A young mother ruffles the hair of her naked daughter with a towel
Momma what’s that silver in your hair? Should we tear it out?
The mother lifts the child on the sink so their eyes meet
Look at me
When the first silver hair arrives, never tear it out dear
It runs from your spine to your neck to your head, keeping you straight
Yours hasn’t grown out yet, but if I pinch above your head you’ll see
Mirror me
There will be a time when color will yell at you, but remember
Your silver hair is more beautiful than all the color that robes you
Your posture is more powerful than the spine of a magazine
You’ll see
The man that sees your silver hair will mirror you
Like you did me
We are drawn together by an outside force
A faulty elevator, delayed planes, a broken revolving door—you choose
We share hotdogs and I wipe mustard from the side of her lip
Just as we are falling in love I lie about a secret
I’m not a prince, it was all a bet, I’m her enemy—you choose
It’s dark and messy but people are still winking at the camera
I find her and look ridiculous in public as an act of pursuit
I shed my fears, I find her symbolic treasure, I sing to the streets—you choose
She runs to me: repeats a phrase, repeats a phrase, repeats a phrase
She leaves the guy she’s really not in love with
Oh yeah, throw the other guy in somewhere near the beginning
At the end we give the bad guys happy endings too
The passing jogger has a smoker’s cough
I hear the buzz of neon and the guitar from the balcony
The short girl’s dog is named grace
I’m walking without headphones
and now the park sounds like a place
I watched her lips say
I love you
Into her phone
To her Russell Terrier
But it will never be for me
Until I whittle the words from my lips
And sharpen the serifs like arrowheads
It calculates how close you are and enlarges the frame as you teeter close.
It creates the sensation of depth by merging inputs based on the distance between your eyes and your closeness. No polarization tricks. No glasses. No staring at a dot or crossing your eyes required.
The technology is seamless as air.
If you like, it recreates the weather in your precise location and spawns pixels of rain drizzle on a wet day and flashes of light during thunderstorm warnings.
It emits your daily does of vitamin D, which sets off a chemical response which pumps a mental association of childhood adventures into the crevasses of your brain.
The lifetime warranty guarantees if you spend at least five minutes a day looking at the painting, it will add two years to your life, or your money back—to whoever you specify in your will.
Art reviewers agree it reinforces the where of your belonging. They call it Essential.
Economists agree the price point for such an advancement in technology will make it accessible to every household. They call it Viral.
Dead artists agree in their well-catalogued notebooks it is the fulfillment of a prophesy. They call it Inspiration.
It can track the movement of a nearby fly and recreate the image of the fly’s legs touching glass.
If you like, you can teeter extra close and smash your hand against the paining, which responds and displays the fly fleeing from your input.
But the true magic is this.
Of all the reprints, none are the same. And in each instance of the billions of blinking eyes, large and small, that look into reprints of a Dynamic Painting, never—never even once, is the image the same as it was a millisecond ago.
I heard about this in high school biology. Natural selection I think they call it.
But the people kept picking all the flowers, mainly roses, so the flowers that were pruned kept growing bigger and bigger each year.
And hardly anyone picked grass, maybe dogs ate it sometimes, so each year things turned to roses, like the trees, even the water when the ducks got jealous.
The people started to walk delicately to not step on them all, and all the gymnasts would hold lessons like how to pick a rose with your toes then grand battement it to your ear.
It was all roses till the local news broke a story.
The newscaster said something like “shit, there are thorns everywhere.”
So we killed the roses and now we only let them grow in a few corners.
The shadows grew till there was no light Imitating bar and street lights remainedLike weak cover bands The sun moved to a different lover Intrigued by the city on the next hill Never settling down Always covering ground Leaving behind a trail of dark Faces longing for light
RSS
“The first silver hair” by Nathan T. Baker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Fabry raises his wine towards the happy couple with his right hand. With his left he drops a piece of roll to the goldfish in the flower vase.
Every Fourth of July the Rainer family hosts a fireworks viewing on their lawn, which overlooks the Tennessee River in Florence, Alabama.
