AFTER SHRINKING by Hannah Cajandig-Taylor

AFTER SHRINKING by Hannah Cajandig-Taylor

We lived in a pale blue dollhouse with three stories & a basement. Obsessed over hot air balloons & weather blimps. Collected snowglobes & birdcages & convinced our giant neighbors to order countless pizzas by jumping on the remote buttons until a commercial with extra-large pepperoni flashed across their TV screen. Until we snuck enough triangular pizza box tables to furnish the place. Grew make-believe green beans & perennials on the roof. Protected our cardboard porch with Venus flytraps. A drawbridge. Toothpick mailbox. The works. Repainted our plastic appliances with glittering silver nail polish. Sharpie’d our heights on the wall, our grip clenched tight as we struggled to lift the permanent marker, shoes digging into the ground. Took three of us just to carry the marker back to the attic. Summer came. We were placed in the untamed backyard. When the crows moved in, our sky tarred & feathered, all we could think was to close our lopsided windows & send hope to our neighbors with chocolate coins in gold foil & tooth fairy kisses & after the birds abandoned our balcony view, the blue became a smiling child in a turquoise t-shirt, cutting little blankets from a washcloth to leave beside our front door. 

 


Hannah Cajandig-Taylor is a poet/flash writer living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where she reads for Passages North and Fractured Lit. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, Hobart Pulp, and Drunk Monkeys, and Gordon Square, among others. Her debut chapbook Romantic Portrait of a Natural Disaster will be released this winter through Finishing Line Press. She's obsessed with Nancy Drew games and gardening.

Art by Bob Schofield @anothertower

Read Next: THE PINHEADED DINOSAURS WITH THEIR TINY SKULLS by Kellie Rankey