KARA CRAWFORD / 3 STORIES
Corporate Life
In the downtown office building, the marketing intern is tasked with shredding sensitive documents. This is not marketing, but she has to do it anyway. All the important people in their important outfits are too busy being busy to fold themselves into the corner of the copy room and convert client information into scraps.
When it’s running, the shredder sounds like ice cracking between teeth. It sounds cold. Every day the intern watches it suck pages into its ribcage, watches it ejaculate confetti into a waste bin on the floor. The office carpet is gray. Everything is gray.
The marketing intern thinks all the boring things an intern might, before they’ve learned to be more interesting. She imagines feeding herself to the shredder—first her hair, then the rest. There would be no blood, only skin and muscle and fat, evenly removed and sliced into strips. She would be grated and slivered with promise, her minced up parts shimmering with all her untapped potential. Then she imagines shredding other things: her boss’s pantsuits (a different color for every day of the week), her boss herself, the conference room table scattered with complementary mints. All of these things, pulled into the shredder’s needy plastic.
The intern doesn’t know yet that there is nothing innovative about destruction. Eventually, I hope she gives up on wanting to rip herself, on seeing the shredder as a secret kind of weapon. I hope she glues googly eyes on it instead, right above where the documents slip inside. I hope she gives it eyebrows and a mustache and a clump of pubic hair.
I hope that, one day, she looks at the shredded paper wilting in heaps at the bottom of the trash and feels nothing in her body but pity at the loss.
Co-Work
Alone, in my cubicle, while everyone around me forces emails down their throats, I rip printer paper into strips. I do this until the pieces are crinkled and soft and small as hangnails. I group my rippings together and add them to the pile growing underneath the corner of my desk.
I am building a nest. It will be hidden and warm, like praying. If I could, I would cut the clothes from my body into scraps, pad the lining of the paper pile with blanket fleece. But I am withheld by the limits of workplace standards, of office supplies.
I will build it, ripping sheets of paper every single day, until the nest is complete, until it's as plump and downy as a bird. Then, at night, when everyone is gone and the computers are sleeping, something will find it. A rat, maybe, or a fox. A human baby or a tarantula or a sickly security guard. Something will claim the nest, will make a home beneath my shoes. I will feed it mints from the breakroom and it will love me like I’m whole.
Listen.
Listen.
Even my mousepad will sing.
Slumber Party!
I remember drawing pentagrams with drugstore lipstick on the bathroom floor of your dad’s apartment, vanilla-scented candles positioned on each of their points. Me, always the one to get up to turn the lights off. Your dad was never home on nights like this, so we could make as much noise as we wanted.
I can see the two of us holding hands and chanting for Lucifer to appear, to save us, to tell us his real name. Only he, we felt, could understand what we’d been through—he’d been cast aside, too,had been jealous and petty and thrown into Hell. So of course he would make sense to us, would tell us what we needed to hear.
All those nights, sitting immobile on the tile, believing it could really happen this time and only being a tiny bit afraid. Waiting in the silence with our eyes full of candlelight, palms slick and buttery from dollar store lotion.
Wishing the dark would just stay put, right where it is. You and me alone at midnight, calling for devils—our hope as jutting and breathless as the points of a star.
Kara Crawford holds an MFA from George Mason University. She is a co-founding editor of Chatterbox!, and a senior reader for Ploughshares. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, TriQuarterly, Pinch, ANMLY, and elsewhere. She was born and raised in Manassas, Virginia and now lives in Pittsburgh. You can visit her website at kara-crawford.com or follow her on Instagram at karacrawford3.