“Fiammeta, you are my heart, darling,” I say, looking into her black button eyes.
It is true: she is a cotton sock monkey, and I make all her clothes – Victorian dresses, petticoats, camisoles, pantalettes, and ribbon hair. Her dress is bluish-green with tiny pink flowers. Her underwear is elaborately embroidered. She wears ribbons. She is the Patchwork Girl of Oz’s younger sister, and she is everything to me. She can speak French, dance the minuet, and do algebra. She sits in a small old English chair that tells her stories about the other children it has known.
I have her with me in the nursing home as I write. We watch old movies together; she thinks her hair is like Margaret O’Brien’s. She is the greatest possible social success, but she belongs to herself. Her expression, character, and disposition are all her own.
Fiammeta is plane geometry: taking a flat piece of cloth, cutting it into pieces, and sewing it into shapes is music, and putting different patterns together dazzles – it is Lord Krishna playing the flute for the goat girls to dance to.
We follow generations of people who made things. They are my ancestors and my place to stand in the world. They follow me everywhere. Paul Baker, of Trinity University, Texas, taught us that there’s no such thing as an inanimate object. Everything has life and energy. The oak plank floor of the main stage at the Dallas Theater Center upheld our dreams.
Fiammeta brings me my beloved great-grandparents. I have my great-grandmother’s photograph as a child in a beautiful dress. In their wedding photograph, they are surrounded by a canopy of light.
Fiammeta and I think of the house we grew up in – with a garden, ghosts, and music. There was Nanny, who made things. This was a doorway to the Land of Oz.
My father taught me to hunt in an open landscape so flat and bare you had to look twice to see its beauty. He taught me in silence. It was a rich conversation. I learned to be still and to take careful aim in the wide world. There were hawks.
I boarded at the Convent of the Sacred Heart for high school. The nuns wore the habit with the vulture headdress. It was another garden, full of trees and ghosts, and a strict education of prayer and duty. Without words the nuns taught us how large the universe is, and how full it is of things we cannot know. Our French teacher, the mayoress of Versailles during the Nazi occupation, gave us a language that glitters in the mind.
I imagine sending Fiammeta to school there and then – how the nuns would love her. Their anguished bones lie quiet now in their sunlit graves.
This is all Fiammeta.
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About the author
Born in San Francisco, Rita studied theatre at university before returning to her birth city to work in offices – but, in her words: ‘I’ve been a storyteller and artist since I was two: “writing” sketches about my beloved Oz and drawing pictures from my imagination.’ Fiammeta Wears Pretty Clothes – a ‘clear winner’ for Kim – brings to life a doll worthy of L. Frank Baum himself. ‘She dealt with memory beautifully,’ says Indira: ‘the way one object can invite all these people into your world.’ ‘It’s like Fiammeta embodied an alternate reality,’ adds Emily.
Further reading on The World of Interiors Writing Competition:
- Meet the UK winner, Iqbal Hussain
- Read the runner-up entries that were too good not to publish
- Discover how Montblanc is inspiring a new generation of writers
- Meet the judges: Emily Tobin, Hamish Bowles, Indira Varma and Kim Hastreiter
- Sign up to The World of Interiors newsletter, and be among the first to know details of any upcoming competitions
A version of this article also appears in the November 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers.
