Crack the Spine
Issue Twenty - Six
Crack the Spine Literary Magazine Issue Twenty-Six May 28, 2012 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2012 by Crack the Spine
Contents William Robinson………………..….…………..….…………....Ambush David Pointer………...……….….....….……Multiple Midline Incisions Donovan Saldivar.……………………………………….Anthony Green Amy Locke……….……………….….….Black Olives and Pheromones Jacob Ferrier……………………….………….……..Someone Else’s Life Zack Nelson-Lopiccolo………………..…………...After the Cremation Sandra Florence……………………………..…………….…….Vigilance
Ambush By William Robinson
My father likes to call early, even though Dale and I are sleeping. Usually it's to ask some inane question like, “Why do they make jelly jars so tough to open?” or “What's up with this guy Jimmy Fallon?” I can tell he’s been drinking all night—I can hear Simon and Garfunkel behind him, the jiggling of ice in his tumbler, the slight cracking in his voice as he gets around to Mom, because the conversation always gets around to Mom. He's still in love with her, even though he won't admit it.
This morning he says, “I hear she's taking a cruise to Alaska with Harvey. She hates the cold. And she's afraid of water!”
Later Dale makes his way into the kitchen. I'm still in silk pajamas, but he's in tie and suit, hair perfectly combed, the whites of his eyes clear from a perfect night of sleep.
“How come you never hear the phone?” I ask. “There could be a fire. Hell, you could be on fire!”
***
Every Tuesday I meet my mother at Hymie's on the Main Line for lunch, but today she shows up at my front door just as I'm off to work, the skin under her eyes swollen from crying all night. “I think Harvey is having an affair,” she whimpers. “What do I do?”
She's wearing a dead animal around her neck and sucking hard on a Virginia Slims worn to a nub. She zips past me, in a dramatic movie-starrish way, to the center of my living room, where she proceeds to pace back and forth in short tightrope movements.
“Why don't you ask him?”
She halts to face me. “Maybe it’s all an accident.”
I want to tell her affairs aren't accidents. Only an idiot doesn't see them coming a mile away.
“You're lucky to have your Dale,” she sniffles. “He's not the cheating type.”
I think I believe that, but I'm not convinced that I do.
Just then the phone rings. My father is doing a crossword puzzle. “What's a nine-letter word for a large, web-footed seabird?”
“Dad, can I get back to you?”
My mother makes the throat-slashing gesture, but she means the 'I'm not here' hand wave.
“Albatross,” I say. It's too easy. He's not calling me for that.
He says, “What time are you seeing your mother for lunch?”
Bingo!
Right now my view is of the back of her head as she turns toward the door. I cover the phone. “Are we not eating?”
“I've lost my appetite,” she says.
“Hey! Hey!” my father screams into my ear. “Did you pick up my prescription?”
“I'm going after work.” He doesn't know I have a life.
“But I need it now.”
After I hang up, I think, it's not easy keeping an unhappy person happy. My parents had the longest litigation case in Pennsylvanian history. Ten years, sixteen lawyers combined. All three siblings dragged into the deep abyss. We were forced to pick sides. She cheated on him with numerous fellows, he smashed her car windshield with a trashcan lid, he accused her of stealing money, she said he coerced her into sex, blah, blah, blah. In the end, only the lawyers enjoyed the ride. No one got the house. With the sale my father bought himself a fancy condo in Rittenhouse Square; my mother screwed one of her lawyers. I think he was number eight.
***
I work as a government official in downtown Philadelphia deciding who and who doesn't deserve worker's compensation. When I first started, I listened to the sad stories—the goiters, the broken hips, the car accidents and the dislocations—and
stamped their documents for approval. Then someone told me that I needed to look at things more clearly. “You shouldn’t take people’s word for it. They’ll lie right to your face and have no qualms about it.” After a while I started to see that maybe there was some truth to it. People came in on crutches and head bandages, and it all made me wonder.
The floor I work on is filled with tons of cubicles under rows and rows of blinking fluorescent ceiling panels. The floor space is the size of a soccer field. My cubicle is located around the center line. And Corey, a coordinator's assistant from another department, works at one end of the goal areas. Still, at some point each day, he manages to work his way upfield to my desk. He's a young kid, with blond flowing hair that he flips back every few minutes. For a month straight he asked me to have lunch with him, and each time I said no. Then one day he said, “Wow, you sure do think a lot of yourself,” and because I felt misunderstood, I changed my mind. We went over to Finnegan’s where he told me stuff I wasn’t expecting. That he’d been on his own since he was seventeen, and that his father used to hit him. And that he’s a perv. I said, “You’ve always seemed like this together guy,” to which he replied, “Happiness is complicated.”
He got me to agree to order a drink with him. Then on the way back to work he said, “I want to make love to you.” I don’t know why, but I burst out laughing. “You think I’m kidding,” he said. So I said, “You're good looking. Good looking people can say shit like that.”
I didn't utter a word of this to Dale. All he's thinking about lately is trying to get me to agree to get pregnant. We talked about children before we married, five years ago.
When the time came, I would stay home, for the first few years at least. Dale makes more money than I do, so it only makes sense. But I told him I wasn’t sure about giving up my job so fast. “Why can’t we get a nanny?” I asked.
He said, “A child needs a parent around those formative years.” How could I argue with that?
***
“I think something is wrong with me,” I tell my friend Kim during a quick lunch break the next day at Starbucks. I get myself one of those muffins stuffed with nuts, seeds, cranberries, the kitchen sink.
“Are you feeling sick?”
“I think so. I made an appointment with Dr. Weiss for this afternoon.”
Kim knows I’m not pregnant. Dale and I use different kinds of protection. Just in case, I took a home pregnancy test two weeks ago. But there was no blue line.
I mush the crumbs together into one tight muffin ball and stare at it. “Hey,” I say, “if I have cancer, then this whole baby talk is out the window.”
An hour later I’ve got Dr. Weiss’s cold fingers feeling for lumps in my lymph nodes. He says, “I can’t find anything.”
“I definitely think it’s something,” I say, putting my own fingers around my throat. “I think we should run some tests.”
We have a stare off. Then I watch him take out his pen, click it, and scribble some notes in a pad out of view. “I'll have the nurse take some blood.” Before he leaves, he smiles, but I detect it’s the uneasy smile of a man who thinks he's got a quack on his hands.
That night, Dale is in the mood. I tell him that not only am I not having a baby tonight but I don't think I'm ever having one. He wants reasons. So I give one: I'm not cut out to be a mother.
He gives me one of those doubting looks.
“What?” I say.
“You know.”
“No, please, fill me in.”
“Joyce, everything is going to be okay.”
I don't bring up the doctor visit. And the fact that I think something is inside me, something insidious, like a bunch of cancer cells running amuck. If I tell him he'd say I’m overreacting, but that's because he sees the world differently. He is easy-going and simple, prone to blind optimism. The owner of a world view that believes bad stuff will always happen but everything has a way of working out in the end.
But I want to give him another reason: he doesn't have a lot of stuff tumbling around in his head and for that I sometimes hate him.
***
It's 5: 49am when the phone rings. I pick up to machine-gun fire, to bombs exploding and German in the background. It's the Nazis and the Fall of Berlin, which my father is watching for the twenty thousandth time on the Military Channel.
“I'm sitting here going through the depositions. Listen to this.”
“Dad?”
“Her lawyer says, ‘Mr. Colter, did you tell my client that you so desperately wanted to have sex with her that you'd be willing to pay her for it?'”
I've heard it all before: No sex. Negotiations. Rules. No talking. No biting. There are things you never want or need to know about your parents. Like the fact that they're human like the rest of us.
“Sometimes I really hate that woman for what she put me through.”
I tell him I'm going back to sleep. Then I hang up the phone and lie there thinking about how it is possible for anger to rage on infinitely. Apparently she wanted his money. In the end she didn't get it. Which makes me come to the conclusion that very minute that he likes to watch the Nazis lose over and over again, the same way he likes
to read the court depositions. Does he want to fuck my mother, or fuck her over? Because Dale is snoring away, I desire a bloodletting. I apply a swift elbow to his ribs.
“What is it?” he mumbles, a reaction too calm for such a sudden bashing.
“Go back to sleep,” I say.
The next day at the office, Kim says over the phone, “Why can't you just let it ring?”
“And what if he's having a heart attack? Or trapped under a fridge?”
“How could he get to the phone if he's trapped under a fridge?”
“You know what I mean. He's all alone.”
She says, “Well, then, maybe the simple answer is you like being his surrogate wife.”
After I hang up, I get back to work. Then five minutes later I hear, “You're so pretty.”
It's Corey, leaning over the top of my cubicle. His long blond hair falls into his eyes. I smell his Axe body spray, a fresh burst of coconut and caramel.
“Have you thought about my proposition?” he says with a smile. “I think I can make you vereee happeee....”
I tell him he's lying. No one can make anyone else happy. Not really.
“Your skin is so smooth,” he says, smoothly.
“See this fella?” I say, and point to a photo of a middle-aged man, very much like a passport photo, paper-clipped to a manila folder, one among many stacked on my desk. Around the guy’s neck, a neck-brace. “I realize now that he's probably faking it. The same way, Corey, I think you are right now.”
He drops his arms off my cubicle partition and walks away. But a few seconds later he's back. “Not everyone is like that,” he says, thoughtfully. “Some people actually believe what they say. Even if to the outside world it doesn't seem that way.”
I'm in the middle of watching him walk down the hall when the phone rings.
“Guess who died?” my father says.
“Who?”
“Ray.”
“Who?”
“Ray! Ray Walcott! Your mother's lawyer. Pancreatic cancer.”
“Pancreatic?”
“It's one of the silent cancers.”
“He was young, wasn't he?”
“Fifty-two. Too bad, too. He was one of the nicer ones.”
After I hang up, I feel a burning ache in the pit of my stomach. Like maybe what is inside me is similar to that which was coursing around undetected and multiplying in Ray Walcott's veins. I call Dr. Weiss and get his receptionist. “You took blood from me yesterday, but will the tests reveal if I have pancreatic cancer?” When I tell her I want to schedule another appointment, she says, “I'll have to put you on hold for a minute.”
While muzak plays through the receiver, I think about what Kim said. Maybe I am my father's surrogate, his camp pen pal, his best friend. I try to imagine Dale asking me if I like being all those things to my father, but then again I can't. Whenever he sees what's going on in my family, he tilts his head like a confused dog. We have different histories. His family lingers two days after Thanksgiving. Bellies full, they move into the living room and sing show tunes around the piano. My sister said to our mother, “Apologize to me for all the things you've done and we'll go from there.” That was six years ago. My brother started drinking in high school. A touch of scotch every morning and night. He chases them with Heinekins. I don't get on their cases. We're all addicted to something. I tell him maybe booze is just love in a bottle. Dale has no idea what I'm talking about.
Finally the nurse gets back on. “Mrs. Danielson? Once Dr. Weiss gets your results, he will set up an appointment with you.”
***
Four days later I go with Dale to the costume store over on Kemp Street because he has an office Halloween party in two weeks. We push through racks and racks of action heroes, taffeta and shiny metallic tights and capes. “Why don’t we go as a hip couple like Beyoncé and Jay-Z, or Brangelina?”
That night, I dream Woody Woodpecker is driving my car while I’m in the passenger seat. He’s not the cartoon, but the mascot. He’s drinking, and laughing that disturbing laugh, he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he. I go to rip his head off, and find Corey underneath. Then the phone wakes me. It’s 11:44pm, but it's not my father this time.
“It's true,” my mother says, bawling like a twelve-year-old. “He's in love with his secretary.” How cliché, I think.
But I also think, Growing up in chaos you expect things to fall apart, and when they don't, you wait.
***
Back from lunch the next day I find on my desk a big orange box of caramel Turtles, ten multi-colored balloons, along with twenty-four long-stemmed roses. The card reads, Thinking of you, Corey.
Then I notice my phone blinking. It's a message from Dr. Weiss, asking me to call. Dialing, my hand shakes. I get the receptionist, who says the doctor has my results and there's an opening that afternoon. I want her to give me my results, but she says Dr.
Weiss has specific rules against doing that. So I drive straight from work and get to his office and sit in the waiting room. Ten, fifteen minutes. Then I move to another room and wait some more. And I begin to think of his imminent words: Mrs. Danielson, I'm sorry, but you were right. You do have cancer. The worst kind. Frankly, the worst of the worst. Perhaps you should try to get your affairs in order.
The door finally swings open, and in he walks, his eyes glued to the chart in his hands as he moves behind his desk and sits. He takes a few seconds, breathing heavily before lowering his reading glasses in order to look at me. “Mrs. Danielson,” he says, “your electrolytes, lipid profile, enzyme levels, white blood count-everything seems to be perfectly fine.”
***
Dale and I are at his Halloween office party dressed as opposites. He's got on a tight satin mini, stripper pumps, a black-colored bowl-cut wig with a big red bow tied on top. He's supposed to be J Alexander from Tyra Bank's show America's Next Top Model, except that he's a damn good-looking faux girl, prettier than a lot of the women at the party who aren't trying to fool anyone gender-wise. I'm dressed in a dark pin-striped business suit with hair slicked to my scalp, a mustache, and a big ol' stogie plugged in my mouth. I don't know who I'm supposed to be. Maybe George Sand, but no one knows who the hell that is, anyway.
Besides, I'm not really pulling it off. My breasts are too big and I couldn't tape them down, so instead I look like a woman dressed like a man with hormonal issues.
I’m drunk, or I’m getting there, for no other reason than I can. I try to get Dale to match
me Zombie for Zombie, but he jiggles the car keys in his pants pocket and informs me he's the DD.
I bump into a guy dressed in a white lab coat, stethoscope dangling around his neck. Dr. Weiss, I think. Then I think, well, it’s not cancer. Nor is it a baby. It’s not anything. The truth is I have run out of excuses, except for the only one that is left: Dale and me. We don’t work as a couple. Not sure that we ever did.
When I look for him, I see him talking to an Anna Nicole Smith look-alike—a young office intern made up in a big blond wig, candied-apple colored lips and boobs pressing up against her throat. I notice them laughing, maybe a little too heartily, so I stumble over. In front of them, I slur, “See this guy here? He wants a baby. A good ol' little healthy baby. But you know what?”
They shake their heads in unison.
“I wanna baby, too, I just don’t want one with him. No. The person I'm gonna have my baby with is with a guy named Corey.” I lose my balance and fall into the girl, then push off her to get my bearings. Then I add, “That's 'cause I'm leaving him,” and I push Dale so hard in the chest that he falls backwards, right on his ass.
***
Early the next morning, I find myself in my bed, in my pajamas, the dark suit of George Sand draped over my vanity chair. My head is woozy. I don't remember leaving the party, getting in the car, undressing myself. “Dale?” I yell out.
I get up and head to the window. His car is in the driveway. “Dale?”
I go to the stairs. “Dale?”
Then I'm downstairs, where I find him sitting at the dining room table. He's staring out the window. He's not J Alexander anymore. But he's not Dale either. His hair is not combed. He's still in his pajamas.
“Did you hear me calling you?”
He continues to stare out the window.
“Dale?”
Then he turns. “Is it true? You're leaving me?”
My memory is suddenly restored: the Zombies, the costumes, the dropped bombshell. I stand at the threshold, grab my robe tight against my throat.
“So I suppose you want me to fight for you? Go crazy like your family, throw a chair or a vase? Maybe even hit you? Is that what you want, Joyce? You want me to hit you?”
I don't answer him. For the first time, he seems to be on the verge of tears. And anger. Maybe fear mixed in. I've seen this stuff before. All of it. It's the stuff of my world, and for which I am dragging him down into. It leaves me speechless.
“Well?” he says. “You're going to run off to have my baby with Corey? Is that his name?”
I want to shake my head. I want to tell him that I’ve convinced myself of a lie. That I thought he was the problem, but he’s not----it’s the future. And happiness. Both of which I’m terrified of. I want to tell him all of this as they scramble for position in my head, but before I can, the phone rings. We both know who it is. Either one of two people. He waits, expecting me to get it. It rings and rings.
I let it.
William Robinson has a BA in Creative Writing from Concordia University and is currently enrolled in the University of British Columbia’s Optional-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. His work has been published in numerous print and online journals, including carte blanche (issues 8 & 10), SNReview, Verbsap, The Furnace Review, Talking Writing (featured writer Aug. 2011), Scrivener Creative Review, CellStories, Poetry/Fiction in Motion, blinking cursor, Avatar Review and Blood Lotus Literary. His short story “To Whom Nothing Whatever Was to Happen” was a finalist for the AWP Intro Journals Award, and carte blanche submitted his story “Storm Chasers” to the Journey Prize for “Best of Canada” consideration. He has also created and patented his own commercial line of artistic poetry products based on the Dada movement.
Multiple Midline Incisions By David S. Pointer
In one hour, the abdomen is entered through an opening in the war. A postage stamp sprouts first wings for worldwide flight. Elsewhere a surgeon grasps the appendix with Babcock clamps, and delivers it into the new wound site. A medivac chopper takes on enemy rifle fire as if it were one of those new robotic bladders outfitted with dual tanks, able to activate a flame thrower while watering all the nearby flowers, double hug me hydrangeas, white roses, whatever? A distant stomach is double crossclamped, and the sun scalds a tan scorpion simultaneously cooking gastric juice beef jerky for some invisible desert creature.
David S. Pointer has recent acceptances in Science Gone Mad, Mass Dissidence, Bleeding Ink and other anthologies. He is a brand new advisory panel member at "Writing for Peace."
Anthony Green By Donovan Saldivar
“. . . we're all in the same spot, this feels like a nightmare . . .” anthony green screams into a microphone on the weekends and we listen. he jumps into the crowd and demands that we scream with him because he knows we're all screaming on the inside. we hold him up with our hands knowing he's an ex-heroine addict turned microphone messiah.
when someone says “I listen to circa survive” you know a little bit more about them as if you're old friends because you've met them through anthony.
his words speak to you like a man who died, died and found the answer to life during a hangover in Montauk.
and when we hit play we know he's out there somewhere, screaming into a microphone with our friends.
Donovan Saldivar is a senior at Cal State Long Beach studying English Literature and Creative Writing. He would like to give a special thanks to his poetry professors: Clint Margrave and Zachary Locklin for guiding him through approaches to writing poetry. His summer plans are to read, work, and generally relax for once from the ups and downs of being a college student.
Black Olives and Pheromones By Amy Locke
You remember reading something recently about the way a person chooses their mate—how the attraction may be mostly chemical. There’s some little chromosomal bit, you recall, that can make a person smell like someone you should crawl under the covers with.
You stare at the man who is being paid to stand in your doorway and wonder if this is what you’re experiencing. Under the circumstances you can’t smell him exactly, but find yourself strangely drawn to him. He isn’t even your type. A little too scrawny, too scruffy…his eyes a nice but unremarkable shade of blue. When he smiles at you, though, you can’t stop thinking that his teeth look deliciously white. You would like to push your face into his and put your fingers in his tangled corn husk colored hair.
Absurd. Isn’t it? You don’t even know this guy. And the cluster of acne reddening his chin makes you guess that he’s a good five years younger than you. Still in college, or even high school. This thought embarrasses you. You’re hesitating, blushing, and he pushes one eyebrow upward.
“Are you okay?” he asks. His voice is deep and smooth and makes you think of hot chocolate. You bet he can sing.
“Sure,” you say. “Fine.” You pull a twenty dollar bill from your back pocket and put it in his outstretched hand. You want to ask him how he got that scar on his palm, but tell him to keep the change instead. You inhale, inhale, inhale, but all you can smell is molten cheese and olives. There’s nothing between you but a pizza—a pizza you’ve been anticipating. A pizza you’re so happy to see, at the end of what has been a hellish week, that you want to kiss the delivery boy for bringing it to you. And yet something about the way he’s looking at you, and that dimple that’s just barely showing itself on his cheek, makes you think you would want to kiss him if he had showed up without the pizza.
You take the box. You say thanks. You shut the door and call yourself an idiot. An enticing medley of smells promises satisfaction, relief, and, best of all, a good distraction. But you linger. You peer through your peep hole, the hot pizza box pressed tight between your stomach and the door. You watch him walk away. Cute butt.
Amy Locke graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA in English. Her fiction has appeared in Bewildering Stories and Monkeybicycle. She lives in North Liberty, Iowa with her husband and two silly dogs.
Someone Else’s Life By Jacob Ferrier
T.J. Walden isn’t a real person; he is an imagined self of the author. We both know he isn’t real, just like any other person who appears in print. He’s not the same as you, currently reading, or I, currently writing. In a moment my fingers will touch the keys of a machine, and T.J. Walden will exist, and in a moment you’ll read a description of the man, and T.J. Walden will exist. He will be an imagined-self of the reader. At this moment, this line, there is no man named T.J. Walden, but that is about to change. My name is T.J. Walden, and I’m a professor of Economics at a University that you haven’t heard of, I’m sure. It ain’t a big one, and our football team doesn’t compete at a national level, and if I’m honest, our curriculum is below average. Most of my students lack freedom… Epictetus, a Greek, said “Only the Educated are free…” Well, I don’t know how he defined educated, if I’m pressed; so I can’t be certain that I’m free myself. I’m middle-aged, black, fat… very fat. Alarmingly fat; at least, I’m alarmed. I don’t know when it happened. I don’t remember getting this way; if I’d been aware it was happening, probably I’d have done something about it. But day to day, the myself in the mirror changed, day-to-day I had less energy. I didn’t notice it happening, but before I knew it… one morning, my wife, Matilda, one morning as I’m putting on my tweeds and bowtie she says “Thad…” god, the tone of her voice then. How could I explain it? If marriage makes two people into one, then she was chastising her own hands, noticing with reserved alarm that they’d withered in the night. “Thad,” she said, “You’ve gotten fat.” Gotten fat. Like I’d found it somewhere, picked it up off the
street. I went to the store and got me some fat. I took the tweeds back off and stood naked in front of the mirror on the dresser. When did this happen? My wife thought I was joking around. “Don’t you play like this is nothing,” she said, “Thaddeus James Walden, you’re too old to be so fat. You wanna die and leave me?” Matilda was right, of course. T.J. Walden was getting old, and he’d gotten fat. If you wonder why I made him that way, consider that I’m doing it on purpose. As to that purpose, I leave it up to you; after all T.J. Walden isn’t a real person. He is one of your alternate selves, a person you’ve created by imagining what it would be like, what you would feel if you were a middle-aged, fat, African American, Professor of Economics at a generic second-second string university. But he is what he is, and what he is effects what he’ll do. Thad loved his wife; let’s make that clear before we delve further in. Thad and Matilda were married before that kind of thing was common, and in doing so they managed to become estranged from both sides of their family.
They were from
Atlanta; Matilda had “Jungle Fever,” Thad was an “Uncle Tom.” In the end, they’d had a ceremony attended only by friends, their respective genealogies abstaining out of… well, it’s hatred, isn’t it? No way to get around it. Nowadays the pair raised the occasional eyebrow, but because neither of them had particularly “urban” patterns of attire or dress, most people assumed simply that some kind of mistake had been made. Thad always assumed that their minds were telling them “he’s one of ours, after all,” that because he used a scholarly form of English that he was, in the minds of whites, akin to a “house negro.” A colleague, wellmeaning enough, explained that since the international slave trade was banned at the beginning of the 19th century, most slaves had been bred in America. “So, by the time of the civil war, a majority of negroes had at least one white ancestor.”
Thad, Matilda, the colleague, and the colleague’s wife, were enjoying a dinner at a high-class Japanese establishment. The event was to celebrate the publication of a paper they’d collaborated on, so they’d turned their pockets inside out for the occasion. In secret, all four at the table were wondering which bills would get paid that month. “Almost every African American in this country is part white.” Thad only nodded, glancing at Matilda… let it go, he was trying to tell her. The colleague wasn’t precisely a racist… however much it bothered Thad that it was somehow “Okay” for him to be with a white woman because he was ‘after all, part white,’ he was willing to let it slide for professional reasons. Scratch that. Thad had, in the process of gaining a Doctorate of Economics, come up against every type of barrier that could be thrown against him. Coupled with his marriage and the fallout from his own family (“You want to marry a white devil?
After
everything the white man has done to you? I suppose you’ll want his slave-name too!”), Thad had long since grown above what he considered ‘minor’ racism. He was a professor of economics, not a professor of history, not a professor of African Studies. If he started alienating himself from his peers his work, which he perceived could eventually help free his race from economic servitude, could be seriously hampered. So he let it slide. But then, the colleague continued. “It makes Malcolm X look a little foolish, don’t you think?” I closed my eyes. I wasn’t even going to answer. Under the table, I put my hand on my wife’s leg… dinner was half over; all we had to do was get through it. It was the wine, he’d simply had too much wine, and surely his wife would rebuke him later. Or he’d think better of it. He was just making an observation… I told myself all this and hoped that she’d do the same. “All that time, he was calling for a separate negro country, calling white people the devil, and he was part white himself. Everyone is part white.”
The night didn’t end well. My wife, just as divorced from her own people as myself, couldn’t tolerate his banter any longer. “So, the more white a…” it took her some work just to say it “NEGRO is… the better, right?” You can imagine how it went from there. My colleague’s retraction was little more than a refinement. He said it wasn’t a matter of good or bad, just that we’re all the same because we are all part white. “The ancestors of humanity came from Africa, so aren’t we all part black, too?” Chaos. We sat for ten minutes in near silence until the bill came, which of course had all been put one check, so we had to lean across the table, put our faces right into one another’s’, and squint. I loved my wife. We’d already been together for a decade, and through it we’d tackled everything together; we were fused into one rod of iron by the fires of American culture. Despite this, something happened to T.J. Walden that morning, two decades later, while he was naked in front of the mirror, looking at the extension of his body forward three full feet from his spine. His hair was turning gray, up top, and in the few, long curls on his chest. His skin, too, was taking on a dry, gray hue around his eyes. He looked into the mirror that morning and wondered who he was. I will now begin to rob Dr. T.J. Walden of the one thing he truly had. You, reader, will help me rob him. If you wish to save him, you know what you have to do, but don’t try to shrink away from the responsibility. Looking in the mirror, Thad realized that he was fifty-five years old, that he’d been married to Matilda for thirty, that they had no children, that he was a professor at a second-rate University, he hadn’t publish a single paper in five years, and that he didn’t know what he’d been doing his entire life. It was less than a year later that he was sitting, naked again, at the end of a hotel bed, his face in his hands. Sitting next to him, also naked, was an attractive middle aged woman, a professor of the school of business. I’ll let him tell how it happened.
After looking at myself in the mirror, everything changed. The why is difficult, even the how… but I was no longer in love with my wife. You’ve heard epiphanies described in terms of striking, hitting; “it hit me like a ton of bricks, like a freight train.” It was nothing like that. I don’t know if those terms are accurate for other people. It didn’t hit me at all. It was more like my mind was unable to work any longer. I was staring at some man I’d never noticed before. And he looked back at someone he’d never seen before. We had nothing to do with each other. When I turned to look at Matilda… there’s a song. “This is not my beautiful wife!” She and I had nothing to do with each other. It’s as if was a train on a set of railroad tracks; behind was the past, in front the future, and I’d been going along, going forward. There was an intersection of rails, another perpendicular set, and I got onto those rails instead.
My future was completely
different now, and my past… what was it? Did it extend behind me, or was it behind some 90 degree bend, diminishing in the distance until there was nothing at all? I was living someone else’s life. As simple as that. How does an affair begin? It’s tiring to think about it. She smiled. I smiled back. Was that the start? We discussed the curriculum over lunch at a local café; I wore a sweater under my tweed jacket. She showed up in skirted suit. We were there until we each had to go back to our spouses. Was that the start? I have no idea when we fell for another… I don’t want you to get the wrong idea… it was all lust, there was nothing more than that. She was so… beautiful, so strong, her cheekbones high, her skin deep and dark. But none of that is important. It could have been anybody. “I’m sorry,” Thad said. He was looking at his reflection in the dark television screen. “I’m sorry, but I’ve made an awful mistake.” She nodded. Thad expected her to be upset. If some woman had entered his life, fucked him, and then started crying, saying she shouldn’t have done it, saying that she was going to go back to her
husband, that they must never do this again… he’d be mad. “I’ve ruined everything, haven’t I?” Women are strong, aren’t they? “It’s okay.” She rubbed his back, but there was no eroticism, only the kind of intimacy that exists between siblings, not lovers. “For what it’s worth, you were wonderful.” He snorted. “Aren’t you mad?” “Of course I’m mad, she said to me, but her tone was more resigned than angry. “But… I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe this was all a mistake.” She let out a huff, and then stood, and began to dress. “A lapse in judgment. We weren’t thinking. But it’s over now, isn’t it? We’ll go back to our husband… or wife, and we’ll just bury it. If I had a dollar for every regret…” Something like that. I wasn’t listening anymore, really. I did what she said. I went back to Matilda, and pretended like I never left. I loved her. T.J. Walden, however, could not bury it. Oh, he tried. We know he tried. The next year, he published. The year after that, he published again. Then a book deal. He wasn’t famous, but known among his peers. His work was insightful, they said. He’s finally come into his element. He retired a decade later, financially secure, enough anyway, that he and Matilda could move to a nicer house without a mortgage. But his affair never left his mind, not for an instant. Each and every time he looked at his wife, whom he had not told about his crisis, he remembered how he’d been unfaithful. Every time he made love, he remembered a different woman. He was sure that Matilda knew he’d cheated, but he could never bring himself do anything about it. He lost weight, but his heart was already ruined, and he needed two stints when he was sixty-eight, and two more when he was seventy. Every time T.J. Walden looks into the mirror, he wonders who is looking back. That’s what he told me. I met Dr. Walden on a discount Caribbean Cruise, in the dining room. All the tables were full, and he waved me and my wife over, asked us to
have a seat. I liked him; he was bright, intelligent, and had a kind of humor to him that could only come from the deepest sadness. Matilda and my wife were dancing (I don’t dance, and his heart can’t take it) when he asked if, since I was a writer, I could write something for his wife. He wanted someone to tell her who he was, because he couldn’t. He wanted someone to apologize, because he couldn’t. Thad didn’t have long. He was too old for a bypass, and it hurt him to walk. The sea air stirred all manner of thoughts in him, he said. He was a beautiful man, and had a beautiful wife. “Even now,” he told me, later, when he and I had snuck from our cabins to meet in the bar. I was using my phone as a recorder, and we’d talked for so long that’s I’d had to run back to my cabin to get the charger. We’d also run up a bit of a tab. They don’t give booze away on cruise ships. “I don’t know what happened to me that morning. I don’t know who I am. Every time I look at her, I wonder why. Every touch is burdened. I told her this morning that I don’t know who she married.” We adjourned for the night. I had his address, and I’d promised to mail the letter as soon as I got word he was dead. “It’ll be in the will,” he said. “Maybe shore-side we can meet sometime, too.” I’d have liked that. Thad died a year later. I could have made the time to get down and see him. As I stood up from the counter, he asked why I thought it had happened, why one day he’d ceased to be himself, why he couldn’t get over it. I told him. “Thad, it’s because I invented you. You aren’t a real person; you exist because I want you to. And I wanted to destroy something I believed in. I wanted to take a beautiful person, and I wanted to rob him of something important. I do this to remind myself. I do this because it’s hard to do. I want you to be happy, I wish it could be so; but I put you in front of that mirror to show myself someone about to lose everything.”
He shook his head. Do you imagine him crying, an old, broken man, with tears streaming down his face? Perhaps he’s stoic, his eyes straight ahead, or maybe they are looking right at you. Maybe he is looking at you right now, looking into you, and asking you, “Why?” Because, T.J., you are someone that I can imagine being.
Jacob Ferrier is a writer that seeks to tackle universal issues in his work. He lives under the maxim "knowledge begets wisdom; wisdom begets freedom." His work has appeared in the Journal Panache and the Saginaw Valley State University magazine Cardinal Sins. He is currently seeking representation for his novel and other works.
After the Cremation By Zack Nelson-Lopiccolo
My grandfather sat my two younger brothers and I down to give us some information for after he passes.
Stand in a semi-circle and pretend to pray, but really one of us dig a small hole and pour his dog, Cody’s ashes to rest above his own.
The family history books, pictures articles and more, all stored in the cupboards next to his work desk , great-great gram was full-blood Cherokee, great- great gramps was an Irish mayor. He tells us to learn the encyclopedia of our potato-famine-trail-of-tears family.
Pick out our favorite gourds covered in his genius art, a way to grab
hold of him after he’s gone.
I pick the one with the most hot-pen burns, so that I can feel like I’m there when they cremate his body, feel each flame rise up singe the flesh until it flakes into tiny pigments of tears and laughter.
Then pick out a freshly dried one so that he can show us the maneuvers to creation. How delicate and precise each movement is, how one imprecision leads to accidental evolution. He tells us this isn’t always bad.
Zack Nelson-Lopiccolo is a graduate of California State University, Long Beach where he stole a B.A in Creative Writing and Literature. He is one head of the Cerberus that runs Bank-Heavy Press, known for their crazy antics and awesome books. His strangely erotic voice can be found in such fine publications as Indigo Rising, ¡Vaya!zine, Short, Fast, and Deadly, Media Virus, Pipe Dream, The Mas Tequila Review, Contemporary American Voices and Carnival. His first chapbook, “Dancing with Scissors” which is a double chapbook with Josue Mendoza’s “Dying Quietly in a Crowded Room” is out now from Bank-Heavy Press. He currently resides aboard a sailboat in Long Beach, CA pretending to be a pirate, but really works as a Drywall Hanger and Taper. He loves canned green beans.
Vigilance By Sandra Florence
California has slipped away from me even though I still consider it home, my family are buried there in the rich gold-flecked earth amid the orange groves, sweeping green fields and flowers set at every grave. The heads of flowers blow yellow petals across the grass as I wander around the cemetery trying to find, for the fourth time, my parents’, my grandparents’, my cousin, and aunt and uncle. * Somewhere in the older part of the cemetery my great-grandparents lie in very old clothes turning to crackly paper because coffins were not made air tight 100 years ago as they are now, guaranteed to withstand floods, earthquakes, small nuclear disasters and deliberate disinterment, perhaps for an autopsy of some kind, an old crime unearthed along with the fleeting bones and the clues to a crime that might have occurred at the very end of a life. A life in which my uncle died and my aunt couldn’t think of any reason to stay and so found a way not to. But there will be no autopsy, it is too late, 13 years at least have passed since my aunt was returned to us in a wooden box and everyone in the family became hysterical at the implication that she would actually be buried in such a contraption and was promptly moved to an air-tight upscale model costing at least 5,000. * The only way for the family to rest in peace over the incident and they clamored to the telephone to plead with the heartless and suspect grandson to return her special knickknacks and the ceramic swans with gold leaf wings and the Christmas elves in their little red pajamas that are by now worth plenty, and the pictures of Edwardian couples dancing in bleak ballrooms as was the custom to always be bound by custom, ritual and ceremony. *
And so now with my aunt safely tucked into a blue and silver coffin with birds engraved alongside to escort her home, we now come to view the face we knew so well, but is less recognizable now, the forehead almost too large, the face and mouth too hard in death, and she had been beautiful with large hazel eyes, and full red lips, a severe kind of beauty. * On the drive home, my mother leans against me, places her hand on mine and it tremors, a benign Parkinsons, can’t believe her sister is gone, the one who she argued with constantly, the one who she called her best friend. The one who married at fifteen and divorced and married and had a son, a beautiful boy everyone called Sonny who died long before she did. * The past, the long dusty dream of it, migrants move in scarred red trucks loaded with water melons and families criss-cross fields for food, driving to the next town for clothes, a tv, a bike, a backyard poker game, ice tea on the porch, a bake sale, a kid’s birthday party, the grand opening of a five and dime and the smell of popcorn and chocolate candy, an auction. The pickup bounces through the pot-holed trail through the walnut grove way back into it where another truck waits and a man stands under a windmill fanning his face with his hat looks just like my dad.
No time like the present to look out over the wide vista of tomorrow in tomorrow land where the snazziest thing was a space man and rocket ship, and the stories he read to us were not in color but were the muted tones, of metals, undergoing transformation turning them to silver, gray, storm blue because the future is a transformation in blue and blue can carry us to a destination tucked in among the trees, a ruined paradise of recycled toys, utensils, and comic books where a girl sits drawing pictures of her future. With the picnickers packing up their baskets of fruit and potato salad, and calling to us kids who blink like tiny lights in the trees and we come down from the trees and run into our parents arms, but not before its one more time around the lake chasing the squawking geese trying to nibble up discarded hot dogs.
In some dreams the water runs over everything, it seeps up over the rocks and channels and up onto the steps and begins to filter under the doors like light. This light is everything you have ever dreamed of, the pink clouds in a gray landscape that you thought was God, the soft rain coming down in the sun so the rain looked gold, the hill of exotic cacti, purple, red, an incandescent green while you climbed the steps to the top where a medieval knight stood waiting for you, blocking your path with his wooden foot. This terrified you. The wooden foot stuck out, kicked at you. What did it mean and then you realized you were at the door to a church and you heard a terrible moaning inside and you managed to sneak past the wooden foot, to escape its kick, and pulled the door back, it was heavy and covered with iron rings, and when you did, this let in light and the congregation inside turned their frightened angry faces to you because you had disturbed their darkness and you said as loudly as you could, I am looking for God. * Vigilance why are we afraid when everything is so good and tastes like boysenberry pie heated up with a slice of butter melting down the sides, doesn’t make sense when my mother’s dress smells like a wave in the dark night. And the dress becomes high and wide, begins to curl and tilt and we are caught in it, the tilt of her, the aim of her eyes and the incline of her smile, and we begin to slide into the curling wave dizzy with its speed hurdling to the shore. * My mother leans on me now, her hand shakes against mine, and I feel a second pulse to catch up with me, to be carried along with my velocity.
Sandra Florence received her MA in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and has been writing and teaching in Tucson Arizona for the last thirty some years. She taught at the University of Arizona for 18 years and in a number of community education sites working with refugees, the homeless, adolescent parents, women in recovery and juveniles at risk. She has published scholarly articles on Writing and Healing, and Writing and Public Dialogue. Additionally she has published creative work in Sandscript, amphibi, InDigest, Red Booth Review, Write from Wrong, Women in REDzine, The Mom Egg, and others. She currently teaches at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona.
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