a sudden rush to the bottom of her deep pool.

She became lost in the liquid chaos. As she willingly sunk these bubbles ascended and left her. The paint slowly slid from the curvature of her face and ascended as well. Naked and bleeding purple, yellow and green she neared the bottom of the twenty foot pool. Naked and freed from invasion she was once again no longer alone. There were six friends if only in belief in six tanks hidden if only for sanity. The six wore masks to breathe as their bodies bathed in a special alchemy of chemicals. As Alex’s paint escaped her, the ink of their tattoos gave way as well. Alex’s eyes, including one which wore the symbol of ‘murder’, beheld paralleled and growing nakedness. She smiled with full knowledge of her lies, concealment and body of crimes that if discovered would transform her to an unrecognizable humanoid. She waved to the six missing, the six ghosts, and the slowly reborn, waved back.

Reviews

[Decere Tiozon]

Tattoos to show off their crimes? Huh. Some people might find that rewarding, not humiliating.

New Utopia sounds very . . . unoriginal. And as I would predict, the city would actually become a dystopian society underneath. I would suggest a different name, maybe even translate that into a different language to keep the meaning there.

Hmmm . . . starting off with information dumping is a little indiscreet. It makes it seem like I'm reading a textbook and not a fictional work. You're trying to build a world, but dumping all of that in the very beginning. I suggest pulling the reader in with an event—the reader would be thrown in the middle of something. Introducing a character when nothing is really going on? Hmm. It's very dull right there, sorry. I think the explanation would be better after something happens first. The beginning is suppose to impress us: the readers.

The language though is oh so beautiful. The flow, the vocabulary. Not at all mediocre. And it doesn't seem like you're trying to impress the audience; it's your own natural voice. And I like that.

You tend to forget the rule of compound sentences though; the rule that prevents run on sentences? Well this is elementary, but for every sentence there is a subject and a predicate. If there are two or more of each, then you'll have a run-on. However, this could be avoided by using compound words. The comma and the FANBOYS (For, And, But, Or, Yet, and So) help prevent this.

[“What is this about?” She said while her body stiffened in defense.]
The "she" after the dialogue should have been lowercased because this is still set up as one whole sentence. She said, he said, she mentioned, they declared are all examples of dialogue tags, which are seen at the end of dialogues (or beginning). Dialogue + dialogue tag = sentence.

Yeah, as I mentioned before, this scene seems more of a second chapter instead of an introductory chapter. Just my opinion of it.

~Courtesy of the Constructive Critics Group~