Crack the Spine - Issue 130

Crack the Spine Literary magazine

Issue 130

Issue 130 October 22, 2014 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2014 by Crack the Spine

Cover Art: “Rainbow Wash” by Katherine Minott Katherine Minott, M.A. is an artist whose photographic work reflects the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi--the celebration of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Her work has appeared in Camas: Nature of the West, New Mexico Magazine, Visual Language Magazine, and the Santa Fe Reporter’s Annual Manual. Please visit her website at katherineminott.com.

CONTENTS

Lisa C. Taylor Leash Laws

Gail DiMaggio En Route, 1995

Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons 15 Minutes of Princess

Judith Thompson The Country of Marriage

Elizabeth Peterson The Medicine Jar

Dvorah Telushkin The Well

Rob Essley Sledge

Lisa C. Taylor Leash Laws

I perch in trees, like a squirrel or woodpecker, always looking over people’s heads, spotting a bald spot or the flat part where their hat rested too long, warming the owner’s ears. It’s not like I’m nimbler than the others, just keener in my vision.

No one knows when his or her treetime will come. Some folks seem to be glued to the earth with sinews underground like electrical wires.

They talk to each other in a way that wastes language, not at all how animals communicate. I speak to Serge by humming even though his room is two doors down. He knows my language, came from a deciduous forest in Maine, and once helped a black bear find a suitable den for hibernation.

Because he’s mostly human, he doesn’t need to hibernate.

He used to stay at the St. Francis

Shelter when the snows came. Like me, he dislikes human food except for berries and nuts, an occasional bird.

Carol brings me granola in a plastic container. Glass is better because it’s shiny but the Strongmen won’t allow it. They are used to making the rules, even ones that make no sense like when Carol can visit, and how much time I’m allowed in the sunroom where I can watch the jays raid the birdfeeder, see the cherry trees shriek into blossom. Carol always tells me I’ll be home soon, and I think of my favorite maple tree. I don’t wound it like the people who insert a metal tap in the tree’s torso, hang a bucket to collect the blood.

They don’t understand that it is the sap that keeps the tree strong. It’s important to keep one’s fluids to oneself.

“Susan. Time for your pill.”

Eliza is a Strongman even though

she’s female. She wears their uniform of blue cotton with white whispery shoes. I know she wants to read my dreams so she can understand the language of plants and animals but I don’t let her. I’ve learned how to stick the pill in my left back molar, the one with a cavity. When I go to the loo, I spit it in the toilet and flush, watch it spiral down into the septic system but I worry about fish losing their dreams.

I open my mouth like a good robot.

Eliza put me on Step Five because I’m one of the well-behaved ones. I don’t tie my sheets into knots or spit out mashed potatoes. As long as I can have some nuts and berries, I am quiet as a snake. It is April and soon they’ll open up the courtyard. Carol can take me outside and maybe through the gate to Keeper’s Park down the street. You have to be a Six to go there but all it takes is opening my mouth and sitting in the semicircle when Strongman Dr. Benton comes in.

“Click, clack, click. How do you feel about that, Susan?”

“Click, clack, clack. I feel fine, Dr. Benton.”

There’s a dogwood sapling outside the window that has been trying to get my attention. She shakes her greening limbs and tells me stories about the vole that lives underground.

I promise to save her some water from the pink plastic pitcher by my bed so her buds will open like promises.

Carol joined the human race at seven. She was never one of us but it’s safer that way. She speaks their language so they let me go places with her.

They punch in a series of numbers on the little metal door and then more numbers on the bigger door until it opens to the land of unfenced trees and boxy houses.

“My mother needs fresh air. Do you think I could take her to the park on Saturday?”

“Click, clack, click. Group goals,

individual goals, Step Five.”

“Great. I know she’ll make Six by then. She’s so pale, it will be good for her to get outside.”

Kurt spoke that language, too. He kicked me out early. At first it felt dark and strange because I didn’t fit into his forest, buried my roots beyond the park, next to the hiking trail where Carol got lost one day.

“Susan, why weren’t you keeping an eye on her?”

Kurt had a kind face, promised to keep me safe when we met on the bench at Creeley Park. I told him about clear cutting, how they were mowing down my relatives with chainsaws, and he laughed, called me an environmentalist, a treehugger. He couldn’t see the depth of the cuts, the muscles, and all those severed limbs strewn by the path.

“I love how you’re passionate about this, Susan. I’ve met so many people who don’t care about the earth.”

I married him because he promised

there would be flowers and a trip to see the redwoods in Oregon. We had pink petunias and blue and yellow pansies in ceramic pots so we could plant them outside Kurt’s house later.

Kurt built me a little wooden bench in the garden, just like the one in the park.

“You can watch your roses and columbine now.

You’re a funny woman, Susan.”

Then he thought I wasn’t funny anymore, sometime after Carol was born.

Babies can understand all languages. That’s why they don’t talk; they’re too busy listening. Once they start to speak, they become selfabsorbed like the rest of the humans.

Their words start to click and clack, and they talk about weather and what kind of poison is best for getting rid of dandelions and ants. I wanted to keep Carol away from all that but Kurt took her from me, put her in the red rectangular building with painted handprints on the wall, and children

who brought their lunches in plastic boxes, didn’t understand what the trees and dogs had to say.

Kurt doesn’t visit me anymore. He married Adrienne and they moved from the deciduous forest to a place called Stamford. Everything is oblong and gray there. Carol calls it the city.

She’s grown, lives with Seymour, her Irish setter. When I’m on Step Six, the Strongmen will let her bring Seymour to visit me and we can talk about where he’s digging and what the earth smells like in April after a rain. Dogs like to talk about smells since their noses are so close to the ground. If allowed to roam, they reminisce about all the animals that have wandered in their path and I feel less lonely listening to them. Kurt thought that barking was the dog just taking a breath, a sharp intake of air but I know better. Barking is conversation, a complicated social network that dogs develop to expand the confines of their yards and homes. Sometimes

they escape, arrange to meet by the river or down the street, warn each other about the dreaded animal control officer with his green truck.

Leash laws are incarceration for canines. I want to destroy all the leashes and short-circuit the invisible fences.

“I have to get an invisible fence for Seymour. They have a leash law in New Fordham now. A little boy was bitten by a Pit Bull and now everyone has to restrain their dogs. I know how you hate that, Mother.”

Pit Bulls are angry because people fear them. They don’t want to argue or bite. Little boys and girls tease dogs because they weren’t taught to respect animals, and a Pit Bull is like a wrestler. Broad chested and muscular, they don’t have to put up with anything. Some days I wish I had more Pit Bull in me.

When I make it to Level Six, they hold a party for me. There are cupcakes with pink icing and nuts and

berries. I don’t eat the cupcakes but I drink three cups of a sugary punch the color of cranberries.

When Carol arrives with Seymour, I’m already dressed in my walking clothes, complicated buttons and zippered trousers. It’s silly but I need them to think I know how to look like them.

“You look wonderful, Mother. I like that blue fleece on you. It matches your eyes.”

You never hear dogs or trees talk like this. They don’t waste language like humans do, saving it to nudge each other or warn of weather or people. Carol drives a red car with gray seats. I buckle my seatbelt even though it makes me feel like the restraints are around me. I know Carol won’t drive unless I do this because there’s a law. Humans like to make laws about how fast you can go, what you need to do when you get to one of their lights or signs, and where you can park.

When we get to the park, I see all my friends lined up to welcome me.

The curly maple has grown taller in my absence. Seymour nuzzles my hand because he knows what’s it’s like to only see the outdoors through a square pane of a window or an electrified plot of land. Carol lets him off his leash so he can run. He pees on the side of one tree and then another to let his friends know he’s been here.

When Carol takes out the picnic basket, the one with juice, nuts, berries, and some sort of seedy breed with nut butter, I practice the pill-inthe-molar kind of pretending.

“Delicious lunch, Carol.”

“Thanks, Mother. I think you’re doing so much better.”

Seymour looks at me with his golden eyes, makes a little gurgling sound in the back of his throat and I hum in response.

When I stand up, at least a half dozen trees bend to point out the path ahead. Two red squirrels wait for me

by the pines; I saved peanuts and sunflower seeds in my pocket. Now I know why they call these shoes sneakers. While Carol is pulling out the Gala apples, I make a run for it, swooshing over the pine needles and dirt beds, my eye on a patch of sky tangled up in the hair of the Douglas fir trees. The wind gives me a push and I propel myself faster and faster, watching the smallest squirrel vault from one tree branch to another, poking his head against the bark.

Carol is calling me, click, clack, click, clack but it’s not a language I speak anymore.

Gail DiMaggio En Route, 1995 Afraid of a spring storm on its way to the canyon, we flee downhill to Flagstaff where CNN is breaking the Oklahoma City bombing – striated rubble, grey dust. The building before. The building after, and Court TV’s got the front gate to OJ’s house – flagstones rippled with blood.

My husband holds my coffee and I lean my head between the narrow wings of the wall phone to call my sister, Lenore.

Her mechanized voice jigs in the air. Off her meds, he mutters.

We are sure we are helpless.

We watch Nightline, CBS This Morning, consider a hunt for what’s left of Route 66.

Lenore’s son calls to describe the wail of patrol cars in the driveway, and my sister shivering in the stoic grip of cops.

Someone in the café turns up the volume.

Nicole said, I wanted to be a wonderful wife but who can love a woman emptied out on the stones?

Lenore’s on an iron bed in the rat warren of Pond House.

The hotel lobby shop sells overpriced calendars – the year in Byzantine icons.

April’s St. Catherine, the little martyr looking across the sales floor as if she could meet my eyes It’s Sunday, everyone is watching OJ squeeze his hands into blood-warped gloves, or the fireman carrying a child, blood matted in her hair, smearing her face, speckling her tiny socks, legs sprawling like our little girl’s when we carried her upstairs asleep.

Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons 15 Minutes of Princess

Stepping into The Great Movie Ride’s break room, I was surprised by its dinginess. The small red couches were saggy and tattered; the fluorescent lighting soul sucking. The other tour guides were all crowded around a long cafeteria table in the middle of the room staring up at a large television watching Days of Our Lives.

Except for the TV, this employee back room wasn’t too different from the one at the movie theater where I worked in Virginia. Even the uniforms were strikingly similar with their polyester black pants and white button-up shirts. I could already feel the familiar tingle of chub-rub on my inner thighs caused by the unholy trinity of itchy synthetic fabric, humidity, and what I like to think of as womanly curves. A year after graduating high school, I’d moved

from the summer humidity of Virginia to the year-round humidity of Florida, added red suspenders and matching pageboy cap to my uniform, and about a dollar an hour to my paycheck, but here in the house Mickey built, I was no longer a mere employee. I was a

Cast Member.

Sitting at the table, I was nibbling at my brown bag lunch when Chip ’n’ Dale came in, pushing past me with their wide waggle bellies while their character handler, an androgynous figure in a yellow shirt and khaki shorts, trailed behind them. No one else looked away from the TV, where Marlena was still locked away in her cage, but I was mesmerized by these life-sized cartoon creatures waddling around the drab break room, perusing the contents of the vending machine.

Oblivious to my lowly tour guide presence, Chip (or was it Dale?) pulled off his head and set it on the table next to me. I struggled to finish my sandwich as its dead chipmunk eyes stared into mine, hollow but still watching. The disgruntled-looking guy underneath was red-faced and sweaty and a powerful funk wafted from Chip or Dale’s disembodied head. This was my first day on the job

as a Great Movie Ride tour guide at Disney’s MGM Studios, now called Hollywood Studios.

Most people party in college, but I wonder how many have guided a large tram car into a perfect replica of Munchkinland from The Wizard of OZ with only three hours of sleep and a massive hangover. Slumped in the driver’s seat, I would pray for just a few more moments of peace before the ride’s blaring audio came on, signaling us that guests were entering the park. The painted faces of animatronic Munchkins would pop up all around me and, in the pre-audio silence, I could hear the clackety-clack of their tiny mechanical jaws chewing at the air.

There are many ridiculous things about working at Disney, however nothing compares with being able to say that you lost your virginity to Goofy. It makes for a great one-liner at parties. “So how’s that work,

logistically, with the big head?” friends would ask. “What’s he got going on under those baggy pants?”

As if my first boyfriend, my first everything, was actually the gangly, dog-like creature in a funny hat instead of a guy from Long Island named Mike. Maybe it would have been better if he was?

I was proud to be cast as a tour guide at The Great Movie Ride, a slowmoving tram ride located inside a perfect replica of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Everyone knew Movie Riders were the best at spieling—reciting a script at great length—in the park. We took guests on a twenty-two minute magical journey straight into the greatest films of all time. The worst spielers were sent to Muppets or Star Tours, where all they had to do was hand out 3-D glasses and herd people from room to room. The Tower of Terror cast members liked to pretend they were above it all with their

spooky old hotel bellhop uniforms and aloof Twilight Zone attitudes, but they weren’t fooling anyone.

I loved giving directions with the special Disney two-finger point, wiping off the benches on “Hollywood Boulevard” first thing in the morning after the park had been freshly hosedoff in preparation for a new day, and brightly reminding guests to “Keep their arms and hands inside the vehicles at all times!” as I guided my tram in to the ride. Pointing out the animatronic Gene Kelly, who was singing in the rain, I would wink and give my red suspender, the one with my Kelly Jean name badge on it, a proud snap.

Mike also worked at MGM Studios, but in the character department.

Disney has strict height requirements for its employees, and, at a little over six feet tall, Mike was suitable for Goofy and some other characters, including Woody, the pull-string

cowboy from Toy Story. That summer there was an elaborate Toy Story parade and every day, at three o’clock, the other Movie Ride tour guides and I would tape down the parade route that ran in front of our ride. It was our job to corral people behind the white masking tape lines to clear a path for the prancing characters and huge motorized floats.

When Woody’s float rounded the corner I would stare up at Mike towering high above the crowd, dancing stiffly inside of Woody’s oversized cowboy costume. For safety reasons Mike was tethered to the float, so he could only wiggle his hips to the music and pretend he was the one talking into the comically large red microphone he held, when it was really Tom Hanks’ prerecorded voice that echoed through the park delivering Woody’s famous catchphrases.

“That’s my boyfriend up there,” I’d

smirk to myself with the giggle of a girl who’d recently discovered sex in the happiest place on earth. What would all these people think if they knew I’d seen Woody with a woody?

Gives a whole new meaning to, “There’s a snake in my boots!”

I lived with Mike that summer.

Theater majors at the University of Central Florida, we were both working full-time at Disney until school started back up in the fall. We carpooled together in the morning. At night, I’d watch with pure adoration he practiced new character routines in nothing but his boxers. Mike’s face was truly goofy as he danced a box step, twirling around with a kitchen broom. It should have been perfect. I should have been proud of him, and I was. But there was also this gnawing sense he was part of this special club, and I hadn’t been invited.

Great Movie Ride tour guides were the top dogs in attractions, but in the

hierarchy of the park, attractions ranked below the Disney characters. I felt invisible, nothing but a glorified usher sweeping up outside the ride with my clunky porter and broom, parking strollers, and pulling up all that sticky parade tape we’d just put down, while the characters danced merrily along their way. This soured my Disney day.

When he was growing up, Mike’s family went to Disney World every summer, and after his dreams of playing baseball ended with being benched on his community college’s team, he transferred to college down in Florida to follow an alternate dream. For Mike, working at Disney was a childhood fantasy come true, but it wasn’t perfect. The heavy suits strained his back, and he often suffered from dehydration. Then, when a park guest ran in front of Woody’s float to take a picture, the driver stopped short throwing Mike

off the top. The safety harness snapped him back, saving him, but also permanently screwing up his back. Being shoved inside a suit was taking its toll on Mike’s body, so he decided to audition to be a face character. One of those lucky few selected to walk and, more importantly, talk as they strolled through the park interacting freely with the guests.

I said I was just going along with Mike to keep his little sister, who was visiting from Long Island, company, but secretly I desperately wanted to be a face character. Being cast as an all-powerful Disney Princess was my ticket into the club. The world around us was built on the happy ending, and even though I’d once seen Cinderella call Snow White a bitch, broken up a fist fight between two adults over who was first in line, and my Goofy boyfriend’s bad back was making him increasingly cranky, I still believed life

had to be better if you were a princess.

We waited with hundreds of other hopefuls in the sticky auditorium for our numbers to be called. Mike was called up first, but he didn’t make the cut. When my turn came, I stood on stage in a line of girls, facing forward, and then turning to the side. Peeking at the other girls’ profiles, this baby definitely got a bit more back and, at five foot eight, I was an inch over the princess height requirement. One lousy inch separated me from every little girl’s dream of being a pretty, pretty princess. Determined, I slouched and wished my heart out.

Then, a Disney miracle happened.

“Part of Your World,” Ariel’s song from The Little Mermaid, played over the loud speaker. My favorite song! As a roomful of strangers judged my face and body for its princess potential, I held my chin up and quietly sang along. Wouldn't I love, love to explore

that world up above? Out of the sea.

Wish I could be… The Disney powers had to see me now and make me part of their world.

“So, so? We saw them talking to you, what did they say?” Mike’s little sister Katie eagerly asked, her eyes gleaming as brightly as her mouthful of braces.

“Yeah, you looked like a whacko up there singing. What was up with that?” Mike sniffed, his nasally Long Island accent giving the words an accusatory bite. Hunched in a folding chair, he peered up at me from beneath his red Floral Park baseball cap waiting to see if I had made the cut.

“Really? I didn’t realize I was singing,” I lied. Purposefully not answering Katie’s question to draw out the moment, making Mike wait a little longer before saying, “But I guess it worked somehow, because I got picked! I got a callback!”

Mike’s blue eyes sparkled with genuine affection as he gave me an “Atta girl!” but there was a snarl to his smile. He had a funny tooth, which had been knocked out playing baseball when he was younger and was still black at the top. It tainted his grin with a permanent darkness, a darkness that only went away completely when he bounced around in character. Then he was the Mike I fell in love with, but beneath the goofiness there was this whole other guy, an angry guy who bitterly held grudges. I was super excited for my callback, but as Mike pulled his cap down over his eyes and sulked off I also felt smug satisfaction over being picked instead of him. Mike had been cast in the coveted show at school, while I worked on the props running crew. He signed autographs as Goofy, while I parked strollers and wiped off wet benches. This time, I’d won.

At Disney, height determines your

character, and I’m no princess.

Instead, I had been called back to audition for Esmeralda, the streetwise gypsy with a heart of gold being stalked by Quasimodo. Close enough.

After making it through a face-to-face audition, you’re put into full hair and makeup to see how you look.

Reporting to a large gymnasium for my callback, it was partitioned off into dozens of tiny glamour pods each containing its own stylist. I don’t know if Disney also holds auditions for its stylists because mine, an energetic man named Stefan with blond hair and frosted tips, had been perfectly cast. Cupping my chin, he critically studied my features.

“Beautiful. Beautiful skin! Do you even have pores? And look at those dimples! My dear, you got this.”

“Dimple,” I corrected him.

Uncomfortable with his gushing, I smiled big and to one side emphasizing the singular dimple on

my left cheek. “I only have one.”

“Well, my dear,” Stefan countered, “it’s big enough for two!” There’s no arguing with a man as he tweezes your eyebrows. “Look up. No blinking!” After applying a heavy basecoat of foundation, Stefan shaped my brows, lined my eyes, and lengthened and curled my lashes with thick coats of mascara. Shoving my frizzy brown hair into a skull cap, he placed a massive curly black wig on my head. The final touch was a gypsy scarf tied in my wig and pulled to one side so that it draped over my sunburnt shoulder. Stefan stepped back to examine his creation. “I love it.

I love it! But of course I love it, I did it!”

Holding one of those big-handled hairdressers’ mirrors up to my face, I sat stunned. My skin was unnaturally beige, almost orange, and my red rouged cheekbones could cut steel.

Topped off by a huge head of dark

black curls, I was less a pretty, pretty princess and more a drag-queen Wonder Woman. The weight of the wig made it hard to control my bobble wonder head. When my turn came, Stefan handed me a sparkly gypsy scarf “for flourish” and called after me, “Girl, you got this!”

A blank-faced man and woman sat behind a table in the small fluorescent-lit audition room. After some welcoming chitchat, the woman asked me to improv.

“For a minute or so. Give us a sense of how you would be Esmeralda, as if you were out and about in the park.”

Fiercely panicked, I smiled back at them so hard my singular dimple ached from the force.

This was my moment. I had to show them I “got this,” as Stefan so firmly believed when he transformed me into this striking, if not somewhat masculine, gypsy princess. Talking in a high breathy, with a touch of husky,

voice in an attempt to perfectly meld princess with Demi Moore — who voiced Esmeralda in the film — I grabbed the man’s hand (because the woman was looking at me like I really was a whacko) and improvised reading his palm. “You have a very strong and long lifeline,” I said. “See here, how it branches out, here, towards this, this other part over here…”

If someone had read my own palm at that moment, would she have predicted Mike and I would break up in the fall and then continue to secretly sleep together for over a year, sneaking around behind everyone in our gossipy theater department’s backs, including our closest friends, and other people we were dating, in a destructive pattern of illicit sex followed by volatile fights? Is there a line on a person’s palm that warns against spending Valentine’s Day in the backseat of your ex-boyfriend’s

car hiding under a smelly old blanket while he smuggles you out past his roommate so you can go to a cheap motel? I imagine not.

“This line here,” my princess slash Demi voice wavered as I was secondguessing my decision to paw the man, “this line means you will experience great fortune at the hands of a stranger…” Then, for my big Esmeralda finale, I awkwardly twirled around the room with Stefan’s sparkly gypsy scarf.

“No!” Stefan wailed as I walked back to his go-go princess pod, wonder head hung in shame. I’d been cut and wouldn’t be proceeding to the next round. “And I was so looking forward to dressing you…” he sighed mournfully. As I filled Stefan in on my audition, he cocked a brow inquiring, “You read their palms?”

“His palm,” I said, once again correcting him down to the singular.

Stefan patted my hand as he consoled,

“Well, my dear, no one can say you didn’t make a choice.” I stared at myself in the mirror, silent while he went to work wiping the make-up off my face, untying my scarf, and removing the wig. My straggly brown hair was matted against my head. My dimple had disappeared along with my smile. Tomorrow, I would be back on my tram going around and around the same twenty-two-minute track to nowhere. Most little girls love to play princess, but do any of them imagine sitting still and watching as someone strips away the fantasy? Twirling around as Esmeralda, I couldn’t predict the future, but I’ve thought about this moment many times over the years as I’ve stared into mirrors, red eyed and wondering what it is about me that doesn’t measure up?

Shortly after my callback, the night after Mike’s family went back home to Long Island, we went swimming. I clung to Mike in his apartment

complex’s overly chlorinated pool, my head buried in his neck, his cool wet skin comforting against my cheek. It was so simple, floating there together as one amorphous being, and I never wanted to let go.

“Promise me it will be like this for a very long time.” I said.

“Like what?” he sniffed.

“This,” I replied, holding on to him tighter.

“Oh… Yeah. It will be,” he said, hugging me back, and I believed he meant it.

Life would have such a better shot at being magical if Chip never took his smelly head off and put it down on the break room table. Mike and I were many things beneath our costumes — bitter, immature, competitive — but we were also in love. Once upon a time.

Judith Thompson The Country of Marriage

The terminal was plush enough for the rituals of departure but your train was late, delayed somewhere unnamed, so I waited with you on Track Number 3, seated on the grimy bench studded with cracked pink chewing gum, some child’s marker of territory or time and wished you didn’t hate airports or the destination or whatever it really was that made us sit here, having said everything that could be said, but still not enough, remembering taking the sleeper from London to Edinburgh and diving underground just before arrival in that chilly Scottish morning, crossing a border in our sleep and the farmhouse where the family gave us tea and the daughter slipped me a shilling to put in my shoe on our wedding day, which, or course, I don’t need now but keep anyway, like the smile I create as your train pulls out, you, at a window, waving, me, on the platform, wanting you to remember me, happy.

Elizabeth Peterson The Medicine Jar

Frank handed her the themselves into a kind of traumatized by his time gift, carefully and with great ceremony. Taking her cue from him, Helen gently pulled away the newspaper wrapped tightly around the object.

It was a jar, jade green in color with a cracked finish.

“It’s a Balinese medicine jar,” he said. “It contains an ointment that’s supposed to have incredible healing power.”

The jar sat on a woven disk that divided into four sections, each wrapping around the jar before rejoining at the top and weaving

handle. Attached to the lid was a carved wooden figure. A Balinese god of some sort, she imagined.

Leave it to Frank to come home from the war with something intended to heal her wounds instead of his own.

That night, after quieting Frank from his nightmares, Helen sat alone in the bathroom of their tiny home. She lifted the lid off the jar and sniffed at the contents. It smelled dark and exotic, the musk of rot and earth mixed with an overwhelmingly sweet floral scent. She thought of Frank,

in the Pacific theatre. She thought of the empty nursery down the hall.

She dipped her fingers tentatively into the dark ointment and rubbed it in slow, small circles on her belly.

Helen’s daughter, Karen, tried to hide her anger around her mother. She understood geography, but not when it came to familial duties. Why Frank Jr. and Hannah couldn’t tear themselves away from their lives long enough to help pack the house was beyond her. Her proximity to her

mother had also made it somehow her responsibility to find the assisted living center, to have the hard conversation about no longer being able to live independently, to watch her mother sit sullenly in her favorite rocking chair and stare out the center’s window as Karen carried in box after box and unpacked them. In the bottom of the last box she found an old green jar with a woven handle wrapped round with faded newspapers. She lifted the jar’s lid and sniffed.

“Ugh.” She said. “What is this? It smells like. . . I don’t know what. . . dead flowers.”

Helen sighed. “Take

it,” she said, without turning her head.

“You’ve taken everything else.”

Karen stood in the front door of her house holding the screen door open. “Take whatever you want,” she said as her daughter, Madeline, maneuvered her wheelchair into the open garage. “She was your grandmother.

You should have something to remember her by.”

But Madeline only wanted one thing. In the rehab center, when she first got home from Afghanistan, her grandmother had visited her every day. She made Madeline talk about the

war, about the things she had seen, the things she had done.

“Your grandfather would never talk to me about his war,” she would say, squeezing Madeline’s hands through the painful exercises. “It poisoned him.”

So Madeline talked and her grandmother listened, unflinchingly. In return, Madeline demanded stories about the grandfather she had never known. These stories and her grandmother’s voice became the rhythm of her workouts, the mantra to which she rebuilt her body.

Eventually, she forgot the particulars of all of

them, except for one. She rifled through the boxes in the garage, knowing it was there.

That night, alone in her bathroom, Madeline carefully unwrapped the brittle newspaper in which the jar was wrapped. She lifted the lid, releasing the faint smell of Jasmine. She dipped her fingers into the jar, tracing the paths of her grandmother’s fingers through its dark contents, rubbing the ointment onto the stump of first one leg, then the other. There wasn’t much left. She hoped it would be enough.

Dvorah Telushkin The Well In Waterford, Maine I climbed down a well.

For a book, To describe The bottom of the well, I climbed down, As Bill, The strapping rancher, Bill: Shoulders wide enough To bear a multitude of sorrow.

With Bill, I could climb down.

Deep down.

Terrified at first.

Terrified to look.

Terrified to step in.

But after 5 feet I felt safe.

Cool, cold, chilled yet safe.

Flying spiders

And moss And cobwebs It all passed by me Without fear.

The sturdy stones Were a bold comfort Like sipping a cup of tea I leaned against the cozy rocks.

Cold chilling and warm I go to a prison Dark and wild Murderous men Hands and arms that slaughter.

But to my utter shock An energy filters through An energy pure and white and light and loving Flushes through my veins Cleaning Burning out the hate How? How does descending to the abyss purify us?

How does the descent somehow uplift?

How? Will the Angel of Death, The Angel we dread Also lift us up?

On his coal-black-fiery-wings And carry us?

Carry us to a place of Burnt-away fear?

A place much less dreaded than we think?

Unimaginable now.

Unimaginable always.

Rob Essley Sledge

“Hey, Clementine, you ready to get going or what?” Greg’s voice boomed up from the driveway. Joshy usually didn’t respond to the stupid nickname. Most of the time, he just fumed and muttered and did whatever Greg wanted. It had been that way for all of the four years he'd known Greg, who was just a dickhead like that. Joshy just hated that stupid nickname. Seriously, who used a nickname that's longer than the person's name to begin with? They’d started calling him “Clementine” after he almost choked on a piece of fruit years ago, then ran around telling

everyone he’d almost died.

Joshy poked his head out through his bedroom window in response.

Greg’s voice set his nerves on edge like usual. “Yeah, just a minute,” he said, in a whisper-shout. “Be quiet—you’re gonna wake my dad.” Joshy was twenty-four, but lived at home and didn’t have plans to move out anytime soon. He fully intended to ride that gravy train into the sunset. Even after eight years of getting fucked up every night, wrecking the house, nearly burning down the garage with a “forgotten candle” (a made-up way to disguise their heavy meth use), his dad wouldn’t kick him out. That was a

fun night, worth every awkward interchange he’d had with his pops.

Joshy just had to hold it together for a while, wait for the old man to retire.

They’d be set for a long time. Last month, his dad tried to give him that addict intervention talk shit, but Joshy knew he could stop when the time came. When the pills ran out, he’d always have liquor. When the hangovers got too bad, he’d switch back to pills. Only on the rarest occasion had he shot up. It was damn good, so good he knew he could never do it again or he’d be dead in a week. That shit was for junkies, after all. Mostly Joshy just liked smoking meth, snorting it, or whatever he could get.

Joshy slid quietly out through the front door, leaving the old man passed out in the recliner. There was Greg, standing in front of his faded brown El Camino. Greg took a pull off his cigarette and flipped the butt in an

orange arc somewhere out into the yard. He climbed in and put his foot on the brake, as Joshy slid in next to Emily. She grimaced as Greg turned the key and the El Camino chortled to life. “This fuckin’ thing is too loud, Greg,” Joshy said. “You’re gonna attract way too much attention at two in the damn morning. You sure you wanna do this?” He couldn’t believe Greg had brought Emily. He knew how much Joshy liked her, and how badly he hated her fake relationship with Greg. Probably just brought her along to fuck with Joshy’s head.

Greg smiled, caught Joshy’s eye, and threw it in reverse. They backed out into the street and gurgled down the block, creeping along at twenty, headlights off. “Clementine,” Greg said, “you’re a bitch.” He laughed to himself and flipped on the headlights.

They picked up speed and before long found themselves hurtling up the 405 toward Sherman Oaks and The

Pharmacy, then off the freeway and running down some backroad through stretches of dark, curvy canyon.

Emily had met Greg at Joshy’s place when his dad wasn’t home, back before Joshy knew anything about smoking that poisonous shit. She was healthy then, all tan and plump and perfect and young. Joshy had known her since they were little kids, and really didn’t want her getting involved with Greg. But he was a friend too, and they ended up spending more and more time together, and then came the drugs. Greg was good at finding shit and seemed to know everybody, and his few years of extra experience made him much more knowledgeable about how much was too much, a lesson that Joshy and Emily had to learn the hard way. More than once.

She took a long pull off her glass and leaned her head back, exhaling a white plume of chemical smoke that

hung in the air like a sickly apparition.

Emily had first tried smoking crystal over Christmas break when they were in tenth grade. Since then, she’d had three of Greg’s abortions, dropped at least forty pounds, and lost a bunch of teeth. She was in rough shape, but Joshy had his own shield of denial and she had money, so he needed her around. He tried not to look at her face much anymore, because when she smiled it looked like she was in pain. Like someone was pulling her happiness out, all of it, through her eyes. She was a dried-up husk. She was a bag inside which things were deposited, many unpleasant things. Greg treated her like shit from the start, but had at least paid for the abortions. Father of the damn year, Joshy thought.

Emily’s mom had finally kicked her out. Just last week, she’d reached the end of her patience, pushed Emily out the door, and locked it. She threw all

her clothes out the window and threatened to call the cops. She didn’t even know about the abortions. Emily had been sleeping in the El Camino, but kept hinting to Joshy that she might need to crash at his dad’s place.

At least now, he wouldn’t have to deal with that shit. The truth was, he’d always wanted to end up with her, but she attracted monsters. Deserved monsters, even.

The rush of night air coming in through the window cooled Joshy’s face. He tried to relax, but the smell of burning methamphetamine lingered in his nose, like a siren song for law enforcement. He looked behind them.

Greg kept changing lanes, jerking the wheel, easing off the gas, then on. It was like riding with an old lady, with a head full of meth. They cruised along for a long time in silence, and Joshy wanted a hit so bad his throat itched.

He elbowed Emily gently and heard the glass pipe slip and fall to the

floorboard. Her eyes were closed and her head bounced, limp and lifeless.

She made a gurgling sound and didn’t respond to Joshy’s prodding.

“Greg, stop the car,” he said, his voice cracking like a teenager’s. Joshy reached over and shook Emily’s shoulder wildly, but she just slumped and vomit poured out of her nose and mouth. The car screeched and scratched into the gravel-strewn shoulder in a cloud of headlights and dust.

“Emily!” Greg stepped out and pulled her out of the car by her shoulders. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, and she folded up into a mess of limbs and dark hair. Greg tried pumping on her chest and blowing in her mouth, but had no idea what he was doing. She didn’t move.

Joshy crept out the driver’s side and knelt beside her pale body. He put a hand to her forehead and winced at the clammy touch. “We gotta move

her,” Greg said. His voice came out steady, different than before.

Somehow older. Like a stranger’s voice. Greg shouted through his teeth, “Now! Before someone comes. Grab her ankles.”

Joshy would have none of that.

“You’re out of your damn mind, Greg.

We can’t—“ “Get the fuck out of my way then,” Greg shouted, “I’ll do it myself.” And he dragged her by the ankles toward the edge of the road and strained to lift her limp body up and over the guardrail.

She flopped and cartwheeled down into the ravine, her white shirt visible in the moonlight.

Joshy wrapped his arms around himself and somehow suppressed a cry. The only girl he’d ever really cared for was gone. Down the hill, dead of some kind of major heart explosion. And Greg just pushed her down there, and now wanted to just go on down the road like a fucking

serial killer. Joshy thought for a long moment about just jumping off, pitching himself over the guardrail, maybe landing atop Emily’s soft body.

Maybe lie there awhile, collect his thoughts. Get his life together. Let Greg go do this job by himself.

“We got somewhere to be.” Greg climbed back in the car and started it.

Joshy flinched at the loud engine but kept his eyes on the murky ravine.

Greg was starting to lose his cool, revving the motor and bouncing in his seat with rage.

“Let’sfuckinggoClementineyoupussym otherfucker let’s go!”

Joshy climbed in and kept himself glued against the door the rest of the way down the hill, one eye sideways toward Greg. They rumbled along, not saying a word. Joshy took a hit off Emily’s glass, felt that familiar rush of endorphins, that fucking unstoppable adrenalin power that he loved so much. To hell with her, anyway. He

regretted just how little he believed himself. “How much farther is it, anyway?” Greg didn’t say anything.

Joshy’s high was thick, like he was floating off the seat a few inches, ready to rip a man apart with his hands. On his left, he felt the void where Emily had been, but couldn’t untangle the confusion in his mind.

Had that really just happened back there, or had he dreamed it? He was going crazy, just about to lose it, when Greg finally spoke.

“We’re ten minutes out,” said Greg.

“We’re gonna park up the block and walk. There are cameras and lights, so you need to pay attention to what I do. Don’t get me caught, Clementine, or you’ll be back there in the ditch with Emily.”

Joshy lit a cigarette and thought about it for a moment, how nice it would be to lie there, atop her stillwarm body, maybe help her soul get pointed the right direction. “Why’d

you just throw her down there like that, Greg?” he said, with an unexpectedly tight throat. He didn’t feel emotions anymore but sorrow piled up just outside the gates of his mind. He lit the filthy glass again, consoled by the swirling white smoke.

He sucked it clear, blew a huge lungful out into the California night, and coughed until he spat a bloody looch onto the pavement where they’d parked. His mind shuffled the night’s events into slots, arranged them first chronologically, then alphabetically, then scattered everything into a blurry mess as the meth took over.

“People die. We couldn’t get caught up there, with a dead girl in the car,” Greg said, pulling the car up a few inches so they could see beyond a Jacaranda through to the parking lot of the store. “She’d have been a liability anyway, judging by how lit up this fucking store is.” Greg hit the glass himself, then nearly passed out

from his own protracted coughing binge. They both lit cigarettes and climbed out of the car like a pair of low-budget zombies. They stood there silent, listening to the night’s hushed activity. It was as if the wind conspired with the distant jet engines and cars on the nearby highway to create a rhythmic whirring, just loud enough to be ashamed of itself for disturbing the otherwise robust silence.

Greg’s face lit up with each pull of his cigarette, and Joshy thought about the glow of brake lights, how they’d stopped up there on the hill, who could see them. His thoughts crossed over and impeded one another, bumping and obscuring like the crazy roads they’d have to travel to get back home, away from this frenzy of immediacy, this weird night filled with poisonous adrenalin. He could turn to the south and sprint away from Greg, who’d give chase but only

for a moment, and if Joshy’s heart could keep from exploding, he’d be up the hill, down the other side, and he’d merge onto the 405 like a fucking commuter. Road rage, and all that. He thought about the score, shook the crazy thought out of his head. Plus, Greg was huge and held that sledgehammer like an overall-clad hillbilly in a horror flick. A wave of poison flushed through Joshy’s brain, and he remembered how hard he’d been grinding his teeth.

He had to be in it until Greg’s bearded face, which Emily had referred to as a “Prison Pussy,” smiled at him and dropped him off at home, debt forgiven. Joshy wanted the experience of Emily’s death to be repayment enough, but Greg’s veins pumped with amphetamines and he couldn’t be stopped. Joshy knew Greg was crazy enough to kill him, even before he watched him throw his girlfriend’s body over the railing. The

first few bumps, when she’d hit the rock, sounded like a wet bag of clay hitting the floor. He’d never forget that sound, he knew that. It slapped and thudded in his mind as they walked toward the store.

Greg turned his head to face Joshy as they approached the retaining wall at the back of the property. There was no fence, just cameras. “Clementine, you gotta be careful. This part is where we make or break it.

Remember how I told you the cameras at the loading dock are real, at the main entrance, real, but at the far side of the store, where it backs up to the mountain, there’s nothing. We need to stay on this side of the retaining wall, keep out of camera view, and jump over when we get clear of the loading dock.”

“But that looks like a twenty-foot drop,” Joshy said, “and what makes you think the camera back there isn’t live?”

“Nobody’s stupid enough to climb the ridge and jump down so far.

They’ve been trying to reduce the amount of data they use, and this new hard-drive recording takes up a shitload of space. My cousin runs their IT, man. Stop bitching out so hard.”

Joshy wasn’t bitching out, he just didn’t want to go to prison. If that was bitching out, then he guessed he’d be a bitch. “No way man. How, then, do we get in the building once we’re down?” He lowered his voice to a haughty whisper as headlights lit up the front of the building. A car pulled into the lot, turned around, and squealed tires back onto the road.

“The hammer,” Greg said, handing Joshy the sledge. “We beat a hole through the block, just big enough for your skinny ass to climb in. You hurry the fuck up, I keep a lookout. This store’s one of the old ones, where the pharmacy lockup is right there in the back corner. They think it’s the safest

spot, but it’s right where your skinny ass will poke through. The camera in there is probably on a shutdown at night, mainly there for keeping the workers honest anyway. You get us a big bag of pills, and we shag it back on down the hill where we belong.” He flashed a gap-toothed smile that told Joshy he felt comfortable with the risk, even if Joshy got hemmed up in the store and caught and sent to jail, where he’d get to experience withdrawals that he swore he’d die before he lived through.

“How am I going to know which pills to grab?” Joshy asked, and Greg sighed and clenched his jaw. He thought better of pressing the issue, and attempted a smile, which made his teeth hurt.

Greg led the way, creeping along the back edge of the retaining wall’s swell, just out of the lit shroud of yellow. Joshy followed behind, listening intently for rattlesnakes or

the jangle of police keys. They all carried big things of keys on their belts, didn’t they? Off in the far reaches of the valley, the moon watched them through a sliver of a keyhole, egging them on. Joshy checked his phone—nearly four in the morning. They needed to get on with it, get in there and try to make a grab right at five, right when the hogs changed shifts and there would be a slight delay in their response. At the corner of the property, they crouched down and peered over the edge of the wall. A security camera, mounted high on the wall, cast a nasty shadow which pointed right at them like the sword of some demon, urgently, pointing them out despite the camera’s unfortunate placement at the end of the importance hierarchy.

Joshy took the hammer and dropped it, steel head first, down onto the concrete below. He scrambled down the retaining wall backwards,

clinging to the stepped blocks like a champion rock climber. He smiled internally, feeling like he could crush a man’s skull with his bare hands.

He’d have at least another four hours of solid buzz, but the crumbs he had left were going fast and Emily’s glass had just a hit or two left. He’d get them before Greg, if he made it out of there. Or a handful of Percocet, damn sure.

Greg was considerably louder coming down the wall, his size thirteens slipping more than once and his awkward bulk nowhere near as wiry and maneuverable as Joshy’s.

They moved, one after the other, instinctively, in the blind spot between cameras, to the corner of the building’s block wall. As cool as the night was, Joshy was sweating like a whore in church and mostly around his collar. Drenched, now somewhat chilled, he started to feel slightly less euphoric and alert. Not a good time to

have his buzz fade.

The store was like any big-box pharmacy, but Greg’s cousin knew the manager and, as luck would have it, the manager had gotten fired a week ago. Perfect scapegoat, Greg had explained to Joshy, who better to serve up to the hogs than a nervous little dude like the manager Carl, especially since he was such a drunk and wouldn’t be coherent when they came to get his ass. They just needed to avoid leaving prints, and not get caught. “Fucking gimme,” Greg had said.

Joshy had never really challenged Greg directly, but had let himself be heard more than once. “We’ll probably get caught, man,” he’d said.

“Real bad idea, dude.” But Greg didn’t care about anything but those two thousand yellow pills, 10mg apiece, ten bucks each, all fucking day. Joshy had to admit, getting a pocketful of those monsters himself didn’t sound

bad, and he could use some extra cash, too. Greg could also be quite persuasive and he didn’t know what it felt like to tell him no.

When he swung the long-handled hammer, it felt like the mighty crusher of inferior skulls in Joshy’s hands. He took a few solid whacks at the third block up from the bottom, stopping to pant for a moment, concerned his heart was beating too fast. Anxiety welled up, but was no match for the surging rush in his whole body. He couldn’t be stopped, at least for the next few hours. They’d probably get away with this. Greg pushed him aside and took the hammer in his meaty fists, gave the same block three immense hits right on-target. The block cracked, falling away in small chunks. Joshy ran his tongue along the bottom row of his missing and broken molars, watched the hammer strike the wall. With each huge impact, the sound echoed off the retaining wall

and startled him, even though he watched the full travel of the hammer’s head.

The interior of the block was full of concrete, and it took them way longer to whack through it than Joshy expected. Greg was a sweaty mess by the time they finally saw the dim glow of interior light, coming off a sleeping computer monitor’s screen saver.

Joshy bent down to examine the hole.

On one side, a thin piece of rebar protruded out from the concrete, like a rusty tooth in the mouth of a statue.

They worked together, brushing debris out of the hole, whacking the wall again and again, nearly thirty minutes’ worth of breaking a hole through the wall. Joshy tried hard to control his breathing, but could only think of Emily and her broken, crumpled body a few miles down the valley.

“Hurry up, Clemen—“ Greg started to shout, but Joshy cut him off.

“Don’t fucking call me that anymore.” Joshy didn’t have a tiny bit of mirth in his voice, just anger.

“You’re the reason Emily’s dead, you dirty piece of shit.”

Greg stood there smirking, beside the hole they’d just bashed in the side of the pharmacy, arms crossed. “This night just keeps getting interesting, eh Clementine? I mean, you’re actually coming at me like that?” he shouted, his voice rising, angrier and angrier, the drugs taking over. He turned, occupied with pulling handfuls of debris out of the hole. “You skinny little bastard motherfuc—“ With a mighty swing of the sledge, Joshy cracked a big irregular hammer-blow dent in the back of Greg’s head. The sound of the hammer connecting with bone sickened and exhilarated Joshy, who’d never listen to anyone call him “Clementine” again.

Greg crumpled into a pile of torso and limbs all splayed out at odd

angles, now fully useless. Greg’s skull showed through the skin in several places, and dark blood poured out at a surprisingly steady rate. Joshy whimpered and sniffled for a few minutes, his hands shaking. He looked down at the hammer, which he’d have to take with him to avoid being fingerprinted. But Greg’s car had been seen at his house, maybe. Joshy breathed through his nose. He’d have to get the pills now. The drug still fed him, and his heart pumped like a caged animal’s. He found himself standing beside the body of a man he’d despised, knee-deep in a crime he didn’t intend to commit. But the hole was there in the side of the building, so he struggled through.

He’d hoped to just reach his arm out from the wall and grab the percocet, but it wasn’t that easy. Because, of course, they’d busted a hole in the wrong section of the fucking store. It wasn’t where they kept all the pills

after all; to get to the medications he’d have to either bust a new hole or go through the inside of the store. He didn’t have it in him to break more of the building with a hammer. He knew he’d collapse trying.

The store was quiet, except the light whirring of coolers and displays, buzzing imperceptibly. He checked for cameras, and as luck would have it, he found a path over to the edge of the pharmacy counter that appeared to be out of camera range. At this point, the cameras weren’t going to ID him anyway, and he’d probably shave his head and lay low for a few years anyway. His mind flashed first to one body, then to the other, Greg’s matted hair and unfocused eyes, Emily’s cracking bones and thudding flesh. He gagged, tried to swallow a bit of saliva, but he was so dry. His rotten mouth tasted terrible. Get his life together, he would. No he wouldn’t. Had to get the pills after coming this far.

The pharmacy counter had a metal screen that connected up into the ceiling, with big Schlage locks securing it at each latch. He breathed through his mouth, trying to pry the edge of the screen over enough to slip through. He couldn’t move it enough.

When he struck it wildly with the hammer it just bounced and mocked him. He pictured the hogs catching him in there, making a racket like a parakeet in a birdcage. The pills, somewhere in that pharmacy, at least according to Greg, would turn things around for him. He had to get in. But Greg didn’t have good information.

Greg was dead. With the handle of the hammer, he popped the side of the mesh loose and formed a distorted hole big enough to fit his skinny body through. His patience gone, he rifled through drawers, smashing the locked ones open, searching for anything that said Oxycodone or Vicodin or Morphine or Heroin or Goddamn

Crystal Meth. His mind was starting to come unhinged and he needed to get out of there. The pills were all useless shit. He looked around, breathing fast through his mouth, winded from the frenzied effort. Behind the rows of shelves was a heavy steel door, which appeared to be a vault of some sort.

He smashed the door with his hammer, denting it and breaking the hammer’s handle in the process, but the door was solid. He smashed the wall beside the door, but there were steel plates behind the drywall. He cursed to himself and picked up the piece of hammer handle. He pushed it through the hole in the mesh and stopped, just as he heard someone’s voice. It said, in a soft woman’s tone, “Joshy? That you? Come on out.”

Without thinking, Joshy responded.

“Who is that? Emily?” He thought he saw the flash of a light coming from the hole he and Greg had busted in the side of the building. Was Emily back,

somehow rescued and there to join him without Greg’s bullshit interference? Would he, despite her mottled complexion and rotted teeth and worn-out body, be finally able to embrace her? His arm snagged on the mesh as he climbed back out and blood trickled down onto the floor.

Her voice, that mellifluous song, coaxing him along, told him to forget about the blood, that it would be okay and that nobody needed to worry about that.

She whispered to him through the hole, “We’re going to be together, Clementine, please come on out.” He’d let her call him Clementine just for now, that was okay. He scurried along, crawling back as he’d done before, out of the cameras’ sight.

“I’m coming baby, I’m coming,” he moaned, “just wait for me, please wait.” Joshy stuck his hands through the opening and sucked in his stomach to skinny-out the way he’d

skinnied-in half an hour before. “I’m coming, Emil—“ Halfway out, he felt a tear as the sallow flesh of his belly caught on the rebar. He remembered the rusty thing, cringed. He pulled himself out, and his lower half resisted. He tried to push back inside, but couldn’t. His body was jammed into the hole, and the rebar held him fast. With his arms, shoulders, and head out, he could just reach to touch the rebar piece, which was lodged in his flesh. Maybe touching an organ. A muffled voice came from behind him, inside the store, where he couldn’t see. A man’s voice, angry and deep and shouting something at him, then something was pulling at his legs. He screamed, shouted, kicked, flailed, and the pain in his gut intensified. With all the strength left in him, he pushed against the block, but the pain in his gut forbid him tearing his flesh farther. Joshy was trapped like an animal, caught like a rat. And Emily

wasn’t even there. She was up the valley, dead. She was probably being eaten by coyotes, or discovered by early-morning joggers.

Greg’s blood drained out in long, dark rivulets that converged near the storm drain in a puddle that glistened.

Joshy stared at it as the pulling on his legs got stronger and, finally, with one big motion, he was pulled back through the hole, his belly split by the rebar, and he grabbed for his stomach, but something was wrong. He felt the slick, wet feel of blood, but something else, like snakes, like he was covered in wet snakes or something. His guts were roped out around him from the trip through the hole, all green and glistening, torn here and there and spilling their putrid contents onto the dirty floor of the store. The hogs came, handcuffed him, flipped him over. The pain came in waves, deep and intense, like he was shitting out all of his insides, like he was vomiting up his

bloodstream and every poisonous thing he’d ever ingested. They came in and put his guts back inside him and made jokes about how he got stuck in the hole. Joshy screamed through the pain, finally calming down when they fed him morphine.

One of the EMTs, a stocky young Sicilian with a beard, said to one of the hogs, “You think this guy’s bad, you should see the one out back. Got a busted skull, deader’n shit. Bled completely out back there.”

Hog said, “Let’s go have a look,” and walked off as Joshy was rolled out to the ambulance. The diesel engine rattled and ground out a strange rhythm as they waited to go for what seemed an hour and, just as the sun brought relief to the long night’s gloom, they started up the curvy road that led back down the valley. Joshy’s pain was better, but he felt poisonous and torn and ruined.

As they came around the curve,

Joshy said to one of the EMTs, “Look down the ravine, there’s a dead girl down there in a white shirt, lovely and soft and so pretty.” He couldn’t believe how easily the words came out of his morphine and meth-addled mind. “And don’t call me Clementine.”

“You heard the crackhead, call it in,” the sober-looking young man said, then went back to talking on his cell phone.

Joshy’s breath was shallow and the pain in his stomach pulsed with each rapid heartbeat. The morphine they’d given him started to take the edge off, and he slipped in and out of consciousness. “You’re going to get your shit together this time,” that beautiful voice said. “For real, Joshy.”

The ambulance merged onto the 405, accelerated to a hundred, headed south through the mountains.

Contributors Gail C. DiMaggio Gail C. DiMaggio spent decades helping her husband, a jazz trombonist, pursue his music in a world where no artist ever gives up a day gig. Refusing to become discouraged, she writes about the life of an ordinary woman because for this she has all necessary credentials. And besides, as a friend recently told her, “What else have you got to do?” Self-exiled from New England winter, she lives and writes in Naples, FL. Rob Essley Rob Essley likes to explore the dark forests of human interaction. He lives near Atlanta, where things wriggle and squirm.

Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons’ work has appeared in Liars’ League NYC, Serving House Journal, Hypertext Magazine, and HiLoBrow. An alum of the Writers Boot Camp screenwriting program, she co-wrote the web series Intersection. She also created and produces No, YOU Tell It!, a “switched-up” storytelling series open to anyone who wants to share his or her story and experience someone else’s.

More at: noyoutellit.com.

Katherine Minott Katherine Minott, M.A. is an artist whose photographic work reflects the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi--the celebration of things imperfect,

impermanent, and incomplete. Her work has appeared in Camas: Nature of the West, New Mexico Magazine, Visual Language Magazine, and the Santa Fe Reporter’s Annual Manual. Please visit her website at katherineminott.com.

Elizabeth Peterson Elizabeth Peterson completed her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts in 1997.

Her work has been published in several small literary journals. She was the winner of the 1987 Phi Theta Kappa National Competition in Creative Writing and has been a finalist for the Loft Mentor Series Competition (19961997), Hunger Mountain's Howard Frank Mosher Short fiction Prize (2005), and Cutbank Literary Journal's Montana Prize in Fiction (2014). She currently lives in Boston with her Golden Retriever, Riley. Ms Peterson works as a freelance writer and teaches at Bay State College.

Lisa C. Taylor Lisa C. Taylor is the author of four collections of poetry. She is completing her first collection of short fiction. Lisa has recent or forthcoming work in Worcester Review, Map Literary, Bartleby Snopes, and Crannog. When not writing, Lisa enjoys cooking without recipes and getting lost on trails. She also teaches writing at a small college.

Dvorah Telushkin Between 1975-1988 Dvorah Telushkin worked as a personal assistant, editor, and translator for Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Yiddish writer who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her translations appeared in The New Yorker, and in collections of Mr. Singer’s stories published by Farrar Straus and Giroux. In

1997, she published her memoir, "Master of Dreams," telling the story of her twelve-year apprenticeship with Mr. Singer. The book received wide critical attention, including a review in The New York Times. The Weekly Standard called the book “a fully realized portrait of a writer… a reminder that the author’s life was as fascinating as his best fiction.” She is currently completing her first novel, "The Cry of the Loon." In addition, she has recently completed a one-woman show, In Search of the Perfect Pocketbook, which is currently being launched. In 2013, she published in the poetry journals, “The Light Ekphrastic”, “Literary Juice”, and “Orion Headless.”

Judith Thompson As an emerging voice in the Taos poetry scene, Judith has been involved in several curated ekphrasis events and has aired on KVOT, a local radio station.

She was also selected to read at the Society of The Muse of the Southwest (SOMOS) poetry series. From 2008–2012, Judith was enrolled in a poetry workshop with Sawnie Morris, and in 2009 she studied with Dana Levin in A Room Of Her Own Foundation’s poetry intensive. Her work has appeared in the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art and HOWL: The Voice of UNM Taos. A classically trained musician, Judith received her bachelor’s in music from Occidental College and, before retiring early, worked as a symphony orchestra executive. For fourteen years, Judith and her husband lived aboard a forty-foot sailboat. Now that they have come ashore, she finds passion in growing organic vegetables and fruits when she’s not immersed in reading and writing poetry.

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