Crack the Spine
Literary magazine
Issue 197
Issue 197 August 23, 2016 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2016 by Crack the Spine
CONTENTS S. A. Miller Guidelines and Suggestions Lauren Lara Eric D. Goodman
The Old House
Small Talk
Katherine Clark
Ten Minutes From Now
Velicia Jerus Darquenne Daughter of the Woods
Jacob Shelton Limb
Clifford Browder Gentle
Eric G. Wilson Oddity
S. A. Miller
Guidelines and Suggestions
Get a dog. Walk twice daily. Dread its passing. With writing, make a metaphor then leave it be. No belaboring. Drink your drinks. Be done with it. Food's optional. Find a bridge. Make a bad decision. If possible, swim to safety.
Eric D. Goodman Small Talk
For long drives, it’s good to have someone to talk to. She had driven from San Francisco to New York with her boyfriend, and that was great … at first. Their week-long road trip began with excitement, a full tank of gas and full thermos of sweet, milky coffee. They stopped off at community stores to pick up bread and bologna, cheese and crackers, bananas and apples. They stopped at rest areas marked “scenic overview” and there, they enjoyed an ambiance unmatched by any restaurant. At night, they pulled off in mall parking lots or parked in quiet suburban neighborhoods along side streets that didn’t have houses on them. They read poetry and stories to one another, made out and made love in the back of her van. He talked about his aspirations to become a disc jockey in New York City. She talked about her interest in making props for horror and science fiction movies — combining her knowledge of science, her interest in art, and her degree in fabrication to create fake body parts or alien creatures that would be consumed on screen by the masses. “I could narrate one of your movies,” he said. “Most good movies aren’t narrated.” “Then maybe you could have a show. An exhibit of your work. I could do the audio tour. You know, those things people carry around and listen to in museums?” “Most props don’t end up in museums.”
He thought for a minute, but not much came forth. “I just wish there was some way we could combine my talking head talent with your special skills.” “If we keep thinking, maybe we can find a way to collaborate,” she said, growing bored. By the time they hit the expanse of Kansas, which somehow seemed to take half of their trip even though the atlas said it only made up a small part of it, things started to change. They argued about who was going to pay for the next tank of gas. He wasn’t pulling his weight at the wheel. “It’s your van,” he whined. “Be a man,” she griped. In Texas, he bought a stupid ten-gallon hat at a gas station. It made him look smaller. She bought a souvenir Indian hatchet. It made her feel bigger. The poetry he’d been reading to her became increasingly annoying, as did his attempts at witty conversation. To drown him out, she began playing cassette tapes she dug up from underneath the seats: an audio drama of Othello, a dramatic reading of Poe’s Fall from the House of Usher. An audio production of Twain’s Letters From The Earth that a friend of hers had produced in college. But he wouldn’t shut up. He kept making snide remarks, an ignorant commentary to the works meant to drown him out. At night, she dreamed of getting rid of him. Leading him to a lagoon for skinny dipping and then leaving him there, just driving off alone, only his clothing in the passenger seat to bother her. Or killing him and using his body parts as props. “These look so genuine,” her prospective employer would marvel as she sealed a gig. She knew how to do it. She’d done it with animals in the lab, had severed and preserved the parts in glass jars or on dried planks of wood.
The further they went from west to east, the cooler their rapport. He wanted to stop off in Columbus to see the Thurber House. “Who the hell is Thurber?” she asked “James Thurber? “He’s only the greatest New Yorker cartoonist and satirist who ever lived. Duh.” He was getting on her nerves, and when her nerves flared, she did crazy things. Once, about a year ago, she had awoken from a sleepwalk and found herself on a bridge with a dead bunny. It’s foot—her lucky charm—dangled from the ignition now. She smiled on the last stretch of their road trip, on that last day of their drive; it was almost as pleasant as the first. Things had changed with the rising of the sun; a transformation had taken place beneath the moon. He was quiet that day, smiling at her as she talked about what she wanted to do when she got to New York. “You’ll love Darcy,” she said. “We can stay with her for a few days until we find our own place. Or maybe you’d like to just stay in the van.” He bobbed his head. He’d become agreeable and easy to talk to. New York City glowed like a lighthouse, beckoning her into its open arms. The navigational system got her through the tight spots, brought her to Brooklyn where her friend from college waited. She got out of her van and they shared an embrace. Darcy reached into the van to help collect some of the bags. She noticed the ornament hanging from the rear view mirror. “Nice shrunken head.” “Thanks,” she said. “He keeps me company when I’m driving.” Darcy laughed. “You talk to it?” “Sometimes.” “Does it ever talk back?” Darcy joked.
“Not anymore.� She slammed the van door and the head bobbed agreeably.
Katherine Clark
Ten Minutes From Now i’ll go to the sink to wash the sleep off and i’ll see the window and through the window i’ll know that none of the daffodils survived the night and i won’t cry but i’ll wish i was soft enough to and i’ll see the snow falling and i’ll feel it in my hair before i do and maybe i’ll wish it could be different; i’ll wish april were kinder and i’ll wish the snow away, i’ll take the name of every flower i’ve fallen in love with this march and call myself by it in inaudible whispers while i wait for the lake to freeze over again, while i watch the calendar turn in on itself, walking through today as if february hasn’t even come yet i’ll find myself in the familiar feelings i’d forgotten when they melted i forgot why they froze in the first place i’ll say things like what’s going on with this weather but i’ll mean how did it know how much i would still love you today, i’ll mean how did it know i needed it to cover this week in violins and april won’t say much back except the cold, except the way it sticks to me and makes my teeth windy, how it takes a sure thing, like spring, and makes it snow
Velicia Jerus Darquenne Daughter of the Woods
I. I look over my shoulder for the house as I follow Cole deeper into the woods. Indiana woods aren’t the ones I’m used to running in. The trees are grey, dried out, and dying. I don’t think it has rained in a couple weeks because the leaves are crunching into powder under my tennis shoes. “Just a little farther.” Cole has taken left turns, right turns, and left ones again. I think he is lost, but I don’t tell him that. He has me turned around, too. I’m not sure if the house is to my back or front, I am just trying to keep up with his long strides now. Finally, we reach the clearing he says we have been looking for. I think we passed this spot twenty minutes ago, though. I start kicking around the leaves and sticks, but I’m not seeing any berries. Cole plops himself down with a heavy thud, and I think even if I wasn’t in the woods I would have heard it. I realize that he didn’t bring me out here to help make money; he expected me to do all the work. “If you ain’t helping, take me home.” “I can’t,” he says. His smile reveals a large gap between his front teeth. “You can’t what?” “Take you home. I’m lost.” “You got to get us back.” I look around, scared, but try to hide that from Cole. My chest feels tight, but he doesn’t seem worried. Actually, he seems overly calm, like he planned this too. “Seriously, Cole! Get up. Let’s go. I want to go.” I kick dry leaves up at him.
“I can’t do that. I’m lost, I told you. But, I know what will help me remember.” I figure he will tell me ginseng will help. I figure he will tell me that so that I will dig up some, but I know it won’t help. I play along anyhow, “And what’s that?” “My mom told me that if you can’t remember something, sex helps.” He starts taking off his belt. I stay quiet, looking for which direction we came from before the panic settles into my stomach. II. At first, I was real excited to go to Indiana with my mom. I’d never been outside West Virginia before. If I had, I don’t remember it so it don’t count. I didn’t know Indiana was flat. The first day, I stood outside looking up, and I felt small and exposed. The West Virginia woods wrapped me up in its bundle of green and brown, hiding enough of me from the sky. Now, the weight of the wide blue sky added pressure on my eight year old shoulders. My mom, her newest husband, his boys, Kash and Cole, my older sister and I all squeezed on top of each other in the two bedroom house for the summer. The house was too small for the six of us, so the parents made excuses to leave every day. Tina and Kash were to watch us, but Kash had a girlfriend and Tina had WebTV. Cole and I sat in the dining room, where no meals have been eaten at in over a week. Drying ginseng roots laid out on newspapers stretching the table. “I hate your mother. I’m going to make her life hell,” Cole said to me, and I believed him. He was only thirteen, but nearly six foot tall. His nose turned up,
his Michelin tire-white fleshed pinked from days in the sun, and he ate everything. He ate until he puked so he could eat again. “What are these?” I pointed to the ginseng, already knowing what they were, but I thought I had Cole figured out. Being older than me didn’t make him very bright. He relied on his size more than brain. Make him feel important, and he stays calm, I knew. “Girls are so dumb.” He rolled his eyes and stood over me. “That’s ginseng root. My dad and I go digging for them out back in the woods. It’s how we are going to get rich.” “How you getting rich off dirty old roots?” I really didn’t know how he planned on getting rich off them, but maybe he did know a little more than me about something. “We sell them. Pops sells them, actually. But he brings me a quarter back for every single one I dig up.” “That’s a pretty good deal. I used to work for quarters, too.” I went to the bar with my pappy and popped the beer tops for his old men buddies for quarters to play the slot machine. I was never allowed to win anything, but it passed the time better than watching CNN or FOX news. “Want to go make some money? I know where they grow.” Cole pulled me up from the table. I didn’t want to say yes, but I didn’t know how to say no, either. III. I dart left then right, trying to remember which tree I might have passed getting to the clearing. Cole chases after me, yelling, but he is slow. Then gone. I didn’t know these woods, but I know woods. Step high but not far. Stepping out far
always puts your heel on a rolling stick, slick rock, or pinecone, and I’ve never done a split willingly. “Go ahead and tell. Ruin your mom’s marriage.” His voice cuts through the trees, and I hear honesty. He wants me to tell. I keep running. The flat lane of Indiana is easier on my thighs and calves, but this run is hardest of my life. I break through the last row of trees and see a black top road. None of the houses look familiar, but I pick right. My run slows to a jog then a walk. My legs are burning pink. I stay on the edge of the road, near the rumble strips, and I keep my eyes on the tree line, waiting for Cole to reappear. Eventually, the road starts to look more like maybe I have seen these front porches before, and I make it home before dusk. I burst through the blue door, yelling Tina’s name before the handle is done twisting open. And there he sat, Cole on the flowered couch, cool as lemon breeze. I don’t look at his pig eyes, and he knows I won’t say anything more because I always run with traffic, not in it or against it. His words become my words, echoing deep behind my eyes. But I’ll always know ginseng sells by the pound, not the root.
Jacob Shelton Limb
I kept clicking on animal gifs and trying to ignore the cut off saw that was sitting in the dining room. Why had I brought it in the house, and plugged it in if I wasn’t going to use it? What was the point of softly tracing the dotted lines drawn an inch below my left elbow in big fat magic marker with its ragged teeth? Had I softly cooed, “Soon,” to the affordable and reliable tool, or had I imagined that? I was doing it again, adding a sense of drama to my own boring story. Why are the aisles of Home Depot so wide? I loitered in hardware stores for weeks, trying to find an implement to suit my needs, and none of the mom and pops felt the need to show off with aisles like football fields. I didn’t want to buy from a big box store, but their prices just couldn’t be beat. I entered the Depot without a game plan. The 25 year olds in orange vests said that I looked lost. The guy in charge of making keys noted the fear behind my eyes. I peeked over the edge of his counter and watched the tiny drill carve miniscule changes in the metal, sculpting it into something new and useful. I just wanted something sharp. A sturdy handheld guillotine or a chainsaw meant to handle a moving target. When the employees asked if I had any questions I skittered away like a deer that spotted a hunter in a field. They just wanted to help. Was there anything they could do for me? “You can get the fuck out of my way, “ I said to no one. “Where are the tools capable of reaching complete oblivion?” I thought.
The one time I did speak to a hardware specialist he seemed to believe that the extra wide aisles were meant for a forklift to safely pass through. But in all my time spent wandering through the maze of wood and concrete, caressing fireman’s axes, and sheet metal, I never once saw anyone driving a forklift. I settled on a Husqvarna because I liked the way it sounded coming out of my throat. And it came with a free instructional DVD. You never get anything for free anymore. The first meeting between a kitten and a tortoise was playing out on my laptop. The small cat hopped around the turtle on a coffee stained carpet, before abruptly cutting back to the beginning, where the cat sniffed out the turtle all over again. The blade was new but the color was dull. I expected it to shine like the sun hitting a glass mosaic, sending beams of light across my apartment. I hit the big yellow switch on the saw’s cord and watched the blade come to life. The teeth disappeared into a frenzied metallic blur. Once, on a family vacation to Louisiana I saw a girl with a stump for a hand, and little potato eye fingers sprouting randomly across what you would generously call her fist. That was when I knew my body was not right. I wanted my arm to be her arm, only cleaner, more aerodynamic. I wanted to have the iPhone 6S of arms. Only slightly smaller. I tried to cover my anxious desire with late night Amazon Prime orders of a stair machine, an ab roller, and even a juicer. I had savage intercourse on the roof of my apartment building with total strangers under the watchful glow of a lone security camera. It’s dangerous until it’s not anymore. It’s dangerous until it’s just something to do. “Can I bring anything? ;)” They all asked through the dating app’s messaging interface. “Ace Bandages. Please.”
“Anyone know the number to 911?� I joked to no one in my apartment. My reflection sidestepped out of the mirror, embarrassed, or maybe just tired. I clicked on the front burner of my oven and waited until the wok was hot, then I tapped the numbers into my phone, figuring that I should give them a call and get it over with. But the operator doesn’t deserve to hear this. Just the aftermath, when I am pure, and exhausted, and content.
Clifford Browder Gentle
It’s smooth, not jagged. It whispers, doesn’t shout. It has soft eyes. Not always a lover, always it’s a friend. It doesn’t rant or preach; it hints Of crushed mint The year’s first snow, that dance of hexagons Or the fluttering Of a moth at night. If you hurt it It won’t fight back, won’t complain But it will haunt you to the end. Push it, smash it, crush it; it’s tough, it persists. It takes the long way but it gets there. Tricked or cheated It will remember and without spite or rage Quietly get even. It can make money, tons of it, but spends it wisely. It’s simple, no frills or flair. Placid, it can bore you. Sexy, it murmurs, caresses, makes out. It is rare, treasure it.
Watch out for it It can build empires or destroy them It can change the world.
Eric G. Wilson Oddity
Elvis was born thirty-five minutes after his stillborn twin Jesse. When Elvis was a baby, a tornado killing two-hundred only missed him by half a mile. Via Oz, David Lynch linked cyclone and Elvis in Wild at Heart, which starred Nicolas Cage, who married Elvis’s daughter Lisa Marie, with whom he quarreled on his yacht. She tossed her $65,000 engagement ring into the Pacific. Unlike other children of celebrities (like Brando’s daughter Cheyenne, who hung herself), Lisa Marie avoided her dad’s depression, which he shared with his cousin Abraham Lincoln, along with somnambulism, an impoverished Southern upbringing, and the premature death of a beloved mother. Milk poisoned by white snakeroot killed Lincoln’s mother Nancy. Elvis purchased two electric mixers for his mother Gladys, one for each side of the kitchen. King and President descended from Isaiah Harrison, born in England in 1666. Did Elvis and Lincoln inherit their depressive genes from him? Manic depression has poisoned the Wilson line, half-broke fanatics and alcoholics wandering the grim Appalachians. Self-hatred harries me, as it did Elvis. Love me love me: the scorch of his songs. Elvis romanced Natalie Wood, who drowned under suspicious circumstances involving her husband. Her daughter Natasha played in Lynch’s Lost Highway. If Elvis had starred in the movie of West Side Story, as planned, he and Wood, who did star, might have married, and Wood might still be alive. Rita Moreno, Wood’s co-star, dated Elvis to make Marlon Brando, whose infidelity turned her suicidal, jealous. “I am the Marlon Brando of DVD,” Lynch admitted. David Bowie plays FBI Agent Jeffries in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk
with Me. Thought dead, he staggers into headquarters and announces, in a southern drawl not un-reminiscent of Elvis, that he will not talk about Judy. Bowie and Elvis were born on January 8. Both released albums in 1972, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Elvis Now. “Seeing Is Believing,” a cut from the Elvis disc, was written by Red West, who later played in Goodbye Solo, set in the city where I live. Also dwelling here is the woman I was dating when I attended a Bowie concert in ‘87. She and I were fighting that night, over how I can’t be trusted because I’ll do anything for adulation. She tore off a necklace I had given her and hurled it into the audience below. She shoved her way to the stage. There she saw Bowie in the wings, just before the show’s second half. He looked at her and smiled. I completed this last sentence the evening of January 10, 2016. When I awoke the next morning, appeared in The New York Times the prose-poem of Jon Pareles: “David Bowie Dies at 69; Star Transcended Music, Art and Fashion.” Aside from sex—was the androgyne adept?—“69” symbolizes Bowie’s reversals. David Jones from South London morphs into ethereal Ziggy, who in turn transforms into Aladdin Sane, reasonable conjurer and “lad insane.” A red and blue lightning bolt splits Aladdin’s melancholy face. Elvis’s trademark is a bolt crowned by “TCB,” Taking Care of Business. Bowie’s death age is more than his death age. He is the Star Man. “I’m stepping through the door / And I’m floating in a most peculiar way / And the stars look very different today.” Transcendence of more than “Rock, Music and Fashion.” Your doors of perception: cleanse. Pass “one-hundred-thousand miles.” These visions rare as Elvis sightings on an earth boring and botched. Pressed to your chair, you are never not channel-surfing reruns in the thousands. Bowie wanted to meet antigravity Elvis, who wore zoot suits and eyeliner to barn dances. In ’72, he flew
from London to New York to see the gaudy King in the Garden. He sat near the stage, his rooster-comb neon-orange, ghostly pale his face. The glam-meet never came off. Liberace, whose twin also died at birth, encouraged Elvis’s bling. Both musicians pined for their missing halves and abandoned themselves to living for two. Hence the emptiness, the excess. Had they met, Bowie would not have admitted cocaine, nor Elvis meth. I confess booze. Call my pain Gnostic: this darkling stretch can’t be all there is. Call it a hole in the soul unfillable in the sub-lunar. What makes one whole, past one-hundredthousand-miles. I was drunk at the Bowie concert where my date broke her chain. I’ve been drinking ever since, corn liquor (from an old fruit jar) when I can get it. I’m heavy depressed, and I will do anything for praise. Elvis teetotaled. Robert Mitchum, who inspired the King’s coif, did not. In Thunder Road, he hotrods Appalachian moonshine beyond the revenuers’ reach. Springsteen borrowed the title. I heard him perform the song in Charlotte in ’85. First time I ever got loaded, on Beam and Sun Drop, and I had no date, I was a senior in high school, and a football star, and had bedded a doting sophomore, and since that time I have been sad. The last number of Bowie before an audience was “Changes.” “I watch the ripples change their size / But never leave the stream / Of warm impermanence,” it goes. Elvis’s final croon: “My Baby Left Me.”
Contributors Clifford Browder Clifford Browder has published two biographies, a novel (“The Pleasuring of Men,” Gival Press, 2011), and a selection of posts from his blog, “No Place for Normal: New York” (Mill City Press, 2015), that won first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016Reader Views Literary Awards, and the 10th Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction. His poetry has appeared in Heliotrope, Runes, The Same, Pivot, The Bitter Oleander, Snake Nation Review, and other journals. Katherine Clark Katherine Clark is an English and Anthropology major at Mount Holyoke College. She wants to be in love with the world and most days, is. More of her work can be found in Alien Mouth Journal, Sea foam Magazine and Animal Literary Magazine. Velicia Jerus Darquenne Velicia Jerus Darquenne is from Clarksburg, West Virginia. She graduated from Fairmont State University in December 2015 with a BA in English, where she interned for Kestrel: A Journal of Art and Literature for two years and now remains as the media editor. During her undergrad experience, her writing was featured in the Student Scholarship Celebrations and accepted for the West Virginia Literary Symposium. She has been published in Whetstone, FSU’s undergrad journal, and won their 2016 Best Prose Award. Currently she
attends West Virginia Wesleyan’s MFA program. She is a loving mother of a twenty-pound cat and a three-legged chinchilla. Eric D. Goodman Eric D. Goodman is the author of the forthcoming “Womb: a novel in utero” (Merge Publishing, fall 2016) and “Tracks: A Novel in Stories” (Atticus Books, 2011), winner of the 2012 Gold Medal for Best Fiction in the Mid-Atlantic Region from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He’s also author of “Flightless Goose” (Writer’s Lair Books, 2007), a storybook for children. Eric is a regular literary contributor to Baltimore’s WYPR, and his work has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Pedestal Magazine, The Potomac, JMWW and Scribble, among others. Learn more at EricDGoodman.com or connect on Facebook. S. A. Miller S. A. Miller is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis. His work has appeared in the Montreal Review, Bookslut, the Short Review, the Sacramento News & Review, and the Pacific Sun. Jacob Shelton Jacob Shelton is a writer who lives in Los Angeles. His fiction has appeared in Nat. Brut, Lovers & Other Strangers, and Maudlin House among others. He serves as a fiction reader for Nat. Brut and as editor of Kill Pretty. His debut collection of short fiction, “Never Be Punk Again,” was released in 2015.
Eric G. Wilson Eric G. Wilson has published several book-length essays, including “Against Happiness” and “Keep It Fake” (both with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). His shorter essays have appeared or are appearing in THE FANZINE, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Oxford American, The Georgia Review, Salon, and Paris Review Daily. He has recently placed fiction in The Collagist and The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review and prose poetry in decomP and apt. He teaches at Wake Forest University.
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