“Take off your skin,” Small says. He’s crying and The Witch’s Revenge licks his tears away. Small’s skin pricks all over, and down under the house, something small wails and wails. “Give me back my mother,” he says.
“Oh, my darling,” says his mother, the witch, The Witch’s Revenge, “I can’t do that. I’m full of ants. Take off my skin, and all the ants will spill out, and there will be nothing left of me.”
Small says, “Why have you left me all alone?”
His mother the witch says, “I’ve never left you alone, not even for a minute. I sewed up my death in a catskin so I could stay with you.”
“Take it off! Let me see you!” Small says. He pulls at the sheet on the bed, as if it were his mother’s catskin.
The Witch’s Revenge shakes her head. She trembles and beats her tail back and forth. She says, “How can you ask me for such a thing, and how can I say no to you? Do you know what you’re asking me for? Tomorrow night. Ask me again, tomorrow night.”
And Small has to be satisfied with that. All night long, Small combs his mother’s fur. His fingers are looking for the seams in her catskin. When The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he peers inside her mouth, hoping to catch a glimpse of his mother’s face. He can feel himself becoming smaller and smaller. In the morning he will be so small that when he tries to put his catskin on, he can barely do up the buttons. He’ll be so small, so sharp, you might mistake him for an ant, and when The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he’ll creep inside her mouth, he’ll go down into her belly, he’ll go find his mother. If he can, he’ll help his mother cut her catskin open so that she can get out again and come and live in the world with him, and if she won’t come out, then he won’t, either. He’ll live there, the way that sailors learn to live, inside the belly of fish who have eaten them, and keep house for his mother inside the house of her skin.
This is the end of the story. The Princess Margaret grows up to kill witches and cats. If she doesn’t, then someone else will have to do it. There is no such thing as witches, and there is no such thing as cats, either, only people dressed up in catskin suits. They have their reasons, and who is to say that they might not live that way, happily ever after, until the ants have carried away all of the time that there is, to build something new and better out of it?
MIEZE CORRECTS AN INCOMPLETE REPRESENTATION OF REALITY
Michaela Roessner
Michaela Roessner has had four novels, assorted fiction and nonfiction published. She is also an exhibiting visual artist. Her most recently published and upcoming publications include “The Fisherman’s Wife,” in Room magazine, “The Klepsydra” in the anthology Polyphony 7, and “The Fishes Speak,” in the winter 2009/2010 Postscripts anthology. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program, she teaches online for Gotham Writers’ Workshop and Axia College. She has practiced Aikido for over twenty-five years and has been known to fall down with great mastery.
Roessner explains her inspiration for this story: “As someone who has always been owned by cats, the whole Schrödinger’s Cat paradox always drove me bonkers. Even if it was supposed to be just a gedankan, a thought experiment, why would Erwin Schrödinger pick a cat to hypothetically lock in a box and put in peril? It’s not like there aren’t plenty of other critters, like cockroaches, flies and mosquitoes, that would have made for a better fit, both literally and figuratively.
“It seemed clear to me that Schrödinger bore a passive-aggressive hostility towards felines. And what a silly choice, as well, for an observer effect experiment. Because who is a more focused observer than a cat? I felt that it was more than time to give a voice to the cat jammed in the deadly box, and to turn the tables in a duel of observer one-up-manship.”
Zurich, 1935.
Mieze flattens her ears to her skull and thrashes her tail about in the manner of irritated cats everywhere. She opens her jaws so that she can smell with the inside of her mouth, a motion humans take for nervous panting.
Humans, who think they know so much. Who know so little.
Mieze needs the extra olfactory sense to track her surroundings in the airtight, light-tight box, where even her enormous, luminous golden eyes cannot see.
But there are many ways of seeing. Many ways of observing.
Eye-blind inside the box, Mieze still knows her surroundings well. She’s been here before. She’s endured many sessions in this container.
As soon as her human pet, Felicie, leaves for school, Felicie’s father, the great Herr Professor Erwin Schrödinger, is prone to pop Mieze in the box.
With the sensitive organs in her oral tissues, Mieze breathes in the smell of the sweet-honey heavy-lead walls of her prison; the acid metal taste and tick of the Geiger counter; the slick glassine odor of the bottle containing and masking, for now, the cyanide gas; the wood and steel of the trip-hammer poised to crash down on the cyanide bottle.
But even more than these, Mieze tastes/smells/observes/knows the pulse of electrons and trembling of nuclei in the little case that contains the radioactive isotope. This smaller box is surrounded by a cage to prevent her from dislodging it in the fit of fear or fury that Herr Erwin seems to expect of her. Does Herr Erwin think she hasn’t noticed that he hasn’t similarly secured the bottle of cyanide?
Well, that’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? Not the great scientific experiment, the one Herr Erwin’s friend, the renowned Doktor Einstein, called the “prettiest way” to show that the wave representation of matter is an incomplete representation of reality.
No, the true reality, the real representation of reality, is that Herr Erwin, father Mieze’s beloved Felicie, detests cats.
So if Mieze, in the process of this to-be-famous experiment, should inadvertently bump into the cyanide instead of waiting for the statistical judgment of nuclei, what will Herr Erwin say? He will say, “I am a Swiss scientist. I am not responsible for the non-precision of felines.”
Yet for all the innocence Mieze knows Herr Erwin would profess, she notices how gingerly he lifts the lid at the end of each experiment, the gloves he has donned, the air-filter mask he wears over nose and mouth.
In spite of her anger, Mieze is drawn to and fascinated by the cage around the box of radioactive matter. It reminds her of the cage that secures Felicie’s brother’s white mice and the wire prison that confines Felicie’s mother’s canary.
Inside this cell too, the atomic particles tremble, hop and spin, watching her watch them. Just like the mice and the bird. Sometimes (Mieze cannot help herself) she feels one paw curling out towards the caged box. Her hindquarters begin their rhythmic pre-pounce twitch.
At these moments she sympathizes briefly with Herr Erwin Schrödinger. Is this not the same twitch she has observed in him as he sets up his experiments?
When he pounces upon and captures the elusive, fluttering bits of knowledge, she has seen in him the sharp spark of the thrill of a successful hunt. She believes he may even experience a brief, atavistic sensation as of soft fur or feathers against the inside of his mouth; a rush of the sweet warmth of blood.
But after a while of such conjecture Mieze grows bored and tired and wishes she could sleep. Then she again becomes irritated with Herr Erwin. She is not stupid. If she dozes, if she suspends her observations, she could die.