The paint chip cards

Pinned to a rotating rack the way a herbarium pins pressed leaves, the paint chip cards fan out by hue rather than species: forty-one strips of what the industry calls greige, dove, cloud cover, and quiet moment, each a half-inch swatch of paint applied by machine to card stock and left to dry under fluorescent light that flatters none of them equally. Touch is unreliable here, and useful anyway. A fingertip run down the fan finds the paper before it finds the pigment, since the paint sits as a thin skin over stock of a particular weight, slightly toothy, slightly cool. The names do more work than the colors. Cloud cover and quiet moment describe the same grey to two different customers, one who wants a nursery and one who wants an accent wall, and the card lets both believe they have chosen something specific. Fan the deck fully open and the greys blur into a single gradient with no visible seams, proof that the forty-one names are a human insistence laid over a continuous thing that does not actually break into steps. Cards go missing from racks constantly, plucked home in coat pockets to be held against a wall in uncertain light, and are rarely returned. The rack does not seem to mind. It reorders more from a warehouse that prints thousands of the same forty-one greys a week, unbothered by which one leaves.

Sig. Lundqvist