ISSUE ONE 2016
THE CRAWL SPACE JOURNAL
The Editors
Sharla Yates, Founding Editor and Editor in Chief Rachael Dymski, Founding Editor and Community Director Kelly Kepner, Editor and Marketing Director Athena Wintruba, Editor and Web Content Manager Adi Bracken, Editor and Social Media Moderator Lisa Slage Robinson, Fiction Editor
A
Letter From The Editors
Hello Fellow Crawlers, Welcome to our maiden voyage with Issue One. This journal has already taken us on many adventures from our first brainstorming session to these words now dancing across the screen. Within these pages you’ll find many dogs (nearly a pack of dogs), a robot, nautical voices, and (many) calls from the beyond. There’s longing, but also humor. A “strange” way of seeing things that makes perfect sense to us. We feel a deep gratitude for our editors, family and all the writers who helped make this first issue a reality. We thank them for their time, creativity, input, and most of all, belief in this literary escapade. We're very pleased you’ve found us and hope that you find as much pleasure in these stories and poems as we have.
Enjoy!
Table of Contents
Kenny Gould
Goondoolay
Tess Wilson
Mechanics
S.A. Foster
Crawling Blue
Marileta Robinson
Black Hole
L a u r a M a d e l i n e W i s e m a n Troll Ashes
Jordan Green Mercedes Lawry Maureen Phillips Kenny Gould
Ship In A Bottle Sea Siren Call Wolf Girl Timmy's Talking Dog
Goondoolay
Kenny Gould
Hello all. Longtime reader, first time poster. I wasn’t going to post at all until I saw KittenMouse’s June 2014 thread about bunk Goondoolay plants. Glad to see I’m not the only one. This thread’s a bit old, but I’m going to post about my experience with the hope that we can restart the conversation and maybe come to some sort of conclusion. I bought my Goondoolay in Winter 2007 from a Merchant in East Farmor. I know he was Guild Certified because I tested his papers with corter oil. The Merchant looked at my palms and ran a hawk feather down my arms, and then he turned around and fumbled through his drawers. After a while, he said, “The Goondoolay,” and brought out the plant. Instructions were taped to the side; I’ve included a copy of the text, in case anyone’s interested: 1. Place the Goondoolay in an area of bright where it won’t be easily disturbed. 2. Water the Goondoolay with one cup of water every other week. I followed the instructions exactly. That’s been going on for seven years and nothing has happened. After the first year, I tried to return the plant to the Merchant, but he refused to speak with me. When I appealed to the City Council, they pointed to the Merchant’s Guild Rule book. Needless to say, I’m a bit disappointed. When my neighbor watered his Goondoolay, the Owl Lord appeared at his feet and gave him a flaming sword. Has anyone else had a similar problem? Or do Goondoolays take this long to sprout? I look forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts.
Mechanics
Tess Wilson
My boyfriend is a robot. I’m not speaking metaphorically, I bought him. An estate sale. Missing an arm, he was inexpensive. Essentially appliance, he helped around the house, took on a few one-armed tasks, changed light bulbs, steadied ladders, dusted, checked off to-do lists. Woke me with coffee every day at 7:30. Good morning, ma’am. Which turned into breakfast together, holding hands while we walked the dog, as long as I held the leash. At the dinner table, Could you pass the – pass the – pass the – until I ding my fork against his head. – salt? Secondhand, he came with some glitches. Friends don’t come around as often. It’s creepy. I just don’t know how to act around him. They don’t know how nice it is, the gentle static of my mornings, waking up to a warm cup, a cold hand on my shoulder. Good – Good – Good –
Crawling Blue
S.A. Foster
I’m scrubbing coffee stains out of Mike’s identical white mugs, hating Ryan Carluso, and wishing for a big brother, when the world first starts to leak. The brother in my mind is a firefighter type. He scales mountains and rescues drowning toddlers, and right now, he leans one side of his tall muscle-self against the wall, folds his arms, and asks, “You want me to kill him for ya?” Yeah, I think. “No,” I say. But I can’t help imagining Ryan with his perfectly gelled hair getting his pretty-boy face ground into the asphalt. He starts crying way too soon, and that makes me realize that I hate him even more, for being weak. Too weak, in fact, to tell me eight months ago, before that night in his garage, that he never really “felt it” for me. Then, right in the back room of Mike’s Coffee where I am supposed to be scrubbing those brown stains from the white mugs and not drawing attention to my too-young-for-taxes self, the wall starts to drip. This cobalt liquid splats on the floor beside the sink, and my first thought is that it looks like the toilet water after my mom puts one of those disks into it so that people will walk into the bathroom and think, Oh, what a lovely ocean bungalow instead of Oh, this is the place where everyone does their business. But my second thought is that, once again, I have broken some difficult-to-replace mechanical item and I can’t even do dishes right, and Mike is gonna kill me, so I turn off the faucet and inspect the damage. A round blue clot is forming where the ceiling meets the wall.
It’s oozing down the fake red brick, and dripping to the floor. And then I hear her. It’s this little girl with a voice like screeching brakes and shattering glass—a voice like a car accident outside your window, and all she’s saying is—help me help me help me help me And it’s like I’m dreaming because no one raised by my mother, by my seashell-bathroom-decorating, “Don’t-use-that-soap-that’s-theguest-soap” mother would ever do something like this, but I could swear that girl’s voice is coming from behind the wall, so I lean in to listen, and then, get this, I touch the blue stuff. And I’m listening so hard that I don’t notice Mike until all twohundred-fifty Sicilian pounds of him is right behind me, and he scares the crap out of me, and his white mug is shattering on the floor, and broken rounded bits are rolling away in pieces where I drop it. “Jesus, Mazzeti! Why you so jumpy, huh?” He wipes a hand on his sorry apron then points an accusing finger. “Sign of a guilty mind,” he says. Lumbering away, he adds, “Don’t think I won’t charge you for that.” I squat down to pick up the pieces, and I notice that the toxic blue mess is all over my hand, so I say, “Hey Mike, you got something that’ll take this off?” Mike sticks his head out from the shiny customer area where he’s already gone to get away from me, and I can tell he hasn’t really heard me, but he looks at the pieces in my hand, and he says, “Just toss it. Nobody’ll drink from it if it’s cracked.” And I realize that he can’t see it. Not surprising, because Mike doesn’t really ever see me. But my mother doesn’t see it either when I try to wash my hands for baked ziti night. And it’s then that I start to panic a little.
Not so anyone can notice, but an inside panic. The kind that still lets you do things like pass the olive oil to Nana, and ignore a text message from Ryan Carluso. Because even though my hand looks like it’s holding its breath, and my heart is beating in my ears like a crazy war drum, the fact is, Mom just can’t see the blue. I think that maybe Nana’s eyes are on me too long, and that maybe she sees, but no. No one can see it. The next morning, in the shower, it happens again. The blue drops look so much worse when they mix with the hot water. They coil out like snakes toward my bare feet, and I think that I’m bleeding, that they’re coming from me. Blood’s only blue while it’s still inside you, I think. Then I hear her again, the little girl. I hear her so clearly. Her voice echoes through the drain like when my mother is belting Puccini in the upstairs bathroom. It’s like this girl is right there, trapped in the pipes. Help me! My father always says he can tell the difference between when his kids are whining and when they are really hurt; this is real. I hear wildness. I hear pain, like someone is holding her hand over a lighter and she can’t pull away. The dogs are coming! Helpme helpme please helpmee! Jesus. I don’t know what I’m doing. I get down on my hands and knees on the floor of the shower, with the hot water pelting against my back, and the blue on my palms and shins, and I can’t believe this, I start talking to the drain.
"Don’t be afraid.” I tell her, giving the advice my dad once gave me about hypothetical rabid Nazi attack dogs, “Just kick them. Aim for their faces.” They have teeth! she says. I’m barefoot. “Well…you have teeth on your toes!” I say, because if I’m going crazy and talking to little girls in drains they might as well have whatever equipment I want. I don’t! she screams. My feet don’t have any teeth! And now she’s crying so hard I can’t tell what she’s saying. I clench my jaw, and I hear my heart drumming a warpath again. Then all the sound stops, and I don’t know how I know, but I know that Nana is in the room. Yes, it’s her. I smell her powder and perfume on the other side of the shower curtain. “You okay in there, my baby?” she asks. I turn the shower off and stand up quickly, without breathing, so she won’t know I’ve been crouched here like an animal. I brush my hair out of my face, dripping blue all down my cheek and onto my neck. “I’m good, Nana. Just talking to myself.” She waits there quiet for a minute, like maybe she’s expecting more. I can feel my skin getting colder as it drips, and I wonder if she can see the blue stains through the curtain. “There no dogs here, baby,” she says softly, and then she pulls the door closed again. Dad always says that Nana hears things. Like dogs, maybe. Like me. Now she’s gone.
The little girl is gone, too. But the blue? That stays. It’s all over me now, like a sloppy inky tattoo job, and I’m pretty sure no one on the planet can see it, but I can see it. I can feel it on my skin like it’s trying to get in, so I pull out all the stops: boots, a turtleneck, hands in pockets, hair combed in a dorky side part, and an inch gone from my crusted over bottle of maybe-it’s-insecurity skin foundation, and it’s all barely enough for me to pass as normal —except that it’s July. And Ryan Carluso’s pool party is today. If I don’t go, he’ll know how upset I am. I promised we were still friends. I promised I wouldn’t be a girl about it. I walk around weird now. I’m listening to everything too close. I see two kids tossing a frisbee, and I yell at them to stop playing in the street. I sound thirty. All nine blocks to Ryan’s house I imagine white dogs coming at me from bushes and from inside of cars when people pull up beside me. When I ring the bell at Ryan’s I imagine their heads chewing up through the soil of the giant potted plants that Ryan’s Mom keeps outside their door. I see them snapping at me, shoving their pointy snouts through the banisters near the entryway, and trying to gnaw a hand off when I reach inside the ice chests where Ryan’s mom has stored all the non-carbonated organic drinks. I imagine kicking their faces in while Ryan and I do this subtle avoidance dance around the pool and the people and the snack table. I am still imagining this crap when the party is dying and I’m getting a fruit juice pop from the freezer in the garage, and Ryan is suddenly there behind me.
And while my hand is on the only orange pop, his is on my ass, and I can’t say I don't like it because I do. But I don’t like Ryan. So I don’t say anything. And his hand starts to travel. And the door to the freezer has been open too long and it starts dripping onto the cement. Shit. It’s dripping blue. Right here, right in front of Ryan, but he’s really interested in getting through my first fabric layer, and he hasn’t noticed. I pretend to look for something behind the frozen strawberries. First I hear Ryan, and then her. “I like that we can still be close like this,” he says, sliding his hand over my stomach. Help me. Her voice echoes, like she’s in a space with its own acoustics. It’s insane, I know, but she must be inside the fridge, or behind it. “I don’t know what I would do without you in my life,” Ryan says. He runs his thumb in a circle at my center. I push aside the carob ice cream packages and the spinach pot pies. I reach deeper, shoving packages, until my fingers brush something hidden in the back and suddenly, I realize what it is. Meat. Steaks. All wrapped in white and discrete, like there aren’t chunks of flesh back there, like there aren’t carnivores in this house.
I just didn’t feel it, you know? I press past the meat and it’s like the freezer has deepened. I have to lean far in to get my fingers against the back. I reach further and push and crack my nails against the cold plastic and they bleed a little blue. I don’t care. I have to get to that girl. I lean further in, and Ryan leans into me, and I reach ahead. We do this again. Then again. Like before. Help me NOW! Drumming explodes around me. I drum too, because I drop dinners and clatter ice trays to the floor. Pound. Crash. Ryan stops what he’s doing long enough to notice me. “Mazetti?” My arm breaks through first, snapping through plastic and wire, and I can feel the open space world back there, where the wall should be, but it isn’t. It’s an open blue world, gushing blue all over my arm, pouring over the contents of the freezer and into the garage, and she is calling me. She knows my name. Ryan hears her, I think, because he freaks. He goes sprawling on the floor, all sloppy in my blue flood. He calls out to me as I pound the back wall out, and haul myself into the freezer, sliding forward like a snake on my wet stomach.
“MAZETTI!” But I’m gone. All the way through.
In there, it’s the little girl, the dogs, and me.
Ryan’s scared boy voice is in another valley. My broken nails are knives, and I slice them across my cheeks, streaking blue. I slice them through my hair on one side, and through my skirt. I’ve got teethboots and skin and just enough skirt. I race to her there, on the rocks beside the crashing blue waves, and the dogs are closing in. She hangs around my waist, hooking her hands in a knot at my navel, like she’s drowning, like she’s part of my skin and my guts. And I start slicing through those canines. I toss them like salads. I kick their faces in. “You okay? You want me to?” I shout. “Yes,” she says, gripping my stomach. “Yes!”
Black Hole A black hole was once a star Until the pressure became too great Now it travels incognito “No pictures, please�
Marlieta Robinson
Troll Ashes
Laura Madeline Wiseman
When we arrived again at the carvings, you scattered half the ashes. The other half you wanted to save for our yard. I said words before the seal and you said words, the bone bits white against the brown of fall. I asked you if the trolls had a way of haunting, of coming back, if this one might come again at night. You shook your head and took me home. You held my hand, took it really. I didn’t say no. Still, it’s strange to sleep. To find a bed and stay without roaming, without listening for what shakes, bodies hitting walls, things exploding above. Sometimes the troll that lives under our neighbor’s porch calls to me. His voice is the voice of cities bombed to destroy what’s underneath. He wants me to look so I look towards nothing. Our yard shivers half-dead. No one tends the stones, collects the dropped limbs, stops the cash crop going rogue. I look towards nothing and see—porch of glass window, porch of junk to be dragged across concrete, porch of blacked tools—then I go inside. Because you thought it best, we frosted every window and moved my bed across the house to the spare, where I sleep now, really sleeping.
Ship In A Bottle
Jordan Green
Deep down there’s a ship in a bottle, Tossing about on a poison half-cup Of frothing black water. How did the ship get into the bottle? Well, I’ll tell you how: A drip, a drop, a piece at a time – A tattered sail, a splintery knot, a creaking, aching board of hull, One at a time, drip, drip, drip, Pulled down by the flow of stormy sea, Through the rigid narrow neck. A drip, a drop, a piece at a time – A bulging barrel, some broken glass, the heaviest cargo last of all, The ship went into the bottle And there it stays, Taking on water, Lightning flaring, Seamen swearing, Wood screeching, grinding against the glass. It pitches and bucks in its tiny typhoon, The gale all the worse confined. How did the ship get into the bottle? I suppose looking back I know now. But a far more important question arises: Now how do I get out?
Sea Siren Call
Mercedes Lawry
Can you hear me calling? Here, on the rocks, with the barking seals and the smooth jade moss. Come closer, I want stories of the wide world. You can touch my long black hair and find secrets in my eyes. Come to me, sailor. Let the wind bring you here where the sun sinks into the horizon with a green flash and the stars begin to speckle the black sky, where I will sing wild and beautiful songs to keep you near.
Wolf Girl
Maureen Phillips
In the den, the wolf pups are sleeping. There’s a secret they are keeping. Snuggled among their furry swirl, They are hiding a little girl. A tiny baby when first they found her. No fur coat was wrapped around her. They pulled her from a rushing river, Huddled around to stop her shiver. Into the field, the pups are bounding. Wolf Girl chases her heart is pounding! Time to run and play across the meadow, Pouncing at every twitch and shadow. Sneaking up the ridge to peep, At unsuspecting silly sheep. A yip, a nip a bark, a wail! The sheep wise up and turn tail. Night is falling, no more prowling. Now is the time for wolf pack howling. Round they circle in a ring, Lift their heads and start to sing. Those at home, lock their doors, When the howling floats across the moors. Then they stand as if spellbound, For one voice is surely not a hound.
Timmy's Talking Dog
Kenny Gould
Once there was a boy named Timmy. A wizard sold him a wish, and he wished for a talking dog. A maltese appeared on his doorstep. It was small and white with beady black eyes, and spoke with the voice of a heavy smoker. It recited baseball scores and incessantly complained about the weather. “Turn it off!” Timmy’s parents said, but the dog wouldn’t shut up.
Contributors' Bios in order of appearance Kenny Gould is a freelance journalist and writer living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he’s currently pursuing his Master of Fine Arts in Fiction as well as his 200-hour Yoga Alliance teacher training certificate. You can follow him on Twitter at @kb_gould or on his website at kennygould.com. Tess Wilson's poems have previously been published in the 2011 issue of Inscape Magazine (print only), in the annual Free Poems series, and in the Summer 2015 issue of NEAT Magazine (http://neatmag.net/issues/). She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University and currently serves as Assistant Editor of Hyacinth Girl Press and Reader/Carpenter for the Pittsburgh Poetry Houses project. Previously, she was an Associate Editor and Online Layout Designer of The Fourth River, Editor/Illustrator of This Time: An Anthology, and a Poetry Editor of Inscape Magazine. She is also in the midst of launching State Bird Press, a micropress featuring zines and other illustrated works. She collects big dictionaries and small rocks. Tess contributed the watercolor art work for this issue. S.A. Foster (Hess Oster) earned an M.F.A. in Children’s Literature from Hollins University and an M.A. in Shakespeare and Education from the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. She spent four years pretending to be other people in schools across the US, Canada, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Mainland China, and the Philippines. Then she moved to Seoul, South Korea, where she pretended to be more people for four more years and ran a group of pretenders called Cut Glass Theatre. She also taught students about how much better and more poetic it was when people pretended to be other people during the Renaissance. She once threw herself a “Congratulations! You’re Jewish!” party. She currently teaches with the California Shakespeare Company and spends time with her dolorous calico Maggie. She has blue and green bottles glued to her wall. She tries to be herself, but that’s not easy. That’s why she writes Marileta Robinson is a former editor at Highlilghts for Children and Highlilghts High Five, and still contributes stories and poems to these and other publications. She has been writing all her life, and has two pictures books to her credit, in addition to numerous short stories for children. She loves to read fantasy and science fiction, and her all-time favorite books are the Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula Le Guin.
Laura Madeline Wiseman’s recent books are An Apparently Impossible Adventure (BlazeVOX [books], 2016) and Leaves of Absence: An Illustrated Guide to Common Garden Affection (Red Dashboard, 2016). Her collaborative book Intimates and Fools is an Honor Book for the 2015 Nebraska Book Award. She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Jordan Green is a STEM-student-turned-author who studies Creative Writing in Tucson, Arizona. She loves reading stories out in the sun, but would never pass up a chance to take a long walk with her dog through the shaded woods of her Ohio home. Essayist, NaNoWriMo champion, and contributor to multiple poetry anthologies, she can usually be found sitting outdoors somewhere, notebook in hand. Mercedes Lawyer’s writing for children has previously appeared in Humpty Dumpty Magazine, Cicada, Cricket, Caterpillar,Balloons, Shoofly, Pennywhistle Press and other publications. Maureen (Moe) Phillips loves children’s poetry. It’s her passion. She is a native New Yorker now living along the magical marsh in Guilford, Ct. She believes Mona Lisa had the right idea. If she could leave one thing behind when her time is up, it would be a smile.