The Door Has Enough of Me

The door asks for my name. I give it my name.

It asks for a number sent to a device in the other room. I go to the other room. By the time I return, the number has become too old to be believed.

Apparently, I have too.

I came here to look at a particular blue. Someone had photographed a winter sky, and I wanted to see whether its gray leaned green. A small errand for the eyes. Now I am establishing a relationship with a company whose name sounds like a drawer being shut.

The door offers to remember me.

This feels premature.

In the studio, I paint the arrangement as it deserves to be painted: a tall door with too many handles. From one hangs my eye, neatly cropped. From another, my hand. There is a tag for the sky I wanted, a tag for the season I wanted it in. Each little picture looks ready to be priced.

I give the brass knobs more attention than they deserve. They catch the light beautifully. This annoys me.

Outside, the afternoon is thinning. I have spent its best hour proving that the person who wanted to look at a color is still the person who wants to look at a color.

The door suggests another way in. A different vendor can vouch for me. I imagine the two of them discussing my reliability while I stand between them holding a brush that is drying at the tip.

I put the brush down. Then I pick it up again, because there is paint left on it.

On the wall beside the door, I make a small rectangle of apricot light. Across it I draw a bare branch in blue. The branch belongs to January; the light belongs to a September I remember badly. They settle together without asking me to resolve the discrepancy.

It is not the sky I came to see. I am still irritated about that.

I work on the edge of the rectangle until the light looks caught in the roughness of the wall. Then I wash my brush. There is a little blue under my thumbnail, and I leave it there.

The door can wait until tomorrow.

—Skinjo