SLIPSTREAM CAT PEOPLE

The cat put her case to the man.

The man listened: first, with the panicked gaze of someone who fears he might have lost his mind, then with the expression of attentive incredulity that often haunts people when they hear of Schrödinger's cat as a particle navigating a "quantum slipstream" for the first time.

Madame Esperluette was watching from her window. She had seen it before: people just stopping to look at that black cat, then kneeling down on the driveway as if it were telling them something too vital – or mesmerizing – for them to care about dirtying their expensive clothes.

It was a mystery to her what people saw in that black cat, but she was more of a dog person – a no-pets-allowed-by-my-husband person, really, since her marriage. Still, she had been feeding that cat for months – her rationale being that it was a necessary measure to prevent the poor beast from meowing all night because of an empty stomach. Her husband pretended not to notice her little pursuit – just as he ignored almost everything else in his wife's barren existence.

When Madame Esperluette went out with the bag of cat food that evening, the man was gone. But there were two cats there now. She bet they were both hungry.

The black cat looked up at her and meowed, almost as if saying, “Finally!”

The orange tabby sitting next to it had the bewildered expression of a cat still grappling with the slipstream approach to Schrödinger's philosophy.

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