"By the Pricking of Her Thumbs" - NYC Midnight Flash Fiction 2022 challenge 2 entry

Hello darlings! This is the 2nd 1st-round challenge of the NYC Midnight 2022 Flash Fiction contest. 

Word count limit: 1000

Genre: fairy tale

Location: tattoo parlor

Item: fondue 

Enjoy!

Synopsis: Rowena the ink-witch lives in charmed, eternal youth, sheltered by a fairy’s wish, until she tattoos a jealous neighbor’s daughter. Can she survive her neighbor’s spite?

                            "By the Pricking of Her Thumbs"

In the city, near the only used bookstore that stays open past six, there’s a natty tattoo parlor with flaming hearts pinned on all the walls. In it, a raven-haired ink-witch named Rowena stabs grateful people, making them prettier.

Back when the tattoo parlor she’d worked in was only a lucrative afterthought in a barber’s backroom, Rowena was as human as you or me. Then she’d etched a fairy’s sigil over a sailor’s heart, and the fairy had given her one wish (and a basket of duck eggs) as payment.

Rowena could have wished for riches, palaces, equal pay, or even an endless supply of cheese – she dearly loved cheese – but she was very clever, and already knew how to make magic with steel and blood and pigment and skill even without fae help. She knew the power of patience. She told the fairy she would wait until she truly needed her wish to redeem it.

The fairy didn’t mind, and as the years, decades, centuries flitted by, she didn’t notice that Rowena stayed young, sustained by the endless negentropy of wishing potential. Why would she? Time is like that for fairies.

Others noticed and gossiped over the years, as they always do about tattooed women. Rowena never married, preferring the company of calico cats and tattooed girls. Although she took a cat, a lover, and her needles, and moved to the New World, the new neighbors gossiped just as much. Word got around about Rowena’s apparent immortality, assumed immorality, and economic independence, and somebody eventually decided to hate her.

     Rowena’s hater was a jealous assistant landlord called Karen. Karen had squandered her own youth on her knees, and she hated to see other women’s youth and healthy knees outlast her own. Rowena was just the sort of person she disliked.

For three years, Karen watched Rowena, and her heart grew darker every time she saw Rowena smile.

Unlike Karen, Rowena smiled easily: she let spent paramours go lightly and rejoiced in new ones, swooned for baby animals, and bounced on tiptoe about tasty bits of cheese. With every excellent tipper and piece of cheesy garlic bread that the ink-witch enjoyed, Karen became more furious.

In the year that Rowena’s stormiest lover left, when thermometers forgot about two-digit numbers and all the rainsprites went on sabbatical at once, Karen’s nineteen-year-old daughter Meghan shyly went to Rowena for a tattoo. Later, she unwisely showed her mother. 

     Karen was livid. “Oh, faithless child! You are doomed! For ‘tis written that nobody with the mark of the beast will make it to Heaven!”

     Meghan’s feelings were hurt. “Oh, Mama, Rowena’s no beast. She’s amazing.”

Karen raged and wept, thinking her daughter was lost beyond redemption. Eventually, she called Rowena and gave her a piece of her mind – which she could barely spare – and asked for her manager, but she found him very unhelpful indeed.

Meghan sighed and waited for her mother to come around. She thought, “there’s always a first time, right?”

But as Karen brooded, an idea unfolded in her head. From the blackness of her heart, killing Rowena seemed like a brilliant idea. (Blackened hearts are a little sloppy about moral illumination.) It seemed to her that if Meghan helped to destroy the witch, perhaps the girl’s soul could be saved thereby. And so a dreadful plan began to hatch, like the long-ago duck eggs had done, engendering countless generations of Old-World ducklings.

Karen bought groceries and wine (just a little: she thought she’d surely be forgiven for having been seen buying it, given her exalted task). Oh, and strychnine from the farm shop, where it was sold as a way of sending birds and rats to their doom. Then she pulled out her witchiest-looking cauldron (which is to say her fondue pot) and cooked up a treacherous potion so redolent of garlic and wine that it hid the poison’s delicate bitterness. She put the lid on the cauldron, surrounded it with tiny pickles, boiled potatoes, and garlicky cubes of toast in a picnic basket, and called for Meghan.

“I’ve thought about it and decided that I was wrong,” Karen told her daughter. “Please take this over to that witch Rowena and tell her I’m sorry I yelled on the phone.”

Meghan was delighted. “Okay, Mama!” She snatched up the basket and carried it over with great pleasure. When she got to the tattoo parlor, she cried out, “Rowena! Mama sent this fondue as an apology…”

Rowena had been trying forever to get Meghan to go to lunch with her, so when Meghan wiggled the basket enticingly, she offered, “Won’t you share this with me?”

“Oh, yes!” Meghan smiled, because Rowena’s hands were gentle, her eyes were bewitching, and her dimples were roguish. (Besides, who doesn’t like garlic, wine, and cheese?!) The two went to the back-room couch, because even clean tattoo parlors are a gross place to sit on the floor, to flirt and dip tidbits into melty cheese.

Naturally, Rowena’s unspent wish kept poisons from harming her, so if Meghan had said no, she would have suffered nothing worse than the consequences of eating an entire pot of cheese by herself. But, sadly, strychnine works fine on birds, rats, and tattooed daughters. Meghan blanched, fell over, and began to gasp painfully.

Rowena had seen rats poisoned before. She guessed right away what had befallen Meghan, and that Karen had meant the strychnine for Rowena herself. “I wish your mother hadn’t done that!”

And because she truly did wish it, so it was.

(“’Bout time,” the fairy snorted.)

Meghan sat up, having forgotten why she’d fallen over. They went back to flirting outrageously over pickles and cheese.

Rowena embraced her new mortality as she embraced Meghan. They soon went to Rowena’s apartment, because back-room couches are gross places to get naked.

As for Karen, she rage-stomped so hard she went through the stairs – but not to Hell, as that would probably have prevented her daughter from living happily ever after.