Crack the Spine - Issue 156

Crack the Spine

Literary magazine

Issue 156

Issue 156 July 15 2015 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2015 by Crack the Spine

This issue is generously sponsored by:

Outskirts Press

CONTENTS A. A. Weiss

What You’ve Missed

Tyler Auffhammer Downtown at Dawn

Abbie Stoner

Mermaid Lake

John Clark Vincent Baby Bunny

Laura Stout

Estate Sale

Alison Hicks

Detail, Olive Orchard, Saint-Rémy

Eva Garber Partnership

A. A. Weiss

What You’ve Missed

Sunflower fields and sips of vodka took on a personal meaning of impaired movement through time when I was a foreigner in a Soviet land working my way through Anna Karenina. I’d taken a farewell 100 grams at the Drochia depot and was still nibbling on my free sugar cookie. The memories of sight and taste from this day would be a foundation for the stories I would tell for the rest of my life. This was my final trip to the capital and I sought images to catalogue as possible nostalgia; my head felt clear and fully receptive to imagery. In the landscape I saw centuries of cycles, village after village of women wearing scarfs over their heads, drawing water from wells for cooking; boys without shirts kicking a skinned soccer ball; a man sweating on the road side, wearing a full suit for unknown reasons, placing his hand in the air and then waiving down as though dribbling a basketball to get the driver’s attention. We stopped to let him on. The man in the wool suit sat next to me and I ceased to appreciate the poetry in my surroundings. His sweat was visible on all bits of exposed skin and carried an aromatic history of vodka consumption.

“Pretty girl,” he said.

I stared out the window.

We drove on and in the outskirts of the capital I stirred in my seat. This brought the man back to action; sensing he would soon run out of time to link our souls, he said: “We have fun. Stay on and suck it.” I looked him in the eyes and he was startled by my directness. A village man.

“After we arrive in the capital,” he explained. “Would it be fine for me to have love with you?”

He’d said the words without threat, almost as though they’d been socially required to fully express the happiness my presence gave him. His mother, perhaps, had taught him to speak pleasantly like this to women. I nearly complimented his lovely tone.

“No,” I said.

He also mentioned how my private parts might fit nicely with his. Until then I’d hoped he would begin a conversation about the book resting in view on my lap. When I disembarked, unresponsive to his pleasantries, he pouted with a fat lower lip as though he’d missed an opportunity.

Off the bus two men immediately offered me cigarettes. Neither wore shirtsleeves. City men. I said nothing, continued walking, and both called me a whore in unison then laughed at the jinx. Beyond the station it felt like less of a gauntlet. On the sidewalk outside a mini mart an unkempt fellow in a cloud of vodka stink proclaimed me his princess, pointing at me with his stubby cigarette as though it were a paintbrush to make a mark of ownership. I accidentally made eye contact and had to display my fake wedding ring. He blew smoke in the air and returned inside for another hundred grams of vodka and a sugar cookie. Further down the street, other men looked at me, yes, made noises, whistles—spoke sexy threats in deep, masculine, vampire voices—but no one properly impeded my path to make me annoyed or afraid. The guard at headquarters merely said hello. His name started with a V. He licked his lips as I walked through the metal detector; but unlike the other men on the street, he’d been trained to keep his insults private. His job depended on acting like an

American. He asked how I was doing, looking upward from my shoes but then never getting above my hips.

I’d beaten Alan to headquarters; we both had full mailboxes.

My lungs emptied and refilled and it seemed I was just then breathing properly for the first time that day. I was still stressed by the task before me— saying goodbye to Alan forever—but now it was postponed and that took away some of the fight-or-flight chemicals I’d built up on the bus ride. Alan’s bus was probably still picking up people walking on the highway shoulders, or more likely he’d missed the first bus entirely in a prolonged goodbye-hug from his host-family. I remembered watching from the side, invisible with mouth agape, as Anastasia’s hugs always lasted several seconds too long. His beautiful, bubbly and buxom host-sister was probably crying and Alan had probably stayed behind to promise her a whole list of absurdities. He would never return to Moldova and he’d never see her again—he surely told her anything but this obvious truth. I giggled with internalized pride at the joke I’d made when first meeting her. He’d brought her along to the summer camp I’d organized for girls in danger of entering prostitution. “Counselors don’t need to supply their own hookers,” I’d quipped. He’d blushed while I laughed until I couldn’t breathe.

Anastasia didn’t speak English well and asked Alan to translate so that she could laugh also.

An oversized manila envelope stood out in the pile of loose mailbox papers.

On tiptoes I fingered through Alan’s mail and saw he had the same one. Now, alone at headquarters, I might get the shower to myself; once Alan arrived I could claim there had never been hot water to begin with. From habit I stood over the blue recycle bin (imported from America) as I inspected the contents of the mailbox: a letter of congratulations from President Obama with a

stamped signature (recycled); a check from the U.S. government for five thousand dollars labeled readjustment allowance in the memo space (shifted to the back of the papers); a letter of recommendation from the country director (also shifted); a list of NGO employers (recycled); a list of government contractors seeking my skillset (recycled); a brochure for the RPCV society of NYC (recycled); and in the manila envelope a memo from the Peace Corps Director titled: What you’ve missed.

You’ll need to start a Facebook account, as everyone uses that now to keep in touch. You’ll need a phone for checking email. The economy is bad. You might have to wait if you want a loan for a house. You’ll need to network online in order to find a job. The RPCV society can help.

I let this last letter drop into the recycle bin as well, but then a small bit of script caught my eye.

Michael Jackson died.

I picked the paper out of the bin and brought it closer to my face. The guard V was still watching me. I didn’t want anyone to see me cry. Quickly, I turned from V and folded the memo in half to read for later. But I was dying to see what else I’d missed in America during the past two years.

As I walked up the stairs I hummed: Billie Jean is not my love... No other milestones—not my first dog dying, not my two graduations, not even my one friend who got pregnant and married after high school and then divorced later that summer—had so effectively communicated that a stage of my life was over.

A dead Michael Jackson meant I was an adult.

Screams came from the lounge. When I entered, the whole floor buzzed with activity as though I’d come upon a newspaper office an hour before a big deadline. The Armed Forces Channel was tuned to a baseball game. The yelling

had come from that area. All the wall-sockets were occupied with charging laptops. Several people were circling around the library, necks bent to inspect book spines. I shelved Anna Karenina and left quickly. The whiteboard outside the bathroom was filled up with a dozen names waiting in line for a shower. I didn’t recognize any of these folks. There hadn’t been this many people at headquarters since I’d first arrived in country.

The new volunteers had landed, I realized.

The sweat against my neck and behind my knees felt abnormally cool in the air conditioning. And the smell of the room wasn’t normal; everyone was wearing deodorant, but the smell wasn’t nice, it was too much.

I turned around.

Downstairs I spoke to the guard V in quick Russian as I departed, telling him where Alan could find me. V looked confused. I spoke in Russian, then halfRussian, then English—frustration growing in my tone with the progression.

“Alan,” I said, pointing to my fake ring. “My boyfriend. I’m breaking up with him today. We’re breaking up today.” V didn’t understand but wouldn’t admit it. He nodded. “McDonald’s!” I said, and only then did V’s face betray a human spark.

He smiled.

Outside the compound it felt like reentering an unwatched corner of World War II. The buildings around the compound were either square and Soviet, blue balconies with white outer walls, or decaying slabs of gothic concrete whose natural and well-advanced decay could have been evidence of erosion or recent bombings.

I passed the same drunk man who’d declared me his princess and instinctively patted my chest to see if I was wearing a necklace. I was relieved to stroll by unmolested. I’d feared he would question my fake husband—

question my womanhood, my feminine nature—but he didn’t say anything, only chewing more biscuit while following me down the street with his gaze.

And then I got angry with myself: Why should I care what anyone in this place thought?

How could anything coming from a pervert’s brain cause me to feel shame?

Soon I calmed, allowing myself the peace of knowing I’d be away from all this within a day. But, still, this was my great problem. I would have to care less about other people and what they thought, how they effected me. Alan would be practice. I moved on and I felt strong.

Going home to New York wouldn’t be like returning, it would be like starting something.

In the station I didn’t see the sleeveless men who’d called me a whore, but there were plenty of other unoccupied gentlemen who could have said nasty things. People must have been resting now. No one spoke, they just stared at my hair, then shoes.

“That was okay,” I thought.

The path from the station went through a bazaar before spitting out onto the main street with restaurants and stores you might find in other capital cities.

Ahead I could see McDonald’s arches.

I thought about my future. “Read and write,” I answered vaguely to myself. I didn’t have a job lined up, and all I could think about was going back to New York and reading. I’d heard about this big adjustment, like going back would be harder than leaving had been. What I would do with my life wasn’t the right question—yet I’d been attacked with that nosey bit of well-wishing for months.

How would I continue to answer the same question in different ways so that I wouldn’t sound complacent or angry? True—I had no good ideas for how to

sustain a life in New York. I’d never truly supported myself. For a millisecond I was inside the mind of someone who liked me and was concerned for me.

I lost that thought when I saw a stack of plastic beer cups on a picnic table outside McDonald’s. The small tower of cups came into view before I saw the man they belonged to, but I knew what this was; the waiter was arguing that leaving empty cups on the table was bad luck, and the man was explaining that he didn’t give a fuck, that he liked charting his progress with beer cup towers, this wasn’t a matter of concern for the damn spirits of Russian superstition, and the waiter should bring two more cups of Chisinau draft—nemedlena—not slowly but immediately.

Alan.

He’d skipped headquarters and gone straight for beer.

“Oh, God,” I said aloud. I thought to turn away, steer myself to a wine bar, or anywhere else, but in fact Alan had already spotted me. He didn’t smile. His stack of cups had grown to four; I’d once seen that stack get to ten before he finished the afternoon by hugging the McDonald’s trash bin, bent over at the waist with his head inside the swivel door.

I sat across from him.

“We have to talk,” he whispered.

Just the week before, after much soul-searching, Alan and I had finalized our plans to move in together upon our return to the states. Our readjustment checks would hold us over until we found jobs. They had seemed like such endearing, logical, happy plans—proof that we’d built something in our time abroad—but when I returned to Drochia during the week those plans turned acidic. The fact that he was happy in Moldova—loved life, in fact—meant that he would bring that happiness back with him and remind me constantly of my

own unhappy experiment abroad. Alan wasn’t the future; he was a one-night stand from a year before that never ended.

But now he’d beaten me to those magical poison words. We need to talk.

Alan bent away after whispering in my ear. He looked around, perhaps embarrassed he’d whispered when full volume would have been acceptable. He looked weak.

“What the hell does that mean?” I said, full volume.

“I, we have to just talk,” said Alan, scanning the other tables for familiar faces. He wasn’t matching my intensity. This was serious. I was breaking up with him in the next twenty-four hours, before we left the country, but I couldn’t bring that up until he confessed what was clearly a disturbing revelation.

An awkward silence brought the atmosphere closer to peace as Alan took several gulps of beer. His posture improved and it appeared he thought this discussion might go well. He smiled and tried to hold my hand above the table.

“Anastasia?” I asked him calmly.

His face drained of color except for the purple of his scrunched lips. I was dying to see confusion in his eyes. I would have traded the embarrassment of being wrong and vindictive, of tipping my cards that I’d always been wary of Anastasia living in the room next to him, for even one word; I waited for him to call me silly or stupid or wrong. But he didn’t say anything. In his blank features and failure to deny everything, immediately, I knew this worst-case scenario was true.

That whore, I thought.

Alan meekly touched my elbow as I stood to leave. He would have needed to flip the table over and scream in order for me to feel better. He needed to call me a stupid liar before I walked away forever.

“I’d like to explain,” he said in Russian. “Let me talk.”

I tipped his beer tower onto the floor, feeling stupid that’s all I could do to hurt him before walking away. That was a shitty ending to our time together, almost a year, but that’s what it was.

Alan stumbled getting out of the picnic table. The waiter wouldn’t let him follow me beyond the velvet rope without paying. Two McDonald’s bouncers appeared and I walked away briskly while Alan explained himself while patting his clothes for his wallet. They threatened to bring over a nearby traffic policeman to arrest him.

I wasn’t crying yet, but I was close. For the last week I’d been preparing myself to cry at this moment, but I’d been expecting to feel shame, not anger.

My mind went to a picture of Anastasia’s round, smiling face.

She spent an hour each morning on makeup.

How long had it been going on?

Gasoline fumes overpowered my senses. I was again in the bus station, my head up, surrounded by leering men. It had been calm during my last passthrough, but now it wasn’t. There were four of them and no one else in view.

This tucked away corner of the station was for repairs, it seemed, a place to put shredded tires into piles before burning. I looked back to see if a winded and panting Alan had caught up.

At this moment, as I had during similar moments, I reflected on my own pre-departure training in Philadelphia: You are entering a country with a different history, different achievements.

Don’t overreact to what you immediately perceive to be different or unfair.

You’ll lose respect if they think you’re not trying to understand them.

And I remembered our playacting scenarios. We role-played as aggressive men and indifferent ladies, walking on imaginary streets inside the hotel conference room. I’d actually been one of the aggressors: I’d said things like, “Hey, sexy,” and “Nice ass.” We’d all giggled. We finished the training with confidence, our lesson being that the only way to respond to those types of situations was to immediately forgive shortcomings, never take anything personally, and move along without responding. If that failed, show them a ring.

The men circling me in the station asked my name and called me very beautiful.

I’d been cornered like this before, in Drochia, and had been very frightened.

A few men had followed me out of a bar; it was the first time in my life I’d been called a whore. They showed me money. I showed my ring and received a slew of insults directed at me and my absent, probably impotent, husband. They even knew this husband’s name: Alan, who lived far away on the other side of the capital.

“It’s okay,” said one of the men surrounding me. “We’re nice men.”

For the first time in my two years I brandished my bottle of pepper spray and got three of the four men directly in the eyes, the fourth turning away so that I only got a little foam on his neck. I was jacked up with energy and I was crying because the spray was in the atmosphere. Tears streamed down my face, but I wasn’t sad anymore. It was like I’d cut a thousand onions for a delicious recipe that I’d enjoy soon with everyone I loved.

No one else got in my way.

I grabbed my stuff at headquarters and left before Alan could get there. I’d check into a hotel for the night to be alone before flying home in the morning.

As I left headquarters the guard, V, said goodbye to me casually as though he’d see me again soon. Perhaps he was excited that I gave him the slightest of smiles for the first time.

That’s how you do it, I thought. That’s how you say goodbye.

I hummed Billie Jean and imagined a future in which I’d feel nostalgic for this very day.

Tyler Auffhammer Downtown at Dawn

A mystic time exists amid loathed last calls and sunrise splendor: when bulbous spiders spin silky webs and swallow half-hardened prey, as busty bar flies and cunning cockroaches slink and slime their way through neon maze, while the constant amber glow of street lights illuminates the late lizard’s creeps and crawls across saw-toothed concrete, when the faint rumble and pop of a leather-clad legion breaks the stale silence of night, as half-scorched smokes sit still on ashtray’s edge, tasting better filter-less,

when mellow, Memphis blues play best bursting and bellowing out of a crackling car stereo, while the twisting black snake blacktop slithers ahead of you in the lightly lit dawn of a fiery downtown morning.

Abbie Stoner Mermaid Lake

I was never scared of the dark when I was young. In fact, I loved the dark; I thrived in it. I never imagined monsters or murderers lurking in the shadows, because I could hear mermaids’ voices lulling me from the lake in my backyard.

And I knew, knew without a shadow of a doubt, that nothing could hurt me with the mermaids around. In the summer, I would sneak out of the house in only my white cotton panties stained yellow near the crotch, and feel the grass tickling the soles of my feet and stones digging into the space between my toes, and I would run toward the lake, smiling like a wind goddess. I could feel my hair whipping behind me as I ran, as wild as the mermaids’ hair in the water where they waited for me every night. And when I got to the edge of the lake I would stop.

I would stop just close enough to send a shiver up my spine when the water lapped gently at the tips of my big toes, little waves from the mermaids’ aquatic gymnastics. Crouched down so that the breasts beginning to bloom on my chest were pressed against the downy fuzz of my thighs and my knuckles were pressed in the mud like an ape, I stared into the water. It was like an inkwell in the nighttime, with a rippling bowl of milk in the center, growing and shrinking as the mermaids got hungry and the moon hid away. Because the mermaids were not always kind.

One day, I crouched next to the lake and heard them giggling from where I couldn’t see them in the dark. I saw their tails flash from the surface at the corner of my eye, but when I turned my head all I saw was a ripple fading away.

That was the first day they were hungry. It was only a matter of time before not even the moon could face them. It was only a matter of time before I brought them food.

“Okay,” I whispered to them, inching my fingers into the water. They put their hunger inside of me so I knew how it felt to starve, to need. I could feel it just below my stomach, a hollow aching that rippled in my veins like their tails in the water. “Okay.” I stood up and ran back to my house, swerved around it, and stopped in the middle of the road. “Help!” I called. “I need help!” I held my breath, waiting for a reply that never came. “They’re hungry.” But footsteps did come down the staircase in the house across the street. The door swung open just a crack and Keegan Price slipped outside. He stood on his porch with the door ajar behind him, his socks bright against the wood of his porch damp from the rain the day before. The skies wept from terror when they heard the mermaids’ cries.

“Jenny?”

I stared back at him, my eyes blazing. He couldn’t resist them. Hesitantly, he stepped down from the porch and toward the road. His arms were outstretched but they dropped to his sides when he stopped at the curb.

“What are you doing?”

“My friends are hungry.” I held my hand out to him. Waited until his grin mirrored my own. “They gave their hunger to me.” He took my hand and ran with me back to the lake. He wasn’t a merboy though, not like I was a mergirl.

He couldn’t keep up and I had to jerk his arm when he started to lag behind.

Had to pull him to a stop at the edge of the lake. They would eat him alive. I would take only what was needed.

“Why are you naked?” he whispered, fear quivering in his voice.

“Why are you wearing socks?”

He looked down at where his socks were stuck to his feet in muddy, sludgy wrinkles, same as the hems of his flannel pants. His gasp blew across my face when I pulled him toward me. I planted my lips on his and let him think my friends weren’t real. But I could hear them. They were just out of sight, cackling, ready to feed. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, but he knew what to do with his mouth. I had let go of his arm and had him by the shoulders. And I waited. I waited for their cackles to turn to thrashes in the water. And then it was just me on the edge of the lake. They took him by the ankles and their thrashing became him thrashing, my heart pounding in my chest became the ghost of his mouth pounding against my lips.

And then the thrashing stopped. The wind died down and I washed the mud from my feet in the water now that the mermaids were appeased. There was no more cackling, not until the next year and then after that not until the next month. The next week. The cackling turned to giggles in the time in between, the same giggles that sounded when the last bubbles ascended from the bottom of the lake after the boys went swimming.

I was never scared of the dark with the mermaids around. When I was in the mud of the lake, the dark was scared of me.

John Clark Vincent Baby Bunny

both my sons were waiting sitting on the step when i pulled up a rare beginning to my alternating weekend they were not smiling and though anger was common between them i sensed none of that today there was a rabbit, they said a baby caught by their new dog the one they were learning to love is it dead, i asked we think it’s hurt real bad we tried to make him stop you know they were my children not knowing what to do yet believing that their father would

it’s not your fault, i said wait here and i’ll go look and hoped with every step to find it dead finding instead a body barely breathing eyes closed so tiny and so torn knowing what had to happen i scanned the yard for any helpful tool remembered at last my father’s axe still sitting in my ex-wife’s garage i retrieved it and i used it then wrapped the baby’s body in a paper towel my sons were in the car when i returned stealing glances as i took my seat doing my best to hide my tears

Laura Stout Estate Sale

I hadn’t meant to come here again. Ever. And now, just ahead, the Caplin house rises from the ground like a gravestone. My last afternoon on that sweep of once green grass involved laughter and plates of cold chicken and Noah whispering in my ear we must slip down to the creek after lunch. I have a simple need to find something from those days, a stretch of time that once sat on a precipice of promise.

People stride across the now weed-ravaged lawn and cracked cement drive, intent on unearthing treasures. Tables surround the two-tiered Spanish fountain at the center of the drive. The fountain, once a gleaming white stucco with water singing through it day and night, is silent. Dead leaves lodge in it’s puddled corners. Gray-haired couples holding hands and young mothers with toddlers clinging to their legs cluster around the tables. They are heavy with glassware and silver trinkets, clocks and lamps. A woman with tattoos circling her neck holds a crystal goblet up to the sun looking for cracks. An elderly man in a tattered gray vest folds his body into a flattened sofa testing for compatibility. Familiarity coats everything like layers of cold ash, and I long to brush it all away.

Beneath an apple green willow tree at the drive’s edge, a young couple examines a baby crib and high chair. The chair wobbles when the woman gently pushes on it. I’d fed applesauce to Lucille as she banged on the arms of that same chair. I would push a wooden coaster under one leg to keep it from teetering, wondering why they kept it when Mrs. Caplin came home most

afternoons with shopping bags filled with designer dresses or sleepy from a three martini lunch with her country club friends.

I slip inside the house, past the sign that says “Private, Stay Out.” The tug to enter is too strong. The rooms are empty except for sealed packing boxes stacked in corners. Outside a car engine fires up, and tires crunch on gravel as people come and go with bits and pieces of what had been a family’s world.

Inside there is not a single breath of life left from the Caplins. The silence is stale and absolute.

Two years ago Mr. and Mrs. Caplin hired me as a full-time nanny for Lucille.

They’d made it clear she was their son Noah’s child - he was now at Harvard Law School - and never once described her as their granddaughter.. When I arrived, Gloria, the housekeeper, reluctantly passed the sweet three-month-old baby into my arms, and then hovered intrusively, hands on hips, until Mrs. Caplin shooed her away.

“Go on now. Let her do her job.”

“And the mother?” I asked.

Mrs. Caplin rolled her eyes. “I’ll be upstairs.” She turned and left the room.

“And the mother?” I asked Gloria later that evening as I cradled Lucille in my arms at the kitchen table.

“Mr. Caplin usually gives the girl a check to take her problem away. This time the girl left the problem here with us.”

Several weeks later, Noah abruptly landed back at the Caplin house, having abandoned law school and all the favors Mr. Caplin had used getting him admitted. Each evening, we all hid from the raised voices and slamming doors, and each morning I would find empty bottles of single malt scotch in the kitchen trash. Noah's drinking fed off his father’s anger and humiliation. And so

for a while, we continued to scurry out of their way.

The fiery moods eventually waned, and the household became accustomed to Noah’s presence. He began to catch my eye and wink, brush up against me in the hallway, notice me as though he wanted to know who I was. One afternoon when lightning shivered across a metal gray sky and I’d just put Lucille down for a nap, Noah grabbed my hand and gently guided me into the pantry where his hands reached up under my sweater, and I felt electric currents shoot through to my ribs. Even then I could smell the woody scent of bourbon on his breath.

On the nights Noah was home, I would lay in my narrow bed listening for his light, furtive step in the hallway, begging for him to open my door, and for his warm body to envelop me under the sheets. Every few days he would leave and return, and as he passed through the room, my heart would race waiting for him to sidle up to me and kiss my cheek, call me his shining star, and then the doubt would release me.

And then a late night call from my brother informed me of my mother’s stroke. I’d been scrubbing bits of birthday cake – Lucille’s first – from china plates. I held one as I grabbed the phone, and the news caused it to slip from my fingers and shatter like broken ice. I was gone from the Caplins with a speed that left me breathless. I flew to Ohio with a change of clothes stuffed into a bag on my lap, my head hard against the window and my cheeks wet. The flight attendant slipped tiny bottles of gin onto my tray. Three weeks later, the bracing truth that I wouldn't be returning could no longer be ignored. My belongings were packed into three cardboard boxes and sent hurtling across the country to my mother's house like pieces of a discarded life. As I hovered by my mother’s ravaged body, the silence from Noah was deafening. I’d been

forgettable; an invisible au pair except to Lucille, who had wailed as I kissed her damp cheek goodbye and crept out the front door.

In the kitchen, cabinet doors hang open exposing empty shelves. Dust coats the countertops. From behind me, a stern voice rushes towards the kitchen. As I turn, a woman bursts across the threshold with a cellphone pressed to one ear, staring a moment before spilling my name out with a sneer.

“Maggie Walters.” Her lips press into a slash and her eyes narrow. I twist my fingers and gape back at her. “What are you doing here?”

Gloria is little changed: wrinkle creased skin, gray tinged hair tugged into a messy ponytail, hard black eyes like marbles. She’d always been broad and plump, but now extra pounds spill out over her waistline, pushing against the fabric of her blouse and skirt.

From the stories Noah told me, she’d been the one to bandage his scuffed knees, teach him nursery rhymes, and to open doors for girls. She sat with his parents at his high school graduation. She was someone his mother had no interest in being.

When I lived with the Caplins, she used to scurry from room to room complaining and nagging. Mrs. Caplin would listen, unsmiling, then wave her off. Gloria knew everything; knew the nights Noah came to my room and left just as darkness was lifting from the sky. When I fed Lucille at the kitchen table Noah would lean against me, settle a hand on my thigh, and graze the back of my neck with his lips. Her eyes would flash at me like streaks of chain lightning as she puttered around us, sweeping the floor or raking her hands through Lucille’s hair. Because I heard the fierce arguments volley between her and Noah, I knew she hated me.

“Gloria. I didn’t think anyone would be here.”

“Noah and Lucille are not here.”

“I didn’t come to see them. I just said...”

“You have nothing here. I sent you all your things when you left.”

Anger coils inside me. I take a deep breath and push it away. “How’s Noah doing?”

Gloria crosses her arms. “How do you think he’s doing?”

“Look Gloria. You’ve all been through a lot. I don’t want to fight.” I walk to one of the kitchen chairs, clear away some boxes, then go to Gloria and put my hand on her back. Her body bristles at my touch, but she allows me to guide her to the chair.

Voices from the yard settle around us like the quiet hum of an electrical grid.

They remind us both of why we are here. The scene I'd heard about in the news plays before my eyes: the blinding lights of an out of control semi truck barreling down on Mr. and Mrs. Caplin in their tiny sports car; the shattering glass and metal flattening like plastic; their lifeless bodies that had haunted me for months. Although distant, the Caplins had never been unkind.

“Noah's drinking again,” she says, her voice low and angry. “Real hard." She wipes at her face, pulls herself from the chair, and paces the kitchen. It feels as though she is struggling to confide in me. “The money’s gone. They spent it all.

Nothing left for Noah and Lucille except for this rundown house.” She stops and points a finger at me. “But I'm taking care of them. I'm here for Noah. Just like I have been his whole life." Her hand drops back to her side. “Better than his good-for-nothing mama."

“It’s good he has you. Good they have you." She doesn’t reply. “Where will you go?” I glance out the kitchen window to the backyard. Dead grass stretches

like a virus beneath a grove of trees. “Where will Noah and Lucille go?” I know she will never tell me. But she surprises me.

“We’re all going north. Too many memories here.” She pauses. “He’s engaged to my niece, Teresa.”

I want to convince her of something; apathy, indifference? But the news must show on my face like a bright wound. “Good,” I say. The word breaks in two as it passes my lips.

“She treats him like he deserves. They’re so in love.”

She could be lying. Lies were often part of her arsenal. Regardless, I’m no longer in the mood to appease. I ball up my pride and toss it aside. I need to know the thing that’s been brewing like a storm in the back of my mind.

“What did you do after I left? What did you say to him?”

A wicked, triumphant look lights up her face. “I told him you’d been cheating on him. It was such a simple thing to get him to believe me.”

An immense pain goes through me. My legs are like water. Often, this possibility had tempered the ache in my heart. It’s her fault somehow, I had told myself. But the truth of how easily he had let me go had been a bitter poison trickling into my veins, hardening, never letting go.

“We didn’t need you. We never did. They always said I was too old. Huh. I cared for Lucille just fine after you left.”

Exhaustion flushes through my body. “I'd better go.”

“I was glad when they died. I hated them.”

I begin to turn away.

“You still don’t know, do you?” A contemptuous smile plays out on her face.

“Know what?”

“About Teresa. They were together before you came. They never stopped loving each other. Never stopped seeing each other either. Didn’t you wonder about all those times Noah went away? And you never noticed the letters, the texts, the phone calls.”

Her words are a cold sharp punch in the stomach. The room tilts as everything breaks apart and reveals something entirely different. I push my palms into my eyes. How had I been so blind?

She struts over and brings her face close to mine. Her breath is sour grass.

“You were just a diversion I had to tolerate. So I used to laugh at you for not knowing. Something so obvious and you never got it."

She has told me simply for the pleasure of bringing me pain.

Gloria shoves past me, her shoulder spitefully knocking against mine. I stumble a little as she disappears into the recesses of the house.

Outside, the air is thick with heat. It pushes against my skin as if I’m buried in an avalanche of desert sand. There is a sense of the world spinning less confidently, and it’s difficult to move, to place one foot ahead of the other, to imagine why I’d ever come here.

A bearded man sitting behind one of the tables looks up from his newspaper and smiles. I realize I’ve been staring at him. His table is scattered with ropes of discolored pearls, and gaudy colored rings and bracelets. Something makes me stop and sift through the clutter. The necklace lies tangled beneath them all. I gently pull it out. The silver chain is knotted in several places, but the diamond is still attached. Unlike the mess of cheap jewelry around it, this tiny diamond is real. I hadn’t seen it since I’d taken it off the night my brother called me. It had never been sent to me. I’d always suspected why, and now I knew I’d been right.

I hold it up and let the thin chain rest against my palm, watch the diamond glitter as it catches the sun. When Noah had given me the necklace, we’d been sitting at a picnic table in a children’s park, surrounded by slides and swings and sand boxes. Just a few feet away from us, Lucille sat in a circle of plastic buckets and shovels and scooped sand through her pudgy fingers. Pewter gray clouds swelled above our little trio like great billows of smoke. Everyone else had left, afraid of the approaching storm. He never took his eyes off me as I opened the box and removed the diamond necklace. He hopped across the table like a small child, laughing and grabbing it from me, clasping it around my neck and saying over and over, “I knew you’d love it, I knew you’d love it. Tell me how much you love it.” He picked me up and twirled me around and I laughed with an innocent joy. Lucille was shrieking and giggling at the both of us when the rain unfurled against our cheeks and shoulders.

The memory leaves me despairing for a moment, and I shudder at all the days I’ve spent hanging on to the thought of him. I lay the necklace down beside the other jewelry where it belongs and walk away.

Alison Hicks

Detail, Olive Orchard, Saint-RĂŠmy

No one is tall here. The air is restless.

A tree can only grow in the wind’s consent.

The trunk twists away from what cannot be resisted, back on itself, builds over heartwood, outward and rough.

Sometimes it is possible to make out a figure. A nude, for example: planted on a mound, legs digging into earth, chest and arms branching up, shaking fists at the mistral, throwing down olives.

Eva Garber Partnership

Dad lost a lot of money on bad real estate investments. Now, sixty-five years old, he was working odd jobs.

Growing up we had it pretty good. My parents inherited a business from my grandfather, Saul Simon, who at seventeen had resolved to corner the pin-back button market in the eastern United States and succeeded at it. He’d called it Simon Brothers Button Company, even though he didn’t have a brother. His reasoning was that nobody trusts a lone businessman.

“People see a partnership as a system of checks and balances,” mom said, “That’s what Peter’s father used to say.”

My grandfather must’ve been right because after he died, Dad took all the money out from under the business to buy a condo in Siesta Key and a cottage in the Berkshires. He had, for a time, a small collection of old Corvettes and a shabby Rolls Royce he planned to fix up and rent out for weddings. Now all he had to show of his father’s hard work was a black ’68 Stingray with a crumpled front bumper.

Now, for money, my dad worked the register at his cousin’s deli, an hour away in Edison, New Jersey.

“Why can’t he get a job closer to home?” I asked mom.

“Pride, I suspect.”

“Why doesn’t he just start a new business?”

“It’s not like the old days,” mom said, spooning white sugar into her coffee mug, “When you could just do anything, call it a job and eventually, people

would pay you to keep at it.” She sighed, “It’s not like that anymore.” She drank it down with the severity of a woman who didn’t know if there would be coffee tomorrow.

No matter how hard things got for my parents, she would still get her hair done once a week at a place in town called “Salon 360.” My sister and I used to joke that it was called that because you came out looking the same as when you went in. She liked going because it gave her a chance to talk to other women, women who understood what it was like to stick it out with a husband who had failed.

My mom grew up poor and uneducated. She met my father working at Simon Brothers Button Company. She answered telephones in the office and he was a supervisor, fresh out of high school, three years younger than her. For my mom, marrying my father was “coming up in the world,” for him, it was finding a wife poor enough to need him. He was an impossible man – angry and impulsive, even back then.

When she was done with her coffee, she got up from her chair, rinsed her mug and filled it with a more coffee, “Bring this to your father,” she said, handing it to me, “He’s in the garage, working on that ugly car.”

“I thought he was working?”

“He took a sick day.”

“Is he even sick?”

She didn’t answer, she just cracked open the window over the kitchen sick and washed out the percolator.

I brought the coffee out to my father who was sitting on a stool reading a how-to-weld manual.

“Why don’t you take it in to a body shop?” I asked, setting the coffee down on the freezer chest.

He didn’t look up, he just went on looking at his manual. It didn’t even seem like he was reading it, he was just trying as best he could to pretend he was.

“Well, there’s your coffee,” I said looking over at the freezer. But he didn’t look up, not even to see where my eyes were pointing.

Mom had put on a sweater and a pair of beige clogs, “I’m going to the salon,” she said, “Look after him while I’m out.” Her blonde, over-blow-dried hair curled just under her chin. I took it in as she walked out the front door and when she came home that night, I thought to myself that it looked exactly as it had earlier in the day. And when I went to garage that night to retrieve the coffee mug, I found it cold and untouched.

I stood for a moment before the Stingray with it’s crumpled bumper. I thought about what life amounts to and about how marriage is not unlike a one-sided partnership. I switched off the garage light, erasing from view what remained of another man’s hard work.

Contributors Tyler Auffhammer Tyler Auffhammer is preparing to jump out of the frying pan (college) and into the fire (public education). He enjoys typical white trash pastimes, including, but not limited to: beer drinking, motorcycle riding, and the raising of flags.

Sometimes, he gets up the courage to write a poem or two.

Eva Garber Eva Garber is a Toronto native living in Los Angeles while she completes an MFA in creative writing at Otis College of Art and Design. Her work has appeared in Word Riot and Literary Orphans.

Alison Hicks Alison Hicks is the author of a poetry collection “Kiss” (PS Books, 2011), a chapbook “Falling Dreams” (Finishing Line Press, 2006) and “Love: A Story of Images” (AWA Press, 2004), a finalist in the 1999 Quarterly West Novella Competition. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Edison Literary Review, Fifth Wednesday, Gargoyle, Louisville Review, Sanskrit, Pearl, and Permafrost, among other literary magazines. Awards include the 2011 Philadelphia City Paper Poetry Prize and two Pennsylvania Council on the Artsfellowships. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers communitybased writing workshops.

Abbie Stoner Abbie is from upstate New York but is currently a second year writing major in Burlington, Vermont. She has piles of books on her floor, writes lyrics for her theoretical band, and doesn’t leave the house without her wrists smelling faintly of vanilla. Abbie’s life motto is “do no harm, but take no shit” and she doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures; like what you like and be who you are without apology.

Laura Stout Laura Stout graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a degree in Economics. She now lives in sunny Manhattan Beach, California with her very patient husband and two sometimes bewildering but wondrous teenage children. In between dreaming up stories, she ferries her two dogs to local hospitals and brings smiles to the patients and staff. Her stories have appeared at Halfway Down the Stairs, Menda City Press, The Corner Club Press, Drunk Monkeys, Literary Orphans, Blue Lake Review, The Greensilk Journal and Writers Type where she received a prize for best short story of 2013. One of her works was also nominated for Best of the Net, 2014. Visit her website at: lauraroxie.com.

John Clark Vincent John Clark Vincent is a writer and poet who lives in Portland, Oregon. He is a poetry editor for The Timberline Review, and has self-published one poetry collection, “Repairing Shattered Glass.” His poetry has won awards in the William Herbert Carruth Memorial Poetry Competition (first place) and the Kay Snow Writing Contest (for both poetry and screenwriting). In addition

to poetry, John has published two non-fiction books on winemaking and sustainable agriculture in the Pacific Northwest, and he blogs about organic farming for Mother Earth News.

A. A. Weiss A. A. Weiss grew up in Maine and served in the U. S. Peace Corps from 20062008. His writing has appeared in Hippocampus, 1966, Drunk Monkeys, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Pure Slush, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Bronx Council on the Arts and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Visit his website at www.aaweiss.com

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