By Charles M. Sumid Copyright 2025

“Où est la rue…” She stumbles,
holds up the phrase book like a shield
between her and the elegant Parisian
who waits with one eyebrow raised.
Twenty-three, fresh from law school,
she’d memorized torts but not
the gender of streets. “La rue de…”
The woman’s mouth twitches:
amusement or disdain? She tries again,
mangles Rivoli into three
wrong syllables. Points helplessly
at the map where her hostel
should be but isn’t.

The woman responds in rapid French,
gestures with cigarette-holding fingers
toward some invisible distance.
“Merci,” she manages, though
she’s understood nothing, will walk
another hour in wrong directions,
her sensible shoes already
announcing themselves as foreign.

Later she’ll laugh about this,
tell friends how she argued
before the Supreme Court at thirty
but couldn’t find a street in Paris
at twenty-three.
•
“These pinch,” the customer announces,
as if revealing evidence of betrayal.
She kneels again, her fingers finding
the exact spot of offense, while the woman
shifts her weight, sighs dramatically.
“I specifically said comfortable.”

Once she would have said Objection:
asked and answered, but here she murmurs
“Let me check for a wider width,”
and rises with practiced grace,
her knees protesting what her mouth won’t.

Box tower in her arms, she navigates
between the Saturday chaos: strollers,
teenagers trying on stilettos for prom,
that regular who never buys, just visits
her blistered dreams. “Ma’am, I found
the navy in a wide, plus these
in burgundy, and since you mentioned
comfort…” She arranges options
like evidence for the defense,
each shoe a small argument
for possibility.

The customer waves dismissive fingers,
the gesture of a judge who’s heard enough.
“These are all wrong. Don’t you have
something with more support but also
elegant? For my daughter’s wedding?
I’ll be standing all day.” The story
changes with each telling: first a gala,
then a cruise, now this. She’s learned
not to cross-examine inconsistencies,
just nods and says “I understand completely.
Let me show you our comfort collection.”

In the stockroom, she leans against
the metal shelving, counts to ten
in Latin: unus, duo, tres…
the way she used to center herself
before hostile witnesses. Through the door
she hears her manager chirping
about sales goals, customer satisfaction scores.
Quattuor, quinque, sex… She selects
three more boxes, tucks a gel insert
as a peace offering, returns
to the floor.
•
Afternoon. The community center
smells of coffee and anticipation.
She sets up her station: cheap brushes,
student-grade paints, the paper
that buckles if you breathe on it wrong.
Around her, other retirees joke
about shaky hands, forgotten reading glasses.

The instructor, young enough
to be her daughter, demonstrates
“wet on wet,” how colors bleed
into each other without permission,
without precedent.

Her first attempt: a storm of mud
where she’d wanted sunset. The second:
a tree that looks arthritic.
By the third, she stops trying
to control the water, lets it
find its own evidence, make
its own closing arguments.
The blue runs into yellow,
creates a green she never planned.

“Beautiful accident,” the instructor says,
and she thinks of Paris streets,
of women seeking comfort,
of all the ways she’s learned
to be wrong with grace.
•
Three stages of a life:
Lost at twenty-three, knowing
only the language of certainty.
Kneeling at fifty, translating
power into patience.
Seventy now, finally fluent
in the dialect of accident,
the mother tongue of maybe,
the liquid grammar of letting go.

She hangs her painting to dry—
this green that was supposed to be sky,
this tree that bends like a question mark,
this sunset that looks more like bruising—
and sees in it every wrong turn
in Paris, every customer served
with grace she didn’t feel,
every objection swallowed,
every closing argument
that opened instead
into something unplanned,
uncontrolled,
beautiful.