Ink (part 1)

Marla was a waitress. She worked at an upmarket restaurant, the kind she could never afford to eat at in a million years. Not on a waitressing wage. And not that she'd want to. The restaurant served the kind of food there was little point in eating, because its key functions were to look aesthetically pleasing and to cost a great deal of money. Gold-flake flecked caviar sprinkled over a single poached wrens egg, perched on a slice of rare-breed calf tongue. She hated the customers because the kind of people who ate there were the kind of people who only ate there to impress others and in her experience, the kind of people who could throw away that kind of money on that kind of food to impress others were awful people, and the people who were impressed by it were the most awful of all. They were rude, cold hearted people who did not acknowledge her as a human being. The people she worked for were not much better.

Marla was also an artist. She was working on a large ink drawing. It was enormous; it took up an entire wall in her albeit small apartment. She was drawing a cross section of a city using an old fashioned fountain pen and a pot of black ink. The skyscrapers were as tall as she was, and she was detailing every room and every object and every person inside every building. She had completed around a third of it, after over two weeks of working on it during every spare second.

It was long and tiring work, and progressed very very slowly because she was being very very careful.   She was drawing the hair on people's heads and the rats in the cross-sectioned sewers, and the hair on their heads, too. She was hoping to exhibit it at a gallery in the city, and she was hoping someone would buy it for a lot of money. She needed to pay off the hefty art school fees she'd amassed during her degree. This was why she was waitressing at a restaurant she hated serving food she hated to people she hated. The only thing she loved was this drawing. Estranged family and work-widowed friends aside, it was the only thing she cared about. Every day she considered quitting her job, but without it she couldn't afford rent or to feed herself, let alone paying back her debts. And jobs were so hard to come by that she clung on to it for dear life, despite how much she despised it. She clung on by the tips of her fingers, wanting to let go but trying desperately not to.

It would be the tips of her fingers, however, that would betray her...