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MRS. ZENO'S PARADOX

Ellen Klages

Annabel meets Midge for a treat.

She enters a small café in the Mission District in San Francisco, bold graffiti-covered walls and baristas with multiple piercings and attitude. Sometimes it is the Schrafft's at 57th and Madison, just after the war, the waitresses in black uniforms with starched white cuffs. Once it is a patisserie on the rue Montorgueil; the din from the Prussian artillery makes it difficult to converse.

On entering the restaurant, she scans the tables for Midge, who is always somewhere.

Annabel sits and requests an espresso. She asks for tea with milk. She waits until Midge comes before she orders, to be polite.

Midge is young and cheaply dressed, in a shabby coat, her stiletto heels clip-clip-clopping on the marble floor. Her hair is the color of faded daffodils, sleek and dark, perfectly coiffed. Her sneakers shuffle on the worn wood.

She kisses the air near Annabel's cheek. "Am I late?" she asks. She puts her handbag down on an empty chair. Its contents clank and tinkle, thump and squeak.

"I'm not certain," Annabel says. It is a small lie, a kindness to a dear friend.

The server materializes. "What are you having?"

Annabel answers and Midge says, "The same, please."

"You know," Annabel says, "I think I'd like a little something sweet."

"Oh, I shouldn't."

"Nothing gooey, nothing too decadent. A brownie?"

"Whatever you want. I'll only have a bite."

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely." Midge pats her waist. "Just the tiniest bite possible."

The brownie appears on Fiestaware, a folded napkin, a lovely seventeenth-century porcelain platter. They gaze at it, fudge-dark, its top glossy, crackled like Arizona in July, sprinkled with powdered sugar.

Annabel cuts the brownie in half.

She eats it with obvious pleasure, flecks of chocolate limning the corners of her mouth. She blots her lips with a tissue, leaving an abstract smudge of chocolate and Revlon's Rosy Future.

"This is too good," Midge says, moistening her forefinger to pick up an indeterminate number of small crumbs.

"Stairmaster tomorrow," Annabel agrees. "Probably." She sips from her cup.

They talk about their jobs, the men they are dating, the men they have married. They have been friends since the beginning of time, Midge jokes.

"That's your half." Annabel points to the brownie.

"Oh, I couldn't. Not the whole thing."

Midge cuts the brownie in half.

They glance at the clock. Time is irrelevant. Annabel gets a refill. "Are you going to eat the rest of that?"

Midge shakes her head.

Annabel cuts the brownie in half.

After the twentieth division, the brownie is the size of a grain of sand. Midge extracts a single-edged razor blade from her large purse and divides the speck.

They discuss the weather. A chance of rain, they agree. Their conversation loops around itself, an infinite amount of things to talk about.

Annabel puts a jeweler's loupe into her right eye and produces a slim obsidian knife from a leather case, its blade a single molecule thick. A gift from an ophthalmic surgeon she dated some time ago. She neatly bisects the dark mote and pops half into her mouth.

"Oh, go ahead. Take the last piece," Midge urges.

"No. Common sense says it's yours."

"I assumed as much." The smooth surface of her handbag warps as she reaches into one of its dimensions to reveal an electron microscope.

Midge cuts the brownie—now an angstrom wide—in half.

"A sheet of paper is a million angstroms thick," Midge says, as if Annabel hasn't always known that. Annabel is a nuclear physicist. She is Stephen Hawking's bastard daughter, a receptionist at Fermi Lab.

Midge is quite fond of them.

"I'm really not that hungry," she says.

Five cuts later, the room shimmers and shudders a bit. Annabel and Midge smile at each other.

"You must finish it off," Midge says, pointing to the apparently empty space between them. "It's just a smidge."

Annabel follows her finger and looks down, which is a mistake. The photons of visible light play air-hockey with the particle of brownie.

"I'm not sure where it is," she says.

Midge puts on her reading glasses and punches numbers into a graphing calculator with nimble fingers. She reaches through her handbag with a sigh. It will take ENIAC decades to process all that data.

"Ninety-nine percent probability that it's here," she says after an eternity. She closes her eyes. "Or in a teahouse on the outskirts of Kathmandu."

"Hard to tell in this phase," Annabel agrees.

The linear accelerator in the seventh dimension of Midge's handbag splits the now-theoretical brownie in half.

"Planck's length," Annabel notes. "Indivisible."

The server disappears into a worm hole. The vinyl booth, the check, and the known universe dissolve into an uncertain froth.

"That was lovely." Midge's voice is distant, indefinite. "We must do it again sometime."

"We have," says Annabel.

 

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