The Meta by Tamara K. Walker

“Your stories are just like your life,” she said.  “You never really finish, just drop the climax like a bowl of hot wax and expect us to extrapolate the ever after from the splash of colored crumbs on the floor.”  It was true.  They had a peculiar parallel tendency to spin an engaging yarn and announce the end before anyone suspected, to set the scene of an intriguing social dynamo and exit stage just as the consequences of the encounter unraveled from their shadowy spool.  Today, she was having none of it.  She seized them by their arm and demanded elaboration.  They winked shamelessly, like someone holding up empty hands to an overeager pup or a child, as if to say nope, really, that’s all there is!  As she released them from her grip with a deflated sigh and they slipped inevitably out the door, she felt as always vaguely yet viscerally unsettled.

“Hey!  Wait!” she called after them again in eviscerated vain.  Against her better judgment, she retrieved a cup of pudding from the fridge and spent the rest of the day darting down paths of speculation as to their whereabouts, motivations, and doings.

© 2013 Tamara K. Walker

Tamara K. Walker is fascinated by anything that reveals the conceptual substructures underlying the amusing mosaic known as consensus reality. She’s an existentialist and wants you to know it. Her writing has previously appeared in Apocrypha and Abstractions and is forthcoming in LYNX: A Journal of Linking Poets. In a previous life, she published considerable amounts of science fiction poetry.

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