Ultraviolet

Art: Consecutive Substack Story 1225

Photo by nasim dadfar on Unsplash

There’s an American tragedy smoothing cement at Atkinson just west of Third.

Tan arms working a trowel in front of a house that paid to fix the streets the city wouldn’t.

Erik Stine is Caucasian, not that it matters, and his skin is darker than some of his African American coworkers.

That doesn’t matter either, really, but…

Look closer.

Look at Erik’s left arm.

There’s a blemish on that arm.

Jason Colver is Erik Stine’s cousin.

Jason made fantastic images on beaches, in the sand, fogged windows and plates that had too much ketchup on them.

He didn’t take to pencils or paint brushes or speaking much, because Jason is on the spectrum.

Terry “Viking” Ratteson is a tattoo artist.

Viking’s girlfriend Danielle, a caregiver at the group home Jason lives in, showed Viking photos of some of Jason’s sand art.

“Outrageous…fucking mesmerizing…” Viking said.

It took some wrangling and some bending of some rules but Danielle and Viking got a tattoo machine in Jason’s hand.

He put some intricate ships and storms and sea monsters on some innocent grapefruit.

Then they got Erik to volunteer to be his cousin’s first human guinea pig.

Everyone involved knew that Jason could not articulate the images he created. He simply created them.

Erik took a chance.

Jason created a ship, with a buxom maiden and the tentacle of a beast wrapped around a mast, with a tattered sail.

No one knows where these images come from.

They reside in Jason’s head, and then, that once, Erik’s arm.

If you spend any time with Jason, you know that his sand and fog and ketchup artworks don’t last long.

He destroys them with a foot or a sleeve or a bare hand.

When he realized he couldn’t do that to Erik’s tattooed arm, he began to scream.

When he saw Erik’s arm two weeks later, he screamed.

Erik stopped putting sunscreen on his tattoo.

It’s a blob now, a blob of dark greenish ink on a freakishly brown arm that works in the sun all day.

Every once in a while an occupational therapist will put a marker in Jason’s hand.

He marks the page with it, sometimes the table, but never in a manner that another human can discern what the image might be.

The tattoo on Erik’s arm was the best one Viking ever saw. Not the best first one. The best one.

Erik Stine didn’t think his cousin would stop making beautiful images.

Jason Colver still makes beautiful images, but he makes them in his mind, where he can wipe them off and they can’t walk away from him, into the sun.

***

Thanks for reading.

I know more than a few autistic people who add great value to the world in their own way, on their own terms.

Any appreciation show to me through buymeacoffee.com/JimmyDoom helps me keep this streak of fiction going. Thanks in advance.

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