i bought a 300-dollar painting at hosa (the ending will shock you)

*All the strange line breaks, punctuation, and grammar inconsistencies are intentional.

After Don DeLillo.

It is a frayed painting. The edges, fraught, where the fine watercolor paper tore in soft layers like scissored pieces of flesh. Perhaps that is what it is. An organ cut from the fine pigmented lines of the artist’s eye.

Messy color—not even framed? —What will be your mother’s inquiry at the mummy-wrap file folder, creased in half, the casket-exoskeleton; you, a collector now, perhaps—newly minted; the yellow-peach framing still and cool where a wet mud footprint wraps around its front. Owning this feels like sacrilege. Words are your primary craft (thing) and they (you have never thought of this) elude possession. That the imaginary and metaphorical red velvet rope is not here, naked and alarming blankness. You can touch it, you can fray it, dirty with your mud-stained shoes, spill innocuous liquids, ownership is permission, ten million ways to kill what exists in precious singularity suspended in your moment in time—

Oh, it is beautiful. The color in blotches. Sticky lines of varnish, streaking a texture of skin over the paint. It is so beautiful. You exclaim over and over. The thin brush strokes, the purple shadows. It is not home here. On your desk. Laid on your lap on the bus ride back. They should be in cacophony, whole schools of them, the color, shape, intangible formlessness became when the shapes hit the paper; in museums, exhibits, as a species as an alloy. The studio. His name is Steve Stannard. He is perched, blinking and owlish, near the back of the walls of pristine white. The studio is the inside of an eggshell, you suppose, tucked into the bursting of downtown Traverse City, and every wall is a mural,

There are barn houses and sloping streets; a man slumped sideways on a sidewalk—or maybe biking; a bulldozer before a suburban house; branches fisting fall leaves. I travel around now, Steve says. You know Edward Hopper?

I do not.

Well, this was his hometown. Near Boston.

Pause. Some number of pauses. —The dialogue frays memory in snatches.

I’m an architect by trade.

His smile is kind.

How long have you been 

(drawing, painting, creating (?), doing this)

an artist?

Steve measures with his hands, suspended three feet midair, waistline. Since I was up to here.

I do not know Edward Hopper. You think to yourself. How wonderful it must be. To speak this secret language. That of color and making skin, pulling and sloshing them over canvas. His style—well, you know nothing of art, first of all, but—it is an unfinished hurry, finished unhurry, delightful noise, how patches of white bunch around the fault lines of paint strokes, where, you know from experience, the pigment pushed out to the borders of the water-color pools; the pencil lines are still visible, and in the background you imagine the brush must have hit its target in raw currents, color bruising the white. Color. Well, should you describe it? Blues and reds. Green. What a futile task, transcribing visual art. It is not meant to be replicated. Photographed. Interpreted and translated. Your painting exists in physical singularity. Something you thought you understood when you inquired like a brazen child for the price—

three and a quarter—

and grieved, almost, that it should be deprived from anywhere else, for selfish eternity,

There are people in the painting. They are holding signs. The words on the signs are streaks of more paint.

Steve, serene. It's the “No Kings” protest in Massachusetts.

The people seem to be men. At least, they are faceless. They are all wearing hats. Perhaps in this universe, there are people all named Steve, with paper and cardboard signs as handbags. Perhaps here they all wear hats.

Did you draw this from a photo? A reference? You feel absurdly obtuse. (There is no title—only a purple ink zip shearing through the yellow of the painting background, which you later inquire and confirm to be his signature.)

I was there.

Steve, serene.

        The dimensions fold and flay. So, you picture the context. You are seeing through the painter’s eye. Perhaps you can expand it beyond the borders of the torn canvas. Where its lifeline cliffed abruptly to bloodless nothing. Perhaps you can make it larger than life.

Beautiful, beautiful.

The word has no meaning.

But there is space for it here.

You can hold space for it here.

Turn back to it. Pace the rest of the gallery, thumbing the paper—bologna cuts?—twenty-five, forty, seventy-five, seven hundred, carol their price stickers on the back. Pluck them from their perches, violin strings; one word, resonance—back to it. It’s a protest. It’s a magnetic black hole. Beautiful, beautiful.

Being here makes me want to cry.

Did you say that?

Maybe you should have. The time is ticking. In fifteen minutes the bus will be here. Sophie and Zahra are beside you. They are artists, they paint, and they ask the right questions about the paper and oils and acrylic; I don’t think art must have a message, he says simply, and paint as much as you can. Under the pressing crushing cavity of time. (Find your purpose. Find your message. —On the nose it is.) In fifteen minutes Sophie must pick out a gift for her brother. Who studies finance. Would he appreciate a painting? —They are dreaming together. Zahra would paint for a living if there was a living to be made from it. Sophie would be a fashion designer. Steve watches from atop and from afar from the pressure vacuum. Don’t stop painting, he offers.

        I would be a writer, you imagine adding. For the second time this horrendous three-day trip, it comes to you, from the pages of Little Women—castles in the sky. If you were an artist, you suppose, you could draw that.

        In the shape of Zahra’s eyes, Sophie’s nose. In hazy non-sequiturs. The train will never come here again.

*

Your mother’s credit card declines, because you said your own name, and then it swipes green.

Steve knocks a quarter of the price. Tucks a business card into the file folder.

Into the casket it goes, your 5x7 inch piece of expensive paper.

Sophie will buy a green hat at Traverse Men’s Shoppe with a duck embroidered on the front.

Zahra will buy a cherry-lime sparkling water at Cherry Republic across the street from the bus.

You think, again, of the line in your piece that was an entry to that prompt for love letters to the state of Michigan:

In Traverse City, spring hills run heavy with tart cherries.

The pounding of your heart.

Nothing. You feel nothing. You realize, and this is maybe that emotion that you have always felt, in museums and holding anthologies, that you are hollow. Not in a good, bad, anything way. In the literal way. Conductors, metal, and all that. You feel crazed and raw on the insides like you have been scrubbed with a sponge. It means nothing. Nothing. It is my birthday present. You declare to your mother on call that night, Sophie and Zahra lounging in your dark, suffocating, mortal hotel room. What did she say? Sophie asks, smiles like a bean.

I want it, you had defended to no one, again, on the call.

Your mother had laughed, disbelievingly, in the way that she did. As long as you like it.

At home, you will find the studio address, find his LinkedIn, Google Edward Hopper, re-read your garbage Michigan piece, open the giant yellow envelope, text photos of Steve Stannard’s white-walled studio to the group chat, crick your neck from the bus ride back, see Zahra’s Instagram post with the photo of Steve Stannard’s photo, sleep for ten hours straight, refuse to show your mother the painting, lay the painting out on your desk as your sister talks to you, which she will not notice at all. And one day you will turn seventeen. And maybe go to Boston for the first time, learn to paint, write more incoherent things, ruin your painting, write it in a college supplemental essay, forget it exists.

There were two title ideas for this piece:

        Will I ever go back to Traverse City?

        In Traverse City, spring hills run heavy with tart cherries.

*

Somewhere—

Steve, serene.

Crinkles a smile.

Happy birthday.