Chapter 1 — Broken Where?

Iota was painting a picture of a small house with watercolors. Beside her sheet of paper sat a glass of water for rinsing her brush. She had already drawn the front door and two windows in pencil, and now she was ready to paint the walls.

Without thinking, she dipped her wooden pencil straight into the water glass as if it were a paintbrush.

“Oops,” Iota said. “That is my pencil, not my brush.”

From the chair beside her, Wong Nam let out a quiet chuckle.

Iota reached out to pull her pencil back, then stopped with her fingers in midair.

“Grandpa, look at this.”

The pencil rested at a slant inside the glass, its lower half underwater and its upper half in the air. Right at the surface of the water, the pencil looked broken in two. The section beneath the water did not line up with the section above it, as though someone had snapped the wood and glued it back together at an angle.

“It was straight a second ago,” Iota said.

“Lift it out and check.”

Iota pulled the pencil out of the glass while water dripped from its tip. Rolling the wooden shaft between her fingers, she inspected it from the graphite point all the way to the end.

“Not broken at all.”

She laid it flat beside her ruler. The pencil was just as straight as the ruler’s edge.

Dipping the pencil back into the glass, she watched it break in two all over again.

When she lifted it halfway up, the break climbed with the water’s surface. When she lowered it deeper, the break stayed right at the surface.

“The water is not really breaking the pencil,” Iota said slowly. “If it were, the wood would still be broken when I pull it out.”

“Then what is happening?”

“The pencil is straight, and yet it looks broken.” Iota frowned. “Are my eyes making a mistake?”

“There is nothing wrong with your eyes,” Wong Nam said. “The question to ask is what happens along the way between the pencil and your eyes.”

Iota pointed to the glass. Between the pencil and her eyes sat the water, along with the curved glass wall of the cup.

“A round glass makes everything inside it look a little strange,” Wong Nam said. “Wider, or shifted to the side, which mixes two things together. Let us use a wide, low dish instead so we can look straight down through the flat surface of the water alone.”

Iota moved her house painting to the far corner of the table well away from any splashes.

Picking up her pencil and cloth, she followed Grandpa to the kitchen.