Free A Box of Gargoyles by Anne Nesbet Page A

hand.
    â€œWiggle room, dear. It’s all about the wiggle room.”
    Maya stared at them in growing disbelief.
    â€œHello?” she said. “Darling parents?”
    They remembered themselves then, turned back to Maya, and included her in their smiles.
    â€œSorry, Maya,” said her father. “It’s just that we first met in this English class, you know, long long ago, right after the creation of the world, when we were in college—”
    â€œWhere they made us read Oedipus Rex ,” said her mother. “It’s a play.”
    â€œGreek tragedy,” said her father. “Oracle says baby will grow up to murder his father and marry his mother, so naturally they send the baby off to be left on the hillside to die—”
    â€œPoor little thing!” said her mother.
    â€œBut instead,” Maya’s father continued, “a shepherd takes him in, and other stuff happens, and he ends up being raised by another family—”
    â€œYes, he does,” said Maya’s mother. “And then little Oedipus grows up and he goes and talks to the oracle, and it tells him he’s going to kill his father and marry his mother, and so he does everything he can to avoid killing or marrying the people he thinks are his parents—”
    â€œWhich means, ha-ha, that he blunders right into killing another man, who of course turns out to have been his birth father, and marrying another woman, who of course turns out to have been his birth mother—”
    Maya’s parents were relishing this story all too much.
    â€œThat’s seriously gross,” said Maya.
    â€œSo the oracle was right all along,” said Maya’s mother. “That’s the way Greek tragedies are. And then we got into a big argument in class.”
    â€œWith the teacher?” said Maya.
    â€œWith each other.” Her mother laughed. “I said it was awful to think of life being all planned out in advance that way. It was so unfair! And how I was very glad I did not live in ancient Greece, if that’s how they saw the world. And your father went on this long tear about deterministic theories of the universe, meaning everything is part of some kind of huge mechanism that just chugs along like a clock. And I said, What about free will? And he said, No such thing, if you’re a determinist . And I said, Then I’m not a determinist, that’s for sure . And he said, Not that you have any choice about that . And then I threw a notebook at him, and the other students clapped.”
    Maya’s father grinned.
    â€œThey did. They were awful. Then, after class, I took your mother out for coffee and confessed.”
    â€œConfessed what?” said Maya.
    â€œThat I knew better. I was studying physics, right? There’s all this stuff in modern physics that shows us that on the very small scale, on the quantum level, all sorts of strange things happen all the time. You can’t even say A will cause B; you have to talk about what’s probable, not what’s certain, and sometimes even the very most improbable things happen.”
    â€œOh,” said Maya. She was still a little too caught up in the idea of her long-ago very young mother throwing a notebook at her long-ago very young father to follow the details of all of these As and Bs.
    â€œSo I said things might have worked out better for poor old Oedipus,” said her mother, “if he had just managed to move from Greece to the quantum level.”
    She smiled.
    â€œMore wiggle room there, apparently.”
    â€œUm,” said Maya. “So if someone now is, like, caught up in some kind of magic that makes her do all these different things, just like the Oedipus guy, then what should she do?”
    â€œ Oedipus was just a story,” said her father, wagging his finger at her. “Stories are a different case entirely.”
    â€œLook for that wiggle room,” said her mother.