Fiction

There once was a girl. She couldn’t write fiction because every metaphor she crammed her idea into sounded like the truth. She sat at her desk and tried to create a story from nothing, a story beginning in the imagination and never leaving, not for even a short vacation or parenthetical statement. She wanted a tale with no strings attached, no associations or allusions or parallels with any semblance of reality. She thought and thought and thought, and even as she grew up and lived her life and finally grew old, she still searched for the Sole Story. But she never found it; no matter how hard she looked or how many notebooks she filled with words. She listened and composed and riffled through and skimmed and considered and rejected. And then she died, as everyone does, in the end.