Crack the Spine - Issue 187

Crack the Spine

Literary magazine

Issue 187

Issue 187 March 31, 2016 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2015 by Crack the Spine

Cover Art

Diwali Lamp by Kartik Agarwal

CONTENTS Sean Jackson Doll Parts

Meghana Mysore

Inside a Burning House

Stuart Friebert The Class of 1922

L. Shapley Bassen

Portrait of a Giant Squid

Fletch Feltcher Nuclear Diety

Michele Meyers

Aliens Invade the Walt Disney Concert Hall

Sean Jackson Doll Parts

Judy puts her knife on the counter and holds the plate where Cairo could see it: two perfectly even slices of cheesecake. The doily underneath is crinkled, so she smooths it out with a tug.

“You’re a diabetic, so why would you eat that much?” Cairo asks. He is twenty, her gay son’s best gay friend. Cairo has been a de facto member of the family since Blake’s botched suicide attempt his freshman year away at college.

Cairo teaches yoga to help pay tuition and he has one of those muted Mohawks that Judy finds trashy. He wears eyeliner even though, as she tells it, “Puerto Ricans are born with makeup already on their faces.” He says his goal for the near term is to teach Blake how to understand and practice the Art of Truthfulness. And how to divest himself of the latent family bigotries.

“Honesty doesn’t really exist in this family,” Cairo says whenever there is a fight, a spoken brawl usually punctuated with the popping of wine corks.

Sometimes Judy lies about the things she does. Eating sugar is typically one of them. She likes to gobble pastries and down lattes until she blacks out and somebody has to dive onto their knees beside her and plunge a needle into her shoulder or thigh. She lies about the obvious link between her own suicidal tendencies and her son’s. She lies about being happy and wanting others to be happy, too.

Her eyes flutter but she has a mug (so solid and rough it resembles concrete) nearby with “coke-strong” coffee in it. With one hand she keeps the plate out

for Cairo’s horrors to filter through it, and with the other she drains her Sumatra blend.

“My Gran-Gran’s recipe,” she says, smiling in her magnificent way, the beauty queen training, the difficult mother, the tumultuous marriage to a husband slain by his jealous mistress. “The almond shavings are from Andalusia.”

She dabs a cloth to her mouth, inspects the lipstick it has drawn away. She is thinking about the word “imported.” It has brought quite a bit of wealth to her family. Her father did quite well brokering with ships sailing between Spain and Miami. Then her husband, who made his own fortune before taking that Wusthof blade into his liver. Blake plans to be a deep sea explorer, primarily though the tonnage of things like almonds and grapefruits.

“I’ve told him not to take this crap from you,” Cairo says, removing the cheesecake plate from her trembling fingers. She still wears her gaudy wedding ring, an effort to deflect those men who think they can pounce on anything that moves. She uses it now to rap on the granite counter.

“And I’ve told you, you little stink, to stop getting inside his head. Blake is prone to giving in to you fem-style faggies. You’re so prim and fucking proper.”

She glares. It is the expression displayed by punk girls, women who bare their teeth at the male-driven world.

He smirks, plucks at the collar of his sleeveless fitness shirt, a bright pink with the Nike swoosh.

“Just because I’m a good person you hate me.”

She does hate him. Because he takes a little piece away every time he hangs with Blake, when they have those deep, dark, mind-blowing discussions about narcissistic personalities and gas-lighting and all those soul-spelunking tonics that their shrinks pour into their tortured brains.

She looks at the knife block with the stainless blades embedded in dark walnut slots, the handles smooth and inviting.

“Don’t you even think about it, Miss Bitch,” he says.

She bares her teeth again, and then her eyelashes flutter as if in a soft breeze.

She falls and he catches her only a little. There is a chipped tooth, some sacrificial bleeding, a knot the color of an unripe plum on her brow, just below her fading roots.

Like a scene from a war movie, Cairo dashes to the “IV drawer” and affixes a tiny bottle to a syringe, hits the correct cc line, then plunges the needle into her taut, tanned shoulder. For a moment they rest silently, the sound of a janky cat mewling in the hydrangea being their only link to the larger, outer world.

Her breathing settles into a casual rhythm. She gently links her fingers around his wrist and pulls herself to a sitting position, not unlike the Buddha.

She strokes her hair out of her face and touches her damaged incisor, then wipes at the blood trickle above her eye and looks at this young Dr. Handsome.

“I could tell them you did this,” she says.

He sighs.

She pours herself a glass of water while he tosses things into the trash. From the back he looks like a girl. Even the way he perspires, a soft bruise of dampness in the center of his spine, is feminine. But he has nursed Blake’s soul back from its darkness. Judy goes back and forth on this: love/hate, love/hate.

There isn’t enough medication in the world to calm her down, make her normal, and seize the rough hand of self-loathing and insecurity that slaps her patrician face. So she always lands on hate when it comes time to choose.

Cairo goes upstairs without asking her if she’s okay now. He just trots up the unlit carpet, one hand carefully tapping the rail, until she hears him go into Blake’s room and start talking loudly on his phone.

This is the late summer and the breeze washes in from the sea, an aromatic and endless breath crafted from blue sky and green water that sweeps gently across the downturned faces of garden nymphs that Judy has set about her lilacs and boxwoods. She listens to the strum of Spanish composers and their unbridled lunacy and logic of flamenco, a gift in taste from her horrible, knife-violated husband who is buried somewhere in Maine, she is trying to forget exactly where.

The vinyl skips when Blake and Cairo run through the house and out the side door toward the beach, bringing her tumbler to a standstill just below her lips—a small, dramatic moment in the hours of a woman who says life is worth living only because death has yet to be properly described to her.

The guitarist resumes, staggering downhill within a scale of unexpected—yet inevitable—harmony. The Montoya records were a loan from some other philanderer, a lawyer perhaps. But then again, there are so many surgeons.

Physicians who look like lobbyists, and they all vacation in the same immaculate, imperial, turquoise places. The lush breasts, the heavenly navels pierced through the mind’s eye of so many vulnerable and proud women, women who escaped a world of laxatives and scorn only to become imprisoned in the long shadows of husbands hell-bent on polishing the shaved vaginas of uneducated dolls.

That song about doll parts. Where is it? Blake used to listen to it. Now it is gone. A song cannot just disappear. It goes somewhere. Maybe somebody put it

in a jar, like the boys used to trap farts and fireflies. She taps at her phone.

Magic is never too far away, often just an app removed from her existence. She plucks earbuds from their tomb in a wicker storage bench and soon is tilting her head back, mouthing the lyrics.

Something something girl with the most cake. Hate. Bad skin. Someday you will ache like I ache.

It’s on that line that Cairo shouts from the beach. His voice peals with the doom of a man in jeopardy, at mortal risk. She knows there is no eternal god, no benevolent force in the universe that can stop what is happening. She runs barefoot through a pass in the dunes, her legs whipped by panicgrass and sea oats, a deranged gull that nearly flies into her wild, open-mouthed face (perhaps permanently distorted like a Mayan mask). On the sandy shore she spies a mass, a shadow, and she recognizes it as a scene that begets a funeral.

People are already gathering.

She screams and immediately her cry gets swallowed by the hiss and rumble of the surf. She staggers through the torment-hot sand. There is an old man kneeling beside her son, a thin man with his hands folded religiously. He makes the sign of the cross and lifts his white eyes briefly to the sky. He alone tried to save her son. This wiry old specimen of high-yield dividends and watery semen, whose eyes lock onto her hers, like a mist, giving her the first kind gaze that she’s had in days.

Meghana Mysore

Inside a Burning House Picture a face that speaks a thousand languages— eyebrows in Arabic, mouth in Japanese.

Picture a house of words—commas instead of windows, paper in place of napkins.

Picture someone you know, her story pale, languid. Paint her, the geography of her nose, the dialect of her lips.

Stroke her face as it crumbles to linguistic vestiges, remnants of a language you once understood.

Somewhere, a house burns to the ground.

Inside, a manuscript left on a typewriter.

Stuart Friebert The Class of 1922

When the lists were posted for which two students would walk side by side down the aisle together at Southview High’s graduation exercises, Schnooty and Augie, given the separation between their surnames, drew different partners.

Schnooty could have lived with the arrangement if his partner were almost anyone except Bertha McNit, he said. Called “Big Bertha” by some of the nastier boys, she kept protesting all during the war years that she wasn’t a German weapon and begged them not to torment her. Schnooty said he was afraid he’d jump out of line and bop the first guy who said “boom boom” when they walked past, which might cost him his diploma. Augie wasn’t sure he wanted Schnooty to try to finagle their marching together, even for old time’s sake, as Schnooty suddenly argued; because Henrietta Hooper, with whom Augie was paired, although aloof and not known for fooling around, ever, with any boy in the county, was something of a blonde beauty. Augie thought it would make quite a statement to “certain people” in the audience if he were seen at her side. But as usual, Augie finally gave in, realizing Schnooty was probably going to hang around for life, one way or another, and a stroll down the aisle together wasn’t exactly a marriage proposition. It didn’t take long for Schnooty to arrange a swap, as well as get everyone involved to shut up about it so no teacher would bolix the maneuver at the last minute.

The Hahns, Augie’s parents, gave their extra tickets to Gertie Meister and her best friend Ida Emmert, who were both juniors. Augie was trying to get serious with Ida, who was toying with him the way she did with any boy stupid enough

to try to go steady with her, which meant first of all that he had to go through Gertie, because that’s how she dealt with “the wolf pack,” they both joked.

Gertie knew that would always be her role around any really attractive girl she’d be drawn to, and relished talking tough if she had to, playing her part to the hilt, if necessary with her muscles out front, she liked to growl.

When the incidental music headed into its final bars, and the auditorium was bulging with bodies, Ida started biting her nails. Gertie had worked on her more than usual, to help with a plan to do something “memorable” during the ceremony – her very word -- so the boys would always remember the moment.

The girls had practically skipped their last week of classes, and Ida kept waffling, scared there would be serious consequences, until Gertie promised she would do most of the dirty work. “Come on, Ida,” she finally said with an edge to her voice Ida could never disobey, “all you have to do is carry the damn birdcage into the auditorium when I give the signal. Don’t worry your little fuzzy head. It’ll be all wrapped up so no one will have a clue. It’ll look like we’re bringing stuff for the festivities afterward. I’m counting on you, Ida Emmert! I promise you Schnooty will finally take some notice of you, kiddo. As for Augie, let’s just say he won’t ever forget me. Besides, I love to make him squirm. It brings out his adorable side.”

Ida had been trying to get past the mention of a birdcage and said, “I know I’m not as smart as you, Gertie Meister, but a birdcage?” Gertie ran a finger across her lips, took Ida by the hand, and led her all the way down Burleigh Avenue to Pete’s Pet Shop, where her cousin Freddy worked. They waited until he finished with a customer, who was trying to decide between two puppies; then he took the girls behind the curtain to the storeroom.

“Meet Myrna the mynah,” Freddy said. “Pete said you could rent her for seven bucks for graduation night, but I talked him down to a five spot. How’s that for a loving act from a dear cuzz?” Gertie gave him one of those cut-the-shit looks. He looked offended but straightened his little leather bowtie and bowed; and so did Myrna, who on cue promptly rattled off the words that Gertie, with Freddy’s help, had been teaching her for some time. Ida nearly fainted, partly from sheer delight, partly at the prospect of what would happen after Gertie unwrapped the cage, and cued Myrna to perform just as the seniors were marching out to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.” But Ida refused to go along unless Gertie promised that Myrna would be kept under wraps until the last possible moment.

Awkwardly hefting the birdcage between them, Gertie and Ida timed their arrival so that Augie’s parents were already seated, as was most of the crowd.

Luckily, their seats were on the aisle so they slid in just as the orchestra struck up. No one took notice when they wedged the cage in between their seats.

Gertie heard Myrna rustling around under the towel and tapped her fingers on the top knob, which quieted the bird, while Ida slunk lower in her seat and stuck her nose in the program.

Occasionally, while the ceremonies droned on and even the graduates in the front rows were growing restless, Myrna let loose a few sounds. “She’s just getting warmed up, all great singers do that,” Gertie whispered when Ida looked like she would bolt. At first, no one else seemed to notice, except Augie, who’d swiveled his head around a few times to smile their way.

“Whatcha got under there?” A man sitting across the aisle leaned over, who said it again, his voice fairly booming. The Hahns stiffened when all the graduates turned around too, at the very moment the class valedictorian was

reaching the climax of her speech. She broke off mid-sentence, stared out over the footlights, and promptly lost her place.

Myrna must have sensed the tension, because she flapped her wings so hard she al-most knocked the cage over. Gertie had no choice but to act then and there. Quickly unwinding the towel, she opened the door to the cage, raised it to clear the seat in front, tilted it a bit so the bird found itself sliding out, and sang out, “Myrna want a cracker?”

As people ducked, gasped, covered their heads, even shrieked, Mryna flew straight toward the stage, circled the dignitaries a few times, and finally perched on the wire that stretched across from both wings, flying a large banner in the school’s colors: CON- GRATULATIONS TO THE CLASS OF 1922!

One of the newspaper’s photos the next day showed a sea of faces upturned as one, while the photo opposite featured Myrna as a sort of crown over the dignitaries’ heads. The lead article reported that no one said a word or could budge from their seats until long after Mryna cawed as if to clear her throat, then rasped out, “Augie and Schnooty, rah rah rah, go team!”

At least that’s what people up close said they could distinctly hear, although Mr. Hahn claimed the bird stuck in “some mighty nice cuss words” for good measure.

The class, as if waiting for an excuse to celebrate on its own terms, suddenly raised Schnooty and Augie up on a dozen shoulders and headed for the football stadium. The principal, thinking his position might be in jeopardy, had all he could do to repair to his office, where one suspected he tried writing out several versions of a letter of resignation; while the vice-principal, who among the administration was the boys’ biggest cheer-leader, had the good sense to hoick the box of diplomas onto his shoulder and follow the crowd. He was

eventually provided an escort and lustily cheered when, suddenly over- come with inspiration, he decided to pitch the students’ diplomas up over the crossbar of the goalpost and into their arms as they ran by, shouting “hike” to cue each student.

After the field had cleared of the last stragglers and a clean-up crew arrived to haul away an assortment of rubbish – pitched programs, dozens of diploma ribbons, even dis- carded bits of clothing, and not a few bottles of homemade brew – Schnooty was still on his back in one end zone, Ida nestled beside him holding one hand tight, while his free arm stretched up at the night’s new stars.

“See that dark blue one, Ida?” He stuck out a finger, “That’s Myrna up there.

That’s where she is now. And I’m going to follow her just as soon as I get my wings. Up, up, up, and away!” She put her cheek to his. Before he kissed her lightly, he fumbled with the ribbon from his diploma and looped it around her neck, drawing it into a neat little bow.

In the other end zone, Gertie was teasing Augie mercilessly. She’d asked to see his diploma, but as soon as he handed it over she started running such fast circles around him that he soon gave up and slumped to the turf. He didn’t even try to snatch it away when she poked it at him, so finally she just hit him on the head with it and dropped it in his lap. At that moment, something welled up in him. He stuck his arm out and pulled her down by the ankle. Before she could open her mouth, he pressed his lips so hard to hers that her arms shot out from her sides; then she softly closed them around his neck till he came up for air.

“Well I never.... Did you ever....” That was the greeting all over town the next few weeks, as total strangers stopped to exchange sentiments about a graduation most now took on as their own. Even Pete, the pet shop owner, got into the spirit and told a much relieved Gertie – for her part she was

determined to pay him back if Myrna never showed up again – that he couldn’t imagine better publicity for his business. He installed both girls behind a little table to sign autographs one whole day. Gertie drew a big fat mynah under her signature.

Oddly, only Mr. Hahn went another way with his emotions. Yes, he was happy no one was going to be punished, not even Southview’s principal, not to mention the girls, who’d become overnight heroines. One night weeks later, when the Hahns invited Gertie, Ida and Schnooty to join them for a private celebration, he started in on a story he’d never recounted before. “Back in my student days in Budapest, I was an avid follower of Louis Kossuth” – he didn’t bother saying who that was, exactly -- “and we were marching down the main boulevard with a banner right behind our great leader, who was spear-heading a protest parade of workers and students, when the police suddenly came at us from all directions, swinging their cudgels...” His voice gave out, and Mrs. Hahn motioned to the gathering around the table to start in on the borscht to give him a moment to recover from “that dark memory,” is all he would say when he came back to himself and led them in a blessing, half in Hungarian, before he lit the candles. For a change, he did not serve himself first, insisting that “our fine young people here deserved first helpings,” after which, for the remainder of the evening, he directed the conversation toward the rest of their lives, letting them plod along with their halting hopes.

L. Shapley Bassen

Portrait of a Giant Squid

It would be an understatement to say that in April, Ray was surprised to be his first cousin Donna's heir. He hardly remembered ever meeting her. In his mother's photo albums from the postwar 1940's, Ray appeared as a toddler, and this older cousin had stood over him in that summertime, casting a shadow.

His mother had died of leukemia at sixty-nine in 1987, younger than he was in this August of 2014. Those photo albums had been long lost. Donna's parents had moved from New York to Los Angeles in the early 50's. Her mother was Ray's father's younger sister. In the past decade of social media, Donna had located more distant members of their scattered family, discovering they were a clan of only children. One lived in Alaska, another in Alabama. After Donna friended Ray on Facebook, there had been posts and messages and some emails, never Skype. He'd kept his distance, having no inclination to travel to California. Four decades of international business travel had extinguished any wanderlust he might have ever had. Also, he belonged to the John Updike school: "The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding."

The legal document said that his cousin Donna's estate included a painting by a major 20th century artist. Ruth Riesenkalmar's work had finally emerged from eclipse by her husband's, and the museum site of their house and shared studios on Long Island had been renamed, hyphenated to include her. After learning about the painting, Ray visited three Manhattan museums exhibiting Riesenkalmars. MOMA displayed two from her cephalopod series. A photo the

lawyers sent showed Ray that his newly inherited Portrait of a Giant Squid was as color-saturated and indecipherably abstract as MOMA's except for its dominant circular center entangled in wavy, sucker-circled lines suggesting a squid's giant eye and tentacles. He could also see from its reported dimensions that it would be an ordeal to install in his apartment.

Ray's spacious tenth floor condo had been decorated decades earlier by his wife who after the divorce had moved to the East Hampton house. A short living room wall was covered in beveled mirror, and his grandmother's marbletopped bombes were end tables for the long couch. He knew the two empty nest bedrooms converted to library and flatscreen TV sanctum wouldn’t do, and even if there were space in the master, he certainly didn't want that squid swimming in his sleep. The living room's nine foot ceilings and twenty foot long wall behind the couch would just accommodate the painting, but it would necessitate removing furniture, including the baby grand piano in front of the East End Avenue East River-facing window.

When it arrived before Hallowe'en, the huge canvas overwhelmed his space.

Its red/orange was overpowered by thick black daubs. Between his thumb and forefinger pressed against his palm, Ray imagined the steel palette knife that had scraped on the black paint. He had to stand in the farthest dining room corner away from the picture for anything representational to arise out of the abstract shapes. Then, a giant squid rose out of dark water, languidly undulating, rising toward an invisible surface that could only be a matter of faith. Its cyclopean circle eyed him. Its tentacles reached towards him. Then it spoke to him.

Ray fled his apartment, across the street from his building into Carl Schurz Park. This was where he walked every morning and evening in decent weather,

along the promenade uptown along the East River from the Mayor's mansion to a short tunnel underneath a girls' prep school, the traffic pulsing on the East River Drive further below. As it always did, the rhythm of walking calmed him.

His thoughts lined up like iron filings to a magnet. He had always straightened out his life on long walks, but he was no flaneur. Walking had crystallized the law and the facts. Marriage ended and children moved away. People died.

Inheritance ensued. By the time Ray walked down the steps at 81 st, his heartbeat was normal. Little else was, but he reversed his steps. A boat horn bellowed. Ray turned and looked south along the river toward the wide bay and open ocean. He couldn't see the source of the gigantic sound. He wondered about cephalopods.

Back in his apartment library, his laptop revealed that the giant squid hid in clouds of ink. They were brainy mollusks. The females were larger than the males. They grew to possibly sixty feet in length. Giant squids each had eight arms and two longer tooth-suckered tentacles for grasping prey. Invertebrates, they had no structural bones. But unlike gelatinous clams and snails, giant squids did possess a paddle-shaped internal support, called a gladius, that retained their form. The gladius was formed of chitin, a material also found in insect exoskeletons. Ray stopped, reminded of a hideous photo from college biology. A human fetal corpse had abdominal organs growing outside its body.

That memory intercut with what he now imagined, the squid as a giant inverted insect. He shuddered. Nothing in horror or science fiction approached Evolution's trials and errors.

Ray returned to digital reading. The giant squid's toothed tentacles warded off deep-diving sperm whales. Those whales often had scars that matched the cookie-cutter-shaped suckers on a giant squid’s tentacles, evidence of a struggle

between predator and prey. Ray was familiar with the competition in Time between lex talionis and the rule of human law, the latter often subsuming rather than superseding the former. He closed the laptop and shut his eyes. In October, it was getting dark so early again.

The next day, he visited the Museum of Natural History's first floor exhibit in The Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life. School groups of children craned their necks up at the ninety-four long, 21,000-pound model of a blue whale suspended from the ceiling. Ray located the diorama of a sperm whale battling its doomed prey, a giant squid. He left the museum and walked to Zabar's, then back to the M79 crosstown bus to the East Side. He presented the shopping bag as a trophy to the painting.

"Look what's for dinner, Ruth."

"Ruth? Okay. Now you're talking."

"Aged Piave, smoked trout, and halvah for dessert."

"Why would anyone smoke a trout?" Ruth said.

"I gave up cigarettes decades ago."

Hallowe'en came and went. Conversations with the painting continued in a similar whimsical vein, and Ray became accustomed to her presence though not to her complaints about space that by Spring resulted in the sale of the condo and Ray's move to a floor-through loft downtown. The return of the grand piano was hugely welcome. Neighbors above and below praised his playing. They told him they stopped whatever they were doing and listened as he began every morning and ended every night with a piano transcription of Barber's Adagio for Strings.

"Whatever you're doing at night?" Ray doubted.

He was invited to a Memorial Day party on the building's top floor. The crowd spread onto the roof with a view of the red, white, and blue-lighted Freedom Tower, and one neighbor asked if he'd been a concert pianist professionally.

"Oh, no, though for decades, when I traveled for work, I followed Thibaudet, Lang Lang, and the Labeque sisters when I could."

Utterly foreign to Ray's s lifelong Upper East Side isolation, these new interactions with people downtown verified his belief that, like a grand piano or Walt Whitman, New York City contained the world. Then Ray gave a party.

The Riesenkalmar canvas aroused even more reaction from the new people in his life. They voiced opinions about the ownership of such valuable art.

"It belongs in a museum."

"Don't sell it to the highest bidder."

"In his will, Jefferson freed five of his slaves, probably his children with Sally Hemings. The rest were sold against a $107,000 debt, orders of magnitude dollars in today's money. In his will, George Washington, who was probably sterile, freed all his slaves and their children. You should free the Riesenkalmar."

"But Ray inherited it from his cousin. She wanted him to have it."

"Are you going to 'Ask the Ethicist' in the Times?"

"I used to like that better when one person answered. This ethics by inexpert committee isn't worth the digital space it appears on."

"We used to say 'the paper it's printed on.' Ou sont les neiges d'antan?"

"Ou, indeed!"

When the party was over, Ray discussed the matter with Ruth. She was far across the loft space from him as he sat at the grand playing quietly since it was close to dawn.

"What do you know about your provenance?" Ray asked.

"What do you know about yours?"

"You never blink."

"How do you know it's my eye you're looking at? It could be a closeup of one of my tentacles' suckers. Or anything else."

"It lacks teeth," Ray said.

"I'm as much an abstraction as you are."

"I deal in facts."

"Once upon a time, you did."

"How, I wonder, did my cousin acquire you? Before her parents moved from Manhattan, did they wander into a bohemian studio and buy you from the then unknown artist for a pittance?"

"Yes, misogyny and philistinism explains so much," Ruth agreed. "Why did you and your wife divorce?"

Ray's hands moved over the piano keys. "I suppose I knew no more about her gathering than she did my hunting. We both knew only what we brought home which was less and less of ourselves. We had a son and a daughter. Wife was very good with growing things. Did something with the Central Park Conservancy. Developed pocket parks I never knew where. Maybe she was on the High Line advisory board. " "What about the 60's? Sex, drugs, and rock n roll?"

Ray played a Beatles' melody. "We may have occasionally dropped in, but we never dropped out. Fear of heights. Too far to fall. Well, at least our boy was

gay. Well-placed by the State Department in Asia. Daughter a California billionaire's BFF in college. Now Heather owns six restaurants in San Francisco and Marin Counties."

Ruth made an odd sound. Ray thought of whalesong and wondered if giant squid also communicated underwater.

"Is that the daughter you saw at the Club Inside the Club?"

The light changed in the open space. It was dawn, and suddenly Ray was utterly fatigued. He closed the piano and shut his eyes.

"I can still see you, you know," Ruth said. "Giant squid live only five years and reproduce only once. The males' penis is seven feet long and penetrates the females' arms where our ovaries produce the eggs we expel as fertilized jellied egg masses mostly eaten by predators. While still flawed, human design is far more balletic and efficient. So your East Side sex club doesn't shock me in the least. The young women freely chose to attend, and the only payment by the older men was the added membership fee. You could honestly tell wives you were congressing with classmates at your college club."

"I never went back after I saw Heather."

"But she told your wife."

The whole horrible scene reappeared as if superimposed, roiling on the giant painting.

"It was explicable but indefensible," Ray admitted.

"You're asleep," Ruth soothed. "When you wake, you won't remember any of this. You'll feel much better."

Ray gave another party for Independence Day. One of the guests was a professional copyist. In her late fifties, Rachel worked for interior designers,

collectors, and museums. A contact at MOMA had wangled an invitation for her precisely in hopes of gaining a replica of Ray's Riesenkalmar for the museum. A week later when she approached Ray, he watched her examine the Portrait.

Then he not only agreed to the commission but also invited her out. At dinner, she talked about the artist, and he talked about cephalopods.

"She was raised an orthodox Jew but lapsed," Rachel said. "Fled the tribe because Hebrew had no word for vagina. Loathed the men's daily prayer thankful for being created in Divine image. Women say, 'Thank You, O Lord, for creating me as You saw fit.' Sounds to me as if the latter gives the Lord more artistic freedom, but I guess believing is as much hearing as seeing. Why are you looking at me like that? You have very big eyes."

"The giant squid had the largest eyes of any living creature except its colossal cousin. Only the extinct ichthyosaurs had such large eyes."

"Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands‌" "What?" Ray said.

"E.E. Cummings."

Ray poured more wine. "Large eyes can better detect even bioluminescent light which is rare in deep water. But the giant squid probably cannot see color."

"Your ex-wife is also colorblind," Rachel said.

"How do you know that?"

"We were classmates at college. I took Mary to the Insiders Club in '78 when we were sophomores. She only joined a few of us that once. Seven Sisters women from eighteen to thirty. Invitations all by word of mouth. Is that when she met you?"

"Lord, no."

"I thought not. It's a big City but a small world. I don't remember you, either. I don't remember a good deal of the 70's and 80's. But poor Mary was victimized by my adolescent iconoclasting. Before AIDS, I thought of the Club as free love and drinks, dinner, and fair game. Hard to tell who was predator, who was prey.

I always knew I could make a living – and did -- with brush not bush, and at twenty, I couldn't see I was as self righteous as the Establishment. No surprise she married uptown, and I headed down when the Towers were young. All these decades later, when I heard about you and your Riesenkalmar, I figured it was karma, beshert. " "Beshert?"

"You've lived your entire life in Manhattan, and you don't know beshert?

'Ordained.' But you will let MOMA buy the copy I'll create?"

"Don't you do any original work?"

"At times, but a copy isn't a forgery. Its dimensions must be changed, and the canvas is carefully marked. Like a tattoo."

Rachel lifted her sleeve to display the inside of her forearm where small twining letters, AEON SOPHIA, were colorfully inked.

"Like an identical twin, a copy is unique," she said. "I've worked with Riesenkalmers before. MOMA knows that the commissions I accept, the paintings speak to me. When the voice stops, so do I. Sometimes heartbreak, sometimes relief, usually both." She shrugged. "Like life."

"Are any of your rings a wedding band? Do you have any children?"

"Ray, you and I don't have to be friends."

"What did the Riesenkalmers say to you?"

Rachel nodded. "All right. Well, one quoted Ecclesiastes about the seasons.

Another was obsessed with the words 'sublime' and 'sublimation'. One lectured

me about the hyper-sexualization of American culture. It kept repeating Agape v. Eros."

"Like a court case. The contract is signed. I'm donating the original to MOMA. She spoke to me, too. I'm keeping the copy they pay you for."

Rachel emptied her glass of wine and inclined it for a refill. Ray obliged.

Startled by the feminine pronoun he had used, Rachel asked, "What did the Portrait say to you?"

They both drank. Their waiter served dinner and brought another bottle of wine.

"I don't remember," Ray finally answered. He frowned. "I hope yours will be mute."

"The rest is silence," Rachel said.

Ray nodded at Hamlet's dying double entendre. He felt mildly nauseated, full, and drunk. He wished for the evening to be over. His hands already wanted the piano. Nothing more to be said in words that music and images would more eloquently express. He felt no wander or lust of any kind, but curiosity survived. One way or another, it killed the cat.

Over a year later, Ray remembered that thought when he visited the Riesenkalmer exhibit at MOMA. He kept his distance from the paintings but observed their observers. In front of the Giant Squid was a young mother with a toddler in a stroller. Ray was close enough to hear her naughtily joke with her boy, "No damn cat, no damn cradle," and the child delightedly echo, "Damn!"

Then, just as suddenly, the young mother stiffened, stared, and cried out at the huge canvas. "What?!"

The little boy screamed and burst into loud tears.

The crowd in the exhibit space instantly shifted like schooling fish threatened by a predator. Led by a uniformed guard, the young mother quickly pushed her stroller away.

Better than most, Ray understood. The museum goers resumed their more placid shoaling at a safer distance from the art, and he, too, returned downtown to his quiet copy.

Fletch Feltcher Nuclear Diety

Ask me the affinity of Carbon and I’ll explain how your feet form an infinity of empty spaces.

We are Carbon’s obsessive compulsion, its four electron arms bond in desperation, loneliness of atomic separation.

Nuclear bodies never really touch. Well, atom smashers, hadron colliders, places people press the smallest bodies warn us caresses of small hearts could rip holes in space.

And let’s not forget the sun, all its fusion, pure power. If your feet were made of sun-skin everywhere you walk would be Heaven. worlds would grow in circles. men would bend knees to pray. only when you sleep.

Where you stop Where you sleep Men would pray

Michele Meyers

Aliens Invade the Walt Disney Concert Hall

Nobody was particularly surprised when aliens showed up at last night’s Rachmaninoff concert. Los Angeles is just that kind of city, y’know, the kind of city that aliens are bound to invade. They looked like the aliens from The War of the Worlds, Martian-types, pretty big, with gray, oily skin and large dark eyes and lipless V-shaped mouths, all tentacle-y and such. They were dressed up nice, tuxes and fine dresses, dabbing at their dripping saliva mouths with handkerchiefs.

As it turns out, according to the aliens, they were not actually invading, nor did they have any particular love of Rachmaninoff (they were much more into Shostakovich, if they had to pick a 20th century Russian composer, followed by Stravinsky). I was in a unique position to learn this information, as I was the usher at the door taking tickets.

“Tickets?” they said. There were probably seven or eight of them in total, including what appeared to be a child alien, well-behaved, not like all the other brats dragged here by their sophisticate Brentwood-y parents.

“Yes, for the concert?”

The aliens shook their heads. “I’m sorry, but we believe that you’ve made a mistake. This is not a concert hall. This, here, is our long-lost spacecraft.”

“Your long-lost spacecraft?”

“Our long-lost spacecraft, last seen near the Small Magellanic Cloud, which, you might note, is only about 200,000 light years away from Earth. Our tracking devices suggest—”

I held up a finger. “You can stop right there. I get it. I get why you would think…but you see, this brilliant work of architectural innovation”—I gestured—“was designed by none other than Frank Gehry. Yes, the visual salience of the Walt Disney Concert Hall lies in its exquisite stainless steel exterior and postmodern style, which could, if perceived in a certain way, resemble a space-faring vehicle. I regret to inform you that, alas, it is only a concert hall.”

The aliens crossed their tentacles. “We find this hard to believe.”

“Perhaps the Disney Concert Hall doesn’t follow the traditional architectural theory that form follows function, but what a way to embody the ethos of the post-industrial City of Angels!”

The lights flickered on and off inside, signaling for the audience to find their seats. The aliens remained stationary, so I did too. Ollie and Felicia, the two other ushers, would be more than capable of guiding the blue-haired old women to their designated rows.

The aliens cleared their throats. “Everything you have said thus far makes sense, but we hear that this so-called hall is also equipped with heat rays? That the parabolic mirrored surfaces have been able to concentrate sunlight in such a way as to create hot spots on adjacent sidewalks as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit?”

I squirmed at this question. This was not a detail that we, ushers of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, were particularly proud of. “I suppose, yes, initially, there were some residents of neighboring condominiums suffering glare caused by sunlight that was reflected off these surfaces, and there was an increased risk of traffic accidents due to said blinding sunlight reflecting into drivers’ eyes, but

the surfaces at fault were quickly sanded down and are now much more amenable to the public at large.”

The aliens leaned back on their heels, a slight waver. “So the skyward gaze afforded by the glass paneling above the main lobby? It’s not for navigational purposes?”

“Gehry imagined the effect of space opening up to the sky to be remarkably tranquil, the visitor suspended between two worlds, the eye engaged in a brilliant voyeuristic dance.”

An alien in a polka-dotted bowtie snorted. “A brilliant voyeuristic dance?”

“I know, I know. His words, not mine.”

One of the shier aliens spoke up, waved a tentacle from the back of the crowd. “What about the seats? They’re wrapped so tightly around the stage.

Such an intimate, womb-like interior is usually only associated with the limited spatial provisions of interstellar travel.”

“Gehry wanted audiences to have a communal experience with both the orchestra and others in the room, the hall a place of shared human solace.”

The aliens rolled their eyes. I didn’t blame them. I rolled my eyes as well.

“Tell you what. We have a few extra seats. I know it must be disappointing, to have come all this way, from wherever you were before, only to discover that this is not your long-lost spacecraft, and I’d like to make it up to you.”

The aliens exchanged glances with one another, a few shrugs. “Okay, we’ll take you up on your offer. Will there be an intermission?”

“Of course! To not allow an intermission at a Rachmaninoff concert would be wholly inhumane.”

The aliens waddled into the hall, and when they emerged, two hours later, they seemed to be smiling, although given their lipless V-shaped mouths, it was

hard to tell the difference between an expression of pleasure and an expression of unadulterated hatred.

The largest of the aliens, the one who appeared to be in charge, nodded its head toward me. “That was lovely. We must reassess our opinion of Rachmaninoff. He clearly deserves greater praise.”

“Yes, you can’t go wrong with his Piano Concerto Number 2.”

“We would like to come back again. Do you know if there are still season tickets available?”

I directed the aliens to the box office. A moment later there was a sudden shriek, followed by a sharp, violent sizzle and the smell of scorching hair and searing flesh. When the aliens turned the corner again, bouquets of season tickets fluttered in their tentacles, a few wisps of smoke trailing behind them.

“Toodeloo,” they said to me. “We’ll see you next month then! Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain? Oh, what a treat! We can’t wait to invite all of our friends…”

Contributors Kartik Agarwal Kartik Agarwal is a first year law student at Gujarat National Law University, India. Apart from writing, he is keen on photography, basketball and loving dogs. Kartik has previously worked with a few non-profit organisations.

L. Shapley Bassen L. Shapley Bassen is the Fiction Editor for Prick of the Spindle and a Finalist for the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Award. The coming of age novel [EgyptianAmerican girl] MARWA was published in February 2016. In 2014, Typhoon Media published her alternative history novel in which Hitler is successfully assassinated, “Summer of the Long Lives.” Also in 2014, Texture Press published her collection “Lives of Crime & Other Stories.” She was an original Reader for Electric Literature, and won the 2009 APP Drama Prize & a Mary Roberts Rinehart Fellowship. She reviews for The Rumpus and others and is a prizewinning, produced, publishedplaywright, ATA in NYC, OH, NC).

Visit her website for more.

Fletch Fletcher Fletcher is a North Jersey poet and science teacher who spends his free time touring on a motorcycle. He received his MFA in Poetry from Drew University and thanks everyone (students and faculty) for fostering what will be a lifelong passion.

Stuart Friebert Stuart Friebert has published 14 books of poems, 10 volumes of translations, and several anthologies. He has also published numerous critical essays, held an N.E.A. grant in poetry, and received a number of awards for his poetry and translations over the years.

Sean Jackson Sean Jackson’s debut novel, “Haw,” was published in June 2015 by Harvard Square Editions. He lives in North Carolina and his latest stories have been published in Main Street Rag, The Potomac Review, Niche, and Cleaver, among other literary magazines. He was a 2011 Million Writers Award nominee.

Michelle Meyers Michelle Meyers is a fiction writer and playwright originally from Los Angeles, CA. Her writing has been published in the Los Angeles Times, DOGZPLOT, jmww, Grey Sparrow Journal, Juked, and decomP, and she has received awards and honors from Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and Wigleaf. She was a 2015 PEN Center Emerging Voices Fellow in Fiction and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama’s Creative Writing program. Her debut novel,”Glass Shatters,” will be published in April 2016.

Meghana Mysore Meghana Mysore is a senior at Lake Oswego High School. Her work appears or will appear in Aerie International, Alexandria Quarterly, Burningword, Cadaverine, Crashtest, Pilcrow & Dagger, Third Wednesday, VoiceCatcher and more, and she is the recipient of several Gold Keys from Scholastic Art &

Writing and an Honorable Mention from the Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest. She serves as a Portland Youth Poet Ambassador and was the editorial intern for VoiceCatcher‘s anniversary anthology, “She Holds the Face of the World: Ten Years of VoiceCatcher.”

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