I Hope You Are Wrong

after Hypnosis, by Claude Tousignant, 1956*

by Lorette C. Luzajic

I hope you are wrong, but I fear you are right, my friend said. She picked at something on the checkered gabardine of her lapel with great focus. I had shared my view that the Chauvin trial verdict would end in flames no matter what it was. It was seldom my way to talk with anyone about all that went on in my mind, preferring to observe the world around me.  But I had a long-time and unique bond with my friend and enjoyed being able to talk nuance and hear honest and conflicting ideas. In any event, we both had mutual acquaintances in the vicinity, and they had already vacated, as if they had been warned of a typhoon, as if the forest on fire was already there in the city centre, and of course, it was. People say it is black and white, my friend said, but it isn’t. She had moved on to the scrutiny of a ring finger hangnail. It’s not that way at all. It is gray and yellow.  I was really trying to understand what she was nervously trying to convey, meaning to listen carefully, but my mind jumped immediately to a giant Tousignant print we’d once had in the foyer. It was a minimalist affair in just those colours, all pristine geometrics: a slim stripe of daffodil yellow beside a rectangle pool of fresh paved asphalt. I’m not sure now where the thing came from. It was faded and framed cheaply in utilitarian plastic, possibly left over from the tenants before us. Even so, I liked it. I was always drawn to more complicated paintings, with many layers and a variety of motivating factors that figured into the big picture. But the contrast in Claude’s colours was perfection: the tidy veneer over the dark void of our human soul on the one hand, the purifying pale fire on the other. 

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Here is a link to Hyposis: https://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/works/17672/

"I Hope You Are Wrong" is published in print in Lorette C. Luzajic's new book, Winter in June Mixed Media Books, 2021).

Lorette C. Luzajic is a writer and artist in Toronto, Canada. Her prose poetry and small stories have been widely published, in The Citron Review, Unbroken, Cleaver Magazine, MacQueen's Quinterly, and more. She is the editor of The Ekphrastic Review. Her most recent book is Winter in June (Mixed Media Books, 2021).