The first time that jaundiced Count Olaf from the pretentiously abstract painting hanging in the foyer spoke to Miranda, she wasn’t all that surprised. She’d been getting a peculiar vibe from some of her household objects lately, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Not that anything else had spoken to her yet, but she could have sworn that one of her ceramic gargoyles had winked at her last week. Another time, when she was climbing the stairs after having binged an entire Netflix series one weekend alone, with too much Ben and Jerry’s and tequila, again, she thought she saw one of the plants wave at her. Tricks of the eye, she thought.
“What’s on your mind, my dear,” Miranda’s therapist Carole later asked. “Has that creepy man at work been making inappropriate comments again?”
Miranda’s mind rushed to think of some tidbit of angsty-chum that she could throw at Carole so that she would back off, otherwise the woman would never let up. Miranda secretly thought of Carole as “the plunger,” because she would just keep pumping at you, until you finally exploded and spewed out all your clogged-up crap at her. She wouldn’t end the session until she felt satisfied that she had moved you at least one millimeter closer to mental health. Sometimes Miranda wanted to reach over and just throttle Carole with one of her fussy floral neck scarves that screamed, I’m a comfy cozy healer, you can trust me. She looked like a woman who enjoyed the opera. Or like Fraulein Berta, the Nazi S.S. officer, with her enormous heaving bosom and steel rimmed spectacles.
When Count Olaf from the painting snickered at Miranda as she passed by him that first time, the morning of her sister Julia’s bloated wedding, and then whispered, “You’re not really going to wear that, are you?” Miranda reflexively responded, “Why, do you think I shouldn’t?” She hesitated. “Is it too mauve?”
“If mauve is just a fanciful way of saying beige, then yes, it is a smidgen 1960s waiting room couch.” He sounded like a snarky office mate, the kind that wishes they were an interior decorator, but in some horribly cruel twist of fate, is trapped inside a hopeless generic cubicle.
At first it was just Olaf making dry and dastardly remarks, like that friend you have that is a little too devilish. Fresh. Inappropriate. Hilarious. Free.
At some point, the relationship slowly shifted so that it was Miranda who was seeking Olaf out.
“I so wish that you could crawl out of that frame and have dinner with me,” she said on a rainy Wednesday night.
“You and me both, darling,” Olaf sighed. “Being framed and hanging on some random person’s wall was not exactly what I was shooting for either.”
Then sometime further down the line, it shifted again, ever so slightly. Miranda saw more that she liked about the count, something sweet and new every day. She always knew where he was and she didn’t have to see him, if she didn’t feel like it. Yet, he stuck around her through thick and thin, just like the real man she had always wanted. Not the runner-away-at-the-slightest-hint-of-drama type of guy.
“When I look at you,” he lulled at her one time, “I see so much extravagant beauty. Like a thousand pieces of aquamarine colored beach glass-all greens and blues and purples, captured in one person, like a jar full of brilliant stones. Solid but shapely, smooth and glistening.”
Miranda didn’t see what was coming next though. And she had been down this road, again and again, but Olaf had seemed different. He seemed kind. Patient. Or so she thought.
“Sometimes the eye just sees what it wants to see, Miranda,” Carole would have said. “Try looking with your inner eye more, my dear.” That’s what Carole would have said, if Carole could have said anything at all anymore. The truth was, Miranda had really loved Carole at first and felt safe with her. But over time, she saw her as unfailingly passive-aggressive, but in a nicey-nice way, like she was trying to trick you into talking with her over hot chocolate and tea biscuits.
Miranda was done with all of that. And so was Carole. It was Olaf who had suggested it, at least that’s the way Miranda remembered it now. It was a bit fuzzy who had suggested what to whom, but they had talked about it, she was sure of that.
One night after Miranda had consumed an entire fifth of gin, Olaf just stopped speaking to her at all. She couldn’t understand what she had done wrong. She took him down and hung him up in different rooms, to see if that would help. But nothing happened. He just stared out silently at her, from within his chunky wooden frame.
Suddenly, everything became dull again. No more glints of inanimate objects smiling at her, or whispering to her, or loving her. Just her and the plants, the fridge, and the sausages.
And with Carole gone now too, she had no one to talk to. It was lonely. And small. And mauve.
“What would a better you look like and act like?” She imagined Carole saying. “Build the person you want to be from the ground up.”
“How the fuck am I supposed to know who I’m supposed to be at 50?” Miranda replied out loud. “I feel like every time I’m finally standing on solid ground again it shifts.”
Miranda turned the corner to come face to face with her crazy rhinestone skull. All that silver, sparkling wildly.
It smiled. Warmish. Not steely, or maybe steely in the magnolia sense, but not in the metallic.
“Don’t think about who you think you are supposed to be, dear. Just tell me what you’d like to see, when you look at yourself.”
Carole was back. Thank God. Now at least she’d have someone to talk to again.
Esme Noelle DeVault is an attorney and poet living in Rhode Island with her husband, son, and dog Charlie. She was previously an English teacher and an academic reference librarian. She’s had poems published in Motherscope, Jonah Magazine, The Big Windows Review, and forthcoming in Inkling Literary Magazine and Kissing Dynamite: A Journal of Poetry. “Framed” won the $100 Judges’ Prize in the Rising Stars Flash Fiction Contest. The contest was co-sponsored by Christmas Lake Creative and Dale Thomas Vaughn.
Photo: Portrait of Paulo Alexander by Amadeo de Souza (Public Domain)