The Chubb Illusion
By Meg Pokrass



Sometimes her boyfriend Jon and she would sit on the porch and make bubble cheeks at each other like fatties. Carla would get into a giggle so deep that she would nearly choke.

"What if you die swallowing your own laughing spit?" he said, once. "What then?"

They talked about having a picnic, what they would bring. He said "grapes and cheese," and she said, "Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill."

Carla imagined they would squabble over many things if they spent more time together, but in truth, they were seeing each other every day and things felt like they were loosening up, peeling off like skin. Underneath, she wasn't babyish anymore, and neither was he.

They both loved Carla's coffee-table-sized optical illusion book, and would smuggle it outside at night with a flashlight to emphasize the effects. The illusions had names like the Cornsweet Illusion, and the Hollow-Face Illusion, and the Chubb illusion. They laughed at the names of illusions, imagining the people who invented them.

"Lab rats," he said.

He asked if she knew how to bake morning pastries when they were lying in the yard of freshly mowed grass on a warm mid-summer night, looking at spots jumping off the pages of the book. She told him that she could bake anything, as long as she had a cookbook and the proper ingredients.

"I have an addiction to muffins," Jon said.

"That's okay," Carla said. Right after she said it she wondered if she really was nice, or if that was just the way it seemed to her.

"Sometimes I forget to put on my parking brake," Jon said, touching her hair. Carla's shirt was filmy because it was summer. She wore a rugged sports bra underneath to minimize the nipple effect. Jon's hand slipped under Carla's shirt, under the tight spandex sports bra, found Carla's rigid nipple. Neither spoke for a while.

"I could shriek and ruin this," she said.

"Yes, you really could," he said.

Like clockwork, they started laughing. She swallowed too much spit, then coughed. He laughed so hard too. She wasn't the prettiest girl in the world, but he loved the part that only came out with him.

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