“Other figures split in two or three or ten. At times, it was only their limbs or facial expressions that split. Intuitively, Jane understood that she was witnessing all the possibilities of the moment before it became. She heard the ambulance siren from miles away and felt a city of heads turning, wondering what happened, swallowing pangs of their own mortality: cause and effect erupting outwardly—inwardly— endlessly, then coagulating into a single moment like a scab.”
“The Inbetween” is a peculiar story, unlike any other I’ve written. For one, it begins with the climax: reality as we know it briefly bursts apart on a subway platform in lower Manhattan. A woman running late to pick up her son from school witnesses the event, but unlike the others on the platform that day, she remembers. The experience reverberates throughout her life, healing relationships and old wounds in mysterious ways. What emerges is a shadow narrative that gestures to science, mysticism, and a fictional mythology of beings who, through conscious observation, hold our material reality together.
I wrote this story after reading an account of the double-split experiment, which demonstrates a principle
of physics known as the observer effect. In short, the experiment showed that on the quantum level, light
acts as a particle when observed by humans (or machines), and as a wave when it isn’t. This story asks:
What are the implications of such an effect on our macro, material world? On our relationships? Our
minds? It is the seed of what I hope to be a larger literary project. This is to say, there are many more
Inbetween stories to tell. I am grateful to Electric Spec for giving it this first one a home, and to all who
read it.
Interesting! Thanks, Noah! Be sure to check out "The Inbetween" and the rest of the stories May 31!
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