Once more, the veil between sense and wonder thins. Liora’s garden, that quiet hinge between worlds, gathers light that doesn’t quite belong to afternoon. Here, the ordinary turns translucent; here, even the laws of being seem willing to play. And this time, two very peculiar cats have found their way through.
That was when she saw the box.
It sat squarely in the middle of the path between the rose bush and the sundial, sealed with silver string. A label was tied to it, but the writing shifted every time she tried to read it. One moment it said Fragile, the next Curious, and once—just once—it seemed to say Do Not Observe.
Liora crouched, reaching for the string.
“Before you do that,” said a voice above her shoulder, “you should really decide how attached you are to certainty.”
She turned. Nothing—just a grin, suspended in the air like a crescent moon caught mid-laughter.
“Cheshire?” she whispered.
“The very same,” said the grin, which promptly acquired a pair of amber eyes. “Though I must say, your pronouncing my name makes me feel rather more existent than usual. A dangerous habit.”
From inside the box came a faint rustle, and then a single, uncertain mew.
Liora frowned. “Is there a cat in there?”
“Technically,” said the grin. “Though ‘is’ is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence.”
She hesitated. The air around the box was trembling, as though the light itself couldn’t make up its mind about being.
Then, very softly, the lid folded open on its own. Inside was a small grey cat—half-asleep, half-awake, with one eye open and the other dreaming.
“I’m Schrödinger,” it said drowsily. “At least, I think I am. It depends who’s asking.”
The Cheshire Cat purred with delight. “A kindred spirit! You vanish by halves, I by degrees. Between us, we barely exist at all.”
Liora laughed. “Then how can I be talking to you?”
The grin widened. “Ah, that’s the trick, dear girl—you aren’t. We’re the ones talking through you.”
The garden blurred for a heartbeat, and suddenly everything—roses, sundial, sky—seemed both vividly present and perfectly imaginary.
Liora sat cross-legged on the grass, the two cats circling her in spirals of maybe and might-be.
“So,” she said at last, “which of you is real?”
The grin began to fade, the box began to close, and Liora felt that subtle pull—the one that always came when the world shifted back toward sense.
Just before they vanished, Schrödinger’s Cat spoke again:
“Tell your garden not to worry. Reality always grows back.”
And then there was only sunlight, and the sound of a single bell somewhere between thought and memory.
That night, as the last light gathered in her window, Liora sat on the edge of her bed, tracing patterns on the quilt that almost—but not quite—formed a grin. The box was gone. The air was still. Yet the shadows under the chair flickered as if something softly breathed inside them.
She thought about the two cats—one who existed only when seen, one who disappeared when looked at—and wondered which was lonelier.
Outside, the garden seemed to hum faintly, as though remembering an idea it couldn’t quite recall. A rose petal drifted through the open window and landed on her hand. It was warm, impossibly so, as if it had been basking in two suns at once.
Liora smiled, not because she understood, but because she didn’t. Some mysteries, she decided, were meant to stay half-open—like boxes, or smiles, or the space between being and seeing.
And as she drifted toward sleep, she could have sworn she heard two purrs—one near, one far—folding softly into the dark.
