Jerry Oltion - Schrödinger's Kiln

By the end of the second week since she’d noticed the phenomenon, she had a complete dinner set, and the pace was accelerating. Her unsteady hands and her experiments had eaten into her production time so badly that she was behind on her orders, so she did the only logical thing: she packed up the newfound pottery and shipped it out to the longest-waiting customer.

After another week she had filled half her orders the regular way and half with the microwave, and in the process she had come to understand the rules, if not the theory behind these strange manifestations. There had to be at least some chance that she had left an object in the microwave, and she had to honestly forget whether or not she had, before it would happen. But with her failing memory, the odds of that being true had grown from a rare event to near certainty.

And now she began finding mysterious casseroles in the refrigerator, vases full of dead flowers in the breakfast nook, and even extra cash in the sugar bowl where she kept what she had always laughingly called her “mad money.”

Life settled into a strange, but comfortable, new routine, one that could have continued indefinitely without further complication if curiosity hadn’t eventually overcome her. On one of the rare days when her arthritis wasn’t bothering her too much to get out and her mind felt too lucid to allow any spontaneous pottery, she went to the library, determined to discover how this could be. She spent an entire afternoon in the science section, starting with microwaves and progressing to waves in general, then to particles and the physicists who worked with them. She read about Einstein and Dirac—and Schrödinger. The man who had proposed the odd notion that a cat in a box might be both dead and alive at the same time until someone looked to see which it was, and therefore forced the Universe to choose.

Change the conditions just a bit, with a forgetful person and a microwave oven, say, and Mary could easily see how her condition could force the Universe to choose between emptiness or a piece of pottery.

She returned home that evening in a pensive mood, circling warily around the kitchen. She’d had enough strange physics for one day. She headed straight for the bedroom, kicked off her shoes, and collapsed on the bed without even removing her clothes. But she had hardly begun to relax when she heard a noise, a tiny scratching sound, from within her closet. She raised up, staring at the door. Was that a meow she heard? Could a cat have somehow gotten into the house, or was she just responding to the power of suggestion from reading about Schrödinger’s experiment?

Slowly, carefully, she lay back on the bed, unwilling to get up and see.