I followed the spots, dime-sized and evenly spaced for ten sidewalk squares, and then came to a splash where the blood looked poured out from a height. After that, the spots stopped. Everything stopped.
And everything turned.
My assumption came clear—that the origin of the blood was back where I began, and I was following it to somewhere. How sure I’d been of my own cartographics, my cosmologics, my own little Earth on its own contained course, until the end roared up as beginning instead.
All inversions are reckonings.
A sign was posted there at the end-which-was-really-the-beginning: “Being happy is the most beautiful thing!” How you read it depends on inflection, where the voice comes to rest, where you make the voice land.
So: at the tail of the sentence (on “beautiful thing”) the exclamation weighing in would be a cruelty to someone grieving.
Or land on the beginning (on “happy”—being happy is the most beautiful thing) and it’s a kind of sloganeering, meaning “replace the importance of being beautiful with the act of being happy instead.”
Or hover mid-line and accent “the most” (“the” pronounced “thee”) so that, as a measure among other beautiful things, happy is the final word on the matter.
The eye rests, the voice lands—and meanings turn. You get to turn them.
Say: It’s a windy day. Or: “When I stand upright in the wind / My bones turn to dark emeralds.”
One’s a fact and sure of itself.
The other describes being found and rearranged.