Schrodinger's Sadness by Mileva Anastasiadou

Fiction

Photo by Krišjānis Kazaks on Unsplash

There’s a cat in the box. The box is closed and sealed and the air is running out. You look at the box and hear the cat moving inside. You think, it’s all fine. You mean, it’s all fine so far.

You pass out a couple times, but you claim you’re alright. I play along. Nothing’s wrong as long as we don’t know what’s wrong. You get dizzy more often. You get dizzier and dizzier. But you don’t say it. As long as you don’t mention it, it doesn’t happen. It happens, but does it really? If nobody knows?

You change the channel when I watch the news. People are killed, I say. As long as we don’t know, they aren’t, you tell me, then you laugh at a silly joke you hear, like you already forgot, the way people will forget about you after you’re gone.

I wonder how the cat’s doing and I ask you to open the box. But you stare at the box, you freeze, then you look away, like you don’t give a damn about the cat. I don’t run to open the box, to save the cat or us. We aren’t happy, but we aren’t sad either, we’re halfway sad when you hold me and you tell me, I’m here, but we could have been sadder if we knew that soon you wouldn’t be.

Disease kills you soon after the diagnosis. The doctor says, if only you’d come earlier. I tell him you didn’t want to know if the cat was alive, but he doesn’t get it. I hear you laugh from afar, like saying, Schrodinger’s optimism doesn’t always work.

The kids remind me that you’re gone. They say it again and again. I’m sad but I soon forget why. I’m sad, then I’m not sad. Minutes will pass before I say, time for dinner, go fetch your dad.

Perhaps we never truly cared about the poor cat at all. Perhaps we only wanted her as long as she didn’t mean grief. You claim we loved the cat too much to let her go, the cat stays longer if we don’t know she’s gone, you say, and I get mad and tell you that the cat will die unless someone saves her. You laugh and say, I’m here. But the box is still closed and I know that you’re here and also you’re not.

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Author's Note:

I read, I write, I listen to music, I visit my comfort places, read my comfort books, see my comfort people, I sometimes try new personalities and play the chef, the baker, the pianist or the guitarist, I smell the flowers or go swimming, but mostly I do nothing, I just sit on the sofa and imagine things and forget the world, but only for a short while.

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Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece and the author of "We Fade With Time" and "Christmas People" by Alien Buddha Press. Her work has been selected for the Best Microfiction anthology and Wigleaf Top 50 and can be found in many journals.

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