Page 12 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

“Most people,” he agrees, in the tone of someone observing an interesting pattern in a species they, too, have observed, but do not feel entirely part of.

Something about that makes me want to smile, which I cover by looking at the water.

“Do they mean things?” I ask. “Or is it more about the art itself?”

He considers this with actual seriousness, which I notice, the not-giving-me-the-easy-answer-first.

“Both,” he says finally. “The early ones were more, like… feeling things I didn’t have language for yet. Later they got more intentional. Both the art and the meaning.”

He glances down at his chest and arms. Then looks back up.

“You want the tour?”

I shouldn’t. I’m in a hot tub in gym shorts with a stranger and I have no script and tomorrow I have to figure out the actualpractical logistics of having left my husband. I should absolutely get out and go back to the cabin and sleep. Right now.

Instead, I say, “Yes.”

So he walks me through his tattoos and I’m fascinated.

“I got my very first one when I was sixteen here.” He points at his bicep. “But it was total shit, so I got it covered up. If you look really close, though, you can still see some of the original line work of the shitty barbed wire.”

He leans his bicep across the bubbling water, and fascinated, I lean forward. I’m not sure I can make any sense of the lines, because the “cover up” is an amazing black and gray dragon. I can’t imagine there was anything except it inked on his skin.

He keeps walking me through the art on his skin like a map of his life. And I see what he means. The early ones that haven’t been covered up are rawer—all feeling, with less control. The later ones have a confidence the earlier ones were reaching toward.

“My back piece was the first time I actually planned the whole thing before I started,” he says. “I was finally thinking about the whole canvas.”

He turns in the water.

And my breath catches.

His back piece covers his entire back from the top of his shoulders to the waistband of his shorts. It’s a scene of such stillness and such complexity that for a moment I can’t organize what I’m looking at. I can only feel it, the way you feel music before you hear the individual notes.

Angels and demons live in a black and gray painting on his skin.

Not at war. Just—coexisting. Each going about the business of their nature.

And in the center is a figure that’s half-man, half-demon, one arm reaching upward toward an angel whose fingers are descending to meet him.

Almost touching, but not quite. The gap between their fingertips is maybe half an inch of skin.

Underneath the reaching figure are other, demonic hands. Pulling the man down.

But their faces aren’t evil. That’s the thing that makes the scene land so powerfully in my sternum like a fist. Their faces are just full of desperation. Likedon’t go. Likeif you leave us we are lost.

You feel like the man is a second away from a decision, but you can’t tell which way it’s gonna go.

The angel’s face has eyelashes. Individually rendered eyelashes. The reaching hand has a scar across the knuckle.

My throat closes completely.

August turns back around.

“Where did you find the artist?” I manage through my suddenly thick throat. I can’t remember the last time I was so moved by an art piece.

“I drew it.” He settles back on his bench. “A friend tattooed it.”

“Youdrew that.”