Crack the Spine - Issue 83

Crack the Spine Literary magazine

IIs ss suuee eeiigghhtty y--tthhr reeee

Crack the Spine Literary magazine Issue Eighty-Three October 2, 2013 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2013 by Crack the Spine

“Given

the choice, we

will always select madness over

method�

Contents

Loren Kleinman Only Human David Press Narrow Escapes Joanna C. Valente God Talks After a Hiatus Richard Hartshorn Par Avion Steven Minchin Burn Dirt in the Name Amber Cook Wednesday Voyeur Sideny Thompson Tony’s Balloon Arch at Hank Hood Automall

Cover Art

by Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier is a writer and a photographer who has developed a real love for capturing life and forms with her camera. Her work has been featured in many different forums, from national newspapers to heritage museums. She began her career in the field of news journalism and it was there she excelled at the art of photography; with film, negatives and endless hours in a darkroom. This appealed to the artist in her. She likes to say she has a trained eye for what the camera loves and that's why she rarely turns the lens onto herself. Enjoying experimentation with the camera has allowed Karen to broaden her photographic experiences to include portrait, fashion and style portfolios, lifestyles, sports, horse racing, military life, news, education and entertainment work. Presently, she is an online magazine columnist and photography contributor, putting her journalism/photography and mass communications degrees finally to good use. She has always found a place for her photography in print and online, being featured in Jaw Dropping Shots, and at literary magazines such as The Canadian Vocational Journal, Crack The Spine and Zen Dixie to name a few.

Loren Kleinman Only Human Try being human he said, and figure out what you want to say.

Get it half-written, and type as if you had your hands for one more hour, as if they would be sold across towns and labyrinths and you never see your hands again.

Think about what you’d write in the last hour you had your hands.

Write about losing your hands to writing, then regaining them in a battle for your hands, the fight to take back your hands, to make them yours again, and fold them together.

Hold your hand in your other hand, then point to yourself.

Hold your hands to your head in the shape of a gun.

Hold yourself with your hands, and lean on your hands. keep the hands moving in the same direction, hold, hug, and fight back.

Write the story for your hands by your hands, and sit up, let the hands wipe away the tears, and lift the body up.

Then wipe the palm clean, start something new, the truth.

Think what it would be like to write something new with these hands, all the words in the right order.

Loren Kleinman is a young, American-born poet with roots in New Jersey. Her poetry explores the results of love and loss, and how both themes affect an individual’s internal and external voice. She has a B.A. in English Literature from Drew University and an M.A. in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Sussex (UK). Her poetry has appeared in literary journals such as Nimrod, Wilderness House Literary Review, Writer’s Bloc, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Resurgence (UK), HerCircleEzine and Aesthetica Annual. She was the recipient of the Spire Press Poetry Prize (2003), was a 2000 and 2003 Pushcart Prize nominee, and was a 2004 Nimrod/Pablo Neruda Prize finalist for poetry. In 2003, Spire Press (NYC) published her first collection of poetry Flamenco Sketches, which explored the relationship between love and jazz. Kleinman judged the literary entries for the book Alt-History: New Writing from Brighton published by QueenSpark Books (UK). She was also a contributing editor/writer for the Cancer Dancer by Patricia San Pedro. Kleinman is also a columnist for IndieReader.com (IR) where she interviews NYT bestselling indie authors. Many of those interviews in IR reappeared in USA Today and the Huffington Post. Her second collection of poetry,” The Dark Cave Between My Ribs,” is due to release in 2014 (Winter Goose Publishing, 2014). She is also working on a New Adult literary romance novel, “This Way to Forever;” and a collection of interviews and essays that explore the vibrant community of indie authors called “Indie Authors Naked: Essays and Interviews on the Indie Book Community” (Publisher: IndieReader).

David Press Narrow Escapes Let’s see let’s see let’s see let’s see. What have we here? The good guys kill civilian families in Kabul.

Altoona is in flames. You suddenly appeared in the Self Improvement section of the branch library. The one with no lions out front. The Pope’s selling rosaries and absolution on the Vatican Shopping Network. You can tune in right now. An apartment building explodes on the Northside of town. The markets crash. The landlord raises the rent. The Potomac overflows its storied banks. Brahms is imperiled in Texas. There’s a traffic jam in Harlem that’s backed up to Jackson Heights. Volcanic ashes ruin summer vacation plans. We retreat inside to tell stories with contrived endings. A good Q-tip is nowhere to be found. At the Paris fashion show, Moschino’s striped pyjamas of death are the hit of the runway. A voice says, “Quick. Duck in here.” Against this backdrop, plot unfolds. *** An alley off Locust and Tenth. You know it well. You know the feeling of the barrel of a handgun in the small of your back. You know the impact of a rubber ball on a garage door. Sometimes you feel like the rubber ball; sometimes like the garage. You know the loud bark of pit bulls straining at the leash. You know the buzzing flicker of a dim streetlight. You know a desperate scream. It may be your scream. You snap to it and find yourself sprinting down this alley. It is 2am, and you wonder why you know the time.

You hear a growl behind you. You run for your life. *** Something tells you that if you look back, something bad will happen. But something bad is already happening. You dare not look back you run as fast as you can you can not breathe fast enough deeply enough your thighs burn your lungs burn your right side hurts like hell you stagger forward trying not to fall. Someone stands in a dark doorway. You can not tell if it is a man or a woman. It may not even be human. “Quick,” the voice says, “duck in here.” *** I need protection. I try to hire Two Guys and a Gun, but it is a full moon and they are all booked up. Fine time to hock my glock. I bend my arms at the elbow. I try in vain to protect my two faces from the hard rocks in an unlocked box of paradox. I watch you sprint through the glare in this alley ahead of me

dropping hot rhymes (smallpox) like breadcrumbs (tick-tocks) thinking they will show you (vox humana counterplots) the way back (electric shocks) but knowing there is no way back (down by the docks). *** I Chase Manhattan. You chase the dragon. I chase a shot of tequila with lime then salt then another shot. You chase your god. I chase your nightmare.You love me but you chase me down a hole in the cold, cold ground. Something’s nipping at your heels. You dare not look back. I chase you. *** I love your red heels, especially when everything else is black and white and shadows are long and your red heels look incandescent. “They hurt my feet,” you say. “They make it hard to run when I am being chased.” And I tell you I love the way they shape your legs. The alley changes. It is narrow and winding.

There are shops but they are closed. You sprint impressively on the cobblestones. The alley becomes narrower and narrower with each bend. One red heel breaks, you turn your ankle. You want to look back but know that will be fatal. You are both dead and alive. I am chasing you. Or maybe I stand in a dark doorway whispering, “Quick, duck in here.” *** “What’s a white boy like you doing in a place like this?” she asks me. “I poured Coca-Cola in my brother’s ear,” I confess. “It made an ice cream float of his brains. Now I am chased by his ghost.”

“Quick,” she says, “duck in here.” *** I run as fast as I can. I can not breathe. I am chased by swine flu, avian flu, armadillo flu, Dunkin Donuts flu, and by contrabassoon flu. Everything in the world has a flu named after it, and they are all chasing me, a posse of flus hot on my trail. I am chased by genetically modified organisms and by radioactivity. I am chased by my own addictions. By the whole psychotic cosmos and, even worse, by nothing. I run in terror from mutated mitochondrial DNA growling and foaming at the mouth. “Tt catch you,” you say calmly, “iit willcatch you!” Then you whisper, “ Let me tell you a story. You will change.” *** You are stuck in this alley of recollections where stories are ghosts and ghosts are stories. I am both dead and alive. You wear red heels. You show thigh and lean against the tomb of Lady MacBeth. “Hey mister, got a light?” you ask me as I run toward you. Then you see what’s chasing me. “Quick,” you say, “duck in here.” ***

You run as fast as you can down the alley trying not to pitch forward. “There must be an end,” you tell yourself.” But it is not in sight. You question what you think you know. Your journey seemed so full of awe and wonder, of love and being loved, of motherhood and rising bread. So how did it come to throwing rocks through windows of the house and boiling your children and feeding them to their father and being chased by devils. The compulsion to look back overwhelms you. “Quick,” someone says, “duck in here.” *** “Quick,” a voice says, “duck in here.” I do. A demon shoos me through a desiccated metaphor that may be the door of you. The door is dried and the paint peels. But light shines through a crack. “That’s my story,” you say. On the other side of the door is another alley, another scream. Inside your story I am both dead and alive. *** You are stuffed in a coffin and sawed in half. One half is dead. The other half is alive. You think this may be an ill-conceived self improvement book. You wonder if you’ll ever need your red heels again. I love you but I lower you into the cold, cold ground. “I am half alive,” you to shout, but no sound comes out.

“Hmmm,” you think, “maybe I will need those red heels after all.” You hope it is all just a bad dream.

“Quick,” a voice says, “duck in here.” *** “Quick,” I tell you, “duck in here. If you tell me your story, I’ll tell you mine.” “Buy me a drink first,” you say. You start somewhere in the middle and I can not tell if you are moving toward the beginning or the end. I start to tell you my story while you are still telling yours. I am both alive and dead. If you read me, you change me. If I name you, I change you. We tell our stories as we run. We resist the compulsion to look back. My story chases your story. Your story tells my story a story. These stories never end. We just abandon them. And then we tell another.

“Quick, duck in here.”

David Press lives in Milwaukee where he has taught, run an educational publishing company, sold battery-operated Santa Clauses, and authored six young adult nonfiction books on abolitionists, environmentalists, and such. These days David writes genre busting micro novels, risky sequences of overlapping, contradictory and non linear nano episodes. Some of these may be read in Fiction Fix, Fringe, Red Fez, Cobalt and elsewhere. Press also writes one-act, theater of the bizarre plays, two of which he has published as an eBook, “Holy Mackerel! Theater of the Absurder,� available from Smashwords, or, if you really must, Amazon. Active in the Milwaukee arts and open mic poetry communities, Press lives with his wife, Petra, an art teacher, printmaker and book artist whose works are exhibited nationally. They sometimes collaborate on unique word/fiber projects.

Joanna C. Valente God Talks After a Hiatus After midnight a raspy voice says the smell of sugar in coffee is yr breath & 90 degrees will be yr body tomorrow bodies will rot like beach glass snake bite will kill humans by 2040 Raspy Voice keeps saying we’re in a dream but we’re awake still keeps talking dreamtalk Raspy Voice wants to get out of the city but there’s no getting out a girl w/ red hair sings reggae she snake dances & I say she looks lost & I don’t know what that means An oriental paper fan spreads across the ceiling sucks her voice up to god & god says you could do better girl god says things like any god would say god gets one of his angels to speak in his place THE ANGEL AS GOD says girl you should stop trying b/c no1 w/ ears can hear you

God asks girl what makes you a woman what will make you a man what can make you a woman what is a woman is a woman is a woman w/ a man w/out a man what is a man in America w/out Elvis w/out a godear We burn the room b/c we can’t decide what to do but light it on fire in gusts above golden waters the sun seethes tastes in union the moon Raspy Voice says I will return in the beloved I will die as a man in America

Joanna C. Valente currently lives in Brooklyn, where she is a part-time mermaid. She received her MFA in poetry writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Some of her words can be found in decomP, Thrush Poetry Journal, La Fovea, The 22 Magazine, and other places. In 2010, she founded Yes, Poetry. Her ghost resides here @joannasaid.

Richard Hartshorn Par Avion Benoit's half-sister, Permelia, a lucid dreamer who on the best of nights lived out a thousand lifetimes on the vistas of her mind's making, took the news of the plane crash the hardest. No one she knew lay amongst the coruscated fuselage, jagged airfoils, gem-shaped bits of glass, or the temporal grave of the Atlantic Ocean; in fact, she did not know the names of any of the victims nor what had caused the accident – hurricane-level winds, the newsmen said, the very winds that had inspired the siblings to book an earlier flight home, but as an astute thinker, she saw an incontestable difference between what caused it and why it happened – and now, even the hungover sophomores in Permelia's eight o'clock astronomy lab noticed the anxious way she raked her fingers along her desk, the amorphous blots of grey beneath her eyes, the way she glared at the classroom windows as though waiting to be whisked away.

It had been a six-day vacation to the Caribbean, the first vacation they'd taken together since their mother had separated from Benoit's father, and the first time they'd spent more than three hours together since the University's Christmas party, prior to which they'd drawn one another's names from the Secret Santa bowl. Benoit taught biology. Permelia was a science department adjunct, and though their offices were only one floor apart, they'd managed to elude each other for nearly three years. Few colleagues even knew they were siblings; their antithetic skin, disparate personalities, and different surnames (Permelia had given marriage a try at age twenty-two, and after the divorce, had retained the new name in order to avoid paperwork, a pet peeve) kept their relation secret, clandestine in an almost artful way.

Permelia had won two tickets to the Virgin Islands from one of her sweepstakes; she entered lotteries and competitions for everything from exercise equipment to lifetime supplies of granola to the weekly ten-million-dollar jackpots, and this trip, a reward from a fitness company she did independent cycle coaching for in her spare time, was the only thing she'd won since her addiction had begun with a gas station scratch-off at age eighteen.

She'd left the second Caribbean ticket in Benoit's office, concealed in a plain white envelope, and he'd discovered it during an office hour when he would have otherwise been planning the next two weeks' worth of lessons. As he leaned back in his leather revolving chair, fingering the cardboard edge

of the plane ticket, it occurred to him that Permelia had no one else to invite. There were no bitter feelings between them, aside from the ones they harbored toward themselves for never having been able to bond, able to jive with the other's father, able to fill the notches of the other's culture – Benoit's father was a Nigerian professor of African Studies to whom Ms. Miller had been married for seven years, and Permelia's father was a man from southeastern New York, a dress-shop clerk with whom Ms. Miller had had a single scotch-fueled evening five years after her marriage's end – there was resentment, perhaps, on Benoit's side, but it was a passive resentment, something temporary, like steam over water.

The trip itself had been a pleasant week of catchup during which Benoit and Permelia had spent much of their time at the hotel, chatting, playing shuffleboard, and knocking back drinks by the pool, things Permelia thought must have made them look like an old couple on a wedding anniversary and not siblings of thirty and forty-two. Benoit had enjoyed Permelia's presence far more than he'd expected, even allowing her to coax him into drinking rum for the first time in ten years. For the first time in his life, however, he'd felt like he had a younger sister. Once, Permelia had fallen asleep in a lounge chair on the seashell-stippled St. Thomas beach, slathered with sunscreen, eyes shielded by the five-dollar sunglasses she'd picked up at the airport, the soles of her feet dusted with sand. When young men eyeballed her, whether they were tourists with spray-on tans or Caribbean lifers burbling to each other in Creole, Benoit felt an inextricable tug inside him, and he glared at the men until a strand of footprints separated them from his sister.

The weathermen forecasted devastation. Both Permelia and Benoit always assured themselves that no one alive could do their jobs, but in a situation like this, when either of them skirted the danger of missing a day of work due to oversleep, illness, or a canceled flight, their palms perspired (Benoit, the biology professor, called it a “genetic thing”); the thought of a department chair wagging a finger, the very prospect of a red mark on a timesheet, induced the fear of replacement.

Benoit made arrangements for an earlier flight. *** The girl entered Permelia's office, which these days looked more like a raccoon's den, by pushing the door open with a balled fist. No knock. She wore glasses with thin black rims and her hair was the color of maple syrup. She dropped her embroidered book-bag onto the carpet as though the office was her own bedroom, and slumped into the chair across from Permelia. She leaned forward on the desk, parting the sea of Post-Its, red pens, and empty picture frames with the spikes of her elbows. “It wasn't your fault, Professor,” she said.

The girl was Morgan Pemberton, neither the best nor worst student in Permelia's 8am class. She sat in the middle row, gave average answers when called upon, and rarely seemed interested in course content, regarding Permelia's ebullient lessons with eyes that may as well have been watching a laundry cycle. But since Permelia had revealed to the class the reason behind her depression – that the flight directly behind hers and Benoit's had been ensnared in impossible winds and crashed into the Earth, killing everyone aboard – Morgan had begun paying closer attention.

“You always know the students who have a crush on you,” another female professor had once told her. “The boys walk into your office and ask if you like to party. The girls are more difficult to figure. If she holds eye contact for one second too long while you're droning on about something even you know is boring, she's got a crush. If she stays after class more than once to ask you if she can read ahead, she's in love.”

Morgan hadn't done much staring. She'd only stayed after class once, and that was to inquire about her absences. In fact, everything about Morgan Pemberton was average: her grades, her behavior, her scientific prowess, even her bedside manner (It wasn't your fault sounded hopelessly hackneyed, scraped from the bowels of the bromide barrel), but regardless, she was here in Permelia's office, elbows rooted to the desk.

“I'm fine, Morgan. Is there anything class-related we need to talk about?”

The girl rubbed an oval of fog from her glasses with the back of her thumb. “I've been thinking. One billion years, right? Then the sun explodes?” She spread both hands as if palming an invisible basketball.

“It will expand into a red giant and most likely devour Earth, yes.”

Morgan placed a fist underneath her chin. “I wonder if we can better ourselves before then. You know, lay off the animal slaughter, stop dumping chemicals into the ocean, recycle more, that kind of stuff.”

“I wouldn't worry about a billion years from now,” Permelia said. “At the rate we're going, there won't be a single human left to see what happens. History suggests there will be another mass extinction event long before anything happens to the sun.”

“That's what I'm saying, Professor. What if we can give our planet some lean muscle? Get the lakes and oceans clean, develop Earth-friendly technology, take the six-hundred-light-year trip to someplace outside the sun's reach and bring our books with us? By then, if we play our cards right, space travel will be as easy as taking your bike to the corner store.”

“You have quite an imagination.” As Permelia said this, she could practically feel her skin wrinkling.

She thought of shuffleboard with Benoit. “But I'm not sure that's meant to happen.” *** In Permelia's dream that night, she stood on a rocky plateau overlooking a ravine. A clump of stars burned through their phases in a black-orange nebula overhanging the ravine, near as a raincloud. She looked down at her hands, a lucid dreamer's technique for determining whether she's asleep or awake.

In the dreams she created, Permelia's sense of hearing was nonexistent; this was her way of engraining herself in the primordial, experiencing the Beginning, spending time with her original self and the original selves of others, selves that others (and she herself) were hesitant to spend time with in waking life, selves unperturbed by the daily noise – she rarely spoke to dream characters, anyway, out of an irrational fear of peeling open some illusory rift. When she'd told Benoit about this place she'd created, he'd deemed it her replacement for a dream house in the country, away from the sirens and the exhaust and the barking dogs, a dream she would never be able to afford on an adjunct salary.

A single plane slashed through the nebula, hurling orange smoke outward over the ravine and revealing a velvet sky jeweled with stars. A queue of plane passengers issued out from the impact crater, all dressed in Prussian blue, their faces just like Permelia remembered them from the television reports. Morgan Pemberton was among them, a church-bell skirt hanging at her ankles, gazing out upon the stars, stars close enough to touch, flecks of crumbled diamond on black. She raised a hand.

The tips of her fingers brushed the purls of the nebula, which had begun reforming over the wound opened by the plane.

The passengers marched onward. She shouted to them, and when none answered, she called to Morgan, but the girl was lost as the nebula descended. *** “None of them would talk to me,” Permelia said, her hair balled in a greasy bun. Benoit sat at his desk across from her, place-mats rolled out, a model plesiosaur skeleton suspended from a hook above his head. Permelia stared into the face of her avocado sandwich, her stomach floating.

“I think you should try to stop thinking about it,” Benoit told her. “Your dream doesn't mean anything. It's a chemical process in your brain; you can't control what it shows you.”

“I can,” Permelia flared. “I always have.” It was unfair. Benoit had no idea how long she'd lived in her own world, how thoroughly and methodically she'd constructed not only the canyons and landscapes, but the laws, the parameters, the directions of the wind and the positions of the stars. “It meant something.”

Benoit inhaled through his nose and took a handful of kettle chips from the bag on the desk, then turned the bag toward his sister. “Last night,” he said, “I dreamed I was teaching frog dissection, and in the dream, I could not remember how to do it. I must have dropped that scalpel ninety times. By the end, my hands were covered in frog eggs and grime, and my students were so miffed that they packed up to leave a half hour before usual. I'm living today as if it meant nothing, so if I'm missing something, you'd better save me before it's too late.” He popped a chip into his mouth and crunched with his lips closed.

“You're joking,” she said, “but this isn't the same thing. Would you at least admit that it's odd for Morgan to appear in a lucid dream when I didn't purposely bring her in?”

He leaned forward, folding his left palm over his right fist. “Permelia,” he said, sounding like her older brother for the first time since they'd reunited, “you're trying to meet the dead passengers in your dreams. What will that accomplish?” Most of what he'd read about lucid dreaming involved dreamers becoming addicted to what they do in their sleep.

She couldn't answer. *** An air pocket inflated in Permelia's chest when Morgan entered the astronomy lab. The girl was dressed in a Prussian blue sweater, a white tank, a pencil skirt and black flip-flops. Earrings dangled from her lobes. A kanji tattoo stretched across the top of her right foot.

“Good morning, Morgan.” Permelia stood in the center of the Myers Observatory, the spherical tower that housed the only fifty-five centimeter refracting telescope in the state. Morgan nodded neutrally, then took a seat beside Carla, a blonde with a preternatural tan, who had aced the midterm.

“I like your earrings.”

“Job interview,” Morgan mumbled.

As the students settled, Permelia clasped her hands behind her back and began pacing. Soft blue light exuded from the projector at the observatory's apex and soaked her face.

“As you know,” she began, “Messier 16, also known as the Eagle Nebula, is one of the most widely photographed, intensely studied, and incomparably varied objects in the galaxy. Therein lie the Pillars of Creation, the tendril-like incubators of stars first photographed by the Hubble Telescope in 1995, each more massive than our entire solar system.” She paused. Morgan's dangly earrings flickered blue in the observatory's light. “Can anyone tell me what you would see if you looked in the direction of the Eagle Nebula with an amateur telescope?”

Permelia looked to Morgan, whose hands stayed folded on her lap. Carla's hand shot up nearby.

“Red gas,” Carla said, “with hot blue stars all around it.”

“Yes.” Permelia paced along the crescent of seats. “Recently, the Herschel Space Observatory revisited the region of the Eagle Nebula where the Pillars of Creation reside.”

With a flick of Permelia's thumb, the projector howled to life, and on the canvas appeared the famous Hubble image of the Pillars, talismanic, like splashes of molten gold, monumental in their stillness, leviathans of conception – no matter how many times she saw that familiar image, fingers of dust reaching into a brume of stars, Permelia's heart quivered.

“The Herschel photograph and the related studies – which you'll be writing about over the weekend – verify that stars are born within the Pillars.”

Morgan's hand floated up. “That's where we need to go, Professor,” she said without being called on. “What would happen if we just flew up there?”

Adrenaline sluiced beneath Permelia's skin. Morgan had opened their private conversation to the entire class, and though the topic of future space travel had seemed insipid back at the office, the inclusion of the audience now made Permelia feel as though her secrets were glowing under that blue spotlight alongside her.

This was a challenge.

“We cannot fly up there, Morgan.”

“You said the sun's going to devour the Earth. Where do we go? The birthplace of stars. The womb of the universe.”

The eyes of the other students remained on Morgan. Permelia felt the hot blue light moisten her scalp, the hollow murmur of the room's heaters suddenly aural.

“Add this to your weekend scrawlings,” Permelia said. The pencils all stood on end. “Tell me what you think you would find if, as Ms. Pemberton suggests, we could travel to the Pillars.” Most of the students scribbled the assignment into their notebooks; Morgan reclined with arms folded. In the ethereal glow of that light, luminous Neptune, the girl's expression was hidden. *** The dream was not benign. Permelia's control was muddled; the terrain transmogrified before her like scenes in a stageplay until the grays and blues melted into the slate blocks of a bridge overarching a shallow creek, the warm colors into the shaft of a gallows tree. The frayed rope hung motionless, transfixed in the breezeless dream air, pink sky burning over black hills in the distance.

The creek stretched for countless yards before bending into the woods; abdication lay beyond.

Permelia jumped from the bridge. A muffled pain blossomed as her feet hit the wet rocks; the length of the fall surprised her. In the split second it took to assess the damage to her dream body, another body materialized in the leafy gateway of the woods, rising from the water wrapped in seagrass, back arched, amber hair flung over silvery-white shoulders.

“Morgan?”

The girl peered down at her palms for a moment, and as if achieving some great epiphany, met Permelia's eyes and placed a finger over her own lips.

She mouthed the word watch.

Permelia followed the girl's eyes to the heavens, the same skies from which that great orange nebula had birthed another doomed aircraft. Droplets of color, maybe planes, maybe comets, shot from above with orange heads and broken blue tails, converting the bridge to rubble, inducing flame to the gallows tree. The blue tails corkscrewed around the women like thread; Permelia fixed her eyes on the creek, unable to watch for the burning fragment that would inevitable destroy her. The flames, reflected in the water, curled and swayed like a kind of silent, gleaming calligraphy. *** Permelia awoke in the same black-and-white t-shirt she'd thrown on before bed, kicked her legs over the side of the mattress, and walked barefoot to the front door. Emerging into a cool, sunless morning, she could smell dew on the maples. She drew breaths of clean air and watched her neighbor, a fiftynine year-old fellow divorcee, ready himself for work. His black grocery apron matched his ancient station wagon, which he parked under an expansive oak tree. The hood was pocked with sap.

She lowered herself to the lawn, naked but for her oversized shirt, the grass bathed in dew. Her neighbor offered a weak good-morning wave before heaving the car door and slipping into the driver's seat. Her thighs cooled; the soles of her feet dragged along the ground until the grass was knotted into cushions beneath them. She was tired. *** Benoit chatted with Professor Reinbach, Chair of the Journalism department, while sliding his lunch plate – adorned with steamed veggies scooped from a steel tray and an aluminum-wrapped hamburger snatched from beneath a heat lamp – across the snack-stocked cafeteria counter. Reinbach, his head clumped with tufts of grey, spectacles pinching the bridge of his nose, had been meaning to catch up with Benoit on account of a student interested in a Biology minor, but Benoit, who greatly respected the old column-scribbler, was eager to introduce him to his sister.

Campus was drenched in Olympic spirit; the atmosphere of the Summer Games had reached the students of the American Northeast all the way from London, and since a local girl, Jessa Colehammer, had qualified for the gymnastics All-Around individual gold medal competition, the Olympic aura was not set to dissolve anytime soon. Students were decked out in patriotic colors, and even the ones doing it ironically lit up at the mention of Jessa's name. Each morning, Benoit passed the same group of boys walking shirtless and wearing American flags as makeshift superhero capes. The campus center's coffee stand had the letters J-E-S-S-A spelled out in plastic lids across the forest-green overhead paneling. The science department's office doors were plastered with newspaper articles featuring slightly different versions of Bob Costas's interview with Jessa from a month earlier. Carla, who habitually neglected to shut off her cell phone in class, would apologize profusely while smashing the power key as Springsteen's “Born in the USA” exploded over Permelia's monologue.

Permelia was already sitting at a small table in the dining hall, poking at a bowl of fruit salad with a plastic fork. A pile of five-dollar scratch-offs lay fanned out beside the food. A female student in a purple knit hat tried to engage her in conversation, asking about signing up for a fall course, but Permelia's eyes were fixed on a tree of green grapes branching over the edge of the bowl. The fork spun between her fingers.

“See? She's a celebrity,” Benoit said to Reinbach as they placed their trays on the table and settled into the rigid cafeteria seats.

Permelia peered up at the girl. “Zip me an email, okay?” The girl agreed and rejoined her friends.

Permelia skewered a chunk of watermelon and halved it with her front teeth. “Good morning. I didn't know this was a group affair.”

“Professor Reinbach, this is my sister, Permelia.”

The watermelon dissolved on the back of her tongue. “We're telling people now?”

“I don't believe it was ever a secret,” Benoit said, still grinning warmly.

Reinbach extended his hand over the lunch trays. Permelia shook it weakly.

“So,” Reinbach said, starting into a dripping triangle of pizza with a plastic knife, “Benoit tells me you two had quite a time on the Virgin Islands. My parents took me there when I was a child. It's funny how memory works; I remember the smell of the ocean breeze and I still have a tin of seashells I collected there, but the only real memory I have from the trip is of my seven year-old brother sipping rum punch behind our parents' backs and singing drunken sea chanties.”

“Permelia's beach cartwheels were every bit as exciting,” said Benoit, crunching a flower of broccoli in his mouth.

Permelia scraped the opaque printing ink from one of the scratch-off tickets with her fingernail.

“This one's already a loser,” she said, shuffling the ticket to the bottom of the pile. The spidery lines alongside her eyes told Benoit she hadn't been sleeping, that her dreams had been growing more chaotic. “Sorry. I'm listening.”

“How was your class this morning?”

“Uninspired. My best student doesn't care about space. She wants to dig up fossils.”

Reinbach was undeterred. “That always happens,” he said. He forked a wad of cheese that had begun coagulating on the plate. “But every class is just one swing of the club. No one will blame you for not being able to dazzle nineteen year-olds at eight in the morning.”

Permelia allowed a hint of a smile. “Thanks for saying that.”

Just then, Permelia spotted the shape of Morgan Pemberton gliding through the pair of glass doors at the front of the campus center. Morgan slipped into the lunch line, loaded her tray, shot the breeze with Bokeem, the cashier, and pitched a few quarters into his tip jar before navigating the crowd of diners and pulling up a chair beside Permelia.

“I'm Professor Miller,” Benoit said, extending his hand. “I'm glad you're not afraid of us old guys.”

The girl's grip was confident. “I'm Morgan,” she said. “I'm in your sister's early class.”

Permelia scrutinized her fruit bowl. She didn't want to talk about the dreams or debate Morgan's theories about the Pillars of Creation with Benoit and Reinbach, but Morgan was immune to aloof behavior; she'd already proven that with five separate lab partners.

“How's it going, Professor? I thought that girl was way out of line with her fossil rant this morning.”

“I don't think she meant anything by it.”

“I think she's a lesbo.”

“Not my business or yours.”

Morgan tipped back in the chair, craning her moley, unexceptional arms into a wide stretch. She crossed her legs, setting an ankle on the opposite knee, and her toenails, on a backdrop of black flipflop, glimmered temporarily in the haze of florescent cafeteria light. Her big toe was painted bright orange, and the rest an ashen blue, like a comet with a burning indigo tail.

As Morgan engaged Benoit and Reinbach, charming the old Journalism Professor with compliments about his peach-colored silk tie and inquiring into the specifics of Benoit's animal dissection labs, Permelia's stomach capsized. Every grape she'd swallowed was a heavy stone. She remembered the spray of blue-orange fireballs in the dream and wondered, though she'd never admit it to Benoit, whether Morgan had dreamed the same thing.

Permelia popped out of her trance at the sound of Reinbach's voice. “Where will you all be watching the big gymnastics final tonight?”

Before Permelia could say she'd be curling up in her desk chair to grade papers with the TV off, Morgan said, “We're having a party at my sister's place. Everyone's welcome. Bokeem even said he'd go.” Although Permelia prided herself on looking young enough and being able to hold enough alcohol to blend in with the college crowd, she was fatigued. Her skin felt feverish and ice-hot. The Olympics and Jessa Colehammer were far from her thoughts; she couldn't escape images of Morgan, sheathed in a dress of seagrass and lily-pads, fastening her gaze on that gem-flecked swathe of sky before the array of flame was cast down.

“Thanks,” she said, “but no.” *** Permelia was all the more surprised, then, when she found herself drawn to the outdoor patio of Lacie Pemberton's cabin, which overlooked a crescent pond and sat contiguous to the summer camp of Jessa Colehammer's family. As Permelia made her way up the drive, stones crunching beneath her flats, the sounds of the pond cried out to her, a cluster of life all its own. Throaty groans of bullfrogs. Crickets' whispers. The intermittent music of ripples as fish breached the surface to seize insects. She imagined forsaking her teaching post and living an entire lifetime on a single leaf or a sliver of pond water.

The patio overseeing the pond bustled with youth and was lit with torches shaped like yellow cornstalks. Convivial human chatter overtook the noise of the pond as Permelia ascended the maroonstained wooden steps; the final round of Olympic whitewater canoeing was visible on the colossal television through the cabin's screen door. “Drinks are in the living room,” someone said to her, “just don't get annihilated before hometown girl does her thing.” It was Bokeem, the cashier from the cafeteria, who was thirty-five and taking night classes at the University. He pulled a beer out of thin air and held it out to Permelia; she took it by the neck. “Didn't expect to see a teacher here. Science, right?”

“Astronomy,” she said, cracking the beer and taking a tiny mouthful. “Just don't blow my cover, okay?”

“Wax-sealed in my back pocket,” said Bokeem, patting the rear of his jeans. A slice of torchlight flickered against the side of his bald head. Lacie, Morgan's older sister, was visible through the glass sliding door, wearing high heels and a skirt decorated with spread-winged robins. She stood in front of the television with her weight shifted to one side, arms crossed, a beer hovering in front of her open mouth as she pored over the American canoer who was about to blast his way out of the foamy river

course in record time. As the canoer finished, Lacie let out a shriek of approval, which was mirrored by the friends and students who clumped the two couches triangulating the TV. Others, standing or occupying waist-high wooden chairs, tucked their beers into the alcoves of their elbows and contributed a few claps before swigging to Team USA. Permelia perused the patio for Morgan, but the girl was absent. Luckily, none of her other students seemed to be there either. The girl in the purple knit hat who had approached Permelia in the dining hall was on the far side of the deck, sipping wine from a paper cup and talking to a tall brunette with a cochlear implant latched to the side of her head. Was Morgan, who had only managed a B+ on any given assignment all semester, the only student enamored with space, with what lay beyond our little orb of water and dirt and phone towers and fiber optics? Permelia took a sip of beer and shimmied between two young men who looked like they were dressed for a workout, and made a beeline for the knit-hatted Astronomy hopeful.

“Hi, Professor,” the girl said, instinctively separating herself from her wine cup. The brunette, who was without a drink, laughed and propped herself up on the deck's stained railing alongside a precariously placed pot of voodoo lilies.

“At ease,” Permelia said, displaying the beer bottle pinched between her finger and thumb. “I'm incognito.”

Relief washed across the girl's face. She slid her hand back toward the cup, which now rested on the railing, but still didn't touch it. “Here to see Jessa?”

“Yeah. Do you know her?”

“I've never met her. No. But now if I ever introduce myself, she'll know it's just because of the Olympics. Kinda missed my opportunity to be a real friend.”

“Don't worry about it,” said Permelia. “That's paranoia. And pick up your drink; you're making me feel like an alcoholic.”

The girl obeyed. “I'm sorry I haven't emailed you yet. I don't want you to think the party took priority over your class.” She placed the cup at her lips and tipped it until the brim touched her nose.

“We can talk about it right here.”

“Okay.” The girl took a deep breath, as though preparing to recite a thoroughly rehearsed monologue.

“Spare me the stuff about working hard and showing up all the time,” Permelia said. “I just want to know that you're actually interested in what's out there, even if there's a very good chance it's just burning gas and ice chunks.”

There was that look of relief again as the girl's eyes smiled at the corners. “Yeah. Absolutely.”

“Ever studied Astronomy before?”

The girl on the railing snorted. Permelia had read about cochlear implants in a magazine years ago; they served as prosthetics to help the deaf make out speech and sound. “She works in a museum,” said the railing-sitter. She spoke perfectly, likely the result of decades of speech therapy.

Knit Hat sheepishly pulled her t-shirt at the hem so that it stretched to reveal the image on the chest.

An orange squid, primitively drawn but haunting in a way, as if doodled by a kindergartener with an advanced knowledge of cephalopod anatomy, floated above the museum's logo. “I give lectures on deep-sea life,” she said. “I'm probably way too old to be in college. It took all I had to approach you this morning.”

Permelia locked eyes with the girl and shook her head as if to say I'll take care of you.

“My name is April, by the way.”

“Good to meet you formally.”

April exhaled, and a slew of tension escaped with the breath. From inside, Lacie shouted a five minute warning for the gymnastics competition. “Alright,” April said, “I'm going to grab a seat. See you in there?”

“Sure.”

The crowd began to funnel from the patio to the living room. The girl with the cochlear implant remained on the railing, running her fingers over the puckering voodoo lilies. Her grey skirt hung over her knees like a theatre curtain and her white cotton top was frilled around the neck. Silver rings fringed the cartilage of her left ear. Her auburn hair splashed perpetually over her shoulders even when she wasn't moving.

Permelia didn't know whether it was the vinous atmosphere or her own quavering equilibrium, but the allure of conversation with this girl was stronger than that of Jessa and her dancing feet.

“There's no need to hustle your classes to me,” the girl said. “I already have a bachelor's degree.”

Permelia hadn't noticed before, but a light fuzz coated the girl's soft consonants.

“Do you honestly think that's why I'm still out here?” Permelia dumped more of the beer down her throat. Her skin tingled.

“I know that's not the reason. I'd guess that you spend most of your time around kids, and I don't have the student smell on me. Good guess?”

“Golden.” Excited conversation ballooned in the cabin as the pre-competition ads ran, hawking fast food and cola. The girl, though, did not seem antsy to go inside. “I have dreams,” Permelia said. “I can

do whatever I want in them. I built a world where you can reach up and touch the moon if you want to.

In college I even thought up a gallows tree so I could kill people who made fun of my hair. It was a moment of weakness.”

“That sounds incredibly tiring.”

“Do I look incredibly tired?”

“You do.”

“Thanks.”

“I don't blame you. You're trying to educate the unmotivated while acting as empress of your own planet. That's not a level of responsibility I envy.”

Lacie was now passing cups around the room and making sure everyone had a drink in their fist. Still no sign of Morgan.

“And yet,” Permelia said, “I still don't feel like that's what's tiring me out. I was on a plane and – ” “Your job is to help young people grow into success stories. In your free time, you're boozing with them and watching them achieve their dreams on international television. You're probably, what, two years older than me? I wonder if you think of yourself as an adult.” Permelia set the beer against her lips and dodged response. “Trust me, you're not just a person who had a couple of bad dreams.”

Permelia wanted to ask if the girl was an expert on trauma, but stifled the question as she thought of the cochlear implant; the dangerous process of inserting it, which included drilling a hole in the skull; how long it must have taken her to be able to form words; whether she'd gone to public school and how long she'd lasted before the barbs of classmates had pierced her. Yet here she was, speaking more eloquently and sensibly than anyone Permelia had interacted with all week, and probably heading toward a higher degree of education than Permelia herself had.

There was silence in the cabin. Permelia peered through the screen door to see one of Jessa's teammates on the TV, tiptoeing her way onto the balance beam.

“I'm also divorced.”

“I guessed that, too.” *** Within the next half hour, amongst the tumbles and twists of the American, Russian, Chinese, and Ukrainian vaulters, Jessa, with her vice-grip toes, had expertly recovered from a near-fall on the balance beam and stuck what Permelia, an admitted laywoman, would have considered a flawless landing.

During that second-and-a-half each gymnast spent suspended in the air after springing forth, spinning

like little planets living out marvelous cycles, Permelia's chest stiffened until the cushioned mat welcomed their feet back to Earth.

Permelia could scarcely hear Jessa's interview over the cheers of the couch-jockeys in Lacie's cabin, but the gold medal hanging from the gymnast's young neck like a fossilized star said enough. Her blonde curls were white flame under the hot lights, and her face gleamed with sweat. “My teammates have been thanking their families and their deities,” she said, “but I want to thank a little patch of grass and maple trees for letting me grow up in it. I miss it. Home is important to me, even when it hasn't been my home for awhile.”

The cabin – along with the beer coolers – quickly emptied. Lacie assailed the torches with a candle snuffer, and the guests all congratulated each other as though each of them had in some way contributed to Jessa's victory. Permelia, who had been watching from the arm of one of Lacie's couches, took her time in leaving, exchanging phone numbers with some and warm goodbyes with everyone who made eye contact. Bokeem said he'd see her soon and gave her a high-five, and the girl with the cochlear implant, whose name Permelia hadn't gotten, pulled her into a timid hug. As the two of them made their way back down the drive, moon-colored silhouettes on black, they could both feel the cool breath of the pond on their faces. *** In the dream, Permelia lay flat on her back in a small metal canoe, drifting beneath a big, watercolorblue sky. Her hands were folded over her chest, the splintery wooden handle of an oar stuffed in her left palm. As usual, audio was null – she could not hear the boat rocking over waves, the gulls calling from overhead, or the damp rhythm of her own breath – but she knew where she was: a river she had imagined, or perhaps one she'd seen and then dreamed about. She brought up her hands and spread her palms into stars; when she asked herself, Am I dreaming?, not even her own voice answered her thoughts.

The boat careened violently to one side, and rather than allow herself to be submerged, Permelia pinched her eyes shut. *** Morgan remained in the observatory after class. Permelia switched on the lights so that the cerulean glow was muted into a dry yellow-brown.

“What is it, Professor?”

Permelia measured each word, each syllable, meticulously. “I couldn't help but notice, while chatting with some adults at your sister's party, that no one seemed to know where you were.”

“Oh,” Morgan said, “you came to the Olympic party? I was watching upstairs with my boyfriend.

Jessa rocked that vault, right?” She was perched on the oak window-seat at one of the observatory's knife-angled corners.

Permelia joined her at the floor-to-ceiling window, lowering herself onto the seat so that she and Morgan were the same height. “In my dream,” she said, “you were standing in the river, and you looked down at your palms. That wasn't a dream character who looked like you. It was actually you.

You were having the same dream.” She paused to give Morgan a chance to respond, but the girl was silent. “Thanks for not acting incredulous. I can't deal with that right now.”

“No problem.”

“You're a lucid dreamer?”

A nod.

“Did you come into my dream on purpose?”

Another.

“And you wanted me to ask you about it.”

Morgan instinctively took Permelia's hand. “I got you to stop thinking about the plane passengers for awhile, didn't I?” Permelia gently pulled away. “That's not why you did it.”

“Professor, that night when the passengers walked across the edge of your ravine with that awesome nebula right above us – what if that was reality? What a beautiful exit. A perfect memorial service, right?”

“Then the comets – ” “I destroyed that tree and bridge for you, Professor. You can't keep something like that in your world. What can a grown adult do with a gallows tree besides kill herself? I saved you.”

Permelia realized she hadn't taken a breath since Morgan had begun. “I did feel a lot better once it was gone. But you didn't do it for me.”

“The world is going to disappear. The Pillars aren't. Why are they so far away? Is it because human contact would cause a complete rebirth?”

“Morgan – ” “But in your world, they're so close, Professor.”

“Morgan, please leave.”

“The room, or your dreams?”

“Leave.”

*** She stayed late. Once the maintenance crew had entered her open doorway, emptied her wastebasket into their bottomless trash bin, and had begun squeegeeing the floor of the hallway outside her office, Permelia quit poring over the final exam, shook her hair out of her face, and slung her bag over her shoulder.

At night, campus reminded Permelia of a crypt, and she could never help stepping lightly along the pavement lest she awaken whatever slept in the school's darkened nooks. Tonight, the oppressive artificial light in her office had been a refuge only for the sake of putting off sleep.

She checked her mirrors and dropped her bag on the passenger seat, which was laden with lottery printouts and torn envelopes. When she turned the key, the staticky guitars of an old Crass album crackled through the speakers. Desperate for another voice, she punched Benoit's home digits into the pad of her cell phone, but there was no answer.

Eyelids leaden, she sifted through the mess of paper on the seat, including folded slips containing the numbers of partygoers she'd met at Lacie Pemberton's cabin. She flipped through the names – Rose, Lacie, Rodrigo, Bokeem – all local phone numbers. The last slip in the pile bore only an address – 675 Baker – and the name Dani written in purple pen. “You'd understand this, wouldn't you?” she asked the ink on the paper. Without looking at the time, she rolled the car from the lot and navigated the snaking pavement until the main road opened beneath a pair of green eyelike traffic signals. *** 675 Baker looked to Permelia like a restaurant that had closed its doors. The bulky front porch seemed to yawn toward the cobbled curb, leaving only enough width for the two-body-wide squares of sidewalk. The dark green awning, trimmed with white, was browning at the corners and was bordered with deadened Christmas lights.

Permelia parked along the curb, crossed the sidewalk, and ascended the fractured concrete stoop.

She scanned the surnames alongside the identical white doorbells. The southmost bell sat beside a blank strip of tape. She tapped the bell with her knuckle, and in the ensuing silence, her cell phone vibrated in the pocket of her jeans.

“Benoit, I'm sick,” she exhaled into the mouthpiece.

“Where are you?” Benoit responded. “I hear wind.”

“I'm not sure if I can't tell the difference between dreams and reality anymore. Or if I only wish I couldn't.” Through the front door of the apartment complex, Permelia could see a carpeted staircase leading to the second floor. The entire foyer within was grayed out beneath a near-dead bulb, and the

dust motes seemed to float stilly in the air as though the building was suspended, petrified, dangling in time.

No one came to the door.

“Permelia, I don't know where you are, but I wish you would get yourself home.”

“I wish you would treat me like your adult sister and not the baby sister you never bothered with.”

Benoit's breath went quiet on the other line. When there was no response, Permelia clapped the phone shut and slipped it back into her pocket. The doorbell remained unanswered, and after Permelia's skin began to chill and toughen, the tiny hairs bristled, and a fog of her own breath erupted from her nostrils and diminished on the air just as quickly, she turned, descended the stoop, and left 675 Baker where it stood glaciated, her shoes bisecting the double yellow line of the road as she crossed. She heaved the car door open with two fingers hooked under the handle, dropped into the deep seat, and, brooding on whether the beautiful deaf girl who lay dreaming on the second floor of the apartment complex had herself been imagined, a machination of Permelia's own dreams, an illusion to rebel against illusive Morgan Pemberton, lifted her feet from the curb, jabbed the key into the ignition, and left the street, the pavement enlivened by the sheen of moonlight, the fervid and reconnected center line, the excess of her own thoughts, the fallow, the tallow, behind. *** She watched the black treetops until the sun hovered above them, a subdued coral-red, and spooned lukewarm apple-cinnamon oatmeal as the sky brightened. Once the bowl contained nothing but sticky dots of sugar, she placed it beneath the faucet, half-filled it with filmy water, shrugged into a black hoodie, and made her way out the front door as quietly as she could.

Her neighbor was up earlier than usual. In the front yard he stood, pear-shaped and idle, gazing up at the same sunrise she'd been watching. She wished him a good morning and slipped into the driver's seat, unsure whether he'd heard her.

The gym was empty aside from the receptionist, a slick-haired early-twenties jock in a red soccer jersey. The walk from her house had provided a pleasant warmup sweat. “Hi,” said the jock, probably recognizing her from the monthly spin classes she coached.

“Hi,” she replied, hoping the dual curtains of black hood masked her face enough that the jock wouldn't be able to tell that she hadn't slept.

“Class today? I didn't see anything scheduled.”

“Nope. Flying solo.”

“Cool.”

Permelia straddled a bike and powered down some invisible stretch of road, watching the stock ticker on the hanging box television frantically morph into various newscasters, homeland security warnings, Olympic updates, lotto jackpot reminders (she made a note to stop at the gas station after work), advertisements for coffee-drinks and vacuums and tampons and upcoming romantic comedies, then another blonde newscaster in a tacky pantsuit interviewing a man with a missing eyetooth about some molehill-turned-mountain by the bereft local media; she tried to imagine the newscaster shoving the microphone into the faces of people she knew: first Benoit, from whom she still hadn't heard after hanging up on him the night before – seasoned, dignified Benoit, who had become an older brother in the course of a month and could return to being a strange coworker just as quickly. “Benoit,” the newscaster would say to him, “you're a scientist; you must know the meaning of symbiosis. Could you tell us what, then, your sister provides for you simply by acknowledging your siblinghood? What do you hope to provide for her?” Benoit would grin apprehensively – however much he enjoyed suiting up and playing genius in front of department Chairs and undergrads, the thought of being on television terrified him – and say, “I need to stop patronizing her the same way I would a student who makes up excuses for late lab assignments. Even if I don't believe in her dream world, even if I think her habits are dangerous, this is my sister, a sister whose life I saved by booking an early flight home, and I need to remember that no matter how ridiculous her self-inflicted guilt might seem to me, it's real to her, regardless of whether her eyes are open or sealed.” The newscaster would nod neutrally. “I see,” she would say. “And how do you respond to our viewers' concerns about your sister's divorce? After all, you weren't in the picture when she was married, and even if she didn't realize it at the time, she would have loved an older brother to talk to.” Benoit would have to think about this for a few seconds. A general sense of live-TV nervousness would ooze through the feed. “I cannot comment at this time,” he would finally say. “If she wants to discuss it with me, I'm sure she will.”

As she pumped her legs, Permelia's hood unfastened, landing in a tiny blanket across her upper back.

The interview with the local man had long ended, but the blonde newscaster was stock-still in the wind, hair whipping over her cheeks, a television smile spread above her chin. The broadcast had delayed in cutting away. In her mind, Permelia could see the girl with the cochlear implant – Dani, if that was her name – sidling into the frame, coming out of nowhere to be interviewed just so the newscaster wouldn't have to stand like that anymore. It would only be seconds, seconds that seemed much more urgent than real seconds, before the newscast cut to a commercial, not enough time for Dani to answer any questions, no time for questions to even be formed.

The final exam of the summer semester was not held in the observatory. Permelia, flat-footed at the head of the whitewashed lecture hall, was apprehensive about traversing the unfamiliar floor until the test was finished – would her shoes emblazon permanent black streaks on the tiles? Even the students, in the way their pencils zipped along the paper, in their gait as they climbed the steps to the exit, seemed out of place, tentative. One at a time, they handed in their exams, rose, and vanished, ending with Morgan, whose lips pursed as she let go of the paper, knowing that as soon as her skin and the test were no longer connected, neither were she and Permelia, at least not on this plane of reality. They would no longer have reason to interact. She opened her mouth to speak, exhaled quickly, and turned.

Away she floated, taking the steps one by one, until the door creaked open and she was absorbed into the blot of white sunlight that burned through. *** Permelia deliberately took a side route home so that she would pass 675 Baker. She'd graded every exam in under an hour, stacked the pages in the office, and submitted the grades via the University's faculty computer system before visiting the recently opened library cafe', where she bought a poppyseed bagel with a palmful of quarters. She licked the cream cheese around the perimeter of the bagel as she descended the ramp of the campus parking garage, and instinctively removed the clutter from the passenger seat as she pulled onto the main road, tossing ticket after wrapper after envelope onto the backseat.

Dani was seated on the stoop of her apartment complex; April was next to her, leaning forward on her knees, her purple candy-striped knit hat pulled tightly around her ears. Permelia would have gone straight home, wouldn't have circled the block again, if Dani's eyes hadn't scaled the shell of the car and met her own as she rolled past.

By the time she'd parked and made her way to Dani's stoop, April was rising to leave. She touched Dani on the knee as she stood, and gave a cool “Hey” to Permelia before walking to her rusted Oldsmobile.

“She was nicer to me before,” said Permelia, looking after the girl.

“She's probably nervous because you're going to be her teacher soon,” Dani answered, not shifting a bit. It was as though their conversation at Lacie Pemberton's party had never ended.

Permelia turned back to her. “Why didn't you answer the doorbell?”

“What do you mean?”

“You gave me your address instead of your number. I came over late.” The exhaustion in her face and voice must have made her sound more frustrated than she thought she was.

“Permelia, I'm deaf. I don't hear over the phone. I switch this off when I sleep.” She opened her palm alongside her head, rotating it to indicate the network of hearing prosthetics. Her response rendered Permelia as still as she'd been in front of the lecture hall. As though sensing this was a harmful stillness, Dani said, “But I'm happy you came to see me.” She nodded toward the spot on the chalky concrete steps where April had been seated. Permelia sat.

“It's going to be nice to have a couple of weeks off.”

“Sure. You can catch up on sleep.”

“I don't know about that. A girl keeps invading my dreams.”

“So you're dodging her by retreating into reality.”

“I guess so.”

Dani pushed herself closer to Permelia. “You know, you can die without sleep.” Again, Permelia went silent, and this time, she could feel Dani shifting, giving off a different heat than she had before.

When the hour was out, Dani was in the passenger seat of Permelia's car, her arm out the window as they cruised along, dipping her hand into the gusts of crisp wind and making little waves in the air.

Permelia told her all about Benoit and their history, about her ex-husband, his stifled aggravation at her taste for contests and sweepstakes, how sex with her seemed to repulse him, the way the soft skin around her ring finger had been discolored for several months after she'd left him, how she'd buried her wedding band under a pile of clothes in the back of the closet. As she pulled into her driveway and put the car in park, Permelia felt Dani's fingers slide over the back of her hand.

“I want something more than happenstance,” Permelia said in a voice barely above a whisper, not removing her hand from the gearshift, where it was held tightly beneath Dani's.

Dani's hand began caressing the spot where the skin-discoloring wedding band had been.

“Happenstance feels exciting to me.”

A delicate rain began to fall. The leaves, already yellowing, shook in the torrent of raindrops, giving off a tapping sound that had always comforted Permelia as a girl. She wondered if Dani could hear it at all, how rain might sound to her.

Dani threw on her hood as she got out of the car, shielding her head from the rain. Her long hair poured from the hood's horseshoe-like opening, and the tips were soon soaked and matted together.

Over the tapping of the rain, Permelia said, “I tried to meet dead plane passengers in my dreams.”

Dani squinted. “What?”

“My brother and I were supposed to be on another flight home from the Caribbean. We would have died if we'd been onboard.”

Dani shook her head and gestured toward Permelia's front door. Maybe she couldn't hear through the noise of the rain.

As they passed through the doorway, the tapping grew to a roar. Permelia shed her work blazer and left it to drip dry on the one chair she owned. Dani was already running her fingers along the frames of the artwork hanging in the living room, and after Permelia had tossed her wet clothes into the hamper and propped herself up on the arm of the couch, Dani sat next to her, placed a hand on her thigh, and kissed her. *** Permelia did not dream. When the night had burned away and sunlight dripped into the bedroom, she felt no urge to leave the bed, that vessel to her other reality, and it was the first time in months she hadn't fled for the lawn. She lifted the blanket and looked at herself beneath the covers – naked. Dani was beside her, curled up and facing the far wall, her breathing barely audible over the sound of the neighbor's lawnmower.

She felt a burst of something like shame, but refused to acknowledge it for long. There was still confusion, maybe – another woman wrapped in her bedsheets, the absence of her night world, the reality she'd authored – but most of it had been absorbed by what now felt like an incredibly vivid dream. “What do I call you?” Permelia asked aloud, knowing the girl could not hear.

As if on cue, Dani's hand made its way to her implant, fiddled with something behind her ear, and then she rolled over, eyes little slivers of blue beneath barely-parted lids. *** Now Permelia remembered the dream. The metal canoe turned over, leaving her to the mouth of the ocean, and there was Morgan in her seagrass dress, hand extended. Permelia, soaked in saltwater, reluctantly offered her own. She felt a surge of energy as though filled with a new kind of oxygen, and the pair rose from the ocean, suspended in the cold wind swirling off the surface. Morgan mouthed something, but Permelia could not make it out. Morgan, seeming to remember she was in a world divested of sound, mouthed the word watch, pointed to herself, tumbled over and leaned back, arms spread, locking her gaze on the heavens Permelia had created. Fearing what lay above the clouds, Permelia carefully mimicked Morgan, lying on her back with no surface beneath her as she continued to rise. The clouds opened like hands uncupping, revealing a sky studded with gems and a plane spiraling out of control. As the wings sliced past them, Permelia looked down, hoping she would see it recover, gain its bearings, hit a pocket of forgiving wind. But Morgan would not let her look lest she miss the sight above them: the Eagle Nebula, fanning out endlessly and entwining the whole world, and within its

layers, the Pillars of Creation, resting, idle in their majesty, glowing with the colors of the universe and drawing the two bodies in. Permelia looked at Morgan. Tears streaked from the corners of the girl's eyes and into oblivion. Her hand tightened around Permelia's wrist, and as she looked back at the Pillars, eyes dazzled, Permelia could feel droplets of magnificent warmth cascading upon her. *** Awake now, Permelia could not have known that she would receive a call from Benoit the following night while sitting on Dani's stoop between Bokeem, who would be strumming a guitar, and the girl in bed next to her, who would insist on getting up and giving her some privacy, but she found herself missing her brother, wondering how to get the answers she'd imagined at the gym. She sat up and reached for her phone on the nightstand, but Dani, with surprising agility for a girl who had been asleep a minute ago, leapt atop her, knees sinking into the mattress on either side of Permelia's torso. She bent like a hinge, face centimeters away from Permelia's, and waited. Her body shone in the trajectory of the open shade, her skin a fabric of silk and birthmarks, a universe in itself. Permelia finally opened her mouth and pushed her lips against Dani's, and the girl responded with a fluttering tongue, explorative hands, eager hips. As the morning went on, they breathed nothing but each other, and Permelia kept her eyes fully open until Dani exhaled and rolled onto her back, bringing the silken galaxy of her skin into a full revolution.

Dani pulled the blanket to her chest, and when the sun tapered in again, she angled her hand against her forehead like a visor. “Good morning,� she whispered.

Richard Hartshorn lives and writes in rural New York State. He is the recipient of the 2011 Richard Bausch Short Story Prize, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, The Dirty Napkin, Eunoia Review, 751 Magazine, and other publications.

Steven Minchin Burn Dirt in the Name

At regular tea you lower your last finger to say, “There’s no need for Poughkeepsie.

Have it removed.”

Across from you I’m wondering who that dark child is and what it is he keeps repeating : “Ethnowhat?

Ethnono! Ethnowhat?”

As he circles your chair I notice that you don’t notice him as you say something about “Burning and razing the dirt…

Replacing the discarded in the name of progress and image of class…”

You argue it can be done away with like a child that got in the way, making up words and darkened the space

that should be rightly given to proper ceremony under the growing sweep of civilization.

At regular tea you right my last nerve and I sway.

“Well, have the dark removed, for everyone’s sake”

Steven Minchin is a poet, painter and video artist in upstate New York's cultural capital, Albany. He has recently published his 50th poem and is finishing work on the upcoming book "Eleven Perditions After Love and Other Nauseating Adventures."

His work has appeared in Mad Swirl, Short, Fast and Deadly, as well as vox poetica and others.

Amber Cook Wednesday Voyeur

At one point in his life, Robert considered voyeurism a sin. Of course, it is what you make of it.

Personally, he preferred the term obsession or even fetish, to some degree. Somewhere, at some time, he had justified it with his conscience. Not that he needed to, but it just felt like the right thing to do at the time.

It happened most often on Mondays or, if the timing was right, sometimes on Tuesdays. On Wednesday afternoons between two thirty and four were also common and occasionally on a Friday morning shortly after eight when the school bus had just made its loop around the neighborhood.

“Taking a late lunch again I see?”

Robert turned suddenly at the voice over his shoulder. The keys in his hand dropped with a start and he nodded. “It’s Wednesday, you know that.”

His boss shrugged and started toward the next cubicle. “I know. Enjoy your chiropractor’s appointment.”

Every week it was the same exchange. Robert shuddered as he stared at the back of his departing employer with disgust. He reached down to reclaim his keys and paused to pick up a discarded sheet of crumpled paper. Looking it over once, it flicked it into the waste basket and kicked both back underneath his desk.

He whisked past his fellow employees, stopping only once to mumble a half hearted ‘see you later’ to a voice he couldn’t identify somewhere to his right. Truthfully, he barely knew any of them and could have cared less whether he saw them later or not. After twelve years of employment, most of them were still merely faces without names.

The office door slammed shut behind him and he jingled his keys in his hand as the warm sunshine hit his face. Spot forty two, row nine – it had been row twelve until a small promotion two years prior and then the boss saw fit to let him move three rows closer to the building. He had wanted a raise, of course, but settling for a better parking spot didn’t seem like such a bad idea at the time. He slid into the blue Toyota, felt around for the ignition and shoved the key in with finesse.

It was a ten minute drive to the cul de sac where his tire marks were still left in the worn away gravel. Robert tapped his fingers against the steering wheel in time to the eighties song playing on the radio that he couldn’t identify. Yet, somehow, he still knew all of the words.

The nearly bald rubber on the tires slowed as he reached the stop sign between Cherry Street and Carter and he pressed his finger hard against the lock button on the driver’s side door. In a way he couldn’t explain, it made him feel strangely invisible. The cul de sac came into view and he pressed down on the brakes.

Robert could see her perfectly from where he sat, from her mud colored hair right down to the blood red stain on her crooked big toenail. He leaned his back against the steering wheel and pulled his lunch out of the paper bag resting on the passenger seat beside him. She had made herself into a porcelain doll that afternoon. He peeled back the saran wrap on his sandwich and breathed in the smell of turkey and three day old wheat.

The house was a copy image of every other one on that street. Minus the hunter green of the shutters, it would be almost impossible to pick it out amongst the rest. But he knew the place like the back of his hand, right down to the hairline crack that ran down the length of the concrete driveway. He narrowed his eyes and strained to see a little better in the bright afternoon sun.

Her body moved near the window on the east end of the house and he caught a quick glimpse of him dancing in front of the bedroom mirror. Often he wondered why she never thought to close the blinds, or at the very least, directed her nearly naked body away from the uncovered window panes. Perhaps, part of him wondered, she knew she was being watched. Perhaps, he thought, she simply liked it.

Her fingers ran through the mess of dark hair piled atop her head and wriggled it loose from its bobby pinned confines. Each strand twined around her finger like tree snakes circling a branch. It glided across the pale, dishwater ravaged skin of her hands and fell back to her shoulders in a heap. It stayed there, for a moment anyway. She almost never wore it down anymore. Not lately, anyway.

Robert drew his breath in slow and let his mouth close on the meat and bread in his hand. Her hand guided a mascara wand to the thin lashes around her eyes. It was a ritual of sorts, like the preparation of a virgin before her wedding night. He ran his tongue across his lips and let the wetness settle upon them like dew.

It was a struggle at times to resist the urge to remove himself from the car and bolt through the window where her finger was pressed, drawing bored circles on the glass. Her eyes peered down toward the south end of the street and his followed suit. Her eyes were waiting, wanting and anticipating something that he couldn’t possibly understand. He chewed a bite of his sandwich a

hundred times over and marveled over the outline of her body in the window. It was hesitantly seductive, like a frightened Madonna, scarred with the subtle loss of a woman who has passed a few birthdays and children. Still, the muscles beneath the softness of her skin quivered and defined the gentle arc of her torso.

“I’m no better than a pervert,” he muttered between mouthfuls of turkey and cheese. That never stopped him, however. She disappeared from the window and he closed his eyes, hearing his own chewing in his ear canals and the sound of her footsteps as they padded down the front hallway toward the front of the house. His eyelids raised just in time to see a blue sedan pull swiftly into the driveway and come to stop just inches from the garage door.

A speck of mayo moistened the side of his mouth and he let it remain there, not caring about its presence one way or another. Her fingers were sliding open the lock on the door; carefully, deliberately and with a nervous excitement. It would stick and she would have to lean her weight into it to force the deadbolt out of its housing. Robert blinked twice and tossed the crust of his sandwich onto the deserted wax paper lying on the passenger seat. A lanky figure emerged from the sedan, straightened his khaki dress pants and slammed the dented door behind him. He scrambled up the sidewalk as the door flew open, just long enough for him to slip inside and slam shut again behind him.

The thought of him standing there in the entry way with a lazy smile plastered across his face made Robert’s stomach begin to churn. He started to open a bag of chips and thought against it, throwing it across the car to the floor board. He wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel until the whites began to show on his knuckles.

The innocence in the world had begun to stifle him. Down the street a group of children played, tossing a football from one side of the yard to another. The school bus had just dropped them off. He turned his head to watch them through the window and counted the number of heads darting through the grass.

“Five,” he said to no one. “No, six.” Maybe seven.

They were lucky. Innocence, or in some cases perhaps stupidity, could be a blessing. It could also be a curse. Sometimes, it was nothing but fate’s way of keeping you blissfully unaware of the warfare taking down your mind, your heart and your unhinged sanity.

It all started as something benign. In the beginning, he had never intended to let things get so far. It was an accident, nothing more. She was completely unaware of his presence, but he was fully aware of hers. She was dancing in the mirror, joined this time by a shadowed figure behind her, writhing and wringing her body like a snake. It was innocent. It was unplanned. It was an obsession. One day a week

at first, then maybe two. Soon it was three, then four and before he knew it Monday through Friday had become prime viewing time.

The curtain dropped in front of the bedroom window and a shadow passed behind it. Robert jumped as an excited squeal of laughter pealed out from one of the children down the street. She would take her time with the encounter, but be speedy as well. There would be music and her hips would sway in time to the rhythm. He would watch her, admiring from a prime viewing spot on the bed and wondering how long it would take to get her panties off when the song ended. Robert stifled a bitter laugh. If he had to guess, he would say three seconds. Maybe four. On a good day, they might already be lying in a puddle on the floor before he ever strolled through the bedroom door.

The alarm sounded on his phone and he fumbled to find it wedged between the car seat and the center console. With a quick wipe of his face, he put the car into drive and forced his foot down on the gas pedal. The trees and houses raced by and within minutes he found himself sitting in his regular space in front of the office. With a sigh, he placed his phone into his pocket and ambled back inside to the cold, uncaring cubicle that was waiting for him at the far end of the office. When his back was resting comfortably against the swiveling computer chair in front of his desk, he placed his phone on the table and stared at it for a moment. Inside his head, he was counting. She should be ready. Clothes would be picked up and arranged on her body, wrinkles smoothed away. The smell of freshly sprayed perfume would be strong in the bedroom to disguise the smell of musk and aftershave that surely lingered. Her eyeliner would be fresh, pointed at the corners of her eyes like a cat and smudged just enough to give her lids a smoky, seductive appeal. The lipstick would be perfectly applied with just the slight hint of liner to keep the inevitable bleed of color from escaping the confines of her lips. A little mint to top off the potion would mingle with the Chanel and just enough sin to smother his nose and cause his lungs to heave in a cough.

Robert tapped the desk twice and reached for his phone, retrieving it and pressing the number quickly. The phone rang once, twice and then a sudden click.

“Hello honey,” the breathless voice answered.

Robert swallowed hard and tapped a few keys on the keyboard. “Having a good day sweetheart?”

Amber Cook's work has appeared in Literary Mama, Adanna, Deep South Magazine, Toasted Cheese, All Things Girl and Dzanc Books' Best of the Web series. She lives and writes in Tennessee.

Sidney Thompson Tony’s Balloon Arch at Hank Hood Automall There was something about ballooning up the lot that could put Tony in a zone. Like everything else in life, though, having the right partner with you was key, and Cooper the newbie proved to be a fast learner of the slip-knot. If you tied a string to a balloon the way you tied a shoe, it’d take you all day to finish the job, and then the wind would rip it loose in no time. But if the stringer could keep up with you, making his slip-knots and cutting his strings, you could get in a rhythm—red, white, blue, red, white, blue—until you began to think more clearly and actually have legitimate realizations you wouldn’t have even on the deadest day. That is, if the stringer hadn’t done a line of meth that morning and wasn’t talking non-stop in your ear, the way Garrett would be doing right now if Tony hadn’t encouraged him to run balloons outside with Roy. “You calm me better than my medication,” Heather had whispered to him last night over the phone while she was taking a bath. He liked hearing that, and hearing the trickle of water running off her raised foot, and imagining that, and imagining her cleaning his house, things like that. She was still on a prescription of Lortab for back pain from when her husband shoved her while she was taking a shower a couple months ago because he’d thought she might be having an affair with one of her Facebook friends, which she wasn’t, not with anyone, and at first her response was that he was being stupid, and when he persisted, she’d said, while shampooing her hair, never imagining he’d plunge at her through the curtain, that maybe she should. She said he’d never done anything like that, but they had been fighting a lot, and the fighting always escalated when they hadn’t had sex in a week. That was all he wanted from her anymore, she’d said. If she wasn’t talking dirty, she said he wasn’t listening. But Tony calmed her, so she wanted to have sex with him, sex every day, and somewhere around the time that Cooper began picking up the pace and all lulls were eliminated, he realized why he calmed her.

“Present your partner with regular walkarounds.” That was one of the lessons from the book The Deal on Love, which he liked because of its relationship to car sales. The idea was that by routinely identifying your partner’s best features and then putting into context how those features benefit you, your partner knows you appreciate her and need her fully. If you’re showing a truck, you can’t just point out the tow hitch and the transmission cooler and say, “Hey, it’s got a tow package, and it’s a helluva tow package!” You have to do the whole walkaround, because side airbags might be the customer’s thing, or

roominess, or fuel efficiency, whatever, and then you have to explain how safe and comfortable and financially and environmentally responsible they’ll be to buy it. You have to apply the sales process to love, as to everything else. Oh, Heather, you’re good looking and good feeling, certainly that, but you’re also sweet and fun, really thoughtful, an excellent server, and by what you say I can tell you’re a terrific mom. So being around you, Heather, makes me a happier person. That’s what Tony did better than her husband.

He heard Garrett and Roy coming up behind him choking back laughter, and Tony knew Garrett had shown Roy his text messages from Danielle that morning. On the way in to work, Garrett had received the first one, which he’d read to Tony while Tony drove: “I had fun kissing you last night.” It was such an innocent thing for her to say, much sweeter than she usually let herself seem, that Tony had cringed a little that Garrett had shared it with him.

Then by the time Tony and Garrett had reached the lot and were parking, Garrett had received his second text, and being too stupid to realize that she was only trying to get his attention the only way she knew how to get it from guys too stupid to appreciate an unmarried girl with no kids, he laughed and showed Tony his phone: “You know I love to suck you.” And then during the morning meeting, and by this time Danielle must have been at work herself, though instead of drawing behind the front desk as she was always doing, she was typing on her phone: “I’m wet.” She was so quiet he’d often wondered what she was thinking. He couldn’t believe it was this.

“Hey, check out the latest, Tone,” said Garrett, all hyped up, holding his phone out for him to see for himself.

Tony didn’t really want to look, but Roy was having such a fit, and Cooper was even reading it and now laughing, as if he knew what was going on, so Tony couldn’t help himself: “I want to have crazy horse sex with you.”

The jerk. He had to find a new roommate. He had to stay focused. He had to make his balloon arch.

“All right, Cooper, get over here,” he said. He reached for the string, then once he’d spooled out about twenty feet and cut it, he handed it to Cooper to hold. “I’m gonna show you how to make a balloon arch, and I’ve made a million of them.”

Tony took a red balloon from the bag of balloons because he liked to stay in order—he’d need thirty balloons in all, ten bunches of red, white, and blue—then mated it with the nozzle of the helium tank and inflated it.

“You have to tie the balloons to one string, you see,” he said as he tied the balloon to the string. “You can’t tie balloons to individual strings and then tie them to one arch string the way some people will do.

No good. Looks like shit, and it’s not full and bunchy enough, not like grapes.”

To keep them both focused, Tony explained the whole procedure as they went along, and Cooper, the professor, ate it up. And Tony thought, as he and Cooper carried the finished arch, bobbing and slithering through the showroom like a Chinese New Year parade dragon, past Danielle with her head down at the front desk, and then outside as they worked together tying the arch ends to the rails on either side of the walkway for ups to walk under, that maybe he could actually make a good dad to a kid that wasn’t his. Him. Tony. Think of that.

Sidney Thompson is the author of the short story collection "Sideshow." His fiction, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared or is forthcoming in such literary journals as the Southern Review, Carolina Quarterly, Prick of the Spindle, Ostrich Review, Ragazine.CC, Danse Macabre, 2 Bridges Review, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, NANO Fiction, Atticus Review, Ray’s Road Review, The Story Shack, The Fat City Review, and Connu. He lives in Denton, Texas, where he teaches creative writing at Texas Woman’s University.

Visit www.crackthespine.com to review our submission guidelines or to subscribe