Where the Light Bends

In a city that had always existed, yet never in the same way twice, there was a small bookstore at the end of an alley. It had no name on the door, no fixed closing hours, and no owner anyone could remember. Inside, the books were never in the same place twice. A novel that sat on the front table one day would vanish the next, only to reappear months later on a high shelf, as if it had always been there. No one rearranged them. They simply moved.

One evening, a physicist entered, drawn in by the soft glow of a single desk lamp at the back. He wasn’t sure why he had come—perhaps curiosity, perhaps something else. A woman was sitting there, flipping through the pages of a book that had no title. She looked up. “You’re looking for something.”

The physicist hesitated. “A book on quantum mechanics.” She gestured to the shelves. “They’re all books on quantum mechanics.” He frowned. “I don’t see any.” She smiled. “Exactly.” The physicist glanced around. The books looked ordinary. Fiction, poetry, philosophy. But something felt…off. He reached for a thin volume with a dark blue cover. The moment his fingers touched it, the title changed.

“Superposition and the Nature of Reality.” He pulled his hand back. The title flickered. “Collected Letters of an Unknown Poet.”

The woman nodded. “Observation collapses the state.” The physicist exhaled. “That’s impossible.” She tapped the book lightly. “Only if you believe in fixed outcomes.” The physicist turned, looking at the rows of books. They weren’t arranged in any particular order—yet somehow, every book was in the right place.He thought of wave functions, of probabilities waiting to be measured. He thought of light bending around unseen forces. He thought of decisions he hadn’t made yet, paths he might take, books he hadn’t read but somehow already understood.

The woman stood up. “The question isn’t whether the books move, but whether they ever stayed still to begin with.” She walked past him, and as she did, the store shifted. The shelves blurred for an instant, as if they had never been there at all. The physicist looked down at the book still in his hand. Its title had changed again. “Where the Light Bends.” He opened it.

And somewhere, in a reality he hadn’t yet chosen, he was already reading the last page.