ASHKENAZY, Ingrid Ellisa

[ingrid ellisa ashkenazy]

INGRID ELLISA ASHKENAZY

FULL NAME: Ingrid Ellisa Ashkenazy.
NICKNAMES: None
AGE: Twenty-three
GENDER: Female
SEXUALITY: Straight.
STATUS: Single.
GROUP: Citizen.
GRADE: N/A.
MAJOR: N/A.
JOB OCCUPATION: Taxidermy apprentice.

HAIR: Long, blonde, and curly! She loves wearing it down, but if she has the time she’ll tame it into some kind of neat style with clips and ties, too.
EYES: Brown.
SCARS/BIRTHMARKS: None of importance.
TATTOOS: There’s an arrow on her arm, morse code for ‘hope’ on her foot, along with an origami crane and the alignment of the planets. She has ‘an inexplicable sense of happiness’ with a dove on her ribcage.
PIERCINGS: Ears once.
PLAY-BY: Carrie Hope Fletcher!

LIKES: Bugs, museums, taxidermy, winter, hot chocolate recipes, musicals, Frank Sinatra, Guys and Dolls (the movie), dragon fruit, dancing, Beauty and the Beast, pancakes, chunky shoes, binging Dark Shadows, bees, wild flowers, star charts, the smell of old book shops, dressing up for nights out, astronomy, knitted hats.
DISLIKES: Bullies, corners, false nails, boat travel, beaches, quiet moments, oversleeping, misplacing her glasses at night, chunky smoothies, shoes that pinch, animal cruelty, celery, leftover pizza (why can’t she eat it all?!), feeling tired during the day, modern horror movies, bad ghost stories, bad cooks.
FEARS: Losing Charlie, the deep sea, blindfolds.
SECRETS: Her very early years are repressed. She doesn’t remember them, and doesn’t think she ever wants to. There must be a reason her mind blocked them out in the first place, after all.
PERSONALITY: This happy-go-lucky creature is modest in her talents, but always smiling and loyal to a fault. She’s sweet but also strong; it might seem like Ingrid is living an easy life, but it’s not one she was born into. She’s dedicated to anything and everything she puts her mind to, and isn’t the type to quit halfway. Ingrid enjoys being surprisingly different, and likes that she’s not always what people expect her to be; for example not many people expect the sweet girl in the floral dress to preserve dead animals for a living and a hobby. She’s caring, and thoughtful. Ingrid is likely to present someone with a gift that she’s put a great deal of thought into rather than something she’s just grabbed off the shelf when she was out running errands. As a girl who wears her heart on her sleeve, Ingrid is the type to let people know when she’s not happy with a situation. She’s spent long enough dealing with things to know that fake smiles can only get you so far, so while she’s not commonly one to lose her temper, she will let people know when she’s upset with them about something. A classic romantic, Ingrid dreams of that perfect love. She’s also very aware that perfection doesn’t actually exist and that she’s not a princess in a tower waiting to be rescued by a prince. She’ll bold enough to do a bit of the chasing herself, but Ingrid still hopes that someone will sweep her off her feet someday.

MOTHER: Olivia Katya Adamec, 42.
FATHER: Mathias Ashkenazy, 53.
SIBLINGS: None (that she knows of anyway).
OTHERS: Charlie Renazki, 62, adoptive father.
PETS: Casper, Bengal cat!
HOMETOWN: Cincinnati, Ohio.
HISTORY: For Ingrid, life begins when she was nine. Ask her to think of her earliest memory and she’ll tell you she was looking out of a car window, watching snow fall, listening to a social worker tell her about the foster home she was being placed in. She had a cut on the back of her hand that she kept picking at, and when the blonde lady wearing too much perfume reminded her that the doctor would come on a Tuesday afternoon after school, Ingrid had asked why. At first the grown ups thought she was a little girl just pretending, but it quickly became apparent that Ingrid could remember nothing before that day in the car. All her memories of growing up had been repressed. She could remember certain things, like moving from Cincinnati to New York, or that her favourite colour was purple, but if anyone asked her about her family or her birthdays she couldn’t answer them. She couldn’t remember how she came to be in care. There was a while when doctors considered reminding her of what was in her case file, and how she had been found by the police and social workers, but then it was decided that it might be too distressing and cause more harm than good. This was an idea they revisited over the years until Ingrid just stopped going to her appointments because she decided she didn’t need to know or need their help anymore.

Ingrid spent her childhood in foster homes that catered to her supposedly delicate psychological needs. She doesn’t know what that meant. She thinks she was just fine in retrospect. She climbed trees, skinned her knees, and fell off her bike and rollerskates too many times but kept getting back up. She wasn’t a troublemaker at school aside from trying to read her own books during class, and perhaps daydreaming when she ought to be paying attention. There were plenty of kids in the system who were worse than she was, and yet no one adopted her. No one even seemed to take an interest in her and she couldn’t understand why.

When she was thirteen, Ingrid found herself inside a taxidermy and curio store. She had ducked inside to get out of the rain and soon found herself amazed by what she saw in there. A gruff voice made her scream when he demanded to know what she was doing snooping about when he was closing up, but when she recovered in a fit of giggles, Ingrid explained her innocent motives and complimented the work. The owner – and artist – was Charlie Renazki. He was a man who lived alone in the duplex that attached to his shop. He had lost his pregnant wife in a head on truck crash some years earlier and had kept to himself ever since. His taxidermy was his solace where he could find beauty in death. Still, stood before him now was this befuddling teenage girl with a mouthful of metal, wild hair and soaked right down to her DM’s. He sent her home without a polite word, but Ingrid came back, again and again, until eventually she had enough money for a tiny moth in a thin frame. It was a luna moth, green and eyecatching, but tucked away in a dark corner of the store because Charlie thought no one would ever buy it since he had pinned it in there just to get it out of his work room. It was a leftover from a curio commission and he didn’t know what else to do with it, and now there was this teenage girl, tenderly brushing the dust off the edges and looking at it like she had never seen anything so wonderful in all her life.

A few months later, when Charlie had realised Ingrid was not going to leave his shop well enough alone, he called himself absolutely crazy as he found himself signing the paperwork to start the adoption process. There would be regularly checks, a whole procedure and plan that he barely understood, but something had tugged at him when it came to Ingrid. He wanted her in his life. If he was one for believing in signs, maybe he might think she had come to fix his cynical life, but he wasn’t that type. So, he remained cynical, but his breakfast of black coffee and toast turned into black coffee and waffles with strawberries and cream. Lots of cream. Ingrid was infuriating to him for as much as he loved her. She was constantly asking questions and rushing about, so eventually he sat her down and started teaching her his trade. It was small at first, just pinning bugs, but it kept her quiet long enough for him to get something done without hearing her say his name in that sing-song way of hers. When everything was finalised in the adoption, Charlie considered himself to be crazier than ever. He had no clue what to do with a fifteen year old girl and yet, here one was, rearranging furniture and singing loudly at 8am.

It was Ingrid who expressed an interest in working alongside Charlie when she finished school. He asked her over and over if there was nothing else that she wanted to do, but she told him over and over that nothing else enchanted her as much as taxidermy did. Sometimes she wondered if his hesitance had something to do with her past, as Charlie had been allowed to see her file when the adoption was completed, but eventually he sighed and told her fine. He would put her through the classes and the schooling necessary to get all the professional paperwork she’d need, and then he’d take her on as his apprentice so she could have some in-house experience. It was like Christmas and birthdays all coming at once for the wild blonde.

She got through everything with ease thanks to Charlie’s guidance and often not his help. Then she was in her own place down the street from the shop because Charlie would grumble that he wasn’t putting up with her shoes everywhere forever. Still, if it’s raining he walks her home – the whole two minutes it takes – and she cooks them both tea. It’s a weird family dynamic they have, but she loves the man as though he had been around her whole life. Twenty-three and finding beauty in the dead things, Ingrid doesn’t care if people find it morbid or weird; she finds it fascinating and remarkable.

YOUR ALIAS: Kim!
RULE WORDS: kidnappedbykim.
WHERE YOU FOUND US: Far away from here.
SAMPLE:

In the Marshlands!

[kim]