The Slow Drawer

"They can't," Maya said. "A feather and a coin. Same speed. They can't."

"The video says they do."

"Videos say anything. I want to see it fall in this room. Our air. Our floor."

Soren set the glass jar on the bench. It was a big pickling jar from the back of a cupboard, tall enough to drop something inside, with a lid Maya's uncle had drilled and fitted with a valve. The hand pump sat beside it, the kind for bicycle tires but working in reverse.

"Drop them with air first," Soren said. "So we have something to compare to."

Maya held a dime and a small gray feather over the open jar mouth. "Ready."

"Ready."

She let go. The dime hit the bottom with a tick. The feather wandered down after it, tilting, drifting, taking its lazy time, landing maybe two full seconds later.

"See," Maya said. "The feather is slow. The feather is a slow thing. That's its whole personality."

"In air."

"In any air I've ever met."

Soren screwed the lid down and started pumping. The handle was stiff. He worked it, forty strokes, sixty, his arm getting tired, the air hissing out of the valve a little at a time. Inside the jar nothing looked different. Glass looked like glass.

"How do we even know it's working," Maya said.

"We don't, really. That's the problem. You can't see less air."

They had rigged the feather and the dime onto a little paper trapdoor inside, a flap you could yank open from outside with a string through a sealed hole. Maya's uncle had helped with the seal and then wandered off to take a call and never come back, which was how he was. He thought the whole thing was cute. He had said good luck with that twice.

"Okay," Soren said. "I think that's about as empty as this pump gets it. Pull."

Maya pulled the string.

The flap dropped. The dime fell. The feather fell.

"Wait," Maya said.

"Again. Pull it up, do it again."

They reset, pumped, dropped. The feather still drifted, but less. It came down straighter. Faster. Not together with the dime, but closer than before, like it had stopped arguing quite so much.

Maya stared into the jar. "It's getting less slow."

"The feather's not changing. It's the same feather."

"So what's changing."

"The room around it. We're taking the room away."

Maya went quiet. Then, "Pump it more. I want it really empty. I want the emptiest you can."

Soren pumped until his arm shook. Maya took over and pumped too, the two of them trading, the handle squeaking, until the hiss out the valve got thin and stubborn and you could feel the pump fighting to pull anything out at all.

"That's it," Soren said. "That's the best this jar will ever do. It's not real vacuum. It's just less air."

"Less is something. Pull."

Maya pulled the string.

The flap dropped.

The dime fell and the feather fell and for the first time they came down close, almost matched, the feather only a hair behind, no wandering, no drifting, just down, like the feather had forgotten it was a feather.

Neither of them said anything for a second.

"Do it again," Maya whispered.

They did it again. Same thing. The gap was so small now you had to watch hard to catch it.

"It's the air," Soren said slowly. "The whole time, it was never the feather being slow. The air was holding the feather up. The feather is light, so the air could push it around. The dime's heavy, the air can't be bothered. Take the air away and there's nothing left to hold the feather back."

"So underneath the air," Maya said, "they were always falling the same."

"The whole time. Under all of it."

Maya put her hand flat on the cool glass and looked at the feather lying on the dime at the bottom.

"That means the feather wasn't slow," she said. "It was just being pushed. Its slowness wasn't even real. It was borrowed from the air."

"Everything falls the same," Soren said. "If you take the room away. A feather, a dime. A bowling ball." He looked up. "A person."

Maya turned to him.

"Think about it," he said. "If you and me jumped off something into a real vacuum, we'd fall at the exact same rate. Doesn't matter that you weigh more than the feather. Falling doesn't care how heavy you are. It only looks like it cares because of air."

"That's weird," Maya said. "Everything else cares. Push a heavy door, it's harder. Carry a heavy bag, it's harder. Heavy is always harder. Except falling."

"Except falling. Falling treats everything the same."

Maya pressed her forehead near the glass, watching the feather like it might do something else.

"There's a thing about that," she said. "If falling treats everything exactly the same, no matter what it's made of, no matter how heavy. Then how do you even know you're falling? Inside the fall. If everything around you falls at your exact speed."

Soren's pencil stopped on the page.

"You wouldn't," he said. "You couldn't. Everything next to you, falling the same. You'd feel like nothing was happening at all."

"Like floating."

"But it's not floating. It's falling so perfectly even that it feels like floating." Maya turned the idea over. "So falling and floating could be the same thing. From inside."

"That's not a small idea," Soren said.

"It's a big idea. The feather told us a big idea."

They looked at the jar. A drilled lid, a tired pump, a dime, a gray feather. The feather that had pretended its whole life to be slow.

"Pump it again," Maya said. "I want to watch them fall the same one more time. I want to watch the feather stop lying."

Soren took the handle. The pump squeaked. Through the glass the feather sat on the dime, waiting to be lifted up so it could fall, exactly as fast as anything else in the universe, the moment the room let go of it.