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It’s late into the night when the magic really happens. It’s when he’s at his worst; when he can’t sleep and is alone with his own thoughts, and the air around him is stale and still. It’s almost as if they know the best time to come alive, like they know when he needs cheering up. He doesn’t know who ‘they’ are exactly; doesn’t know when he started referring to his tattoos as entities, as real life things. Maybe he’s been watching too much Toy Story. If he turns his head a little to the side and throws on a cowboy hat, he thinks that maybe he even looks a bit like Andy.
He closes his eyes, tips his head back against the pillow, and tries to summon them. He knows he doesn’t need to; knows that they’ll come of their own accord –they always do– but it makes him feel powerful knowing he can make his tattoos come to life.
He sees the room begin to glow, like a hundred tiny fireflies emerging in the darkness, and this is how it happens most nights. He wonders if he’s prone to hallucinations, or if someone’s gotten into the habit of spiking his kale smoothies every morning. Maybe he got a bad bunch of bananas. He casts his eyes to the ceiling, and can see the outline of the mermaid flickering in and out of focus like a broken street lamp.
He fiddles with his rings impatiently while he waits for the mermaid to come into focus, and desperately tries to remember her name. He knows she told him when they first met, and he’s usually good –brilliant, actually– at remembering names, but it’s late and he’s tired and he can see all of his tattoos as clearly as if they were actual people and things, god damn it!
Is it Jemima? Matilda? Maybe it’s Rebecca! That definitely sounds familiar. When he looks up again, the room is aglow and the whole gang’s here. He can see the pair of swallows and the butterfly from his torso doing figure eights through the dark sky, and there’s the big ship that lives on his arm dropping its anchor into the sea. He can even hear the beating of the human heart, but then it gets drowned out by the soft voice of Jemima (?) as she begins to sing.
Sometimes he puts in requests, but tonight she’s gone with an acapella version of one of his own songs and oh, where on Earth did she learn to sing like that? He settles down into the mattress and pulls the blanket up to his chin. He looks up, and there’s a garden filled with ferns and roses, and they’re in their usual position. It almost makes him dizzy, watching them float around and around, side to side, in the darkness above his head.
He feels himself drifting off to sleep as the (nameless) mermaid finishes her song and begins another, and when he wakes the next morning the first thing he does is check if they’re all still there. They’re not, of course. They never are.
There’s a sudden knock on his door, and he hears his roommate’s voice asking who the hell he was talking to last night. He swears he hears sixty-five different laughs echo throughout his room and oh, karma is a bitch.