Untitled Unfinished New Fiction

On my name, every word I’m about to tell you is the truth.

They will lie and tell you I’m sick, delusional, pathological: mental.

They will mislead you.

Robert Frost found two paths in a wood, then whittled it down to a choice; the duality of man, what’s right versus what’s easy. Syrupy shit like that. I read that poem and thought, “That’s a man without foresight or ambition. I can find 10 to 20 paths, well-tread or virgin, in any given forest. He should’ve kept looking.”

Trust no one but the anonymous.

*****

The first one was a fluke. Usually, one has practiced the art before attempting a masterpiece, handled all of the instruments, come to know them intimately, breaking them in with a fierce yet familiar every day embrace; they have rubbed the flames of Crimson Red between their palms until it melted into their life line, their heart lines, the M.C. Escher swirls and spirals of their thumbs, held their hands up to God and wept at his generosity, thanked Him till the oil turned dry…

So many colors. So many options, choices, weapons, gifts, cuts, bandages, gingham dresses, oil-stained Levi’s, bouffants and toupees, the snap-click of the heels of her shoes, the smart wingtips he wears to the office, the ability to live or die whenever one chooses, to be torn between eating ice cream or a salad and choosing the ice cream. Our open hands have been filled by His ever-open hand: the world is sweet and sharp, muddy, crystalized into perfect ponds of ice, toxic, kind, jealous, and unforgiving, and He offers this to all of us, every day.

But art, is, of course, subjective. Some look at a Rothko and see a square. Critic So-and-So will carefully and eloquently tongue lash a Basquiat for being too ethnic, as the racists like to say. Others look at Da Vinci and see mathematical equations that add up, some small, invisible scaffolding constructed by the eyes to direct the gaze up, down, all linear and vertical, yet all angles and curves, a swift dash across the horizon line, and these solutions make sense: they are the sum of us.