American Chordata: Magazine of New Writing Issue One, Spring 2015 | Page 22

4 • FI CTION

attached to the fridge. This is utility. If we had a ladder, we would
build bookshelves along the upper edge of our walls. It would feel
like we lived at the bottom of a very tall library, and we were very
small.
I lost three boxes of books to the US Postal Service. Somewhere
in Iowa or Montana or Idaho are my copies of Jane Eyre, MobyDick, and the complete Austen. I like to think that they arrived on
the doorstep of an unsuspecting elderly woman who just recently
lost her husband and is in need of comfort. Or else to a teenage
girl growing up in a communist christian household who has read
only the words of Mao Tse-Tung and Jesus Christ. I picture my
books emanating the warm glow of untapped dreams. In reality,
they are probably still taped down in their boxes, buried underneath
other boxes in a dank and unlit storage unit. I imagine them cold
and water damaged, shriveled pages starving for the touch of fingertips.
Carson tells me to look on the bright side. He is a firm believer
in the bright side, which is one of the reasons why I love him and
why I am willing to move across the country to be with him. He
says that now we have fewer things to get rid of.
The other trick to living in a small space is to get rid of your
things. Kick your habit of mindless consumerism! Don’t let your
possessions possess you!
Back in Iowa City, I lived with my aunt in her duplex three
blocks from campus.
“Move west with me,” Carson had said, while we sat around her
cherry wood drop-leaf dining table eating spaghetti and meatballs
from vintage mango-wood Pottery Barn plates. “I’ll teach you how
to slide down mountains on your ass. I’ll teach you how to glissade.”
“I don’t know.” I poured myself sangria from a Crate and Barrel
pitcher. “I’m not very good with change.”
“But life is all about change. Evolution. You evolved when you
finished grad school. That’s a change. This is just another change.”
“What would I do out there?”
“You could do anything. What would you do here?”
I didn’t answer.