Or Else

by Joe Hart

It wasn’t just houses that could be haunted. Hearts could be too.

What was worse than not knowing? Wondering about anything serious wasn’t fun. Schrödinger’s cat was a great thought experiment, but I think he missed the crucial point—human beings weren’t meant to live in a state of uncertainty. Never looking inside the box to see if the cat was alive or dead would drive us insane. A deer, a bear, a lion—they didn’t worry about the unknown, about mystery. Hunger and thirst and the need to procreate. If one of their kind disappeared, so be it. Time to move on. Hunger. Thirst. Sex. That’s all, that’s it. But for people, mystery was horror.