Crack the Spine Literary magazine
Issue 169
Issue 169 October 28, 2015 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2015 by Crack the Spine
CONTENTS Daniel J. Cleary Bastards of Young
Bob Thurber
Strong and Bitter and Sweet
Josh Karaczewski Because of a Jacket
Shannon Phillips
To the Filet Mignon Left on My Plate
Ruth Z. Deming
Alone Again After All These Years
Timothy L. Rodriguez
I Enter Bethlehem
Daniel J. Cleary Bastards of Young
In grade school, Sammy had a dirty nickname for every member of the Indians starting lineup. Brett Butler was Wet Butthole, Joe Carter was Blow Farter, Mel Hall was Smell Balls. In fifth or sixth grade, when rumor started going around the playground that the Tribe had signed Tony Bernazard, one of the kids decided to challenge Sammy. “Let’s see what you can do with that name,” the kid said. Sammy thought for about two seconds. “Tony . . . Tony . . . Tony’s Boner’s Hard.” He was that quick.
Bob Thurber
Strong and Bitter and Sweet (For V.C.)
In the spring of 1980 my father was residing in a loony bin, undergoing treatment for “general and severe despair.” But because he had admitted himself of his own free will (and paid a full six months in advance) he could voluntarily leave at any time, day or night. On Sundays, when the weather was pleasant, he would sign himself out after breakfast. No one tried to stop him, and as long as he readmitted himself within 24 hours no new paperwork had to be completed. The staff simply held his bed, and the management of his treatment remained on schedule. On this April afternoon we were drinking strong and bitter Ethiopian coffee sweetened with steamed goat’s milk in a place called La Penguin Café. As usual, he needed a haircut and a shave, but he didn’t look any worse than the last time I’d seen him. I was about to ask where he’d like to go for dinner, when he said, “You might find this hard to believe but at one time, my old cronies and I, for a little while, we actually held the answer right in our hands. Of course, we were so young and raw, we didn’t know what in hell to do with it. We hadn’t yet asked any really important questions of ourselves, or of the world, so we really had no idea. And the answer that we found, packed so tightly, seemed too neat, far too impractical to be useful, though it had weight and a shine, and we considered the thing too densely bright to simply discard. So we picked it up and carried it with us on a long walk through leaves and grass then over a plank that served as our bridge across a drainage ditch. And we ended up burying it,
this thing we’d found, in a weed field at the base of a hill. At the time it seemed like a failsafe hiding place because there were no development in that area, not a house in sight. It all felt so illicit – the digging, the removal of rocks, the hollowing out, the filling in, the smoothing over – almost though not quite criminal. We were, after all, just children still clinging to our innocence, ruthlessly ignorant to our rapidly developing arrogance, only mildly aware of our inflated sense of self. Each morning our mothers dressed us in soft, thick coats, kissed the center of our foreheads, then sent us off to school or out to play, and all day we cowered behind our collective virtue. “Time went by like it always does. Years passed, we grew up, got old. One by one we got around to asking ourselves the important questions, though not in words. We made our inquiries with feeling, mostly out of desperation, because by then we had learned despair and grown frustrated by our limitations. Eventually, one of us remembered hiding the answer, so phone calls were made, and together we went back. The ditch was gone, of course, filled in and sealed over with flat new road; and the hill was gone, smoothed into a giant parking lot for a giant Wal-Mart; and there were dozens of new streets, houses everywhere you looked. But we still managed to find the spot. We mapped the area, marked the place, then returned later that night with picks and shovels. If you had seen us working you would have thought: why are those old men tearing up somebody’s perfect lawn in the middle of the night. You wouldn’t guess that we were mad men frantically digging for the answer we had hidden years before, that we were old fools about to discover that we had overlooked one prime, fundamental, essential fact: the success of hiding anything precious in this life depends so much on who else is searching, who’s asking, who gets there first.”
It was the longest speech he had ever made to me, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Was the sharing of this story an indication of renewed strength or more eveidence of increased instability? I remember leaning, feeling a desperate need to look into his eyes. His elbow was on the table, right between us, and he was holding a spoon in the air; his hand trembled so badly the spoon became a blur of splintered light. I decided he was absolutely crazy. An old fool who’d giant-stepped right off the deep end. Practically everybody who knew him shared that opinion. Especially my mother. But right now, today, at fifty, the same age he was then, I don’t think there was a thing wrong with him, at least nothing that’s not a defect creeping beneath the skin of anyone who dares ask hard questions of himself concerning the unending chaos of this world and then waits patiently for an answer.
Josh Karaczewski Because of a Jacket
If I had not gone to my locker to drop off my jacket I would have been there for the shooting. It happened across the street from my high school at the donut shop at lunchtime, where I would go to hang out with my smoker friends (I did not smoke – our friendships were bound with guitar string and insouciance). Details came in succession from overdramatic girls in passing: “Two guys got shot – but they’re not dead,” and, “Just some little Mexican gangsters,” and the mostly ignorant like. The teacher sentries at the crosswalk, their arms stretched out as if to pat us back toward our classes, were inadequate to our intrusive numbers, and I reached my friends for an account. It surprised me how shaken they were, these chain-smoking, cheap-beer-swilling, bad-grade-hardened rockers; I had to break their shocked brain error-loop of, “Man, I can’t believe that just happened, man…” to disentangle a narrative thread. “This guy just walked in and Bang Bang Bang!” “No, it was four shots…” “Five…” “And then he goes running, and L. A.,” the joke of a school resource officer who was assigned to strut under aviator sunglasses around our campus, “came out of nowhere and got him!” “Did a flying tackle, right there…”
I flinched, looking at the spot of driveway they were pointing to, imagining road-rash burned arms with imbedded gravel. “Man, I wouldn’t have gone after someone with a gun like that,” the awed, earned respect of a delinquent; L. A. would not be a joke anymore. Someone relayed the possibly heretical news that absences would be excused if we were too shaken up to attend afternoon classes, so we walked over to the closest of our homes. The news stations had already caught the scent of blood, so I called my Mom in case she was watching – a phone conversation I hope I never receive: “Hey Mom, there was a shooting at school – I’m fine, I’m at Tim’s; I’ll be home in a while.” We sat clustered in his backyard, in the matte shock of the event, prophesying gang reprisals; shaking our heads and whistling at the girl who, when she had attenuated her hysteria, found and then showed off with a nascent fame the bullet holes through the front and back of her baggy magenta jeans. But soon the edge of the excitement, and the event’s recounting began to undertake embellishments by the witnesses to sustain the waning interest, and I left to start my long walk home. On my way home I had to pass the school and the donut shop. The news vans, and teachers and students were gone. You would not know that anything had happened there hours before. Not being a bystander, I cannot fully claim the experience. But though firstperson details might have made for a better story, I have wondered if deciding to put my jacket in my locker at the beginning of lunch graced me with a better dream life.
Shannon Phillips
To the Filet Mignon Left on My Plate
I was spoiled, stuck up. I was embarrassed because I talked too much. Wine glasses mocked me at the table. His hand smoothed the linen next to his wine glass. Later, my ass would be stuck up, shaped by his hands. I wanted to be cool and smooth in front of him, but my face was difficult to control. I couldn’t look at his eyes. The light in the wine was in my eyes. He knew he could fold me, knew that I would bend. I wanted to be cool and smooth in front of him, not like that steak on my plate, all that pink shame out for everyone to see. I couldn’t eat it. His hand smoothed my face to wake me from the wine. He knew I would fold.
Ruth Z. Deming
Alone Again After All These Years
He rarely answers any more. He loves you, of course. And you daren’t say, “Is this the way you show it?” Married now, two kids, new job, you learn about him on Facebook, the son you brought home from Texas because his father had a terrible temper and treated me like shit. Always put me down. I knew it was a mistake right after the wedding. You’ve got his blue eyes, Dan, but you’re nothing like him. “Where’s my billfold?” my husband would yell and pound the table. A graduate of Rice University. I left him while he was getting his master’s in City Planning. I pace the living room hoping Dan will pick up. “Hey Mom!” He’s positively jubilant. We are one again as I press my hands on my once-pregnant belly. It matters not what we talk about. The wife is upstairs. But you and I are alone together. I lie on the red couch and stare at the cobwebs on the ceiling as you prattle on, not spontaneously as in days of yore, but answering my quickly thought-of questions, the more to keep you on the line, into my loving bosom, fearing the Godawful sound of the dial tone. The mice, you laugh, live behind the refrigerator and outside in the backyard shed. Like me, you are merciless and set traps when the cats – three, no less - lie down on the job. Tell me a cute story about Grace, I offer. You pause but a moment and tell me about her genius in game-playing – Animal Rummy, Chutes and Ladders (but she cheats) and The Ladybug Game. At four she has an eidetic
memory. Your wife and that father of yours gave her that, their candle-lit brilliance. You’re puttering in the kitchen. People at your new job, you tell me, drink beer at their desks. I remember when you and your friends hit the mosh pits in downtown Philadelphia, you with your long blond dreadlocks and nose-ring. All behind you, my darling. You probably haven’t a spare moment to remember your days of innocence and joie de vie in your new life as a proud member of the upwardly mobile buy-me-everything set. Twenty minutes have passed. I arise from the red couch. Will he or will he not? He does. Love you, Mom. Love you, Dan.
Timothy L. Rodriguez I Enter Bethlehem
I enter Bethlehem Like the needle Filling my vein With the celestial. I on the high way Drifting to heaven Before it ever came To the here ‘n now; I, in a beyond Not known for being Great, not looking For magi or inn, But the man on the corner To keep me in grace With only a passage of cash to get me through the newborn hour.
Contributors Daniel J. Cleary Daniel J. Cleary holds undergraduate and master’s degrees in English from the University of Dayton, an MFA in fiction from Cleveland State University, and a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Dan teaches fulltime as Associate Professor of English and serves as Writing Program Director at Lorain County Community College, where he won the Faculty Excellence Award in 2013. He is also a 2014 recipient of the Award of Excellence from the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development. Dan’s writings have appeared or are forthcoming in The North Coast Review, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, The Journal of Teaching Writing, and Literacy in Composition Studies. He has also contributed selections to writing textbooks and delivered dozens of scholarly conference papers at regional and national academic conferences, including the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention and the Conference on College Composition and Communication(CCCC). He has recently been appointed to a three-year term on the National Association of Teachers of English (NCTE) Standing Committee on International Concerns. Ruth Z. Deming Ruth Z. Deming, winner of a Leeway Grant for Creative Nonfiction, has had her work published in lit mags including The Writing Disorder, Literary Yard, and Hektoen International. A psychotherapist and mental health advocate, she
runs New Directions Support Group for people and loved ones affected by depression and bipolar disorder. She lives in Willow Grove, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia. Josh Karaczewski It feels like Josh is the only writer living in San Leandro, but he looks forward to retiring somewhere warmer. His stories have been published in several literary journals, a couple receiving Pushcart Prize nominations—though he has yet to win any carts. His books include the seriocomic novel “Alexander Murphy’s Home for Wayward Celebrities,” and the collection “My Governor’s House” and other stories. Until the riches pour in allowing him to write full time, he will continue forcing high school students to read, write, and think, while developing his family’s candy company Chastity Chocolates. Visit his blog. Shannon Phillips Shannon Phillips earned an MFA in Creative Writing from California State, Long Beach. Her chapbooklette, “Cold Bastard is My Favorite Lunch Meat” was published in 2012 by Washing Machine Press. In 2014, Arroyo Seco Press published her chapbook, “My Favorite Mistake.” Currently, she edits Carnival, an online poetry magazine. Timothy L. Rodriguez Timothy L. Rodriguez was a journalist when newspapers counted, he is a poet when poetry doesn’t count for much, and he is a novelist when the fate of fiction is uncertain. He has published in English and Spanish. His novel, “Guess
Who Holds Thee?” is available on Amazon. His most recent novel, “Never Is Now” is being serialized in the UK at www.newlondwriters.com. He makes loose change selling his seascapes. He is a practitioner of Robert Frost’s line— the only certain freedom is in departure; he has traveled widely and assumed many walks of life. For the moment he lives on a barrier island in North Carolina. This year his stories and poems have appeared in: 2015 Oracle Fine Arts Review, 2015 Anthology The Greek Fire produced by Lost Tower Publications (UK); Ashvamegh Journal, New Delhi, India; The Writer’s Drawer (UK); Baer Books Press. Bob Thurber Bob Thurber is the author of “Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel” and other titles. Over the years his stories have received a long list of awards and honors, appeared in Esquire and other notable publications, been utilized as teaching tools in schools and universities, and selected for over 50 anthologies. “Nothing But Trouble” a story collection accompanied by photographic images, was released in April 2014 from Shanti Arts Publishing. Bob resides in Massachusetts. For more info, visit: BobThurber.net
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