Liora and the Cats Who Explained What Cannot Be Said

(A companion to the story of the unfinished puzzle)

The morning after the puzzle that couldn’t finish itself, Liora woke to find two tails — one striped, one indeterminate — hanging casually over the edge of her bed.

“You’re awake,” purred the striped one.

“You might be,” murmured the other.

Liora blinked.

“Cheshire Cat… Schrödinger’s Cat… what are you two doing here?”

“Consulting,” said the Cheshire Cat.

“Advising,” corrected Schrödinger’s Cat.

“Arguing,” they said together.

The Cheshire Cat materialised fully and sat at the foot of her bed, his grin appearing first as usual. Schrödinger’s Cat appeared and did not appear beside him, occupying a small region of maybe.

“We thought you might want,” said the Cheshire Cat, “a little more insight into your puzzle.”

“And into puzzles in general,” added Schrödinger’s Cat. “Especially the kinds that know more than they can say.”

Liora sat up. “You mean incompleteness?”

Both cats shivered in delight.

The Cheshire Cat began:

“Every world leaves something outside itself, my dear. A picture needs a margin. A story needs a next page. And a system—”

“—needs a place it can’t reach,” finished Schrödinger’s Cat. “Otherwise it would collapse into a tidy little cube of certainty. And cubes are dreadfully boring.”

The Cheshire Cat arched his back.

“Consider your puzzle yesterday. A system of pieces trying to show a picture.”

“But one piece always refused to fit,” said Schrödinger’s Cat, swishing his maybe-tail. “Not because it was stubborn, but because it was loyal.”

“Loyal to what?” Liora asked.

“To possibility,” the two cats whispered.

Schrödinger’s Cat paced in a circle that was also a spiral.

“You see, a system can describe many things. But it cannot describe itself completely from inside. It needs at least one piece — one truth, one gesture — that stands outside, pointing back at the system, showing its shape. The puzzle’s missing piece was that gesture.”

“And you,” added the Cheshire Cat, “noticed it. Which is impressive. Most adults try to hammer the last piece into place and then blame the puzzle for not behaving.”

Liora laughed.

“So Gödel’s theorem,” she said slowly, “is like the puzzle’s way of saying: ‘I can show you anything, except all of me.’”

Both cats beamed.

“Exactly,” said the Cheshire Cat. “Any system rich enough to speak of numbers, or puzzles, or cats—”

“—or even itself,” purred Schrödinger’s Cat, “will always whisper something it cannot shout.”

The Cheshire Cat floated upward, his grin widening.

“And the beauty of it, my dear, is this: the unfinished part is not a flaw.”

“It’s the doorway,” said Schrödinger’s Cat softly. “The part through which new truths enter.”

Liora felt a warm glow inside her, the kind that comes from understanding something without needing to own it.

“Is that why the sky looked different yesterday?” she asked.

Schrödinger’s Cat flickered.

“The sky always leaves a piece outside itself.”

“And so,” the Cheshire Cat added, “do you.”

He poked her gently on the forehead with his tail.

“That’s the piece that keeps you growing.”

For a moment everything shimmered — her room, the cats, the morning light — as if the whole world were acknowledging its own unfinishable truth.

Then both cats leapt toward the window.

The Cheshire Cat dissolved into stripes of laughter.

Schrödinger’s Cat dissolved into perhaps.

And Liora was left smiling at the space they had left behind — a tiny, bright reminder that every world, and every story, and every self, always keeps one piece outside the picture, so there is room for becoming.