[ Issue #2 ]

The Physics of Invisible Ink [ by Taryn Markle ]

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My body looked different in the places he had touched, the places where his hands had left trails of sweat that streaked like paint across my epidermis. Well, it didn’t look different, but it felt different. Maybe it’s because the atoms between us that tried to keep us apart gave way and we were the first people ever truly to touch. Maybe it’s because no one in the world knows what it means to feel except for us. The paint that he colored my body with turned invisible as it sank into my skin, and I don’t think he knows that he tattooed me. He placed his hand around my throat and pressed until I could feel his paint dripping down my neck. I gripped his hand with both of mine and pushed his fingers further into my skin until paint had replaced the blood in my head and I could feel the electrons between us give way. My nails dug into his flesh hard, and for the first time, I left my own paint on him. When I saw him next, I thought it had evaporated, but when I ran my fingertips across the places where his skin had expanded into the crescent divots that I had last left, I could feel the invisible ink under the surface. I smiled, and he asked why, but I couldn’t tell him that we had defied the laws of physics, because I don’t think that he would have believed me.

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Taryn Markle is an English and Creative Writing major at NKU with a minor in Theater. She has been published for poetry or experimental works in the Ambient Heights Anthologies, drip lit magazine, and Loch Norse Magazine, and was invited to read at the Kentucky Women Writers Convention in 2018. She is a 2019 GSA Creative Writing Alumni and is published for fiction in Loch Norse Magazine. She creates experimental pieces that explore the chaos that is everyday life, emotions, and relationships. Her friends can attest that though she often cannot speak a single coherent sentence, she is quite skilled with a pen in her hand.