Flat Girl

The girl was flat with longing and purpose, the thickness of an idea eternally forming but not inclined toward the circumscription of shape. Dimensional girls were a dime a peck, could be found rounding themselves inside countless tomes, thinking thoughts that lent a story a respectably leaden heft. The girl believed respectability had very limited application and might not permit one, for example, to give a wolf a baguette, when everyone knows there is no creature in greater need of lunch than a wolf.

This is not to say the girl had no ambitions. For one, she aspired to cronehood. Of course, all flat girls dream of one day becoming crones as crones are more agile and consequential than they appear, dear warted subverts, which is to say they can slip through security unnoticed while hatching nefarious plots, plots that needn’t adhere to the dreary and limiting logic that corsets the Everyday. Yes, when the Flat Girl sought the wisdom of that opinionated looking glass, the one women are urged to consult about their value, and asked who the flattest of them all was, he spat, “The crone, of course!” and he pursed his lips enviously, for he knew there is a good deal more freedom in the flatness of types than in the roundness of mirrors.