Spooky Einstein - New Flash Fiction

Remember when you were kid and walking to school and your best friend warned that you should never walk on the cracks in the pavement? Suzanne Conboy-Hill, who we last saw in June, is back with a cautionary tale about just what has/had/could happen if you do! (If you are wondering about the title - Einstein once described quantum mechanics as “spooky action at a distance”.) Suzanne describes herself as a British writer "with no genre allegiance". Her flash fiction and short stories have been published by Fine Linen Literary Journal, Full of Crow, Zouch Magazine, and Cut A Long Story amongst others. She was a finalist in the Lascaux Short Fiction Prize 2014 and she once met Isaac Asimov and can be found at http://www.conboy-hill.co.uk 


The Spooking of Einstein
by Suzanne Conboy-Hill
 
 
"If you walk on the cracks, the bears will get you."
 
"No, they won’t."
     
But they did. Not bears exactly, more trans-dimensional, multi-versal, quantum-coherents with no sense of humour. Bert concluded this from the instructions they gave him which made as much sense as some he’d seen in self-assembly kits where literal translation gave rise to absurdities such as, Take bradawl which is slippery when wet and refrain from washing child inside out. May contain nuts.

Bert was wrong of course as there are no such creatures, at least not since the multi-dimensional, trans-versal, quantum-entangleds had wiped them all out. They too had no sense of humour because, being singularities, every joke that ever was or ever would be, existed simultaneously in each of them, which was helluva dangerous so humour had naturally been selected out. Darwin is/was/will be very proud.

Bert, whose abductee function was to be that of mediator at a ‘Big Bounce or Big Bang?’ conference, puzzled over a new edict, Do not inhale while adjusting the direction of the companion mind. It must cooperate with rescue at the lighting of the red lamp but not linger thereon. This set him off chuckling, then chortling, his shoulders shucking up and down like an old car on a bad road. Then he sucked in a mighty breath for the full LOL, inadvertently relocating the entire community of multi-versal yada yadas to the moribund nuclei of some bunged up alveoli he had lost the use of when he started smoking at age fourteen. They tinkered therein super-deterministically and fixed a bit of errant DNA. Einstein is/was/will be a little bit spooked.

Back on the pavement, his mediator role precipitously curtailed, Bert reconsidered his response to the question of cracks.