Crack the Spine - Issue 137

Crack the Spine

Literary magazine

Issue 137

Issue 137 February 4, 2015 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2015 by Crack the Spine

Cover Art: “Spine Anatomy� by Kitty Oberly Kitty Oberly is a current student at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, majoring in Illustration. She enjoys creating art, reading, listening to or creating music, learning about the world, wishing she could make a million graphic novels, trying to write and talking to animals. Her art can be seen anywhere from schools, art galleries and other planets.

CONTENTS

Minnie Joung Love in a Box

Strider Marcus Jones Salted Slug s

Fikret Pajalic

Spider Tied Our Feet

Joseph Fonseca The Question

James Babbs

Pledge

Samantha Barrett About Love

Minnie Joung Love in a Box

Yuni wondered whether a coffin could Thanksgiving and Christmas. No one contain such sounds of love. The church was filled with Korean immigrant families who had settled in Fontana. They couldn’t afford to pay for a church pianist, but the fifteen year-old girl had played the accompaniment to the Hallelujah Chorus of Handel’s Messiah in its full complexity at Christmastime a year ago. They were satisfied and she was swept into the proceedings. The choir director possessed such sophisticated musicality that he brought a sense of worldly culture into the church community of shopkeepers, clerks and short-order cooks: and so they could dream.

She played for weekly Wednesday evening services, choir practices before and after Sunday morning services. And there were special practice sessions for choral concerts celebrating Easter,

seemed to notice that she might be somewhat young for such responsibilities, weddings, baptisms and this -- her first funeral.

Mi-jo Kim was dead. Yuni could see her ink black hair parted down the middle, framing her face, rosy and fresh even without make-up. Apart from lying in a wooden box, she looked hardly different from when she used to dash in for choir practice with books in her arms after classes at Mesa Community College, sit in her place in the alto section and rest her eyes. She had had an all-business determination about her, especially when wearing what looked like the vest and pants from a man’s suit, as she had often done. Yuni had sometimes wondered if they had been her father’s, slightly too large, even on Mi-jo’s statuesque frame. Yuni pictured Mi-jo standing at

her place in her choir gown like the rest, somehow glowing with youthful beauty, more than anyone. It was so easy to picture her standing there: and yet, she had died of pneumonia, found in the one-bedroom apartment she shared with her mother in the Fontana desert, strangely and wrongly gone, consumed by a force surely too powerful to withstand.

For the funeral, Mi-jo’s mother sat in the front pew alone. She and her husband had deferred having children until they thought they could afford them. So many years had elapsed before Mi-jo was born that her husband had died of old age when Mijo was still a baby. Although her hair remained as dark as Mi-jo’s, several front teeth were missing. She covered her mouth with her hands when she spoke, so the gaps were hard to see at first. But what Yuni couldn’t help but notice were her hands: dark purple splotches, enlarged with arthritis and grotesque.

She had heard people

whisper as if sparing Mrs. Kim shame that she had worked at motels as a maid in Korea, just as she did in Fontana.

None of the young men Mi-jo’s age had captured her attention. Yuni had watched several of them over a year trying to engage her in conversation, one by one asking her to join a group of them who went to the local diner after practice. (It was cheap and the vinyl looked like leather.) When she politely refused, their heads would bob as if they were indifferent.

Three months ago, Yuni had detected an odd smile cross Mi-jo’s lips during choir practice. Within a few weeks, she had spotted it again, and then again.

When Mr. Lee had practiced singing his solos, unfurling his right hand in the air, his hand trembled like a feather. He and Mi-jo would exchange glances as if he held a fragile moment in the air, afraid he would drop it. From then on, Yuni watched from her bird’s-eye view at

the piano where she could see both of their faces as if sitting in the balcony of a theater. As weeks passed, Mr. Lee, an old bachelor, became more gaunt, his jawline more angular, his voice more beautiful than ever. At the same time, Mi-jo’s face became only more youthful, more divine and aglow, and soon their joy so apparent in his singing and on her face, Yuni did not need to sense anything more to know their passion for each other grew like a gemstone born out of desert rock.

Would it matter that he was more than twice her age, his back and shoulders beginning to curve, his gait no longer brisk? Would they wait to have children?

As Yuni accompanied his solo at the funeral, she did not imagine that underneath the over-ironed suit, he might have worn a blouse of white linen, like those worn by poets in the time of Shakespeare. She did not imagine his collar rended open, strings undone in passion, Mr. Lee writing

long letters of lyrical love in ink, melodramatic, helpless and bound up in her perfection. The flat ridge of his long nose, the square openings of his nostrils, and the tight formation of his lips pulled up warm and aching tones like the sounds of an oboe from the depths of his body. Yuni pressed down the velvet hammers of the keys and the pedals, softening her already softer tones as she watched his chest rise and then followed the crescendo of his tenor, as if ringing for the ages from a hilltop, a mountain, a moon of Jupiter— until at last he sang as if he stood in the constellations begging her to return to earth. He poured such beauty in the box that the mourners sat spellbound, and the young accompanist followed him to the last note. It faded tenderly into silence, landing, finally, like a veil over her exquisite face.

Over several weeks following the funeral, Mrs. Kim sat in the front pew on Sundays. She wore crisp new

clothes and a new pair of dress shoes, no doubt gifts from Mr. Lee, or so everyone thought. No one imagined that Mi-jo had secretly worked three jobs (not only two), madly saving money in her dresser drawer, ignoring a nightly wheezing and severe shortness of breath to her peril. No one imagined that the tiny diamond solitaire on Mrs. Kim’s craggy finger was a gift found on Christmas Sunday deep in Mi-jo’s drawer. In search of the smell of her, Mrs. Kim had grabbed Mi-jo's socks, her underwear, clenched them in her purple hands and then, as if they were loose treasures, stashed them into her toothless mouth, until she came upon a blue velvet box, mixed in behind Mr. Lee’s letters – this gift from Mi-jo for her mother. No one imagined the pouring of such love in a box.

Two years later Yuni left Fontana, and many years later she would wonder if they continued to dream: she would wonder what they imagined.

Strider Marcus Jones Salted Slug s

your words stung, and hung me upside down, inside out, to watch you swan turned shrewhairbrush out all memory and meaning, from those fresco pictures on the wet plaster ceilingthat my Michaelangelo took years to paint, in glorious colours, now flaked and full of hate. the lights of our pleiades went out, with no new songs to sing and talk aboutsuspended there inside sobs of solitude and infinite despairlike soluble syllables of barbiturates in exhaust fumes of apology and regrets. you left me proneto hear deaths symphony alone, split and splattered, opened on the floor, repenting for nothing, evermorelike a salted slug, curdled and curled up on the rugto melt away while you spoon and my colours fade to grey.

the heart of truthintact in youth, fractures into fronds of lies and trust, destined to become a hollow huskbut i found myself again in hopes congealing pools and left the field of fools to someone elseand put her finished book back on its shelf.

Fikret Pajalic Spider Tied Our Feet

My girlfriend, Ida, has bad dreams. They make her body squirm and stain her voice with fear.

“These dreams,” she says, “they’re night terrors. I did the research.”

“Maybe you should see our doctor,” I say.

“Doctors! They’re all quacks. You said it yourself. Been seeing them about this since I was little.” Ida shakes her head. Her hair gets caught between her eyelashes.

I said that about doctors after being misdiagnosed with conjunctivitis. I kept pouring these drops in my eyes, day and night to no avail. It turned out I was allergic to the cheap fabric of our new towels. Later I found out the dead giveaway for conjunctivitis is a green discharge from the eyes, which I never had or was asked about. But generally I trust doctors.

I don’t think it matters what Ida or doctors call her dreams. They’re something.

Ida always starts with her feet. Like a cat burying its poo. First there’s a small jerk which fast increases into furious pedalling. Usually, I wake up before she really goes off. Before she screams and sweats and kicks around. Before she clutches my hand until there’s no blood left in it.

Now it’s good for me. I’m wired to her while we’re sleeping. It’s like we are connected with these tiny threads. It’s like a spider tied our feet with its silk.

Most times I manage to calm her down and I’ve learnt to fall asleep after. I’m not sure if it’s better for her. She was grateful in the beginning, but now she doesn’t say much on the subject.

She told me how these terrors are real, like she’s really falling from a building or being chased through the woods. I never pressed her for more details. Knowing more would change things, I thought. I liked things the way they were. I felt we were going someplace, together. I left Ida’s dreams to her.

Ida works from home. She transcribes these police audio files from court proceedings and investigations.

“These files,” she says, “this should give me a million ideas for my writing.”

Ida used to write everyday but now her written words came to a trickle.

“Nothing,” she shouts, “not a fucking speck of inspiration.” Her hair is in her eyelashes again. “It’s like the more I listen to this and the more I transcribe, the less I want to write.”

During the night Ida wakes up stroking her arm. I call her name and tell her all is okay. I think she’s awake but she keeps rubbing her forearm telling me it’s burning.

“Make it stop.” She pleads.

I ask, “Stop what baby?”

“Fire. My hand is on fire.” She cries.

I hug her and rub her hand but she keeps saying, “Make it stop.”

Ida is someplace else. I take her to the bathroom and put her hand under the running faucet. Slowly the rigidness leaves her body. It takes her another five minutes to fully come to.

“I was on fire,” she says back in bed.

I give her a few moments and then I ask if I could take a photo of her.

“What a strange thing to ask,” she says but agrees.

Ida is my photography subject while I’m trying to get into a part-time course. I need to build up my folio, which is full of cityscapes and still life. I need some people in it so I started photographing Ida a few months back.

I photographed her many times and I think this, the way she looks after her dreams, could be something different. She says she understands. She says she’s curious to see the photos. A little worried but curious.

But it’s too dark just with a night lamp and when I turn on the light Ida squirms. She hides under covers so I give up.

We wake up with our legs entangled. I get up and open the curtains. She covers her head with the blanket and uncovers her feet and makes a grunting noise. She’s so adorably lazy in the morning. Likes to lie around for a while.

It’s Sunday and I have no plans so I stay in bed with her.

I fasten my eyes on the floorboards and watch the dance of light and shadows. The wind outside is strong and comes from the west. The big blue gum tree creaks and leans over and the branches and leaves tick the window glass. Tree shadows dance on the floor creating patterns I think are worth capturing on film.

I get my camera, wind the film forward to an unexposed frame, twist the focus ring on the lens until the scene in front of me becomes pin sharp. I check the exposure needle on top of the viewfinder, steady my hand and press the shutter release.

The sound of the shutter blades opening and closing is still reverberating when I begin imagining how the print will turn out. I can already smell the

darkroom. Developer, fixer, stop bath, watching the print appear under the red light.

I haven’t taken anything good in ages. When I talk to Ida about it she says, .

“It’ll pass,” and puts her hands on my shoulders and kisses me on the forehead. Like a mother kisses a child. This kiss annoys me.

Later, when I walk the streets looking to take some shots I still feel her saliva burning my forehead. I wipe the skin with my sleeve but it takes the whole morning for the sensation to go away. I come back home with a handful of rolls and I know every frame is crap.

Ida asks me how I went. I rip the film out of every single canister and let the light ruin the film. I squash it in my hands, throw it on the floor and stomp on it.

“Great,” I answer as I dump all of it in the bin.

Ida leaves me alone. To calm down I clean my gear, the lenses, camera bodies, filters. I do this for an hour. When I’m finished, Ida enters the room and tells me her mother is coming for dinner.

“Great,” I say again.

Ida leaves the room, not saying she reminded me earlier about it. She doesn’t give me anything to do, doesn’t expecting anything from me. This is fine with me.

At 6 pm Ida orders some Asian food from a restaurant. I can hear her giving them the meal numbers while she looks at their brochure. There better be Thai green curry as hot as the hinges of hell, I think to myself.

She asks for delivery to be at 6.30 pm. Her mother is coming at seven but she’s always early. Ida doesn’t remember her father; her mother’s been a widow that long. At 6.20 pm Ida puts some peanut oil in the hot wok and tosses in some chopped onion, crushed garlic and shaved ginger. She lets it simmer for a couple of minutes and then turns off the gas in the stove.

The aroma spreads through the flat. At 6.30 pm I pay the delivery guy and give him a two dollar tip. He looks at the coin, flips it in the air, catches it and then he winks at me Jackie Chan style. I like the guy and I stop him while he runs down the stairs. I ask if I can take a photo of him. I quickly explain what I do. He agrees but Ida comes from behind me, thanks the guy and takes the bags with food.

“Are you crazy, my mum will be here any second,” Ida snaps.

The guy is still there on the steps looking up at us. She puts on her softest voice, apologises, thanks the guy and tells him that we love their food.

The guy shrugs. “Next time you order, you shoot me then, okay?”

“Okay,” I say. I bite my lip and make it bleed. Heat spreads through my mouth. I go to spit out the blood right there on the landing but instead I swallow it. Ida’s mother might ask questions.

In the kitchen Ida is busy putting the final touches on her deceit. I go to the balcony and sit there looking in the distance. We rent the fourth floor flat and from our balcony you can see a highway in the distance and a turn off that veers to the right and takes cars into the suburbs. The peak hour traffic has died down. I can hear the ratatatata of a truck as it slows down. When the night is deep I often hear that sound. Sometimes I wish that’s all I hear in the night.

At the bottom of the turn off there is a small, grimy, hand-written sign that says, ‘We Sharpen Everything’. The sign is nailed to a tomato stake and every time I drive past I expect not to see it. I figure it’s a workshop where you bring your knives and blades. The building is old and has three worn out steps leading to the entrance. In the middle, the steps are sagging where countless feet walked. I want to go there and ask the guy who runs the shop if he could sharpen me. In my mind I see this old guy in coveralls shiny with machine oil screwing up his wrinkled face and twisting his head to the side.

He thinks I’m having him on. Then I would tell him that I’m worn out, that I need some sharpening. A moment passes and then we’d both laugh. He laughs because he thinks it is funny. I laugh because it is true.

“So good in the kitchen, isn’t she?” Ida’s mother says during dinner.

I nearly choke on my rice. Ida just smiles and with the chopsticks pushes her food in the bowl. I reckon the old lady figured it out.

I did this once when my parents came around. My parents cook with fresh vegies and fruit from their garden and go to restaurants only on special occasions. My father always complains about the size of servings in restaurants. He says it never fills him up.

So I pulled this trick on them once, but instead of Asian noodles I ordered kebabs. As soon as I served the food my mother smacked me behind the ears and told me I better cook proper food next time or she won’t ever come again.

“How dare you?” she yelled at me.

My parents stood up to leave when my father, a man who thinks subtlety is a place somewhere in Ireland, pulled out Ida’s contraception pills from his back pocket and shoved them in my chest.

“I found these on the night table,” he grunted.

There was no time for me to ask him what he was doing there. He fired another salvo at me.

“We want to see children before we die.” He growled and fixed his eyes at me like he saw a man with horns. “Do you think we’ll live forever?”

My mother squeezed out some tears. They accused me of having an aimless lifestyle and of being against nature but wisely they didn’t mention God. They knew Ida’s not big on the white bearded man in the sky. With Ida they were nice. My mother kissed her hands and told her she has their permission to smack me any time she wanted.

“Use the skillet,” my father added.

My mother apologized to Ida for me stopping her from having children.

“I thought I raised him well,” she said and shook her head.

She then turned to me and said, “A pretty girl like Ida won’t wait forever for children and marriage.”

Ida and I never spoke seriously about children or marriage. It was always something that might happen in the future.

After they left Ida was angry. She called them unbearable. She said they just might be the reason we won’t ever go as far as having children. I said nothing because I didn’t know if I wanted to ever go that far with anyone.

Plus there was nothing to be said on the matter of my parents.

Ida’s mum eats with some appetite for an old woman. After dinner I bring out biscuits and offer her coffee.

“How about next time we go to a restaurant for dinner,” I say. I can’t help myself. “There is a nice Thai place close by.”

Ida gives me the look but I don’t care. I’m angry about her sending away the delivery guy. I probably missed a good portrait shot tonight and she needs to know that.

The phone rings and Ida picks up.

“It’s my work,” she says, “there was a stuff-up with one of the files.” She goes to the study.

It’s almost nine. Ida’s mother will be leaving soon. We drink coffee and I don’t know what to say so I ask her something I’ve wanted to ask her for a long time.

“How come you named her Ida?” I ask.

“It was her grandmother’s name.” Ida’s mother picks up the napkin from the table and wipes her lips. Then she pulls down her bottom lip and shows me a little red dot on the inside. She says she had that dot since she could remember. She says every night before she goes to bed she touches it with her finger and wishes that the next day is a good one for everyone in her family.

She says it is getting ulcerated and doctors advised her to remove it and she doesn’t know what to do. This is where Ida gets her mistrust in the medical profession, I figure.

“What do you think,” she asks.

“You don’t play with things like that,” I say.

“I thought you might say that,” she says and pauses. She puts her hands on the table and straightens her back.

“I see things are a little tense. How is she at night?”

I tell her about my efforts to control the terrors.

“You have to stop that.” Ida’s mother puts her hand on mine. “You do love her?”

I nod.

“You have to let her dream, let her fall and burn and be crushed. All of that is Ida.” “I wish something was said earlier,” I say.

“Somebody said,” Ida’s mother say, “lessons not learnt in blood are soon forgotten.” She puts her hand on my cheek and says, “It’s the only way for her.”

“Still,” I start, but she interrupts me.

“We can’t change yesterday.” She takes her hand off. “I’d like to see those grandchildren your father is talking about.”

I’m in shock again, but I know I shouldn’t be. Of course, a daughter would confide in her mother.

That night I feel the spider’s silk cutting into my ankles but I don’t wake Ida. I watch her scream and contort her body into backbreaking positions. It’s hard for me at first. It takes an effort for me to stay still, but soon it becomes easy.

Soon, it just takes love, lots of love. Love that drains me dry and I don’t know if I have enough of it for every night.

I watch Ida in darkness as she sits on the bed, unmoving. After a time, she wakes up all sweaty, breathing through her nose like an old draught horse pulling a load. She goes to the bathroom and turns the tap on. The water runs for a long time. She comes back to bed, lies down and falls asleep. In the morning I leave her in bed and go to the shops. When I come back, she screams.

“I wrote some stuff.” She shoves the papers in my hands and I start to read.

The story is about a little girl who won’t eat, drink, pee or poop until the parents figure out she wants a doll as a present. They buy her one, two, six dolls but every time the little girl cuts the doll’s hair off until one day they bring her a doll with red hair. She starts eating and pooping. When parents later ask her why, she tells them because her hair is on fire.

I tell Ida I like the story. She’s happy. Her feet are barely touching the floor.

I want to kneel down and kiss her feet and bite her calves.

“I’m starving,” she says, “lets eat, something that’s been fried into oblivion.”

While we eat homemade chips and fish fingers Ida says, “Take a picture of me.”

She gets up and poses. She slumps on her heels and takes this weird position with her head resting on her clasped hands and her hands on her knees. I start clicking.

Ida says, “I want to see the photos tonight.” She taps the camera. She reads my mind. I lock myself in the bathroom and start assembling my makeshift darkroom.

It’s almost midnight when I pull the print out of the stop bath and put it in the water to wash. After a few minutes, I turn on the main light and pull the print out of water. I stick it to the tiles above the bathtub and see water leave the fibers of the paper. There are little rivers coming out of Ida’s eyes.

I watch the print, straight on and from both sides. Ida, in the photo, is looking right at me. I remember the moment I pressed the shutter. I see her eyes, lips and cheeks. I see her go down on her heels and put her face on her hands and then on her knees, as if she’s sleeping with her eyes open.

She folded herself into one ball of delight and perfection. She gazed slightly upward, straight into the lens, into my eyes.

I take the print rubber squeegee and wipe off the tears from Ida’s face. I let mine run.

Joseph Fonseca The Question

It’s impossible to answer the question expect of a man who formerly made his now.

On the campaign trail he could tell them what they wanted to hear.

Resolutely, calmly, even reassuringly.

While stumping, he was a man of modifiable action. No platitude was too banal, no promise too unachievable, no grin too wide for him to unleash. He lived for the seemingly unscripted moment, ‘caught unaware,’ when he could look into the eyes, or better yet, the camera, and affirm thoughtfully, “That’s a good question.”

But now? Now the unrelenting deluge threatened to all but consume him. This was the job he fought for, the job he had sacrificed his health, sanity and hairline to attain. The business partner who shared his bed and birthed his son only spoke to him when cameras rolled, while his Vice had all the characteristic charm one could

living as a bureaucrat. How cliché: The most visible man in the world was lonely.

He could deal with isolation. What was politics if not an absurd march towards shamanistic solitude, positioning oneself as the intermediary between ‘the People’ and the ineffable, platonic ideal of ‘Democracy?’ This path was chosen for him before he knew what school subjects interested him, before braces straightened his immaculately white teeth, before he had learned to like girls. If he hadn’t been the one calling the shots, at least he never had to fret through his 20s wondering what it all meant.

He spoke the words, took the photos, suffered the slung mud of skeptics who rightfully assumed he had no original ideas, and he won the seat.

Grayer for his efforts, he still struck

an impressive pose, equal parts GQ and Time’s ‘Man of the Year.’ It shouldn’t have mattered, but: He looked the part of the President of the United States, the part played by movie stars with far higher approval ratings than he could ever hope to carry. They hated his policies and decried his ideology, but they didn’t mind looking at him when he stood before Congress and told them what they didn’t want to hear.

His handlers were now his cabinet, a judiciously pruned firm of not-exactlyfriends who believed in him or didn’t not believe in him. Well, their loyalty had paid off and everything they had worked towards for the better part of decades had been achieved. Buy him a second term and their ambassadorships, book deals and political careers (future presidencies?) were all but assured.

Was it any wonder, then, that the only moments he enjoyed were those brief few each day spent with his eightyear-old, Graham? Graham didn’t call

him “Sir,” with that vaguely condescending deference that implied, “You’re only here because of us.”

Graham didn’t hand him briefings with certain bad news inside. And the questions Graham asked, he could answer.

Some questions, though, defied him.

The magazine interview was all part of the job. For the first couple months, he had been told, he could expect two or three media interviews a day, minimum. Most of them covered the same ground and this interview had started out no different, running through topics like taxes, immigration and abortion. Safe territory.

But then, the question. The interviewer set upon him with that relaxed, earnest smile which suggested the next topic would be casual, no policy.

“So,” the man from Rolling Stone leaned back, “what bands are you listening to now?”

He stared back at the man, silently,

and blinked. Blinked and blinked.

Stared and blinked.

And then, finally, “Next question, please.�

James Babbs Pledge I want to make myself invisible when I enter this room I don’t want her to see me I don’t want her to turn around and look at me with those beautiful dark eyes I want to slip into the spaces next to her I want to almost touch her I want her to feel me when she doesn’t know I’m there I want to follow her everywhere I want to walk with her through the darkness and the light I want to hide in the corner of her dimly-lit room I want to hover there for a long time

waiting while she takes off her clothes I want to watch her stepping naked across the tiled floor

Samantha Barrett About Love

When Anna got up that morning, she had no idea how much of the day she would spend thinking about love. It was the furthest thing from her mind when she pulled the parking ticket from her windshield wiper in the still predawn. Street cleaning. Again. The Pittsburgh Parking Authority always nailed her for that. She stared down at the pink and white slip, and the bitter cold air seeped through the skin of her fingers as it threatened to reach the bone.

She seriously considered just crumpling it up and walking away. Instead she folded it in half and put it in her wallet, knowing full well that she was not the kind of person who could ever leave things undone.

The first time she thought about love was when she pulled into the school parking lot and found that Coach Bryson had cleared the snow out of her parking space. Twenty-five years her senior and on the verge of retirement, Coach B didn’t give a shit about teaching gym class or coaching the boys’ soccer team. But since Anna wasn’t a fifteen year-old boy, he didn’t hate her, and being parking space neighbors they usually ran into each other at some point during the day. He had become some kind of cross between an uncle and a brother-in-arms, and when he wasn’t telling Anna she should be teaching Chinese instead of Spanish, he was bad-mouthing the other teachers under the pretext of bringing her coffee during her free period. He reminded her of her father, who had spent most of her college years spinning the phrase “those who can’t, teach!” and putting snow tires on her car every winter before she even thought to ask.

The parking lot was devoid of people as Anna shut her car door and balanced yesterday’s quizzes on top of a precarious stack of papers. Her heels click-click-clicked against the cold pavement as she made her way to the main building, spartan and bleak as a penitentiary. The dim haze of dawn was just beginning to lift as she trotted up the steps and pulled open the heavy glass door. Early morning was when she best liked the school. The halls, normally full to the bursting with students and noise and anonymous projectiles, were silent. There was an emptiness to the enormous building that Anna found comforting. She liked seeing the place at rest, before the chaos of the day reminded her exactly why night school pamphlets littered her dining room table at home.

Anna shifted the folders in her arms and dug her room keys out of her leather shoulder bag. The thin strip of classroom she could see through the window on the door was dark, and after the lock clicked she trod the familiar path to her desk without turning on the light. Depositing the folders on the cluttered surface, Anna let out and audible sigh and stretched her arms over her head. Today she was looking forward to a barrage of angry students; the test scores had not been good. She separated that folder from the stack and let her hand rest for a minute on the blank and unassuming cover. What she couldn’t explain to herself was the deep sense of guilt that came with handing back a failed test. Anna had told them to study. She’d spoon-fed them the information. Reminded them all week that the test was coming. And still…

She turned on the lights and left her door open, returning to her desk to prepare for the imminent invasion of homeroom. At least in that respect she’d been blessed with a gaggle of studiers—complete silence for the first half hour of the day.

The failed-test folder glared up at her from the corner of her desk, promising evil. Anna plopped her bag onto her lap and dug through it, checking to make sure she had a full pack of cigarettes. The second time she thought about love that day was when she found her phone nestled in the bottom of her bag. When she dug it out, she read: “Text message, Hal: Want to get coffee Saturday?” For a moment, she stared at the little screen. Then she hit delete.

Students began to filter in around 7:15, and Anna turned on the wallmounted TV for the morning announcements. She pulled her blonde hair back into a neat bun at the base of her neck and opened her binder of lesson plans. Hal wanted to get coffee. Of all the things he might have wanted to talk about, getting back together probably wasn’t one of them. Anna stared at today’s lesson plan without really reading it. She wasn’t sure how she felt anymore, about the whole thing. The split in September had been amiable, as far as break-ups went, but somehow she doubted that the man who’d said, “I just don’t feel that way about you anymore” would have changed his mind in the space of six months. A few more students trickled in as the homeroom bell rang, and she nodded at them as they took their seats. She still loved Hal, of that she was absolutely certain, but several months ago it had stopped being about happiness and started being about something else. Anna was exhausted from torturing herself about it.

The morning announcements were largely about the approach of the Spring Formal, and Anna’s normal group of studiers pulled their heads out of their books long enough to be derailed completely. The room, abuzz with excitement, filled with a palpable sense of hope unique to the anticipation of a high school dance. Anna pulled out a thick yellow highlighter to try and

make herself pay attention to the lesson plans. When the bell rang, she gave up completely and went to stand outside her classroom door. As mandated by the principal, teachers had to monitor the hallway between classes. The mad press of students surged along like tidal currents. Anna looked from face to face, all of them familiar, most of whom ignored her unless they crossed the threshold into room 205. When the bell rang again she closed the door.

Like her homeroom, first period Spanish was electric with excitement about the dance. The Folder of Doom quickly crushed their spirit, along with that of Spanish 101 during third period, and fourth period Conversational Spanish. Anna made it to lunchtime feeling rather at peace with the world for having littered her classroom with disappointment and panic. After the initial guilt, she felt a strange detachment that happened every time. This had been the last quiz before the final; the last gasp before the plunge. She knew that she would be inundated with emails tonight from angry parents who wanted to know why she hadn’t properly taught their children the material. Anna hated giving out failing grades, but at some point she had to let go. She could only help these students so much.

Maybe she was losing faith in herself, she thought, as she sat down at her desk to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a plastic bag full of corn chips. In her first few years of teaching, she had tried as hard as she could to make sure every student passed her class. She had stayed late to tutor, answered every parent email with recommendations on how their child should study. What had happened between then and now? She paused in raising a corn chip to her mouth, contemplating the thin curl of salt and grease. She had become exhausted from that, too; the constant, allencompassing effort, only to be met with disappointment. Anna was all too

familiar with that by now. The school bred it in spades, so if you brought it in with you, you were already fucked.

The third time she thought about love that day was during sixth period, Advanced Spanish, when the first shots were fired. The chalkboard behind her was filled with verb conjugations: past preterit, perfect, imperfect— everything that would be on the final. The ten students who had made it to the advanced level course copied down the information in practiced automatism, having been the ten tests in the folder who had achieved a higher grade than a C. A sharp crack echoed down the hall and through the open door, and with remarkable instinct, though none of them had ever experienced it before, everyone knew what was happening. Anna stopped talking immediately, dropped the chip of yellow chalk into the metal tray, and hurried to close the door. She turned off the lights. The students were out of their seats. One tried to open the window, but Anna gestured to the wall under the chalkboard instead. She let the two youngest students—a pair of sophomore girls—shelter under her desk. The rest crouched in the chalk dust, hidden from the view of the narrow window into the hallway. The door only locked from the outside. Anna sat with her back against it.

And then she thought about love. Her students hunkered together, some crying, all shaking, all wondering whether they would make it out of the classroom. She sat with her back to the door because she knew she was their best chance. It was not a passionate love, like a mother’s love for her children, but a resignation of love. Anna knew all of them: Tori, Marcus, Kayla, Brett, Jessie, Kyle, Emma, Tyler, Matt, and Drew. They had been ghosts passing through the veil of her life, never touching, never really aware. Anna gently leaned her head against the hard wood of the door. She held her hands

in her lap to keep them from trembling. These kids needed her. She was their best chance.

A shadow passed over the window. One of the kids let out an audible gasp.

Anna closed her eyes. They all waited. The shadow hovered over the light streaming in from the hall. Anna held her breath and kept absolutely still. The tiniest sound could betray them. She wondered whether anyone had been shot already, or if she would be the first. Coach B came into her head, and she pictured him hunkered under his desk in the boys’ locker room, waiting in his foxhole for the bomb to drop. She thought about what her dad would say if he could see her huddled in a dark room with her students, barring the door in the only way she could. “Don’t be a hero” seemed to fit. “I love you” probably wasn’t at the forefront, but she knew it was there. Then she thought about Hal. A cold breeze from the open window brushed her face, and Anna opened her eyes. Something hard and metal thunked against the door. One of the girls huddled under the desk gave a tiny gasp. Anna looked at her. It was Tori, a girl with an unbreakable habit of texting during tests. Normally, Anna couldn’t stand her. But as the young girl raised a shaking hand to wipe the tears from her cheeks, Anna couldn’t think of anything at that moment that mattered less. The shadow lingered for another moment and passed on, turning into footsteps that drifted down the hall. Maybe the shooter thought they’d all jumped the single story down to the rear parking lot. Maybe they’d found someone else in the hall, and the shots that erupted a few seconds later were more than just the discharge of a gun. Anna looked all of her students in the face, every single one of them. They looked back, their tearstained faces

empty of the hope and excitement that, this morning, had been so prevalent.

This place was a prison to them now.

They waited another hour before the SWAT team came through and gave the all-clear. Anna stayed with her students, shepherding them out onto the campus and toward the gas station across the street. The whole school was there, cluttering the vast parking lot, a teeming mass of fish in a shallow tank.

Anna looked around, searching the parking lot for something she didn’t quite realize until she saw the back of Coach B’s red baseball cap. He turned and caught sight of her. She waved, too far away to say anything over the cacophony. His worried face became less grim, and he nodded. They stood like that for a moment. Brothers-in-arms. Coach B nodded again and disappeared back into the crowd.

The patchwork of letterman jackets, backpacks, and dress code-violating midriff shirts were a blur that made Anna dizzy. She drew away from the chaos and pulled her phone out of her pocket. She had seventy-two new voicemails and one text. Turning her back on a local news reporter begging for an interview, Anna clicked on the message first.

“Text message, Hal: I know we’re not really talking, but will you please let me know you’re okay?”

Anna’s finger hovered over the reply button. For a moment, she seriously considered texting him back. Then she closed the message. She called him instead.

Contributors James Babbs James Babbs continues to live and write from the same small Illinois town where he grew up. He has published hundreds of poems over the past thirty years and, recently, a few short stories. James is the author of “Disturbing The Light” (2013) and “The Weight of Invisible Things” (2013).

Samantha Barrett Samantha Barrett graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and received her MFA in Creative Writing at Carlow University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 365 Tomorrows, GeekSmash.com, Voices from the Attic, 10/ten, and The Chaffey Review. She has been a guest of Strange Animals Pittsburgh reading series, MadFridays reading series, and has curated Saturday Night Storiesreading series. She is also the owner and head writer of Red Murder Mysteries. Samantha loves living in Pittsburgh, and includes the city in her writing as often as possible.

Joseph Fonseca Joseph Fonseca has been published in the Washington Post as well as Third Wednesday, the Waterhouse Review and many other journals. He was the winner of the 2012 Abstract Quill Short Story contest and his travelogue, “10 Cities / 10 Years,” has been featured in US News and World Report and the SeattlePI among other outlets. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and runs the website, 10cities10years.com.

Strider Marcus Jones Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and ex civil servant from England with deep Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry are modern, traditional, mythical, sometimes erotic, surreal and metaphysical. When not writing, he can be heard playing his saxophone and clarinet (just ask his neighbours). His poetry has been published most recently in The Screech Owl, Catweazle and The Gambler magazines; Vagabonds: Anthology Of The Mad, mgv2 Publishing Anthology, Killer Whale Journal, The Huffington Post USA and Writer’s Ezine.

Minnie Joung Minnie Joung is a literary fiction writer. She is at work on a collection of short stories and her work has appeared in the Atticus Review. She is also working on a novel currently titled, “The Mathematical Handbook for Scientists and Engineers.”

Kitty Oberly Kitty Oberly is a current student at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, majoring in Illustration. She enjoys creating art, reading, listening to or creating music, learning about the world, wishing she could make a million graphic novels, trying to write and talking to animals. Her art can be seen anywhere from schools, art galleries and other planets.

Fikret Pajalic Fikret Pajalic came to Melbourne as a refugee and learnt English in his midtwenties. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming inMeanjin, Overland, Westerly, Etchings, The Big Issue, Writer’s Edit, Regime, Verity La, Gargouille, Verge Annual, Seizure, Tincture, The Minnesota Review (USA), Fjords Review (USA), Bird’s Thumb (USA), The Red Line (UK), Structo (UK), and JAAM (NZ).

He is working on a short story collection funded by Arts Victoria.

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