Prologue

There is a color first, before there is anything left to see it with. Not blue. Not violet. Something in the seam between them that refuses to be either, the way a wrong note sits between two right ones and makes both sound less sure of themselves.

Then sound, if sound is the word. It arrives already blurred, as though it has crossed something thicker than air, thick enough to round off every hard edge. Voices, more than one, close together and not quite together, the way a choir sounds half a second before it finds the note it is reaching for. Except the correction never comes. It hangs there, perpetually almost.

There is no floor and no up to fall toward. There is, briefly, a sense of being counted. Not measured. Counted, the way a person checks that the coins in a purse are still the number they were yesterday. Then the counting stops, and something moves through whatever is left to move through that is close to relief, with grief folded flat inside it, the two feelings sharing one small space without touching.

A weight settles that is not a weight. A door closes, or opens. No way is offered to tell which, and the wrongness of that suggests the difference was never the point.

The voices try again for the note. They do not find it. They stop together, mid-breath, in the silence that follows a chord nobody resolved. Not abandoned. Held, by someone who has decided, on purpose, that unfinished is safer than done.

Then there is nothing left to notice any of it, and the color goes too. None of this has happened yet. Or it happened an unbearably long time ago. Or it is happening now, somewhere very small and very patient, waiting to be found by the wrong hands, or the right ones, or simply hands, whichever come first.