Crack the Spine
IIs ss suuee s seevveenntty y--ttw wo o
Crack The Spine Issue Seventy-Two July 17, 2013 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2013 by Crack the Spine
Contents Daniel DiFranco For Neither Can We Carry Ken Haas Saturday Night Laundry Marcus Pactor Mannish Dana Inez Purchasing Power Laura Pendell Music Kristina Erickson Eighteen Weeks Bridget Gage-Dixon Absolution William Cass Touch
Cover Art Ira Joel Haber Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 100 on line and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists' Fellowship Inc. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.
Daniel DiFranco For Neither Can We Carry They pulled a body out of the river when I was nine. The water had begun to freeze and they had to chip the ice away. My father read about it in the newspaper the next day. Gary Bailsey jumped off the bridge when he found his wife with another man. That part wasn’t in the paper. Our town was small then. Word got around. His wife disappeared not long after the funeral. I knew these things and could only appreciate the weight of them, fragments of the adult world, with the small deference of a child. I never saw the body, but there were pictures of police and firemen on the banks of the river in the paper. I still think about it whenever I’m near water. Thirty years later I still think about it. *** High up on the church, garland and a star adorn the steeple, silver and gold ring steel against the sky. The church sits at the end of a square in the town I grew up in. My parents still live here. The town is bigger than it was then. I walk into a coffee shop and order a tea. I sit by the window. A group of kids come in. College students home for break. “Jake’s picking us up at twelve,” a girl says. “I have to go home first,” says another. “Make sure to keep away from his older brother,” a boy says. “Why?” “He’s a pervert.” They leave. I watch them walk down the street. I look at the girls’ asses. Firm. Young. A lady wearing too much makeup, probably my age, I can’t tell, looks at me from the condiment bar. I feel her eyes. I feel like Jake’s brother. The door opens and a woman goes to the counter and orders a coffee. She pays and looks over. “Dean?” she says. She takes her drink and comes to my table. “Dean Baker?” “Maggie?” We went to school together and had the same friends. She gives me her number to meet for drinks. She has to get back to work.
“Tonight?” she says. “Ok,” I say. “I’m glad I ran into you,” she says. She lingers. Looking at me. “Me too,” I offer back. “See you tonight,” she says and leaves. I walk around town past the old shops and new shops. On Main Street, restaurants and bars filled the once vacant storefronts. The tiled entries from their former lives sit, lapidary, ignored. The druggist, jeweler, baker – people dead and gone, people no longer needed. There’s a canal that runs behind the street. It’s old and was built when industry was powered by water. I can see the ducks huddled on a small landmass. I am getting cold and think of my wife. We fed the ducks the last time we were here. She told me a duck’s quack doesn’t echo. That it is a naturally decaying sound. I turn away from the canal. Some things happen once and are never repeated. Can’t be undone. I go to my car and drive to my parents’ house. We sit in the sunroom around an old wood-burning stove. It keeps us warm and heats the house. In the cold months we lay corn bags on the flat top of the stove. I take one and put it in my lap and turn it with my hands. “Is it warm enough?” my mother asks. “Warm enough,” I say. “It’s going to be a cold winter,” my father says. “Colder than last year, they say,” my mother says. It snowed during Laura’s funeral. It was the start of a blizzard. We stood around the grave. The ground was frozen and laid in solid pieces. The priest said words and my father and my mother were there. I have this vision of a painting – black forms clustered, grey streaks. I think of Rembrandt and darkness. Laura and I didn’t have any children. We were waiting. I remember thinking I wished we hadn’t. I still wish that. I remember the cold and I think of our children. I know they don’t exist. I think she is somewhere with them. “Dean,” my mother says, “Are you ok?” “Yes,” I say, “Just daydreaming.” My parents share a look.
“I’m fine,” I say. I go outside to load up firewood for the night. I put on the leather apron and lift up the skirt and lay wood across. This is a different life. My parents won’t be able to do it much longer. They’re ok for now, not too old. Had me when they left high school. Right before my father went to Vietnam. There’s a picture in the dining room of him in uniform, holding me – back when he had his own ambitions and life ahead of him. I’m older now than he was in the picture and in all of my childhood memories. I’m in the middle. I went to a doctor for a while and told him these things. He said I was experiencing “separation.” “No shit,” I said back. I apologized – it wasn’t his fault. “I’ve heard worse,” he said. “It gets better,” he said later. I hadn’t heard a doctor say that in a long time and I hated hearing it. I didn’t want it to get better. I felt that would be a betrayal. Inside I load wood into the stove and put the extra logs in a basket. I go to the kitchen. “That should be enough for tonight,” I say. I wash my hands in the sink and put on my jacket. “Heading out?” my father asks. “Yeah. Ran into an old friend.” “Be careful,” my mother says. “It’s supposed to start snowing later tonight.” “Ok.” I drive into town and circle around for a while before parking. I feel like I’m someone else. Like I’m watching this happen. I feel reckless. I walk to the bar. I think of Laura. It seems long ago – it seems yesterday, this morning. The last months she was in the hospital, stable, then it was quick. I prepared for her death every day – she would recover a little, and then slip further. I can see Maggie through the window. I think about leaving. She looks out and sees me and smiles. I wave to her and go inside and sit down. “Hi,” she says. “Hi. Sorry I’m late.” “It’s ok. Take your jacket off, stay a while.” She laughs. She is wearing a purple sweater. Black skirt. She looks good. Her perfume is clean. I’ve smelled it before. Her eyes are clear and soft in the twilight of the bar. I order a gin and tonic. Lemon. She orders one too. “How have you been,” she says.
“Occupied,” I say. We talk about our jobs. We talk about high school. We talk about nothing. She excuses herself and I follow her with my eyes. Her body moves under her clothes. When she comes back she is different, like someone suspended on the upside of a seesaw. She picks at her napkin. “I’m sorry about your wife,” she says. “Thank you,” I say. “Poor thing,” she says, “I can’t imagine.” “It’s ok.” It’s not. I order another drink. Her hand is on my leg. It feels heavy. I want it there. I don’t want it there. I put my hand on the small of her back as we leave the bar and feel her movement. We are back at her apartment. She is divorced. Kids at their father’s. She puts music on and keeps the lights low. Her breasts push against her sweater as she pulls it over her head. Her body is warm. Familiar. Her fingers are on me. Grabbing. She lowers herself, wrapping me in warm velvet. *** She is asleep next to me. She is beautiful and the years have been quieted from her face. I get dressed and leave. It’s snowing outside and the street lights are surrounded by muted halos. I walk to my car and get in. The engine chokes and won’t turn over. Needs a new battery. Meant to do that before I drove out to my parents. I’ve forgotten to do a lot of things lately. I’ll have to walk home. I think of Maggie, home, asleep, warm in bed. I could go back, make up an excuse if she wakes up. I head toward my parents’ house. It never happened. It never happened. It’s not that cold once I get moving. I walk through town and I’m the last man in the world. The long stretch of Main Street, its store lights and front windows dim, lay under a coat of snow. More comes down. My feet crunch and I feel bad. I turn back and see my footprints on the sidewalk and think of a picture my mother has in the kitchen of two sets of footprints in the sand. Then there is one. That’s when God carries. I look at my footprints, vanishing, filling in with snow. I feel alone. I have to cross the bridge. I’m not sure which side Gary jumped from. The river flows to the east, yes, that’s the side he would have gone over. Halfway across the bridge I stop. I can see the high reaches of the church lit up back in town. I look over the railing at the river. It isn’t moving. It’s frozen and covered in
snow. I could walk across it. He must have been here just before the freeze. I step up on to the lowest rail of the bridge. And then the next. It doesn’t look that high, but water is hard. Goddamnit Gary. I climb back down and go home. I throw some wood in the stove and go to my room. I don’t bother getting undressed. Sleep doesn’t come. I think of last Christmas, our last one. I held her hand and she smiled at me. I remember the feel of her hand. I can’t see her face in my mind. It’s getting away from me. We brought nothing into this world, the priest said. He said a lot of things. I didn’t know him and didn’t fault him for that. Everybody’s got a job. Snow fell to the bottom of Laura’s grave and clung to the walls, ridges and ledges etched in white. Not far off, behind a mausoleum, two men stood smoking cigarettes, leaning against a backhoe. They had a job too, and someday they would die and somebody they didn’t know would say things and put dirt on their grave. *** A knock on my door. “Dean?” my father says. I wake up, a sharp inhale, a yawn. “You in there?” he says. “Yeah.” The door opens. He comes in. Sits down next to me on the bed. “Where’s your car?” “The battery died.” “We’ll take care of that today.” “Ok.” He pats my leg. “Your mother kept a plate warm for you.” “Ok.” He gets up and walks to the door. “Dean,” he says, his hand on the doorknob. I raise my eyebrows. “Take your time,” he says. I get a shower and the water feels good. I wash myself, then turn up the hot water and stand there and let the steam surround me. After breakfast we drive into town. The snow stopped sometime this morning. Two inches, but the roads are slow. My father gives me a jump and I drive my car to the garage. My father suggests a movie.
“I’ve been going to the movies a lot,” he says. “How come?” “I thought retirement would be different, I suppose.” “Different how?” “I don’t know,” he says. “Not like this.” “What’s mom think?” “She seems ok. She wants to start a garden in the spring.” “Flowers?” “Vegetables.” “Flowers would be nice, too.” There’s a theater that plays old movies during the day. They are showing one I haven’t seen. My father hadn’t seen it in a long time. A detective is hired by a man to spy on his wife who he fears is being unfaithful. The detective falls in love with the woman. The movie ends with the two of them, the woman and the detective, driving over the Mexican border, and fades out with a shot of a gun in her purse. We walk back to the shop. My car is ready. My father wants to go to the market to pick up some fish and potatoes for dinner. I told him I want to stay in town for a little while longer. “Ok,” he says. “I’ll be home in an hour or two,” I say. I walk down to the canal and lean against the railing. I used to go fishing here when I was a boy. I caught a catfish once and brought it home. My father showed me how to clean it and when my mother saw what we were doing she wouldn’t let us cook it. Said it wasn’t safe. We had to throw it out. My phone buzzes. It’s a message from Maggie. “Sorry about last night,” it says. I’m not sure what to write back and put my phone away. I think of the movie. Everyone in that movie is gone – they were alive an hour ago. I think of Laura. We always said we wanted to watch the old movies together. I walk back towards my car and I can see the church above the small buildings. It’s grey and looks wet where there isn’t snow. There are men on ladders, on the roof, taking down the decorations. They are
chipping away at ice surrounding the drains. It comes off in small measures and falls away, down, past stained glass windows and statues of saints, the bigger pieces catch the sun and glint before landing on the ground, where they will melt, and eventually evaporate, carrying nothing out.
Daniel DiFranco lives in Philadelphia where he is currently working on an MFA from Arcadia University. He received his B.S. in English education from Temple University. He teaches high school music and English. His work has appeared in Fiction at Work. Wanderlust bit him at an early age and he learned the hard way there is no peanut butter in Europe.
Ken Haas Saturday Night Laundry
Bearing in mind the Chinese or Japanese proverb that if she’s not the one sail on to death like an empty ship, about the moment I realize for the first or fifth time that she’s not or I’m not, we’re on our tight-lipped trail from the garage après Vivaldi and twin iced martinis, clacking past the basement laundry room just in time to catch my downstairs neighbor shrink away in sweats, flip-flops, and month-old pedicure, unleashing the vision that this will be me in weeks, after countless accusations, four half-hearted arguments, two euphoric recalls, and one full-blown apostasy. Tonight, nonetheless, tuberose candles, bubble bath, and side-by-side packing for a holiday that will lead to separate returns. There’s something to be said for empty. Not that Zen crap with a silver lining but the kind that suggests I have no special cargo, not even the clothes I’m tired of washed with too much soap, tumbled not nearly enough to dry,
crammed in a plastic basket under a bare hundred-watt bulb that will have me blinking in the elevator well past my shy neighbor’s floor, dazed by the balm of the glistening damp, lonely for anyone who can help me get the basic stuff right, thinking maybe she’s in tonight, maybe she’s the one.
Ken Haas lives in San Francisco, where he works in healthcare and sponsors a poetry writing program at the UCSF Children's Hospital. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alabama Literary Review, Caesura, The Cape Rock, Forge, The Coachella Review, Freshwater, Hawai'i Pacific Review, Helix, Natural Bridge, Pigsah Review, Quiddity, Red Wheelbarrow, Schuylkill Valley Journal Of The Arts, Squaw Valley Review, Stickman Review, Tattoo Highway, and Wild Violet. His work has also been anthologized in The Place That Inhabits Us (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010) and the Marin Poetry Center Anthology (2012, 2013).
Marcus Pactor Mannish
The Subject hated the way Dave called him “Android.” He hated more the way Dave pronounced the name in drawn-out syllables, the first oddly italicized, the second a crowning failure of an insult, as in “I don’t see it figuring, Android.” In Jacksonville, six or seven accents could be distinguished by a careful ear. The number depended on whether or not the Subject was afraid to seem racist by counting the wretched Ebonics he suffered in his family’s new neighborhood. It was language so beaten down that consonants outside of “S” were excluded from non-swears. His opinions of that number and the racism to which it might be linked did not often change. Dave’s accent was native to Macclenny, a place the Subject privately called a mass of nails and sticks. The Subject wanted that hick land to be paved over. He yearned for the graying and flattening work of the progress machine. The Subject felt himself a speaker well-suited to his time. At regular intervals he brought his boy to the front porch to take in fresh air. They would go no further than the porch till the yard was fenced in. This “No Further” did not govern trips to the park or noontime stroller rides. The rule applied strictly to outdoor play on their block and blocks nearby. Springfield, their neighborhood, had a shrinking reputation, but a reputation nonetheless. It would vanish with fences and restorations, with more growing, respectable families investing here. On the porch, he showed the boy flash cards one after the next. He illustrated rhyming words with toy trucks: “crash,” “smash,” “bash.” When he so taught, he activated his sing-song voice. The boy sometimes sang back and sometimes ignored his tutelage. The Subject believed the boy loved his mother, the Subject’s wife, more than him. Sometimes he ached over this prospect. Other times, he understood the boy’s preference, for the mother had breasts, and the tenderness they implied was real. The Subject more often ached over the house. It developed new issues daily: clogged pipes, fallen shelves, and holes growing in the shapes of celebrity silhouettes.
In the boy’s closet, he found the body of a strange white bug. Its presence seemed to imply a race of them growing pure in the walls. Despite a long night of Google, he could not classify the bug. When his wife suggested it was a booger, he screamed. She later suggested that he ask Dave, who knew a great deal about outdoor crap, but the Subject was too ashamed to haul this white bug to his neighbor, especially because in the cool light of day he began to suspect that it was indeed a booger. Better than he knew crap, Dave knew how to install cabinets and replace rotten boards on the side of a house, useful skills in a rebounding neighborhood, skills the Subject ought to have learned or ignorance he ought to have pondered before applying for a mortgage, but he did not mind paying Dave in six-packs of beer. Dave felt them for coldness. Dave said, “Thanks, Android. Hey, you feel okay?” It was kind of funny, because Dave looked sick to him, an all-the-time sick. The right side of Dave’s face was splotched with a birthmark shaped as though pink paint had been spilled upon him when he peered out the womb, and neither mama nor medical wiz had tried wiping it off. The Subject asked his wife whether or not he looked funny. She did not know what he meant. He said that he had felt each of his cheeks in turn and that they seemed to be plastic. Also, several of his characteristic expressions hurt when he tried them, as when he had earlier disciplined the boy in part via employment of a look he called “stern.” The wife said he did not look funny to her. He employed again his stern look. She laughed. It hurt him. She coughed and held her mouth, but failed each way to stifle it. Then she bade him sit. She opened a bottle of pinot noir. He was grateful. He said he felt unlike himself. He again felt his right cheek. Dave held a great yard sale. The neighbors, all resembling the Subject and his family, bargained about Dave’s wares. They marveled at his old charms. He had yarns, they said, and he was always willing to help out. It was true. The Subject knew his hatred was irrational. Besides, the man would soon retire, move home to Macclenny. That’s why he sold cheap. The Subject’s wife, a lover of kitsch, came home with ten Confederate flag postcards. In late nights, the Subject plotted their misplacement. Dave once said, “I never heard you speak of home, Android. Where you from?” The Subject was from the crosstown suburb of Mandarin, but more important than the specific name of that suburb was the implication of Dave’s uttering: that the Subject was not from the South and therefore did not count,
that he might as well have been from Moscow or Samoa. No, those were exotic spots of origin. Dave meant that the Subject had been wired in a lab and shipped here in a box. Dave clearly did not understand how much of the South was not Dave’s idea of the South. That idea had been paved over, mostly. But Dave thought that idea lived on, rough and drawling, and that Dave was that idea made whole. The Subject ought to have corrected Dave, but he had been designed for patient, civil quiet, not debates of cultural geography, especially ones based upon a premise that shaky. One weekend, his wife took his boy to visit her parents in Palm Coast, a visit he declined to participate in because of paperwork he’d brought home from the office to complete. He said that the careful analysis of these files might earn him a lunch with upper management. But, alone, the Subject put aside that work in favor of jazz and masturbation. Afterward, he found in the boy’s room a swarm of white bugs. Not boogers. They flew. They dotted the bed, dresser, buckets of toys, and collection of stuffed bears. The trucks were shelled with them. He rescued the flash cards. Though drunk, Dave came over. The bugs, naturally, had gone. Dave pointed his flashlight under the bed and along the walls in the manner of pest control servicemen. He could not find the crack through which a bug might crawl. He said, “I heard of white maggots, Android, but not white bugs. Maggots leave slime, though. You know that?” The pink mark was lighter than the reddened white face. The man’s sweat was sublime poison. The following week, in the Subject’s back yard, a raccoon surfing his garbage was shot above the left temple, courtesy of Dave. The Subject watched it all transpire with a thumb to his plastic-feeling cheek. The blood darkened his grass and sour junk. Dave made a stop sign of his palm. “I got it, okay? You best sit. This beyond your program.” The Subject leaned against his door. His eyes were aimed at a point above and beyond Dave’s head, though not at particular things above and beyond that head. Not at the fence in need of leveling. Not at the haunted-seeming house with shreds of paint and ruined boards he once showed the boy in a hollow threat. His eyes functioned as before, but his brain did not receive their transmissions. The Subject knew that he ought not to be shocked. He knew that men often shot raccoons in Macclenny. Still, it seemed to him an Andrew Jackson move, an unhappy anachronism proper to cotton gins and wood shacks, but not now, here. His opinion was not widely shared. Matthew came from that haunted house to praise the shot. Bill and Jan did not rush out to express horror. Dave bagged the raccoon and dragged it over. They smelled it together. Swampish. Dave asked, “You want know why I
call you ‘Android’?” The Subject did not. While eating, he pictured Dave laying plastic wrap over his counter, setting atop it a cutting board, and skinning the body thereupon. Dave would reserve one steak for dinner, freeze the rest. White bugs spiced the meat. They were bugs and not maggots because they left no slimy wake and were too winged and legged to be other than bugs. “Like cumin,” Dave would say, pronouncing the last word like a sexual verb. The Subject did not enjoy these pictures. They made his chewing of pasta more difficult. His wife and boy ate fine. Their silverware hit hard upon their plates, in search of spaghetti. At times, the boy’s look seemed less tender than raccoon steaks. When, for instance, the Subject asked where the flash cards had gone, he did not appreciate the boy’s silent glaring response. The boy’s face remained soft and babied yet, still. It all made him feel less alive. He tried to explain this to his wife. She rolled over in bed. His wife had never endorsed the flash cards, stern face, and No Further rule. He listened to her breathe. She did, over and over. She more frequently took the boy to see her parents. She less frequently wanted the Subject to come. He seemed involved in a subtraction. He wished he remembered less about math. *** He dreamed white bugs ate Dave’s birthmark and head, revealing a brain tattooed in Hebraic script that meant the Subject’s real name. His wife donned new negligee, a pink number that reminded them both of life beyond the boy. She said that she missed how it was. He agreed. He apologized for his behavior in these last days. She stopped him before he could list his many regrets. They made love. He kept bone-still when white bugs crawled out her hole. He brought the boy outside to test new trucks. He did not plan to purchase love, but perhaps attention. For a while they smashed wordlessly the trucks against one another and against the porch’s brick railing. They grunted. They made noises to signify hard brakes, fine accelerations, and hairpin turns. Then he brought out the new flash cards. These had been handmade, designed to win over the boy with words like “truck,” “stop,” and “go.” Again and again, the boy smashed two of the trucks together. The smashing made an unmusical sound. The Subject grew impatient. He took the boy’s shoulder. The boy turned. Quite predictably, white bugs descended from his nose and eyes.
The pest control woman took his message and made a promise. Because he doubted her sincerity, the Subject went to Home Depot. Surrounded by boards and chemical scents, aisles of gear that extended roofward, and hundreds of people for whom raccoon dead were no large matter, loneliness ate him out. Those people knew what to do. They pushed their carts. They examined cuts of wood, read boxes, and swung tools. To fit in, he purchased a Max Kill Bug Zapper. *** His block had emptied out. His neighbors had gone to visit the elderly or salute the troops. Civic pride seemed involved in their going. Dave wasn’t with them. He had gone back to his sticks and nails. That was fine. Upon the table, the Subject found a note from his wife. She wanted the past. He did too, but it had been paved over. No matter what else broke down, the progress machine worked. He brought the bug zapper to the boy’s room. He turned on electric death. This was where he belonged. The white bugs would come. He, a proper husband and dad, would protect his kin.
Marcus Pactor's collection, “Vs. Death Noises,” won the 2011 Subito Press Prize for Fiction. His work has recently appeared in Interim, Knock AUS, and The West Wind Review.
Dana Inez Purchasing Power
It was the most dramatic scene of my life and I was laughing. As for the human condition, I’m not concerned with it. You can’t have an ounce of drink until you finish your meal. You can’t have a new personality until you finish your meal. The human condition is written out on the forehead of the president. The font’s not so great, it’s not looking so good. The president is wearing hot-pants and a Liza Minnelli t-shirt. Which begs the question, Who’s out of whose mind. Find me a human condition and I’ll laugh. Find me a store and I’ll purchase. As for the meal, it’s going OK, but it is no human condition. As for your purchase, you can’t have it until you finish your meal. He was like, That’s not what I said. And I was like, Find a human condition and I’ll drink to it. Find a new personality and I’ll finish my meal.
Dana Inez is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems have been published in Bone Bouquet Journal and Two Serious Ladies, and her fiction is forthcoming in Unsaid Journal.
Laura Pendell Music after a painting by Remedios Varo
To make music one must assemble the verdant green from a leaf. Carnelian and ochre from flowers, the weight of stones. The invisible. One must learn to listen for songs. The rhythm of ocean as it takes the shore. The sizzle of woodsong seized by flame. Gather these like shells. Or paper clips. Create a mosaic. Understanding, the framework. Silence, the unexpected grout.
Laura Pendell has an MFA from Mills College. She grew up in New York City and now lives in the Foothills of the Sierra with her husband and cat. She writes, makes hand bound journals and artists books and tends a garden. Her poems can be found in Jelly Bucket, The Tulane Review, Talking River and Soundings East or on line at Foliate Oak, Blue Lake Review, Wild Violet, Mary: A Journal of New Writing, OVS, Assisi Journal and The Edison LIterary Review. You can read her very occasional musings at www.womanrisingbooks.blogspot.com
Kristina Ericksen Eighteen Weeks He gazed through the glass at the ancient specimen. It was a meteorite found off the Algerian border, shipped and carried all the way across the ocean to this very museum case. And here it was, standing humbly before him in all its ancient glory. Millions of years old, the meteorite had withstood unimaginable conditions. It had traveled far distances from the unknown depths of the universe, only to blaze through the atmosphere and fall to the wayside, sitting nestled into the side of an Algerian cliff for innumerable generations. And then it was found. Archie stood face to face with the meteorite and glared. They had just lost the baby. She was eighteen weeks weeks along but already a lifetime was loved, imagined, and planned out. The doctor had let him see her in the pan. Bloody, bluish, and almost six inches long, she was meant to be their's, but cruel forces had cheated her from life before the very start. Archie took off his mask and left the OR. He had gagged, gripping the edges of the trash can in the clinic atrium. At eighteen weeks a fetus looks like an alien. Archie had seen illustrations in an anatomy book. With a large, misshapen head and translucent skin, it looked like either an alien or a baby squirrel. Archie couldn’t decide on which one it was. Looking at these depictions made him sick. That wasn’t his daughter. But it was all she would would be. *** Archie returned to work the next day. “Aaarchieeee!” someone screeched down the hall. The nasally voice snapped him back to reality – here he was, standing in Atlanta’s famous Harrison Museum of Natural History in front of this Algerian meteorite. The case reflected the glare of the fluorescents. He indifferently glanced over to see Winston, his assistant, bounding out his office door. Though he was short and round, Winston didn’t let his stubby legs slow him down at all. Swinging his arms wildly, Winston waved a paper in his face. “It’s the GSG! I told you a million times, Archie! They’re after us!” he exclaimed, jabbing his finger excitedly in the air. Beads of sweat bejeweled his fleshy forehead. Winston was convinced that the Geological Society of Georgia had been after the Harrison Museum for some time now. Though they were supposed to support each other in the field of geology and
natural sciences, the GSG and the Harrison Museum no doubt had strained relations and were far from achieving professional camaraderie. It was only conspiracy-theorists, like Winston, that were suspicious of the GSG’s recent attempts to reach out the the Harrison Museum. Archie was much too reserved to let tiffs like this bother him. Winston shoved the paper under Archie’s nose. “It’s Ol’ Glory herself! They want her!” Archie stepped back, holding the creamy typewriter paper up to his eyeglasses. It was smudged with Winston’s sweaty fingerprints. *** Back at home, his wife had broken her postpartum silence a few days after the operation. “What did she look like?” she asked. They had been laying in bed, in the dark, waiting for sleep to come. Sadie’s voice was flat with emotional drainage. Her pelvis still ached dully from the procedure. “An animal,” was all Archie could answer. He had been curled on his side, facing away from her. At eighteen weeks a baby begins to hear. It can become startled by sudden or loud noises. Archie wondered what sounds the baby had heard. Did she listen the radio in the car, Sadie singing along off key? Did she hear forks and knives clink against the dinner plates, the hum of the TV late at night, the construction crew down the street? He wondered if she ever heard him speak. He liked to think he had a nice voice. It was deep and calming. It would have put her to sleep if he had read her bedtime stories. *** “The representatives of the Geological Society of Georgia would like to meet with your curators to discuss an inter-museum collections program,” the letter read. It seemed non-threatening enough. With Archie as head curator of the Harrison Museum, it would be up to him to take care of these matters. “They want her, boss! They want the meteorite!” Winston interrupted. His voice went up in pitch when he got this worked up. “It’s ours! I didn’t spend twenty months filling out grants to get her out of Algeria and over here in our display for them to mooch it off us!” Winston exclaimed. When he got angry, his face had a habit of turning beet red. When something was especially upsetting, you could almost see a purplish tint to it. Today it was a shade short of magenta. Winston’s emotional display was a bit much for Archie. Young and energetic, Winston was a bottlerocket that could go off at any moment, shoot across the sky, and land, fizzled out and forgotten. Archie had other things on his mind. “It’s not going to happen, Winston. I won’t let them take it.” “Oh, but they’re good, boss! They’re good,” Winston exclaimed, his eyes widening in seriousness. “Those GSG bastards know what they’re doing.”
“Winston–” “They can’t take it! It’s mine goddammit! It’s my baby!” Winston set his fist down defeatedly on the meteorite’s case. They both turned towards it. *** That night Archie came home to find bottles of prenatal vitamins in the garbage can. He dug them out and set them on the counter. They were still mostly full. The capsules clanked hollowly against each other. He checked the kitchen and living room – both vacant, with Sadie nowhere to be found. She usually was watching TV or cooking dinner when Archie came home from work. Today, the TV fell silent. He found her upstairs in the nursery, sniffling in the rocking chair, though, it could hardly be called a nursery yet. All it had was a rocking chair and some baby blankets tucked in the empty dresser. Two of the walls were half-painted a ballerina pink, rough and jagged around the edges of the crown molding. Bubblegum drips had dried down the sides of the paint can that now sat abandoned in the corner. Balanced on top was the stir-stick, half-glazed in a rosy flush. A box under the window held the parts of a crib. Archie hadn’t gotten around to setting it up before they lost her. He thought he still had time. Sadie faced out the window that overlooked the front lawn and held a crumpled kleenex in her hand. “I’m too old,” she whispered fearfully. She sounded like a child. “It’s too late.” “This isn’t it. We can keep trying. The doctor said we could try again next month.” Archie leaned against the door frame. She shook her head and rocked back and forth. “I can feel it,” she whispered. With this acknowledgement, another wave of emotion took over Sadie. She pressed the worn kleenex to her teary face. Archie resigned from the dispute and quietly stepped back. Taking a cigarette from his pocket, he went back down to the living room to sit in his favorite armchair. It was a dark leather with carved wooden feet, an inheritance from his grandfather. Turning on the TV for some background noise, he sat in clouds of smoke, lost in thought and the flickering lights of the evening news. Walter Cronkite spoke to him. He was thinking back to nine years ago. *** After graduate school, Archie had been offered an understudy position of a lifetime. He was to be stationed in Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains for four years at a Triassic sandstone riverbed dig site. Though he had just walked Sadie down the aisle, he couldn’t refuse the offer. So he took Sadie with him. They had packed up all the wedding gifts, most unused, and stored them with the in-laws. Appliances and Cambodia didn’t mix. It wasn’t what Sadie had wanted, but he couldn’t turn down the offer.
“Four years isn’t that long,” he had told her. “If the sandstone made it two-hundred million years there, I think we can do four.” The first year had been the hardest. Primitive living was something a geologist was used to – the field was a second home. Archie knew it was hard on Sadie, that he was robbing them of their early years. Somewhere amongst the lush evergreen rainforest and the jagged cliffs of dolomite, Sadie had gotten pregnant. They had been so careful – after all, the rural Cambodian mountainside wasn’t a place to birth a baby, let alone raise one. So they had gone into a neighboring village and taken care of it. That was nine years ago. *** In all of human history, there was only ever one person recorded to be hit by a meteorite. Archie had read about it in National Geographic once. It was a fat old country woman just laying on the couch in the middle of Alabama in a town that no one had ever heard of. She was just laying there and the thing crashed through the roof, bounced off the radio, and hit her smack in the leg. It was 1954 and people were still worried about the Russians. Some had seen the flare across the sky and were scared it was a nuke. The woman fought with her landlord over the rights to the meteorite, then bought it off him. The Smithsonian made an offer on it too, but the woman wouldn’t budge. Years later, she ended up donating it. *** Archie locked the door of his office and turned off the overhead light. Opening the blinds, he sat, waiting for the parking lot to empty. Employees of the museum trickled out, scattering towards their vehicles or walking down the block to catch the 6pm line. The cars, once condensed into the small lot, dispersed as each stopped briefly on the street before turning right and driving out of his line of vision. They were off to live out their grandiose weekend plans. And then there was Winston, with his briefcase swinging wildly. A sudden gust of wind took his hat, lifted it, and sent it rolling across the lot. Scrambling after it, he snatched up the hat and angrily pulled it over his large head. Archie watched him turn the key in his car door, all the while glancing back over his shoulder. Winston would forever be looking over his shoulder. The last few stray cars left the parking lot. At long last, Archie was alone. Alone, but still with his thoughts. He had never told his wife what he had wanted to name their daughter – Olivine, after the mineral. She wouldn’t have liked that. Sadie had no interest in the natural sciences, and used to tease him about being surrounded with rocks all day. Sadie wanted to name her Catherine – a lone lasting remnant of
their Catholicism. She wouldn’t budge on the name, though Archie never thought of his daughter as a Catherine. Archie slid open the dark mahogany desk drawer. Nestled in the back was his key ring, packed with a jingling array of all shapes and sizes. He walked down the unlit hallway to the exhibits, his glossy dress shoes echoing off the empty floor. The sun’s late-afternoon rays lit the room in an amber glow; its dying beams stretched to reach each display case. He stopped in front of the exact one he wanted – the one Winston affectionately dubbed “Ol’ Glory.” Back in the safety of his office, the iron-rich meteorite sunk right into the curve of his hand. Though it was small in size, it was dense and weighted. Tracing the grainy depressions and craters with his pinky, he wondered if this small piece of ancient intergalactic infancy had yielded a sonic boom upon it’s arrival on earth. He tapped it gently on his desk, producing a few minuscule lose grains. Then, seeing its fragility, he held it to his breast. Maybe Sadie would wonder where he was. Maybe she wouldn’t. She probably didn’t even notice when he never made it home. She was probably still sitting up in the nursery. Part of Archie was probably still sitting up in the nursery. Maybe the GSG was after him. Maybe they wanted the meteorite after all. They couldn’t have her, not this time. He wouldn’t let them. The sun went down and Archie sat in a newfound darkness, clutching the lone world-weary meteorite close. Deep down, he heard it cry.
Kristina Ericksen is a native of Minneapolis. She wrote her first short story in the second grade about two girls playing with marbles and eating hot dogs at Dairy Queen. Kristina has been published in Firethorne Literary Journal, Heterodoxy Feminist Magazine, The Gustavian Weekly, Sun This Week, koistory.com, and now Crack the Spine. She will graduate from Gustavus Adolphus College in 2013 with a B.A. in English.
Bridget Gage-Dixon Absolution Forgive the blackbird, the creek that splits the stone. Forgive the timber train That rattles you from sleep, The dark air’s demon tongue. Forget the lovely boy You mistook for salvation. Forget his body tubular and hard Against your summer skin The way the lake glared up At the hovering moon. Begin again, embrace the shattered glass, the sin and shame of vulgar games let the slow gravel stares fade from your memory. Forgive the fence, the wind, the azaleas that refused to grow. Forget fifteen, its warbling song, Its deep caves of perpetual change. Begin again at forty-four, Embrace the snug rumor of redemption. Bridget Gage-Dixon is a reformed troublemaker, and a lover of language who spends her days teaching teenagers where to place commas. Her work has appeared in several journals including Poet Lore, New York Quarterly, and The Cortland Review.
William Cass Touch
Martha helped her husband, Joe, to their favorite bench in front of the pond. He lowered himself onto it slowly and placed his cane against the backrest. She sat next to him, holding the small plastic bag of stale bread on her lap. The ducks had already swum over from the far side and come close to the edge where the old couple sat. It was a gray day, chilly. The last of the leaves had fallen from the trees. No one else was in the little park in the late afternoon. Martha opened the bag, tore a few pieces into small hunks, and handed them to Joe. She did the same for herself. The ducks crowded together at the pond’s concrete border in anticipation. Joe threw first in a motion as if he was shooing away a bug. Martha bent forward a bit and tossed hers underhanded; she aimed for the small ducklings at the fringes of the group. In a few minutes, all the bread was gone. Some of the ducks remained, but most swam away. Martha put the empty bag in the pocket of her cardigan sweater. A small breeze blew. On it was the hint of winter. She pulled the cardigan closer around her. Joe reached over and took her hand in his. He held it on his thigh. After a moment, she placed her other hand over the two of theirs. They sat still, looking across the pond to the neighborhood where they lived, to the place they’d called home for many years. *** A mother was making dinner in her kitchen. She was chopping celery at the counter while her toddler played with pots and pans and other utensils on the floor. The sound of the TV came from the other room: a crowd cheered on it. The little boy was banging on a pot with a wooden spoon. He sang a made-up song as he did. He had a head of brown curls, and his eyes were closed as he sang. His mother smiled listening to him, chopping, until he banged his finger with the spoon and cried out in pain. The mother dropped to her knees beside him. He pointed to his finger, and his eyes were full of tears. She took the finger, brought it to her lips, and kissed it. “There,” she said. “All better.” Her husband had hurried into the doorway, a newspaper in one hand. She glanced at him. He asked, “Everything all right?”
She kissed the little boy’s finger again. He looked up at his father and nodded. *** Nick stood by the back of his car while he filled it with gas. Another car pulled up on the other side of the island and a big man got out of it and came around to the same pump. Nick frowned watching the man, then a grin spread across his face. He walked around the island and tapped the man on the shoulder. The man turned and took a moment to regard Nick smiling in front of him. Then he smiled widely himself. “Nick Negrete! Nick, Nicky, old Nick!” He opened his arms and the two men embraced. As they did, they patted each other on the back. When they separated, they looked at each other and shook their heads. Nick said, “When did you get back in town?” “Just now.” The other man gestured to his car. “Heading to visit my mom.” “What’s it been, three years?” “Something like that.” “Got time for a beer?” “Sure,” the big man said. “If you do.” He made a fist and punched his friend several times lightly on the chest. *** Rudy sat where he usually did away from the arrival and departure area at the bus station. The afternoon was making its rapid descent towards evening. The streetlamps had already come on. He watched a young man in a military uniform climb down from a bus and embrace a young woman who was waiting for him on the platform. They hugged for a long time, rocking back and forth, squeezing each other with their eyes shut tight. A short time later, he watched a middle-aged man lead an older woman to an idling bus. She had her hand on his arm. Before he helped her climb aboard, he kissed her cheek. He watched a father hold the hand of his son while the driver slid the boy’s suitcase in the compartment under the bus. The boy looked to be ten or eleven. The father knelt in front of him, held his face in his hands for a long moment, and kissed his forehead. The boy swallowed hard and his eyes blinked rapidly. He climbed onto the bus, and sat against a window where they could look at each other. The boy made a little wave as the bus pulled away, and the father did the same. Rudy walked home, poured himself a shot of whiskey, and heated a pan of soup on the stove. He ate it from the pan standing there with only the stove light on against the gloaming.
He drank another shot before he went into his bedroom closet. He didn’t turn on a light. He gathered his wife’s clothes together into a bunch and buried his face in them. After the six long months she’d been gone, they still held traces of her scent. In the darkness, he ran his cheek across them, kissed them, and hugged them to him.
William Cass has had a little over fifty short stories accepted for publication in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies, including the winning selection in The Examined Life Journal's recent writing contest. He lives and works as an educator in San Diego, California.
Visit www.crackthespine.com to review our submission guidelines or to subscribe