New Graffiti & Love

A microfiction exercise in "being gorgeous" from Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin.

In the darkening heartbeat of the night there came a scrawl of black letters clamoring across the pale white wall. Deep in the alley, far from the light, a blurry ink melds into shapes. A smooth greasy sigh escapes from the pinhole of a shaken bottle. Then the rattle, the prattle, of another bottle in motion, like many beads tossed back and forth in the hands.

Swollen on the canvas the shapes emerge like titans crawling forth from an ancient mist, bleak and vile, yet immensely regal and profound. Sharp lines slash the foundation out from under itself and build new cities, new visages, where crowns glimmer and names are etched in permanent stones to last for all eternity. The scrawl, completed, sounds as a horn through the mountains: I was here. I lived. I was someone who mattered.

The bottles vanish into bags, and the bags and their patrons vanish into the ink, and come morning the new graffiti will bathe in the morning sun and begin its proclamations for wandering, curious eyes.

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Superb fortune! A single gamble, a haphazard hazard, and now! How can anything be on my face but a smile? Providence smiles too, all too warmly. Oh, her shining eyes like diamonds clearly in my mind. A love like this there surely has never been! Gaze upon me again, my darling. I die when you blink and am resurrected when you smile.

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