LIVING WITH CARA

She was always getting smaller. Leaning over the drafting table—the one she had bought for next to nothing at a liquidation sale in Rosemont—she hid herself inside her work. She drew comics, which were these little scenes in two inch by two inch boxes that, like the jar of pickled cabbage we had forgotten on a shelf in the garage, intensified inside their containers.

I wanted a constraint like that. My work was big, a musical that would never be produced, with kick lines, costumes, rotating stages—all of it chaos that I could never seem to finish. Maybe I didn’t want to finish, so I sat at the piano and let it spread. I had even begun to think that it would take over the house and started scanning the classifieds for a bigger place. I found one on Western Avenue that looked perfect, but when I tapped her on the shoulder while she was drawing, she said what do we need a bigger house for and besides we can’t afford it, so I let it drop.

Anyway, I watched the shrinking—it was happening all the time. At night, curled up at the edge of the bed. During the day, at the drafting table, her face closer and closer to her drawings, her back bent in imitation of the work, compacting, until the drawings were too dense to even see and she had to put her chin on the table. They didn’t sell pens small enough for her, so she made one with a needle and some ink, and I bought her a jeweler’s glass so she wouldn’t strain her eyes.

I found the jeweler’s glass in a drawer a few days later.

Then one day I tapped her on the shoulder, said I wanted to know what she was making, to which she said it was just doodling, don’t worry. But I wondered if she would implode like the jar of pickled cabbage eventually did, and anticipating this potential outcome—maybe hoping for it—I waited until she was asleep on the couch upstairs, then I took the jeweler’s glass from the drawer and went down to the drafting table, where I saw a panel drawn on a piece of paper, and in that panel another panel, and then another, and another, and each one sucked me further down through the original square hole until I couldn’t see the light where I had fallen in and couldn’t see ahead of me and knew only that I might reach the center if I just kept going down, and so down I went, further into the hole, looking for an ending—and I nearly made it, was so close I could almost see the end, which was inside a house, which looked exactly like the house I had seen in the newspaper, and I went to the door and was about to knock when, from behind me, there was a cough and I was sucked back out through the hole to the drafting table, where I turned to find her awake, watching from the top of the stairs, and that’s when I knew that this time I had really done it, but boy was it wonderful to watch her fill the room, like a gas, intoxicating and expansive, knocking the jeweler’s glass off the table to the floor, where it cracked, distorted the view through it, and that’s when she started to apologize for the damage, but I said don’t worry it’s fine, already forgotten. So we spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, her legs splayed over mine, breathless.

Moments like that were precious. But they were rare. Most times she’d skip the implosion. Just collapse.

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Cameron Shenassa is an MFA candidate at Oregon State University. His work has appeared in Chicago Literati, The Wolf Skin, and elsewhere. He lives in Oregon.