Devonne Brown

“That painting on the wall is askew and is about to fall down on the fragile candy dish on top of the buffet. Between the shards of glass that escape and the bits of sweets that scatter, it will never be safe to go barefoot in the house again. Move the damned painting,” He said.

I pulled the chair over to the buffet, climbed up, and took down the painting before the predicted disaster could occur. The candy dish, a relic of the eighteen hundreds, was full of tiny foil wrapped chocolate bourbon bottles, each filled with a dram of some kind of whisky. They were beautiful. It was no wonder he was so paranoid about the impending ruination of the candy dish. 

What was I to do with the painting though? There was nowhere on the wall to hang it. It seemed a shame to hide a child’s work of art so grand and heavily framed behind a large piece of furniture. But that’s where it was going, behind the buffet it had hung over for all those years. In truth, the picture itself was rough and ugly, the frame was worth a fortune.  Its removal was a blessing to the decor of the room, even though somebody would have something to say about it worth bleeping out, I’m sure. It had been hanging there for so long, cobwebs grew behind it. I wiped them away with a paper towel and rewarded myself with a piece of candy.

Now that the painting was down and the wall was clean and cobweb free, did a void need to be filled? The room looked fresher and cleaner without the overbearing ugliness of the childish print. Just because something was framed, doesn’t mean it ought to be called art, especially if it gets hung on a wall.