American Chordata: Magazine of New Writing Issue One, Spring 2015 | Page 21

m o n l e vc h e n kova

Gletscherpark’s “Gepatsch-Stausee” lake, 2014

Carson has
searched the
Internet and
ordered six
air plants.
They sit with roots exposed inside clear glass eggshells—crinkled
green ferns that look like a bad perm job and succulents shaped
like roses. We hang two of them from the curtain rods and the rest
from hooks on the ceiling.
There is a crack in the corner of the ceiling and sometimes
bits of plaster rain down on our bedroom-living-room-diningroom. This studio is all of those things. A three-for-one, we call
it. Plenty of room for two.
The trick to living in a small square footage is to utilize your
vertical space. What you don’t have in length and width, you make
up for in height. Multiply it together and that’s how you get volume.
In addition to the air plants, we buy hanging shelves and nail
them to the walls. We line up our knives on a magnetic strip and
glue more magnets to the back of our spice tins so they can sit
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