Miranda | between vice and virtue
Upon smelling flowers, Miranda always fought the urge to look around and search for a coffin to which they surely belonged.
Upon smelling flowers, Miranda always fought the urge to look around and search for a coffin to which they surely belonged. Indeed, not that there was a coffin, but that Miranda was a cynic, and cynics saw the truth in things. That was all.
She pulled back her shoulders, huffed with indignation and sat up straighter in the chair. Flowers were really quite useless for anything other than a funeral or a wedding, which the common herd often hold to flock about and feel good about themselves and pity each-other and clasp their hands in melodrama, as if they possessed some quality or other that momentarily surpassed all other things. She thought it proper that the money which went into a bouquet of roses or chamomiles ought to have been used elsewhere.
But what could that something be? Miranda scanned the room, narrow eyes darting up from the polished floor and along the tapestries draping, all the way to the bedposts and the ceiling. She then settled on the desk before her: the mirror with its worn handle, the ink splattered around the pot, the the works of Goethe and Machiavelli and Montaigne stacked up in a neat pillar of leather and paper. Yes — books, Miranda thought, was the answer.
Even the thought of books made her less cynical for a few moments. Like birds which rise above the cities of the world in the early mornings and observe the masses as nothing but little colliding specks; their gaze sweeping and wide, unshackled and all-seeing, as if each member of the murmuration held the solemn heavens above their backs, and the clamour of the earth in their throats; like birds, thought Miranda, books were epiphanies of emotion and experience: clarity in-between the lines, and infinity held in the palms of the hand.
With agitation, she flung open a tome to the quickest page, stumbled as she read along the lines. Poetry! Poetry!
In the sudden flash of passion, she clasped her hands and sung aloud: she rose to her toes, voice aided by a force old and deep enough to crumble stone, and set fire upon the wooden bedposts.
In an instance a sudden warmth surged forth from her ribs and up her body, until she felt an urge to unbolt the windows and fly, rising up like the smoke from a candle, until all the night city was unravelled beneath her, and the frosty air stung her face. She wanted to see the blue of the Aegean, tossing and turning, morning waves cresting and falling, threading across a vast plain like the dresses of the madonnas, twirling in the bright streets of Malta, which angled and intersected and rose skyward in a structured resonance, as the chamber organ would, tracing along the limestone arches and illuminating the iridescent rose-windows of the Notre-Dame on the Île de la Cité in the twilight.
Had she seen herself in the mirror, Miranda would’ve seen a lady not quite so sulky and heavy, but lovingly intense and unbound. Yet she slumped on the table and covered her face with her hands. She had lost governance over her thoughts, once again. Too simple, too brutish, too unrefined. Too romantic, she whispered to herself, too highfalutin and too untrue. Forget. Forget. Forget. She murmured. Birds are creatures with brains no bigger than a fist, who forage with miasma in their feathers and strip seeds from crops and flesh from carcasses. And books? Books which tell of morality — do not. Books which warn of sin — cannot. Books that contain neither — should not even be of the same breed of before, and ought to be considered equals to the magazine or the paper instead — hardly worth their pence.
Having said this, Miranda drew a satisfied breath, stole a glance at the mirror and saw herself as she ought to be: her truth. That was all.
