Never. There’s a word.

A little misfit

Little Misfits — a place for occasional short unclassifiables ... fictions? ... not fiction, not non-fiction, neither fiction nor non-fiction ... neither neither nor both ...

Never. There’s a word. Waiting for another. License. (Where did that come from?) Hurricane. Silence. Invitation. She would have been a painter if she had been happy she said once to a friend outside the Guggenheim when they lay side by side in the grass in the park after walking around in Joan Miró. (She doesn’t know how to move forward. The world paralyzes her. Again. Her fire going out. Too young, she thinks. Not ready, she says.) Not one word. Give this, give that, give another. Where is your driver’s license? Where are you from? Why did you flee the hurricane? (And yet? Halfway between her father’s age on dying and her mother’s, more than two decades between the one death and the next—she sees the pattern, suddenly. Thinks—hopes?—it is the pattern alone that takes her vitality.) What did you want from the silence? Are you waiting for an invitation? The songs her dreams sing, in colors, as if she had been a painter. As if she had been happy. (She was a child when her father died. She didn’t think so at the time, but looking back, the old woman she is at the young woman she was, at the wandering paths between, a child back there is what she sees.) Why are you here without your friend? Were you going again to the Guggenheim? Why did he disappear from all who knew him? (Or is this enervation just the election, the relentless cycle, the news?) On a good day, still, you can walk in the park, you can carry on, make it through, you can live in the world, as if it’s bright now and dancing with red, and gold, and blue, an illusion conjured forever, mind and body, by Miró.

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