His arm already had about ten tick marks on it
He liked them in neat sets of five, like a school child would write them while they’re learning to count
Sometimes he asked for them to be drawings
One tally was green, with a rosebud on the end
One had the texture of a rope you’d find keeping boats tied to the dock
One was just a simple line like all the others, but blue
He would come in roughly every three weeks or so, sometimes more often sometimes less, never on the same day but always around the same time, two pm
Once he’d hit 11 marks, and I had to start a new set, I finally asked him what they were for
I joked that I’d seen Black Panther one too many times to assumed they’d be for anything but lives taken
He looked solemn
And said not taken but lost
He went on to say that he worked for the suicide hotline
And every time someone called in and didn’t make it through
He got another tick mark
He said he wanted to remember them, to show that someone cared about their lives even though they never thought anyone did
The rose was for a girl, fresh out of college, she made it through classes but not through the anxiety that had haunted her for four years
She had called about a week before she departed, saying that the smell of roses was the only thing that was keeping her going
A drought came through, scorching everything
He read in the paper that she’d died not to long after that
It wasn’t always the suicidal ones who called though
Sometimes it was friends, family, concerned people that wanted to help
One time a friend called after a death
Asking about signs they could’ve caught, making sure that nothing like this would happen to someone they loved again, because they would catch it next time
Her friend was found in the family pool
The only thing the girl said was that at least the last thing she saw was the blue of the sky, or the water, or the bottom
Blue was her favorite color
Hence the blue tally mark
The rope he said was a classic
His whole arm could’ve been covered in ropes if he wished
Some of the worst ones he couldn’t bear to remember, didn’t dare ink onto his arm
The sound of the phone crashing to the floor after a gunshot went off in the background, after minutes of pleading look just take they phone they can help you
Some of them gave reasons, others didn’t
They couldn’t live with mistakes they had made or things were getting hard or everything just hurt
He said he’d been working this job for about a year or so now, and that most people don’t last much longer than that
It takes too much of a toll on them, but he said this was nowhere near the burdens his callers were carrying
With that, the next line was done
I didn’t really know what to say, besides to wish him well and that I hoped I never saw him again
He said the same
This was written from a prompt:
You run a tattoo parlor. Every couple of weeks, the same customer comes in, always requesting the same tattoo: an additional tally mark on an ever growing cluster of tally marks.
I took it in this direction.