The Second Law

A sloth in a top hat reclines in a hammock with a martini, explaining mass-energy equivalence to no one in particular. Around him, an almanac plate's worth of witnesses — wolf, owl, crab, frog, snail, a small fairy mid-flight, a grandfather clock standing under a tree as if it were a tree itself. Hand-painted signs offer thermodynamic counsel in serif type: lower your frequency, efficiency over speed, the second law is rough. Above it all, a luminous tangle of spaghetti radiates sunbeams, which the Victorian naturalist who composed this plate has declined to annotate. The thesis is in the banner: conservation of energy, observed in its purest form. The sloth, it turns out, has been correct the entire time.