The Measure

by Nikki Erlick

she could spend an entire lifetime reading and never keep up.

Flying, to Ben, always felt like sidestepping time, the hours on an airplane existing outside the normal continuum of life below.

That would mean the world had flipped around, like the ceiling above him, the humans now seeing from God’s perspective.

twenty-two years and older,

“Aren’t there just some things in this world that can’t be explained by facts or science?”

There could be a lot of pain waiting inside that box, too.”

couples who’ve split up based on different beliefs about the strings.”

“When your sample size is the entire world, you’re bound to find anecdotes that support any theory,”

The measure of the string held instead the full measure of one’s life. From the beginning until the end.

agreed not to sue over any bad news—they

window of barely two years.

“Gone to live my life,” “Spending more time with family,” or “Off to make some memories.”

“Closed. Looking for closure.”

these powerful chests, like the black box of an airplane, simply could not be destroyed,

a sudden relic of the days before. Before.

The world had somehow tripped and tumbled through the looking glass,

videos of a teenage boy attempting various means of destroying his parents’ strings.

I can’t keep teaching them history and pretending like we’re not living through it right now.”

“Clearly, seeing their strings drove them both insane.”

do they actually control the future, or simply possess the knowledge of it?—kept

It was an unsettling thought that someone was essentially immune to dying until they reached the end of their string—especially strange for those, like Nina, with long ones.

Thanks string!!

How could so many people be willing to experiment with their lives?

Quitting a job, getting engaged, being unusually cagey at a party, anything could be construed to support either side, long or short.

Even before the boxes appeared, the traditional barriers of privacy had long been collapsing, hers already a society of over-sharers.

finally, even the act of looking at your string—what should have been the most intimate, the most personal of moments—became just another insight into your life that no longer belonged to you alone.

“They’re a reminder that sometimes we screw up, and sometimes the system screws with us, but if you live your life with enough passion and boldness, then that’s what you’ll be remembered for. Not the crap that happened along the way.”

the legal team worried that doctors who released short-stringers with a clean bill of health might be flirting with a lawsuit.

“How can you just let me die?”

merely self-fulfilling prophecies, testaments to the weak human spirit so easily swayed.

So, maybe, I don’t know, whenever things feel scary and unfair and confusing for us, there’s another, nicer place that we could find, too.”

Honestly, now might be a good time to talk about how people react to something they can’t understand.”

To focus instead on the blessings in their latter half of life, filling their weekends with gardening and book clubs and tennis, those simple pleasures made all the more pleasurable for feeling so ordinary in an extraordinary time.

She came to the bookstore for relief from the endless news cycle, the stresses of the world outside.

There were few places where she felt more contented than a bookstore. She had a sometimes overwhelming tendency to disappear into her daydreams, so Amie took comfort in being surrounded by the equally prolific dreams of others, preserved forever in print.

If those were the alternatives, Amie thought, perhaps they should feel lucky that the strings were all they got.

wondered, as she did almost every day, if she was making the wrong decision by refusing to open her box and rejecting the knowledge that had given so many of her friends and colleagues—nearly

unprecedented peace...

They couldn’t control the boxes’ arrival. But perhaps they could control how people used them.

“If everybody stops looking inside their boxes, then life can go back to normal.”

Five short-stringers who may not have even known they were short-stringers, or who had come to the hospital looking for help, unaware that the very fate they were hoping to avoid was waiting for them just behind the ER doors.

Something’s a tragedy if we could have stopped it.”

words shed their weight a little more with each occurrence, until they barely resembled the dense nouns and heavy adjectives that once pressed upon entire rooms.

Would the doctors be allowed to ask about her string?

But would they actually treat her differently, if they knew the truth?

Surely, if a doctor had to choose between saving a patient who was eight or seventy-eight, they would save the child first, right? Maybe this was the same? Help the long-stringer first?

Did a patient receive less care because her string was short, or was a patient’s string short because she received less care?

impacts on their health insurance?

bank denied his loan application because of his short string!

confided in a coworker about my short string, and now I just got laid off from my job as part of “long-term fiscal planning.”