Gertrude Stein and the Watercolour Opera, by Ryan Griffith

Gertrude Stein, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) c. 1906

Gertrude Stein and the Watercolour Opera

It will come when it touches and bleeds permanent rose though nothing is permanent especially permanent rose.  If you let it come one must let the colours decide what to do, water and paper are like Italian tenors, they can swell and still time in the balcony.  Sometimes there is a there there, the paper knows what to do but one can’t know what it means, only listen hard to the darkness and Gertrude Stein and all the colours of the deep. The umbers are my favourite and Purple Lake where all my Picassos go swimming in the tragic enormity. How silly to wear conventional dresses when the pores of the paper are such a delight, ceding control to the velvet and silver and Puccini, though nothing is what it is. One must listen and one must listen to the silence undressing, it’s the silence that decides, the space to feel.

Ryan Griffith

Ryan Griffith has published in Fiction Southeast, NANO Fiction, Flashfiction.net, and The Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions. He runs a multimedia narrative installation called Relics of the Hypnotist War.