Crack the Spine Literary magazine
Issue 145
Issue 145 April 8, 2015 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2015 by Crack the Spine
Cover Art: “Estimation” by Louis Staeble Louis Staeble lives in Bowling Green, Ohio. His photographs have appeared in Agave, Digital Papercut, Driftwood, Four Ties Literary Review, Gravel, Iron Gall, Microfiction Monday, On The Rusk, Paper Tape Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Up The Staircase Quarterly and Your Impossible Voice. His web page can be viewed at staeblestudioa.weebly.com.
CONTENTS Elizabeth Warren Shine
David Pring-Mill The Crosswalk-Sign
Julie C. Day
Raising Babies
Jennifer Harvey
Hush Said the Grass
Donna Emerson Brocco’s Old Barn
Robert Joe Stout
Realities of Tourism
Vanessa Enriquez
Sunday
Elizabeth Warren Shine
Living above a bar has its advantages, like, I never know what I’ll find when we clean up of a Sunday morning. Ma shoves a broom into my hands and I get to work, shoving dirt and dust in the air so as it settles back on the floor rather than into the warped plastic dustpans like Ma wants. My back’s crooked as a politician, so I’m not all for bending over except when there’s something in it for me. Something like a quarter, a cufflink, a shiny bit that catches my eye. Ma wipes at the windows, smearing smoke from cigars around and around in circles without cleaning it off, so it’s hard to see with the dust motes in front of my eyes and if something wants found, it has to work at it. Work like the frayed gold thread in Ma’s wool church blazer, a hand me down from her own Ma, split and worn and reaching out for attention like a glittery snake. My
nose itches, means I’m about to kiss a fool but I’m not superstitious like Ma so that old notion don’t mean a thing to me, but just as I start to push my nose around a bit with the palm of my hand to ease off some of the bother, it grabs me. It’s gold, so bright it catches the thin ray of sunlight that streams in past Ma’s grimy streaks on the window. I squat onto my bare, calloused heels and hold the broom handle in one hand to keep me steady as I reach out to pluck the thick circlet out of the dust. I hold it up to my face and stare, blowing gently to remove some of the dirt, and the gold winks at me, strong and true like a wise old eye. “What’s that there?” Ma stands over me with hands full of rags and vinegar, stinking like a pickle factory. “Nothin’, that is, nothing, ma’am.” I close my fingers into a fist over the ring but I know she sees it, sees me
hide it. “You know, there’s men that come in here with no business doing so,” she starts. I only half listen but I catch what she’s saying for the most part. “Men what has women folk at home, wives, and babies,” she means to go on. “They don’t have no business in a bar but there it is. Wouldn’t have food on our table without that business.” She shakes her head and wipes the side of her face along the fat dimpled flap of her lower arm. “Serves them right to lose something they ought not to have taken off in the first place.” She steps one two three away from me, her body turning like she’s about to start a waltz, and stops without looking back. “You mind that, boy, when something shiny catches your eye. You mind your own business.” I blink, once, twice, mostly because of the dust in my eyes but a little, just, thinking of the gold in my hand and the words from Ma’s lips.
David Pring-Mill The Crosswalk-Sign
Have you ever noticed the crosswalk sign and its gentle switch from me to you? The man of electric light is your verb, is you walking; but the red hand is not your hand. You do not hold out your hand while waiting to cross: The hand is being held out at you. And so all day, the sign does that careful white-to-red blink of shifting perspective, uncertain of its identity, so certain of its timing— as if the chaotic world can be divvied up into moments of safety.
Julie C. Day
Raising Babies
Even though it was spring, God’s time for new life and rebirth, beneath three feet of hard-packed dirt, the baby wouldn’t stop crying. Unlike back in Asheville, real flowers were hard to come by at Grandma Charko’s house. But they were necessary. Two weeks ago Sylvia had grabbed a handful of zinnias from the neighbor’s garden. Last week she’d lifted roses from the top of a shiny gravestone. Yesterday she’d even sacrificed the carnation Grandma received at church, pressing it down into the dry, unyielding ground. “See, baby? See what a seed can do?” But still the baby kept crying. Momma’s garden sat in a corner of the backyard, not far from the chain-link fence and the looming shadow of the neighbor’s sagging porch. Sylvia could hear a dog bark followed by the frantic scrabble of large paws against an unknown door. The garden was a lonely place for newborn things. “It’s okay, baby.” Sylvia crouched down and patted the hard earth. “It’s all right.” When Sylvia was little, Momma used to sing those nursery songs with the hand gestures. Maybe that was why the baby cried all the time—it couldn’t move its arms. “The itsy bitsy spider,” Sylvia began, her spider fingers laddering upward, “climbed up the water spout….” The dog had finally quieted; Sylvia could hear the whoosh of cars speeding along 3rd Street and out of town toward the East Fork White River. One block in the other direction stood Columbus’s historic district. Grandma’s church, St.
Peter’s, was on that street, by all those houses with the fancy wrought-iron fences. Beyond this little stretch of 4th Street, it was almost like Grandma’s faded-wallpaper house didn’t even exist. “…And the itsy bitsy spider climbed up the spout again.” Sylvia’s hands reached high overhead, then dropped quickly as yet another whimper rose up from the ground. “Mma. Mma. Mmaaaaaaa.” “Shhh.” Sylvia scuffed her Mary Janes against the late-spring ground. “Shh, you stupid, cranky baby.” The bad baby-seed was ruining everything. And she and Momma had both worked so hard. They had started working as soon as Grandma pulled into the driveway of Grandma’s house and hauled their suitcases up the stairs. Grandma may have dragged the two of them, Sylvia and Momma, all the way from Ashville, North Carolina to her own home in Columbus. She may have even driven Momma to some doctor and made sure to collect all those medicine bottles with the hard-to-open caps. That didn’t mean Momma had given up on her dream.
Sylvia and Momma arrived in Columbus at the end of summer, just before school was supposed to start. The air conditioners stuttered and droned, and the grass was patchy from weeks of August heat. But at night the air cooled, and Momma pulled the thin cotton blankets around Sylvia before she kissed her goodnight. “Now that summer’s over,” Momma said before she closed the bedroom door, “it’s time to prepare for the spring rebirth.” “Like Grandma’s baby Jesus?” In her nightlight’s glow, Sylvia could see Momma’s smile.
“Yes. Exactly like that. Goodnight, my little gardener.” Somehow Momma never mentioned her plans to Grandma Charko or to anyone at Grandma’s church. Even though all those old people were always talking about rebirth and resurrection. And for some reason, now that they lived with Grandma, Momma’s smile looked all wrong to Sylvia, different, all teeth and stretched skin. Back before Grandma Charko showed up at their old apartment in Ashville, it was just the two of them. Sylvia and Momma. No God. No doctors. No Grandma Charko. Back then there had been no smiles; Sylvia’s days were all about sad Momma and anxious Momma and not-even-able-to-walk-Sylvia-to-school Momma. Gazing at yet another Momma smile, Sylvia was reminded of those germs Grandma Charko kept talking about; no matter what Grandma and the doctors did, no matter how happy those Momma smiles made everyone else feel, underneath her smiles, those big Momma-feelings were still spreading and spreading, getting ready to burst yet another cell.
Just like every other morning, Momma sat with Sylvia and Grandma in the dim, wallpapered kitchen. Momma sipped her coffee and Grandma ate her oatmeal one careful bite at a time. Sylvia could almost count the seconds between each mouthful. Three. Two. One. Swallow. Meanwhile, Momma smiled and smiled. “I thought I’d plant a few flowers, Mom, to get my mind off of things. You know, therapy.”
From the center of the table two salt-and-pepper-shaker girls in yellow dresses watched Momma and Grandma Charko. Nearby a crowd of wallpaper ladies stared at them with faded, gone-away eyes. Momma’s own eyes were wide and shiny, like all those nights in Asheville when Momma didn’t bother to sleep, swallowing stuff she took out of that small wooden box. Momma took a different kind of pill now. Grandma and her days-of-the-week pillbox made sure of that. “Flowers?” Grandma’s voice was calm enough. Still Sylvia noticed that Grandma had clenched her spoon in one claw-like fist. Momma noticed, too. “It’ll be glorious, Mom. Transformative. Like the hands of God himself.” Momma tossed her head and stretched her lips extra wide, then stood up and quickly unlocked the sliding glass door. “Sylvia. Little Sylvie, come dance with me!” she cried, darting down the back steps and out into the yard. Carefully not hearing Grandma’s “wait,” Sylvia followed. Of course she did. Momma needed Sylvia’s help. Momma and Sylvia covered the flower bed with leaf mulch. They snapped off the dead flower heads. The two of them cleared the ground of weeds, revealing the curling grubs and worms underneath. “Autumn’s not the right time for planting,” Momma said. “We waited too long.” As though Momma had known Grandma was going to drive out to their apartment in Asheville and collect the two of them. As though this move back to Indiana was an actual Momma-plan. Sylvia bent and picked up one of the worms. The worm wriggled against her palm, not even trying to escape. Why weren’t people more like garden worms?
“The ground has to be prepared just right for plantings to survive the winter.” Momma’s eyes were on the undulating worm or perhaps just the bits of dirt coating Sylvia’s hand. “The season’s not entirely lost, though we have a lot of work to do.” Then Momma knelt down and laid her ear to the ground, listening, she said, to her worm friends loosening the soil. Whatever that meant. Sylvia glanced toward the house. Grandma stood in the kitchen window, her arms crossed, her expression hidden by the comparatively dim light. Sylvia couldn’t even see the ladies with their pretty parasols and wide skirts that covered Grandma’s kitchen wall. It was better, Sylvia decided, if she didn’t show Momma any more worms.
Even without Sylvia’s help, Momma remembered. Grandma and Sylvia stood at the kitchen window watching the water run down Momma’s face: Momma’s cloud tears making all the world gray. “Don’t you go crying,” Grandma said. “But, Grandma—” Sylvia started. Momma lay stretched out on the soggy ground. And she hadn’t moved for an age, not even when Sylvia came inside. Momma needed the worms' help to calculate the optimal planting time. That’s what she’d said. Worms cared for all buried things, she’d said. “Now, hush, little Sylvie. I’m listening,” Momma had said just before Sylvia ran to find Grandma. “Grandma?” Sylvia tried again. Grandma looked round and sturdy underneath her loose, flowery dress, but Sylvia didn’t feel the slightest urge to lean in for a hug.
“I’ll talk to the doctor about her pills. Got cleaning to do right now. You coming?” Grandma Charko pulled her cardigan more tightly across her shoulders, then walked back into the interior of the house, not even waiting for Sylvia’s reply. Sylvia stood next to the fading wallpaper and the worried ladies, staring at the too-full woman sprawled out under the too-gray sky. Some seeds needed more help than others to find their way. Some people, too.
Momma didn’t garden anymore. The January wind rattled the windows. The wallpaper women seemed to huddle beneath their parasols. These days it was just Sylvia and Grandma Charko and yet another Sunday dinner table set for two. It was ice cold outside. Hopefully, the ground was warmer underneath. “Can’t believe they still haven’t found your mother,” Grandma said spooning green beans onto both their plates. “Bet she planned this right from the start.” Grandma Charko’s lips were all puckered, as though Grandma wasn’t the one who had herded both her and Momma into her car and all the way back to this very house. “Hopefully, blood won’t tell,” Grandma continued with what Sylvia thought was a certain lack of Christian charity. Change is really, really hard work, Momma had whispered all those weeks ago, on that cold November night. But Sylvia wasn’t going to share Momma’s secrets with an angry Grandma. “It’s okay, Grandma,” Sylvia said instead. She tried not to smile or frown, tried not to look all droopy with feelings. What if Grandma started hearing the worms? What if Grandma asked Sylvia to help? Sylvia already had enough to care for in the garden. Though Grandma
had known Momma for a really long time, much longer than Sylvia. Grandma Charko, Sylvia decided, was probably immune to Momma’s feeling-germs.
All those winter prayers at St. Peter's church with Grandma, all those candles Sylvia lit in the hidden garden shrine didn’t help. Neither did the lullabies, the roses, or the carnations. Spring had arrived and still God and the worms hadn’t transformed a darn thing. “Stupid, stupid baby.” Sylvia scrunched her nose at Momma’s flowerbed and kicked at the spring-softened dirt. The other green sprouting things were rising up from the ground, and yet no newborn Momma wriggled out, wrinkled as a garden worm. “I’m ready, Sylvie,” Momma had said as she looked up at the autumn sky. And Sylvia, holding that cold shovel in both hands, had tried really hard to believe her. But Momma’s plan wasn’t working. Sylvia looked down at her scuffed leather shoes and the bunch of brown tea roses. Grandma would be so mad. She liked to sit with Sylvia and count the wallpaper ladies on the kitchen wall before heading off to services. But Sylvia had promised Momma she would help. And Sylvia always kept her promises.
The April air was night-cold. The stars hung overhead as Sylvia took two paces to the left of the garden plot, pressed the sharp edge of the shovel into the dirt, and began to dig.
It had all gotten muddled somehow: the baby cries and all those tears. But this time Sylvia had a plan, a real plan. This time Sylvia would get it right. Soon that lonely baby-seed would be sprouting up all green and freshy new. Momma’s baby-seed just needed someone to hold its hand. Sylvia sighed. Grandma’s Bible Study would be over soon. She needed to finish up. Grandma wouldn’t understand about all the dirt. A few months in the earth was a small enough price to pay for a freshy-green rebirth. Soon enough Sylvia and Momma would finish their new baby bodies, and together they would rise up, ready to face the sun and the wallpaper-dim world.
Jennifer Harvey
Hush Said the Grass
Rose felt fingertips touch her, heard a voice proclaim “so beautiful” and she blushed, pink and delicate. But the fingers did not linger. They never lingered. And once again the voice moved on. And Rose thought, “I don’t want to be admired. I want to be loved.” She was tired of fleeting glances and soft spoken whispers. She wanted more. “Tilt your head a little” Lily told her “You stand so tall, so rigid. You must learn to be more graceful.” Violet disagreed “No, you must bloom. Be vibrant Rose, be bold. You are too pale to know what love is.” Rose listened and tried to sway in the breeze but it made her sad to move this way and drained all colour from her. Daisy laughed and told her not to listen to them.
“What do they know?” she said “Retract those thorns. Dance in the sunlight. Relax, enjoy life. There is nothing more to love than this.” Rose felt the sun kiss her and thought for a moment “perhaps Daisy is right” and she giggled, but only a little. From a shaded corner a voice spoke up. Fern. “The shadows are also good. Be cool and calm and you will soon learn what it is that you need.” Hazel shivered in the breeze and said “Yes, this is true, Rose. Lay down in the shade a while and take a moment to think.” So Rose thought for a moment. She thought about love. She imagined fingers caressing her, not afraid of blood or thorns. She was close to understanding something when Jasmin interrupted.
“What you need is perfume. Be alluring. Be potent. You are too delicate, Rose, dare a little. Only those who are remembered are loved. So leave a trace of yourself in the air that they will never forget.” Rose wondered if she could ever be this way. She was none of these things. She was slender and straight, prickly and pale. Her perfume was delicate, even when the sun shone upon her after rain. She was not sure if she was ever remembered. “I will never have what I want” she thought and she felt herself wilt a little. The grass spoke then. “Hush” it said. It has been silent for a long time. It has swayed in the breeze, bowed down before her, but she has never noticed. Drops of dew have glistened on its blades. Gifts of sparkling droplets that have been laid at her feet, unopened. Its songs have gone unheard, taken
by the wind. It is a sadness the grass has endured; but no longer. “Hush” it says. And Rose is still. She forgets all the things she has been told. All she feels is a gentle brush of blades and the pull of the soil beneath her, around her, which has bound them together all the while.
Donna Emerson Brocco’s Old Barn
I sit in Brocco’s Old Barn. Watch the farmers pull in, pick up hay. Silky yellow, fine cornsilk colors stacked stout on Monday morning. Bill’s Chevy flatbed truck out front with baled silage, bright green, blunt cut. Hay for horses, cows, farmers’ fields, pigsty. And orchard grass—green straw for bedding, the places where rain gathers in late gardens. Alejandro uses two hay hooks to grab, haul the bales onto Juan’s wooden cart. Hay for his ponies. They share mowing
stories, ask about the children. Black long hair against blue work shirt, curly black hair against plaid. Fragrant hay, farms near and close by this valley, inside, stories and sweat, no one’s rich. Just enough to go around.
Robert Joe Stout
Realities of Tourism
Tourists in Mexico are much like late-night revelers in a dancehall or hotel lounge. They only are there for the moment, laying the lives they really lead aside to indulge, briefly, in something diverting, inconsequential. They don’t want problems, they get enough of them at home: bawling children, insensitive bosses, bills, deadlines, car repairs. Depending upon their ages tourists want stimulation, entertainment, conviviality. That those providing it are faking doesn’t matter. As long as there’s enough tinsel what’s behind the tinsel can’t be seen and as far as tourists are concerned what can’t be seen doesn’t exist. The more elaborate the tinsel the more money the tinselers accrue. For the tinselers tourism is a full-time occupation but for the revelers, the tourists, participation is brief, temporary, a purchase (Visa, MasterCard, American Express). As buyers they want satisfaction and it’s up to the tinselers to provide it. Which they do. Tourism is very much like prostitution. One could in fact define it as a form of prostitution: the granting of temporary pleasure for a price, no strings attached. Those who sell most—and at the highest prices—are those who offer the prettiest appearances. Superficial and cosmeticized. Give the customer what the customer imagines that he or she wants. Temporary pleasure, maybe a bit of excitement. Something to talk—brag—about when one’s back home.
Since the highest paid prostitutes are those that frequent the most elegant places it’s important to stimulate customers by creating an exotic fantasyland. (Fantasyland because 70 percent of Mexico’s population lives in poverty, assassinations of human rights workers, journalists and social protesters are everyday events, governmental corruption impoverishes schools and hospitals and the minimum wage is the equivalent of $6.00 U.S. a day.) As with prostitution the tinselers find that it best serves their interests—and those of their johns—that is, the tourists—to take their business to their customers by constructing isolated pleasure palaces (often called five-star resorts) so the customers don’t accidentally wallow into the disgusting commonplace of poverty, corruption and crime. Sunswept beaches, exclusive marinas, all-services-provided hotels. Las Vegas-style choreographed dancers extolling an indigena past that never existed. Guided tours to Mayan palaces that detour past rivers contaminated by oil seepage and industrial waste. Colonial cities with cobblestone streets and exclusive boutiques whose armed guards prohibit barrio residents from entering the parks, schools and shopping malls. Government-controlled television folderol that equates news with propaganda, culture with Disneyland. (Although many contend that the TV monopoly controls the government, rather than the reverse.) Spend your money but don’t look through the tinsel: You might see tortured angry faces, hear words describing migrant deaths, twelve-year-old permanently disabled coalminers, unmarked mass graves. Leave as you came: a tinsel seeker with three credit cards. You’ve been prudent; you’ve been careful; you won’t take back a late night reveler’s distress.
Unless you looked through the tinsel and have been infected by a horrible disease: Reality. Once you’re contagious you can’t escape. It never goes away.
Vanessa Enriquez Sunday
Just me and my dad on Sunday mornings, as my mom ends her night shift and my brothers are lost in their dreams. On our way to Coolidge Park my dad stops by for coffee. It takes twenty minutes to get to my game. The corn man and the hotdog guy rush me towards my teammates. I step out onto the field and the ref blows the whistle. Everyone can hear my dad on the sidelines calling out my mistakes; I can hear him getting frustrated “tu primero”. The more I ignore him, the closer his voice gets. You first, you first! And that’s game. Every week there’s no dodging our talk back home. “si solo supieras” if you only knew, he says. Here we go again.
Back when he would spend the entire day playing. Back when he got a second wind. Back when he was never afraid to fall. Back when he was home. It is a part of him I can only hear about in his stories, that I can see replay in his memory every Sunday morning. And the only passion he didn’t leave behind.
Contributors Julie C. Day Julie C. Day’s fiction has appeared in such magazines as Interzone, Bartleby Snopes, and A cappella Zoo’s best-of. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from USM’s Stonecoast program and a M.S. in Microbiology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Some of her favorite things include gummy candies, loose teas, and standing desks. You can find Julie on Twitter @thisjulieday or through her website. Donna Emerson Donna divides her time between her home in Petaluma, California, and her family homestead in western New York. Recently retired from Santa Rosa Jr. College, Donna’s recent poetry publications include Calyx, Passager, The Place That Inhabits Us, Poems of the Bay Area Watershed, The Paterson Literary Review, The New Ohio Review, The South Carolina Review, Praxis (SUNY), Sanskrit, and Eclipse. She won the Tiny Lights Flash competition, 2010, among many other awards. Her chapbooks include “This Water,” 2007, :Body Rhymes,” 2009, nominated for the California Book Award, “Wild Mercy,” 2011, and “Following Hay,” 2013, by Finishing Line Press. Her prose and photography publications include the L.A. Review, Stone Canoe, Passager, and Lumina. View more at her website. Vanessa Enriquez Vanessa Enriquez is a sophomore at California State University, Long Beach. She is an electrical engineering major. Vanessa decided to take an english
poetry class to try something different. She has only academic experience in writing. Jennifer Harvey Jennifer Harvey is a Scottish writer now living in Amsterdam. Her writing has appeared in various magazines, journals and anthologies, most notable The Guardian, Carve Magazine and Litro Magazine. She is the flash fiction editor for Litro Online and a senior judge and contributing editor for Mash Stories. She has just completed her first novel. David Pring-Mill David Pring-Mill is a writer and award-winning filmmaker. His writings have appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Sheepshead Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Menda City Review, and many other publications. Follow him online at pringmill.com. Louis Staeble Louis Staeble lives in Bowling Green, Ohio. His photographs have appeared in Agave, Digital Papercut, Driftwood, Four Ties Literary Review, Gravel, Iron Gall, Microfiction Monday, On The Rusk, Paper Tape Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Up The Staircase Quarterly and Your Impossible Voice. His web page can be viewed at staeblestudioa.weebly.com. Robert Joe Stout Robert Joe Stout is a freelance journalist, poet and fiction writer in Oaxaca, Mexico. His latest work has appeared in Garbanzo, Pinyon, Abbey and Exit 13.
Elizabeth Warren Elizabeth is a librarian with a PhD in American literature as well as a published author of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and professional pieces. She prefers to publish creative work under a pen name, so as not to disturb her dead by sharing their stories.
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