Ribbon By Tamara K. Walker

In her hand, she held an infinite red ribbon. Time was stillish for someone grasping abstract manifestations of dimensionality, and only moved when she thought of it, like distant clouds only seem to shift when on the tip of your mind. In between the thinking-times and the time-thinkings, she often amused herself by threading it through her fingers, humored that she could perceive the end, width-wise. Aleph arrived one day in a counter-intuitive go-kart while she was proceeding down a textured racetrack of indeterminate length just as it became endless. Keeping it linear required considerable focus. He flirtatiously castigated her: “It simply won’t do for the keeper of Fields to be dallying about with infinity.”  A bubble of haughty hilarity threatened to burst in her face. “You’re handling it with ease, thus you must be considerably larger than it,” he went on. “Plus, it would look SO much better tied cutely in back of your hair, in a neat little bow. . .” His voice betrayed ulterior excitement. Teasingly, she blew him an autonomous kiss.

“Oh, I’ll define Axioms when I feel like it,” she breathed breezily. As he rambled predictably about responsibility for the future fate of knowledge and why not just tie it up like the others do in a petite floppy bow, she idly tied one on the tip of her finger.

“What what are you doing?” he said, taking notice of her wistful inattention. Smirking, she pinned it on him, silencing him immediately.

“First prize,” she said.

© 2013 Tamara K. Walker

Tamara K.Walker is forever captivated with why we think about things in the ways we think about them, and likes to explore the implications of thinking about them differently. Her writing has previously appeared in Apocrypha and Abstractions and LYNX: A Journal of Linking Poets.

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