Flash: Daniel Dominowski
Dead/Alive Cats
It wasn’t the purpose or the function, but the style and that didn’t make sense to me. I counted style as a secondary objective. It was a matter of importance, but less importantly a matter of interest. Some days, he did nothing but write, and man, his work fucking howled. Other days he got carried away, pacing the living room while ranting about Schrödinger’s cat.
“Fucking dead-alive cats roaming the streets, meowing and unstoppable,” he was frenzied, “they are/aren’t there/gone. They won’t play or kill mice, because they don’t know where they are.”
According to him, the world would be overrun with dead-alive cats and we were all headed to that same fate. He had never been more sure of anything in his life. Superposition, he called it. I called it groovy and decided that it would be fulfilling to experience superposition. I checked the cupboards and found two bags containing Psychotria Veritas and Syrian Rue.
I heated up the stove and began to prepare for the weekend. Being interesting and having a purpose is always more important than the style in which you do it; style is only necessary to avoid being dull.
“If you’re dead/alive, do you care about getting hurt?” It seemed like a pressing question, which presumably made him think I was crazy. I stood in my kitchen, brewing a pot of that Amazonian tea, and by god that bastard was going to drink some. We would see whether the style overcomes the function, and whether or not you can be alive and dead at the same time.
That night we witnessed the collapse of the wave function, returned and were vacantly aware of the cats’ demise: their minds just could not handle it.