Ideas at the heart of quantum theory, to do with randomness and the character of the molecules that make up the physical matter of our brains, lead some researchers to suggest humans can’t have free will.
** QUANTUM SHORTS 2023/2024: FIRST PRIZE
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Ezra is born with a red line of probability wrapped around her fingers like the string of a balloon. It expands with her as she grows, sneaks under her fingernails and curls up there. It bracelets her wrists and runs over knuckles, twists and stretches and overlaps. Her hands are stuck in quantum cobwebs.
The red strings wrapped around her hands lead in all directions, connecting to plants, people, the lamp, the walls, each individual blade of grass in the little spit of dirt beside her apartment. The lines outline her world.
“Pretty,” she says, pointing at the threads, and her aunt doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
When she’s seven, Aunt Jane sits her out in the grass with a big bucket of shrimp and ice, straight out of the market and still salty from the ocean. Ezra’s been preparing shrimp for eating since before she could pronounce her own name, and the steps are second nature. She picks off the legs and twists off the head like a bottle cap, then draws off the shell with gentle pressure. She cuts shallowly into the back and tugs out the vein.
There’s a red line extending from her pointer finger into the shrimp, shimmering under the skin where the vein used to be. She knows that she’s supposed to clean out the shrimp, so she pulls on the string like she just pulled on the vein. The shrimp shudders in her hand, legs regrowing from its softer underside. Its legs prick against her palm as it squirms, alive but still headless.
Ezra screams and throws the shrimp at the ground as hard as she can, pulling on the red line again in hopes of reversing whatever she did. The shrimp hits the grass and collapses into a pile of pink glitter.
She’s afraid of her threads, at first, but she learns to control them as she ages.
Their apartment is a place of creaking pipes and peeling wallpaper, sagging ceilings and the smell of the ocean slipping through the cracks in the walls. The vent under the kitchen sink is the only place where the heat actually works, and on cold days she stands with her toes pressed right up to it. Whenever Aunt Jane sees her there, she wraps blankets around Ezra’s shoulders and promises to get the heating fixed before next winter.
Aunt Jane works as a waitress at the diner a couple blocks from where they live. She comes home smelling of grease and sheds her work clothes like a lizard before hugging Ezra.
“If only I had a million dollars,” Aunt Jane says, arms around Ezra's shoulders and rocking them back and forth. “Then I could take care of you proper.”
Ezra is ten years old and she is starting to understand the fact of money. She snags a thread near her nail and pulls.
Aunt Jane works as a lawyer in the firm downtown. Their house seems like a fairytale to Ezra, three stories tall with spiralling turrets and balconies all along the sides. It was paid for by Aunt Jane's father, who used the last of his inheritance to buy a hundred acres of land in the middle of nowhere, despite his family urging him not to. Ezra knows that there is a world where he died penniless and destitute. She has lived that life. But in this new world she has found for herself, oil was discovered on his land. Ezra is warm in the winter.
And if her aunt laughs differently than she used to, if the freckles on her face connect in a new constellation, if sometimes she seems like a stranger…then that’s a price that Ezra is willing to pay.
She pulls a thread when she fails a math test. When her aunt gets fired. When an earthquake breaks their house to bits. Whenever something goes wrong, she slips sideways into a different reality where it went right.
She lives her days hundreds of times in hundreds of ways, trying to get them perfect, and the more lines she pulls, the further she gets from the reality she grew up in.
Again—
Again—
Again—
Again—she trips on a root—she steps over the root and runs straight into the tree—the man on the radio is talking about a mugging downtown—the man on the radio is talking about a new restaurant opening—Aunt Jane flies through the sky with wings sprouting from her back—Ezra has a husband—Aunt Jane is coughing out the blood from her lungs—Ezra lives by herself and feels crushed by her own loneliness—Aunt Jane is singing her a lullaby in the rain—Aunt Jane is introducing her to rock and roll and heavy metal—Aunt Jane strums her vocal cords like a guitar—
The shadows look like forests of kelp, swaying in the breeze that comes off the water.
“It’s been on fire for years now,” says the woman next to her. She looks like Ezra’s aunt if she turns her head just right. The ocean is burning.
The sky greets the ocean at the horizon line, reflecting the fire burning as far as Ezra can see. She feels small beneath the red of the sky, a red so deep that her strings almost blend in with it.
“I keep trying to find you,” Ezra says. “And I keep failing.”
The woman smiles in the same way that her aunt did. “Well, nobody said this was going to be easy.”
The woman opens up her sequined bag and takes out a pair of golden sewing scissors.
The metal of the handle is warm against Ezra’s skin. She pulls her threads taunt and slices through them.
The world tips sideways at the first cut, and tilts further with every new line she severs. It feels like she’s amputating a limb but she keeps going, cuts until the only thing left of her threads is the remnants fluttering around her fingers.
When the world evens out again, she’s home.