Crack the Spine Literary Magazine

August 26, 2019| ISSUE no 254 Literary Magazine crack the spine Poetry Barbara Rascoe Angela Dribben Caroline Maun Short Fiction Jacques Debrot Cara Long Corra ISSN 2474-9095 Creative Non-Fiction Daniela Hillman-Robles Cover Art Jean Wolff Flash Fiction Mitchell Korckmalnik Grabois Bryan Jones Micro Fiction Ana Gardner Watchtower short fiction by Jacques Debrot The old landline phone was ringing in the living room when Siddhartha O’Neal entered the house with Peanut the chimpanzee’s cremains. He kicked the door shut behind him and let the call go to voicemail. “Hey, Space Cowboy,” a woman’s voice said. “It’s Karen. Pick up the phone.” Sid had met her a few weeks previous on a Buddhist dating site. “Spiritually-evolved, fiscal conservative, slightly cat-clawed, wants to meet you,” she’d gushed on her profile. Sid set the cremains down on the coffee table next to a book of Greek myths and a yellow chunk of moon rock in an airtight glass case, and ambled off to the kitchen to scrounge up some three-day-old som tum from the back of the fridge. His blood sugar had plummeted at the funeral home and he was still feeling light-headed. In addition to the cremains, the funeral director had handed Sid a clasped manila envelope that contained the few things that were in Peanut’s possession when she died: a slim plate gold cigarette lighter, a keyless “pooing pig” key chain, and a pair of cat-eye sunglasses with one green lens popped out. Peanut had died relatively young, at thirty-nine, of cardiac disease. Years earlier, she and Sid had been the sole crewmates aboard the Watchtower 3, a space station in low lunar orbit. The station, their home away from home for nearly twelve months, measured three hundred feet from end to end, but the crew compartment—including the cooking, sleeping, and personal hygiene facilities—was entirely contained within the tire-shaped seventy-foot cylinder of the Watchtower’s pressure hull. In the zero gravity of space, Sid and Peanut got around the station by pulling themselves, like spiders, along the guide ropes strung limply from the ceiling or bouncing feet-first off the walls and the ceiling panels. Sid was a veteran of half a dozen space voyages. And Peanut, whose IQ, while roughly comparable to that of a very bright seven year old at best, had been training with a team of monkey handlers in high-tech simulators for most of her life. Even so, prolonged periods in outer space took getting used to. Their food, for one thing, was coated with a foul-tasting gelatin to reduce crumbs. And Peanut was slow to successfully adjust to weightlessness. Until she got the knack of it, she’d make terrible messes in the space toilet and was continually forgetting to clip things to her space clothes. For the first few weeks, her lip gloss, nicotine patches, and zero gravity pens floated all over the crew compartment. Fortunately, nothing was ever truly lost on the space station and the unsecured items that Peanut mislaid were all sucked up by a big fan and deposited in a canister, which she and Sid would check several times a week. At the start of Sid and Peanut’s mission, NASA had attempted to keep the pair constantly occupied, checking and rechecking the readings flashing on the station’s complex instrument panel, updating the onboard computers, and hustling Sid through endless and pointless-seeming experiments on flathead worms and slime molds. But the truth was, there wasn’t a whole lot to do in outer space that wasn’t just busy work, and after a while Ground Control radioed less and less frequently. In the increasingly free time the two had at their disposal, Peanut would entertain herself with board puzzles and finger paints. Sid, for his part, kept a journal during his off-hours and made a habit of regularly browsing the station’s vast electronic library, devouring one Arthur C. Clarke novel after another. Following lunch, he’d Velcro himself to the wall and perform three hours of isometric exercises daily to minimize bone loss and muscular atrophy. But he slept badly in microgravity. Catnaps were frequently all he could manage. Buckled upside down into his SnoozSak, he’d gaze, heavy-eyed, at the unshuttered windows below his feet and groove on the stunning views of the cratered lunar tableland and the distant, blue earth—like a circular window in some dark Gothic cathedral—until sleep finally overtook him. Peanut, of course, was not anatomically equipped for human speech, but she and Sid chatted easily in Sign Language. Peanut’s mother—purportedly, the “world’s most intelligent ape”—had been a fluent signer herself and had signed to Peanut from the time she was an infant. On Saturday, May 29, I was born, Peanut had confided to Sid at their first meeting in a Houston restaurant just down the road from the Johnson Space Center, a spot popular with the entire astronaut gang. The peanut is not a fruit, she’d continued. I am peanut. Cindy is a cat. Why? I can play piggyback. We will be friends. Gaping at Sid with her bright, marble eyes, she held up an orange and green-striped smurfball. This is my ball, OK? THIS is, she signed, and then, suddenly shy, blushed violently, her face turning from pale yellow to chocolate purple. During Peanut’s final illness, Sid had invited the chimpanzee to live with him in the sprawling logwood cabin he’d originally purchased as a retreat between space flights. Located on a pine-studded hillock above a squalling trout stream, Sid had moved there permanently after his last mission, a three-month stint at the international moon base, a small village of igloo-like modules on the dusty lunar north pole. “I told Roshi Nick that you were coming to our New Year’s Eve party,” Karen told Sid on the phone later that evening. Nick was the leadership coach of Karen’s Buddhist temple. “He wanted to know if you had directions.” There was a burst of static. “Are you still there?” she asked. The connection was bad. “We keep cutting in and out,” Sid said. He carried the phone to the sofa and read aloud the directions he’d downloaded from the internet. It was a long monotonous drive, close to three hours, the bulk of it westbound on I-299 through open prairie. “Expect me at nine,” he’d told Karen. She wanted him to arrive earlier in the day, and then share a light dinner with her before the party got going, but Sid didn’t think he could handle all that. He was a Mr. Spock type, a sterile scientist right out of central casting. Uneasy in social situations, he tended to engage in one-sided conversations or repeat himself. On the Watchtower 3, he’d sometimes cover up the earth with his hand to make it disappear. It felt like an act of obliteration—no more people. The gesture relieved him, although he’d feel guilty afterward. Thankfully, Karen never seemed to be at a loss for words. But that night she was uncharacteristically quiet. Perhaps it was the bad connection, or maybe it was just a case of nerves. At any rate, before they hung up she reminded him again not to bring her flowers or a gift of any kind. “I hate roses,” she claimed. “I don’t want anything like that. Just bring your wonderful self.” Sid tossed the directions aside, then got up off the sofa and lugged a suitcase upstairs from the basement. The last time he’d used it, five or six months before this, was on a silent meditation retreat in Helena. The luggage ID tag was still wrapped around the handle. For ten days, Sid did not make eye contact or speak a word to anybody. It reminded him a little of life with Peanut aboard the lunar space station, except lonelier. Karen had volunteered to put Sid up for the night and he’d accepted. But he worried afterward that the arrangement implied they were going to have sex. Sid wasn’t a prude, exactly, But he hadn’t slept with a woman in years, not since his wife’s death. His daughter kept telling him that he was depressed. “You spend too much time by yourself,” she’d chided Sid. “It’s not healthy to be alone so much.” A sturdy big-boned girl—her wrists were thicker than Sid’s—she’d recently become engaged to a colleague at the grade school in Sugar Land, Texas where she taught Special Ed. Growing up, she had been a shy, awkward child, diffident, overweight. Sid had never really bonded with her. She’d been much closer to his dead wife than to him, even if his daughter’s relationship with her had not been an uncomplicated one either. In high school, she’d permitted her mother to regularly record her weight and waist size in a ledger, after which she’d construct a strict caloric regime for her to observe. His daughter had long since let herself go, in any case. She was obese now, and her skin was bad. But, in spite of this, she seemed to have gained a hard-won feeling of self-acceptance. Overnight, the weather turned brutally cold. At dawn, the temperature was still well below zero. But Sid got out of bed early anyway, dressed, made himself a quick breakfast, and with the frozen snow rattling down on the cabin’s metal roof, carried Peanut’s urn out to the car. He drove north, past clusters of trailer homes and well-kept ranches, and then, half an hour later, turned off the state highway onto a two-lane blacktop, straight as a high wire. A few hundred acres of rolling grassland poured open on each side of the road. Sid drove for another ten minutes, then pulled over and stopped within sight of a big dried-out wash with a dozen or so red, crumbling hoodoos. He shut off the engine, and sat there for a minute or two. It had stopped snowing, but gusts of bitter wind were blowing spindrifts off the top of the road. Fetching the urn from the passenger seat, he removed the heavy-duty plastic bag containing Peanut’s cremains. The bag weighed about four pounds, but it fit snugly into the pocket of his heavy down coat. Then he climbed out of the car and, bending in half against the wind, trudged away from the road, his breath streaming behind him into the cold air. When he reached the hoodoos, he stopped and removed the bag from his pocket. Directly overhead, an airplane passed, leaving a white streak behind it. “Farewell, friend,” he said to the bag. Then he heaved the cremains into the shifting grass. He’d aimed low, but some of Peanut’s cremains blew back into his face anyway. He bent over and spit out hard into the ground. There were ashes in his mouth, and the chalky taste made him gag. Loops of saliva dangled off his lips. When he returned to the cabin, he attempted to meditate. He sat on the floor in a quarter-lotus posture and focused his attention on his breathing. But he was too restless to sit still. His mind was racing. He shifted his weight to relieve the pressure on his tailbone, already a little numb from sitting on the hard floor, and tried to imagine his thoughts as leaves falling from a tree. That was usually as far as he got. He wasn’t much of a Buddhist. His parents, Mormon backsliders, had chosen his name after the Hermann Hesse novel, which they’d discovered together in a course on New Age religions when they were undergrads at Berkeley. He who has found the meaning of existence, was the Sanskrit gloss. A cruel joke, Sid thought, all things considered. Sid’s mother, a dreadlocked oil and auto parts heiress, was a direct descendant of Brigham Young. He had grown up on the family’s seaside compound, the remains of a much bigger property that had diminished over several generations. His father, a PhD dropout walked around barefoot, even in the winter, played the sitar, and raised honeybees behind the guesthouse. Sid had barely known him. Emotions had been nothing more than molecules to his old man. One of the few positive memories he had of his father was of the bee mask he used to wear on Madhu Purnima—the day of the full moon in the month of Bhadro. His father, Sid remembered, would place a queen bee in a small wire mesh cage and tie it under his chin. Within minutes, the rest of the hive would cover his entire face and neck, as if he were wearing a living head mask. His father could sit that way for an hour or more, like the Yogis who stopped their hearts or cut themselves and didn’t bleed. The next day was New Years’ Eve. Sid packed light. Just a change of clothes, a travel toothbrush, razor, and a half-used tube of organic tooth paste that he’d used to brush Peanut’s teeth after she’d become too listless and weak to brush them herself. As her health declined, she continued to smoke like a chimney, but grew increasingly feral. She stopped signing and, growling and hooting instead, refused to wear clothes, even a diaper. The drive to the temple passed without incident. The sun broke out briefly once or twice on the freeway—a glary, flickering mid-winter light—before the clouds took over the sky entirely. Then, at dusk, after threatening all day, it finally began to snow. The road quickly turned white. Twenty miles or so from Karen’s temple, Sid got lost on a side street. There were no signs, just dark prairie. But after backtracking, he immediately spotted the turnoff he’d missed a few minutes earlier. He drove past a row of billboards advertising attorneys and retirement communities, then entered the temple grounds through a tall red lacquered gate. The temple itself resembled a down-on-its-luck motel from the sixties, all pink stucco and shaped like a space age boomerang with a small gold stupa on the roof. A large masonry-style sign in the parking lot said, BAHN YAH SAH ZEN CENTER. “It’s you,” is how Karen greeted Sid as he strode up to the front entry where she was standing with a lit cigarette in her hand. She flicked the cigarette away and pushed her hair back from her face. She looked a lot like the pictures Sid had seen on her dating profile, except heavier—chubby even—but not in an unattractive way. “I can’t believe you made it,” she said. The door, propped open behind her, was pouring out hot air. “Isn’t this insane weather?” Smiling widely, she extended her hand toward Sid and he took it in his own, feeling a little clumsy, the way he always did whenever he shook hands with a woman. “This is the mystery man I told you about,” Karen explained to the roshi, a few minutes later, in the main shrine room. “The astronaut,” the roshi said with a neutral expression. He was tall and willowy with a long, lantern-jawed face. Everybody else had dressed casually—“jeans and khakis,” Karen had advised Sid—but the roshi was wearing a dress shirt and a wide tie with upside down horseheads on it, both of which were badly wrinkled. “Glad you could make it,” he said. “Karen’s told me a lot about you.” He bowed slightly, his palms pressed together in a praying gesture, Sid returned his bow, then followed Karen across the room, sidestepping a pair of noisy kids whose parents, presumably, had been unable to foist them off on a babysitter. There wasn’t a whole lot of space to maneuver anyway. It was a long room, but narrow and crowded. There were small twinkle lights taped to the walls and dozens of votive candles. A mass of globe-shaped paper lanterns hung from the low drop ceiling. “You’re even more handsome than your pictures,” Karen said. She took Sid’s coat and lay it on top of her own on a chair in the far corner of the room. “So fit,” she said. She squeezed Sid’s bicep muscle through his shirt. “You’re not disappointed in me, though?” she asked. “My hair’s usually not this color. The girl went a shade too light.” She flashed a quick crimped smile. It was noisy in the shrine room. Sid and Karen had to raise their voices to be heard above the din of the eighties dance music playing in the background. They danced a little themselves. Karen was an excellent dancer, light on her feet and agile. She patiently lead Sid through the basic steps of the Hustle and the Funky Chicken. But for most of the evening, the two sat together on a pair of folding chairs in the corner and talked about trivial matters—their children and diets, the countries they’d visited, the books they read. It was not any different really from their phone calls. Sid let her do most of the talking. As she grew more relaxed, she began to recite risqué jokes, batting her fake eyelashes and flirtatiously twirling her hair around her long index finger. It was as if she was pretending to be a character in a romantic comedy. “Stop making me so interested in you,” she said. “I’m trying to be aloof so you’ll think I’m cool.” Immediately, she put a bejeweled hand over her mouth in mock distress. “Did I just say that out loud?” she asked with surprised eyebrows. Then she dragged Sid off again to dance. Around midnight, Karen asked Sid to fetch her coat. “I want to see the fireworks,” she announced. A muted television nearby was turned to one of the network New Year’s Eve specials and they watched as images of the crowd in Time Square were intercut with celebrations in Bangkok, Mumbai, Prague, London. Sid hadn’t seen Karen consume more than a couple of drinks, but she seemed a little inebriated. Her eyelids dropped slightly and her face shined under a sheen of sweat. Sid fetched their coats and followed Karen outside into the parking lot. A few wet snowflakes were falling on the hulking palm trees scattered across the temple grounds. They were alone. Frigid as it was, nobody else had been disposed to venture outside. Sid folded his arms across his chest like a straitjacket, his face tightening in the cold. They waited in silence. Karen lit a cigarette and, perhaps uncomfortable for the first time with Sid’s impenetrable reserve, smoked it mechanically as if it was a chore she was determined to withstand. Then, at last, a big burst rippled in the sky a quarter mile away. It looked like a luminous eel, lighting up the immense ragged clouds overhead. “Hey,” Karen said, and touched Sid’s coat cuff. She was holding a small hip flask, the first Sid had seen of it. She took a swig, then offered the flask to him. “Losar tashi delek,” she said, baring her even, white teeth. The furry blonde collar of her jacket stirred against her cheek. “Happy New Year,” Sid replied. The boom of the fireworks echoed softly across the compound. Sid took a quick swallow. A little communion sip. The flask was filled with vodka. He handed it back to her. After the party broke up, Sid followed Karen in his car back to her place. She lived twenty minutes away, in a bunker-like McMansion in a subdivision of big ugly houses. Her driveway was frozen, but the clouds had broken up here and there, and a few glittering stars were visible: Vega, Betelgeuse, the Orion Nebula—pinholes in a black cloth. “Welcome to my humble abode,” Karen said as they stepped inside. She showed Sid into the living room. The space was cluttered with gaudy furnishings—a massive leather-looking sectional, multiple antique side tables, tacky blue crystal chandeliers and a tall bookcase, the shelves stocked with titles relating to ESP, psychic surgery, cryptids, cattle mutilations, and the like. In place of family photos, an abundance of creepy oil paintings depicting Indian buffalo hunters and American bald eagles hung on the walls. They were her late husband’s artwork, Karen explained. “Eagles were Hank’s totem animal,” she said. According to her, they carried prayers from the spirit realms and imparted spiritual illumination and knowledge of magic. She leaned unsteadily against a chair and kicked off the calfskin ankle boots that she’d worn to the party. Her bare feet were diminutive and plump like a doll’s, the toenails painted cherry red. “What else can we drink now?” she asked, holding her ankle boots in each hand like a pair of dead fish. “There’s a bottle of Stoli in the freezer. Red wine. And, uh, Seagrams.” Sid demurred politely. “Sorry to be a party pooper,” he said. “But I’ve got a big day tomorrow. Let me take a rain check.” “Just one more drink,” Karen urged, a little drunkenly. “A glass of wine?” Reluctantly, Sid agreed. However, one glass inevitably turned into two, then three. Polishing off the rest of the bottle, they lounged on the leather sectional and listened to music. Then, at some point, Karen pushed herself up from the sofa and returned with an album of old photos from her childhood. She used to have crossed eyes, she said, pointing to an ugly picture of herself looking fat-faced and glum with a black eyepatch over her right eye. At the private all-girls’ boarding school she’d attended, she was often ridiculed on account of it. Then she showed Sid photos of her parents—a morose-looking nondescript couple—and of her siblings—two older brothers. A picture of a long-dead dog seemed to move her the most. “Blue Dog, he was called, a Weimaraner with eerie blue eyes and a slate blue coat.” She tapped the picture with her index finger and then tossed the album aside. “I think I’m drunk,” she abruptly announced. She finished her wine and then didn’t seem to know what to do with the empty glass. Sid took it from her and set it on the floor. Then she leaned back on the sofa, shut her eyes. “Just hold me,” she slurred. Sid regretted not having excused himself earlier and retreating upstairs to the guest bedroom, but he was unused to alcohol and the wine had gone to his head. He lay beside Karen and tentatively wrapped his arms around her pudgy waist. Through the soft fabric of her blouse, he could feel her diaphragm rise and contract. “That feels good,” she whispered. Her body was much softer and more ample than his late wife’s had been. “I just need to be held,” she murmured. She curled her legs up and, in almost no time, drifted off. After a few minutes, Sid could hear her making little bubble noises in her sleep. Karen was making coffee when Sid awoke. She poured him a mug, and after he’d showered and shaved, she made a point of showing him the disheveled room that her late husband had used as a painting studio. The room, which she’d left unaltered after his heart attack, smelled like stale cigarette smoke and perfume. There were flakes of scraped-off wax and paint curls on the hardwood floor. A pile of dirty rags had been tossed in a corner and jars of pigment, paint tubes, and brushes lay haphazardly on a paint-drizzled gateleg table by a large easel. “This is where I do my morning stretches now,” she said. “Here, in Hank’s studio. The light is very special at this time of day, don’t you think? Magical, really.” A moment later, she startled Sid by kissing him hard on the mouth. It was a passionate kiss. She grabbed both of his ears and pushed him up against the wall. The kiss went on for perhaps a minute. When she was finished, they went downstairs and she brewed another pot of coffee and fixed a stir-fry breakfast for the two of them with brown rice, organic eggs, and quinoa. On the Watchtower 3, Sid and Peanut had shared a special, almost symbiotic, relationship, like an oxpicker bird and a zebra. Granted, Peanut had not seemed to fully comprehend the purpose of their mission. She may not even have had any real concept of outer space. Midnight is this, she would sign, pointing a long, hairy finger at a nearby window. But her training in the Simulator had been very thorough. Sid valued her as highly as he had any of his former crewmates, and when they were done for the day, he would unfailingly reward her with bananas and grapes or a zany game of Simon Says. The only true emergency the two encountered during their sojourn on the Watchtower station occurred about six months into their mission. Sid and Peanut were playing tag, when the station was shaken by a violent jolt. A red indicator light lit up: FIRE. An oxygen tank in one of the lower-deck storerooms had apparently exploded. Sid immediately swung into action. He feared the worst. There was very little margin for error in outer space. But after a quick scan of the flashing control panel monitors in the command center, he determined that the damage to the Watchtower was in no way critical. Both the climatization and oxygen-supply systems were fully functional and the station’s atmospheric pressure was normal. Relieved, he got on the radio to Houston and apprised them of the situation. A pair of nail clippers—Peanut’s—floated past his face. “Roger your damage assessment,” Mission Control responded ten minutes later. “We have reviewed the telemetric data on our end and concur.” However, they advised Sid to initiate an EVA as expeditiously as possible in order to survey the damage, if any, to the Watchtower’s outer hull. Sid agreed and forty minutes later, after he’d crawled into his bulky, pressurized jetpack, the Watchtower’s airlock door hissed open and he spun out into the black silence of space. “Believe it or not, it was my first spacewalk,” Sid confided to Karen, with uncharacteristic animation, over breakfast. He described drifting across the length of the outer hull, its surface bristling with spidery antennae, and feeling a sudden, hot flush of trepidation. Before exiting the Watchtower, he’d neglected to turn on the station’s powerful spotlights. However, this had proved unnecessary, he said. The dazzling earthlight thrown back at him from the debris-strewn plain of the Mare Serenitatis, had brilliantly illuminated the Watchtower’s polished metal hull. “I’d never felt so insignificant,” Sid told Karen, “as I did at that moment.” Karen dabbed with a napkin at a bit of egg stuck to the corner of her mouth. She confessed that she couldn’t imagine blasting off into space, herself. “My place is on Earth,” she told Sid. By noon, he was back on the road. A new dusting of snow had collected overnight in the cuts and folds of the desert prairie. But the sun was out, high in the sky, draining everything of color like an overexposed photograph. Sid let out a deep breath. It was good to be alive. A strange kind of happiness welled up in him. Perhaps the earth might one day be his place too, he thought. Icemelt flash fiction by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois 1. My books froze in the unheated schoolhouse in which I lived. I was an avid reader, so I tried various tools, tweezers, pliers, both needle-nosed and flat, and screwdrivers. I didn’t use any power tools as those would obviously have been counter-productive but, no matter how I tried, I could not pry any two pages apart to make them readable. It was the kind of disappointment common in my life. I couldn’t go to the library because the county was so short of money, they were no longer plowing the roads out my way, which was quite far out from the county’s center, a place I thought of as the ass end of the middle of nowhere, not an original thought, I knew, but I also knew that as an uneducated man, I was not expected to have original thoughts. 2. I sent you letters from Iceland. They melted before they could be read. You found little puddles on the ridged floor of your mailbox and were confused. My letters were eloquent, but eloquence cannot survive the heat of Florida’s palm-lined boulevards, where old Jewish ladies spray spite like prehistoric plants that have not evolved for 60 million years. My letters were full of noble sentiments, lyrics from ancient mythology, lost farming techniques, love affairs marinated in bathos, and a cold, stone sea where no one has ever surfed. That’s okay. Unless we are utter morons, we know that despite our grandiose delusions, our words will not survive. Those that don’t melt are fuel for the incinerator or kindling for a funeral pyre in Bali. poetry by Barbara Rascoe Outside the leaves drift downward as though they are strewn by the hand of some contemplative Opehlia newly gone mad Ophelia “Don’t turn off the lamp,” I said, craning my neck to check the dim glow in the living room. Syd came to bed chuckling. “Don’t care about the electric bill, huh? I’ve never seen that thing off.” “It’s a memory lamp. For Emma.” I wondered how long before I got used to saying her name like that. Without ‘what’s up’ or ‘what the hell’ or any of the thousand things we said to each other. A name alone. “I thought she was just missing,” said Syd. “Yeah.” “So maybe.” We all hid behind the maybes. “Just leave the lamp on.” micro fiction by Ana Gardner Mer Lecht Regina awoke with a lobster claw for a left arm. She wasn’t surprised, exactly. She’d had a sense of it, a premonition, really, that the claw would be coming. She lay in bed for a long time marveling it. There was, she knew, going to be no hiding the claw, as it was very large and a mottled red and black color. No, the claw would be seen; it would be gawked at, guffawed about, pointed to. It would be the source of gasps and sniggers and jokes. She snapped at the air with it, amazed at the power it possessed, but surprised by its weight. She supposed she’d be needing more regular massage sessions and maybe some physical therapy. After a while, when the first wave of awe had worn off, Regina ambled out of bed to go to the toilet. As she sat there, she contemplated all the ways the claw would change her life. Thankfully, she was right-handed, so that was an immediate positive. But she supposed driving would be out of the question – maybe a special steering wheel? She could always drive one-handed, plenty of people did, though not for claw-related reasons. Regina finished up on the toilet and tried to tear off a few squares of toilet paper with her claw, but she only succeeded in yanking all the paper off the roll, while shredding three little bits. Regina giggled to herself. A claw! A lobster claw for an arm! She snapped at the air again. Her claw made a delightful and sharp clacking sound, a bit like teeth chattering. She snapped the claw to the beat of Prince’s “Raspberry Beret”. In the kitchen, she tried to determine how to best approach preparing her breakfast. She wasn’t much of a cook, more of package opener and food re-heater. Regina settled on cereal. The box was new, so it required unsealing. She knew that if she attempted to hold the box with her claw, that she would cut it in half. The claw felt like it was spring loaded. Regina placed the box between her body and the counter and slipped the fingers of her right hand beneath the lid, unsealing it. “Ha Ha!” she shouted, raising and waving her claw in triumph. Regina sat down at her kitchen table and ate her cereal. She thought about the claw, of how she would introduce the claw to people she knew. She needed advice. Regina found her phone and called Duncan, her ex-boyfriend. He answered on the third ring, which was his habit. She could hear Owen, his husband, talking to him in the background. “It’s Regina,” she heard Duncan whisper, obviously holding his hand over the receiver. “Oh hi Regina,” she heard Owen drawl, sleepily. She asked Duncan to come over right away. “What is it?” he asked, somewhat alarmed. “It’s – you have to come over. Bring Owen if he wants to come, but get here.” Regina hung up. She knew the cryptic nature of her call would make Duncan hurry. Owen may slow him up a little though, and Regina knew Owen would come along. He always did. They were like that as a couple. Regina called them a ‘farmers market’ couple. They wore matching plaid and knew what herbs to use in roasts and with vegetables. She wondered how Duncan could ever have been attracted to her, a woman who didn’t care if food was seasoned and who never had on matching socks. "It won’t last,” her mother had said, after meeting Duncan for the first time. Of course, her mother was always a naysayer who believed the worst possible outcome was the most likely outcome. Regina had not bothered to tell her mother that Duncan was bisexual. It would simply open up a line of questioning that would go nowhere good. And besides, Joy already believed the relationship was doomed. Regina had only told her mother about their relationship because she longed to have that kind of relationship with her – an open and non-judgmental, mother-daughter camaraderie. But her mother was incapable of trusting her daughter – or herself, or anyone else, really – that fully. Regina often wondered if what had happened with Regina’s father had changed her mother. She was really too young to remember what her mother was like before the incident, though from pictures, Regina thought her mother’s countenance more matched her name back then. Regina’s father, Howie, met Joy when they were in college. They met in a history class, which both were minoring in. They had a few dates and fell in love. Howie joined the military in order to avoid being drafted and assigned to a branch, and so he served in the navy during Vietnam for two years. Howie and Joy wrote each other frequently while he was deployed. When he returned in 1971 they married. Joy had a job as an accountant, and Howie re-enrolled in college and pursued his degree. Joy became pregnant with Regina late in 1973. Howie started drinking during her pregnancy. Joy tried to get him to stop, but he continued, sneaking alcohol into cough syrup or aa thermos, whatever was handy. Regina was born in the summer of 1974 when Howie was on a bender. He didn’t see or hold her until she was four days old. Joy hoped that holding his daughter would make him want to sober up, but it didn’t. Joy and Howie started having fights, awful, ugly fights. Howie would leave for days. Joy moved out of their shared apartment and into a studio apartment when Regina was two months old. One day, Howie called Joy and told her he was sober. He asked her to come over for dinner. He wanted her and the baby to move back in. All was well for a few days. But on the fourth day, Howie failed to come home at his usual hour. Joy fell asleep waiting for him. The next thing she knew, she was awakened by the sound of a smoke alarm. Her eyes flew open to find the room thick with smoke. She frantically dove for Regina’s crib – she was crying. Joy held her close to her as she felt her way out of the apartment. Joy managed to make it safely to the street, with Regina clutched close to her body. By the time she made it out, fire trucks were already on the scene. Regina was just shy of six months old the night her father set their apartment on fire in an attempt to kill her and her mother. Howie was caught two days later, holed up in a fleabag motel. His defense was that he had fallen off the wagon and became convinced that Joy was going to leave him forever and steal their baby. So he set the fire. He was out of his mind drunk and hadn’t been sleeping. It was a thin defense. The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to thirty years in prison. As a consequence, Regina did not know her father. He would, occasionally, write her a letter from prison which her mother would confiscate. Regina didn’t remember asking about her father when she was young. In fact, she didn’t even know why he wasn’t in her life until a mean-spirited older cousin told her one Thanksgiving. “Your father tried to kill you and your mom, idiot,” the cousin had said. “That’s why you don’t see him. He’s in prison” Regina had only shrugged at that news – the story made no sense to her, and so she shoved it aside. She did want to ask her mother more about it, but knew that she wouldn’t be answered, not in the way that she wanted. By that time her mother was stern, almost severe, and she seemed to always be moving. She often startled poor Regina, who was prone to daydreaming. “Don’t dawdle,” Regina would snap at her as they made their way through crowds, or down grocery store aisles. “Pick up your pace!” So Regina held off asking her mom anything about her father – or about what cousin Lana had said – until she was twenty-three years old. But the year Regina turned twenty-three, she found a lump in her breast. It turned out to be benign, but before she knew that she told her mother about the lump. She inquired as to their family history, and the family history of her father. Her mother winced ever so slightly at his mention. “Your father’s family are all fit and healthy,” Joy proclaimed. “No cancer, no nothing.” “Then why did he try and kill us,” Regina asked, staring hard at her mother. The lump was a gift to her; the lump allowed her to color outside the lines of their relationship. Joy met her daughter’s question with a powerful silence that lasted many seconds. “Who told you that?” she finally asked. “Lana,” Regina said, “but a long time ago. When we were kids.” “Your father is sick in his head,” her mother said after a pause. “And I didn’t see it. I made a mistake.” With that, Joy stood up and left the room. Regina heard her rooting around upstairs, and a few minutes later, she returned with a bundle of letters. “Here,” she said, thrusting them toward Regina. “This is all for you, from him. And I have nothing else to say on this subject.” With that, she left the room again and did not return. Regina left after an hour or so, tucking the letters into her purse. There were maybe sixty in all, all unopened, dating back to 1976. The last one was dated from 1990. She assumed her father had died. When she returned home with the letters, she did not read them straight away. It took her nearly a week to open the first one. Once she did, she read them in sequential order. The letters were nothing special, mostly full of mundane observations, some questions about her, a few entreaties to not hate him. The letters did not stir Regina. They did not awaken any deeply held desires for a father-daughter relationship. However, she discovered that the letters stopped in 1990 because her father had been paroled. She called her mother and asked if he ever wrote again after that. Her mother simply replied “No”. “You know he was paroled in 1990, right?” Regina asked. “I do,” Joy replied. “Okay. Nothing else?”  “I didn’t fight it when he came up for parole. They said he was a model prisoner and they didn’t believe he posed a threat. I wrote him one letter right before he was released asking him never to contact us. And he hasn’t.” While Regina waited for Duncan, she revisited her father’s letters. She kept them in a shoebox in the closet. Getting the shoebox down proved difficult, but she found it was large enough that she could balance objects on it, so she was able to slide the box off the shelf with her left hand, and balance it on the claw. She sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the box for several minutes. Duncan knocked loudly on the door, shouting to Regina that he and Owen had arrived. Regina drew a deep breath, then got up to unlock the door. Duncan and Owen spilled in, Duncan first with Owen right behind. Duncan stopped abruptly when he spotted the claw, causing Owen to crash into him. “Regina!” Duncan exclaimed breathlessly. It took Owen a moment to get his bearings. He laughed and moved toward the claw. “Did you get stuck in this?” he asked, running his hand over it. “Not quite,” Regina said. Owen was still marveling at the claw. Duncan was searching Regina’s face for clues. “I don’t know,” Regina said. Owen looked to Duncan, then Regina. His countenance changing to reflect a growing horror. “You don’t mean – come on Regina.” Regina turned and headed back toward the kitchen, motioning with her claw for Duncan and Owen to close the door. Regina heard it click moments later and footsteps following her. She sat down at the table in front of the box. Duncan sat next to her. “Ah, the old shoebox,” he said. Regina nodded. Owen peered at it. “Are there magic potions inside there,” Owen asked, half in jest, half serious. “Letters from her dad,” Duncan said, shooting Owen a quick dirty look. “Oh,” Owen said softly, then began nibbling on his cuticles. “Why do you have the box out again, Regina?” Duncan asked. “I don’t know,” she said. The weight of the claw was starting to pull her body to the left. She adjusted in her seat, trying to sit up straight. Duncan said, ‘May I?” and reached across the table for the shoebox. Regina nodded. “You’ve read them all before though,” she said. “There’s nothing new in there.” Duncan took the lid off the box and ran a hand over the stack of letters. He withdrew one and skimmed it, murmuring a few words here and there. As he was reading through it, Regina lurched toward him extending her claw. She grabbed the letter with it, tearing it apart. Duncan sat startled for a few seconds. “What the hell, Regina” he said. “I’m tired of these letters,” she said. “I have no feeling for these letters.” She took one out with her right hand and slid it toward Duncan. She withdrew another one and slid it toward Owen. Duncan nodded and withdrew the letter. Regina again sliced it. Owen was more apprehensive, but after Regina had sliced two more letters of Duncan’s he held his up. Regina tore at it. They began shredding the letters at a frenzied rate, cheering after each slice of Regina’s claw. Owen snatched up a pile of the letters and had Regina cut through them again. He tossed the paper scraps in the air like confetti. After about twenty minutes, the letters lay shredded in a celebratory pile on the floor. Duncan looked over at Regina, his grin now fading. “What the hell are you going to do?” he asked. Regina sighed. “I’m going to move on,” she said, snapping at the air with her claw and bobbing her head as she clacked away. Duncan leaned over and kissed her cheek. Owen sighed. Regina felt the weight of her claw and knew it was growing. She would be changing again soon, regenerating. She looked at the claw as a symbol of her survival. “I’m hungry,” she announced. “Let’s go get some grub.” Shredding short fiction by Cara Long Corra Self Study For several years now, I have been the only scholar admitted to the University of Isomorphic Subjectivity. No professors teach here at UIS. It’s a self-study program. The campus is all to myself. This institution is dedicated entirely to the study of me. Inside my backpack, I’m lugging a copy of my dissertation that I’ll work on at my research carrel in the school library. My work deals with the keys to my deepest sense of self. I’ve completed the chapters on my childhood, but the true quality of my scholarship remains obscured in the distorting shadows of my looming doubts. I’m always fighting off troubling thoughts that I may never finish all this research into my elusive identity. I walk into the library that houses six spacious floors that contain rows of book shelves crammed with the accumulated knowledge about my existence. The library holds a vast collection of books and records that describe the events in my life and preserve every word I have ever written. All my personal notes and emails are indexed and catalogued in this premier research institution on my life. Despite the hours I’ve spend here, I’m not sure I know much more now than when I started my first semester. I walk over to the elevator and take it to the fourth floor where I maintain my research carrel. The doors open and I get out and head toward my assigned work space. I pass a glass case that’s been pushed up against a wall. The case contains some of my earliest graded handwriting. My uncertain scrawl on the yellowing paper under the glass always reminds me of how in elementary school once, the teachers took us on a field trip to the natural science museum to see a special exhibition on Egyptian mummies. I wore khaki shorts with a loose-fitting shirt and a pith helmet that my mother had bought for me. The other kids had laughed at my outfit. Fake stone columns at the entrance to the exhibit were stenciled with phony hieroglyphics that showed repeated images of an ankh and a man with the head of a falcon. A knee-high papier-mâché urn capped with a bull’s head was next to a plastic trash can. But the 3,000-year-old bandaged bodies displayed under the glass were frighteningly real. The smallest sarcophagus, constructed for a boy, seemed particularly sad the way it had been put in its own room away from the others. At my carrel, I put down my dissertation and remove my backpack and coat. I arrange things the way I like them. I sit in my chair and sigh. It’s time to get to work. I retrieve my editing pen from my shirt pocket and examine the tip. But then I stare down a long library corridor that terminates under the green letters of an electric EXIT sign. There’s a water fountain underneath it. I’m not particularly thirsty, but I leave my chair and walk to the fountain. A sip of cold water offers a moment of distraction from the crushing doubts about my work. On my way back to the carrel, I meander down aisles of books dealing with my childhood. The warm arms of nostalgia wrap around me for an uncomfortably long time and finally I have to break away. But just as I resolve to get back to work, I look over and see the lights above the elevator door indicating that someone is going to the floor above me. It’s disconcerting to have an intruder in such an exclusive institution. I decide to investigate. The stairwell enables my ascent and I emerge onto the upper floor. My search for clues reveals a small red string on the grey carpet. Another one is up ahead. Then I look down a long aisle of books dealing with my college years and I discover the source of the strings. A young woman in a thick red sweater is putting some books on the shelf. She turns to face me. It’s Arianna. I almost married her. But I got cold feet. I broke it off three weeks before the wedding. She had to return the gifts we received from relatives and friends. All of that happened before I enrolled. Her dark hair is pulled back in a bun and her blue skirt almost touches the floor. She lowers her head and adjusts her eyeglasses to peer over the rims at me. “I’m trying to study,” I say. “I’m the new librarian,” she says She is still very attractive. Then I notice my dissertation is on a cart next to her. She picks it up. “I’ve decided this goes on the shelf dealing with your abandoned works,” she says. “I’m putting it between the stack of applications that you never filled out to those legitimate schools you once considered going to and the Dear John letter that you wrote to me.” For an instant, I almost object, but then I realize it belongs there. Without even thinking it through, I surprise myself by acting on impulse. “What are you doing after work?” I ask in a voice that’s trying too hard to sound bullish. With a scowl on her face, she raises her left hand to give me a clear view of her wedding ring. It’s larger than our engagement ring that I remember returning on a sad morning one September. I mutter an apology and then I go back to my carrel where my back pack and coat are waiting for me. My back pack is much lighter without my dissertation. I want to leave. I realize at that moment that the only way for me to graduate is to drop out. I have to move on. On my way to the elevator, I pass the case pushed up against the wall and I think about the mean laughter of children and the ancient rotting bandages under the glass. flash fiction by Bryan Jones Her mantra for her sixties, I am not responsible for anything I did before forty, explained her straightfacedness when she poked out her bottom lip on behalf of my brother-in-law’s unseen scars, Bless, I don’t know how anyone could beat their children. This moment always comes with her, my Milky Way, stars and darkness, swallowed by microbursts of remembrance, of flying furniture, of flying off the back porch, of the door to my bedroom slamming against me, against the wall behind me, over and over because I painted the window trim gloss black with the paint she brought me. Because I ate more gelatinous packaged ham slices than she had accounted for, failing to run dish water hot enough to burn, or when I did using her latex gloves to survive scalding temperatures meant to destroy bacteria, sin, and skin, those gloves belonged to her. These offenses sunk her skin in around her skeleton, glazed solid black pits for eyes, sent limbs spinning through the living room. Tasmania. I raked her silver Caprice Classic down the brick wall, wheel well to wheel well. Steppenwolf turned up until I couldn’t hear the metal grind. She only rolled her eyes. When I was in high school, she drank screwdrivers with my girlfriends on Sundays while I cured all their hangovers with bacon. The order of things preoccupied her, not my moral fallability, fucking my best friend’s boyfriend at sixteen while Momma folded laundry with precision in the next room. Seam to seam. Sleeve to sleeve. Tightly creased. Wash the mug where your mouth goes first, then the inside, the outside and the handle. Clean house every Saturday morning at 7am after coffee, after aerobics, before grocery shopping at Food Lion, from ceiling down to baseboards. The bathroom last, toilet after sink, after bathtub, before floor. Order to be preserved or punishment to be persevered. Thirty years pass, I find all houses filthy but Momma’s, keep my own husband close by my side, incessantly backstitch threads of culpability into my memory. It creates a very strong seam. The Order of Things poetry by Angela Dribben Strong Coffee for Strong Men My dad smells like cigarettes and coffee. He is ten the first time he shoots a gun; too young to hold a deer carcass in his hands and not feel anguish. This is the language grandpa knows. Son, I love you. Grab that dead bunny. Dad’s a law student; he’s already balding. He wanted to be a dentist, but says he didn’t like it. He gets accepted for a master’s program in another country and starts smoking. He can handle the stress; he used to be an athlete. His belly keeps on growing. The tire explodes and the car spins out of control. Dad simply closes his eyes. Suddenly, everything is silent. Or was it really silence? Everything is mute; his ears buzz in confusion. He crawls out the destroyed car. Everyone else lays somewhere on that highway, scattered like candy from a smashed piñata. Mom’s face is disfigured. My skull is fractured. My sister sits in midst of dust, blood, and fear. Everything will be okay, dad says. Grandpa has had two heart attacks. He drinks his coffee black, but sometimes leaves room for pastries. Dad’s the same way. They dip the sugary bread in the dark pool of their baggy eyes. creative non-fiction by Daniela Hillman-Robles Unfinished poetry by Caroline Maun The time I screamed stayed with me, more real than the road, grass, or stars. Who knew that experience would be an egg that won’t hatch, a nodule of energy threatened by a collapse that will take you out, too. Which cardinal sin is it to build layers of nacre around that egg-scream and pretend the knot that shapes you isn’t there? What if what was inside was a fiddlehead fern, unfurling like an alien tongue, tender and grasping? Cara Long Corra Cara Long Corra lives in Albany, NY and works as a statewide affordable housing advocate. “Partly Gone,” her first collection of stories, was published in 2014 by Unsolicited Press. Jacques Debrot Jacques Debrot’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including Nothing Short of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Stories, The Collagist, and Hobart. He has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and recently won The Thorn Prize in Fiction. Angela Dribben Angela Dribben’s heart is buried in a tobacco row in Southside Virginia while she writes from the mountains of North Idaho. She attended Bread Loaf 2018 and begins Rainier Writing Workshop in the 2019 cohort. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Cirque, Mudfish, decomP, New Southern Fugitive,and Cathexis Northwest. She has the privilege of working as an associate poetry editor at Typehouse Magazine and poetry feedback editor at HighShelf Press. Ana Gardner Ana is a writer and researcher currently living in Rhode Island with more quadrupeds than strictly necessary. Her work has previously appeared in Storyland, The Dime Show Review, and others, and is upcoming in Argot. Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over fifteen-hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes, and. was awarded the 2017 Booranga Writers’ Centre (Australia) Prize for Fiction. His novel, “Two-Headed Dog,” based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and as a print edition. His poetry collection, “THE ARREST OF MR. KISSY FACE,” will be published by Pski’s Porch Publications in early 2019. He lives in Denver, Colorado, USA. Daniela Hillman-Robles Daniela Hillman-Robles is a third-year international Creative Writing student. Native from Mexico, she strives to dig up and expose truths hidden around and within us. Bryan Jones Short fiction by Bryan Jones has appeared recently in Cease, Cows, The Cossack Review, The Atticus Review, Foliate Oak, and The Tiny Journal. He lives and works in Texas. Caroline Maun Caroline Maun is an associate professor of English and Interim Chair of the Department of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and American literature. Her poetry books include “The Sleeping” (Marick Press, 2006), “What Remains” (Main Street Rag, 2013), and two chapbooks, “Cures and Poisons” and “Greatest Hits,” both published by Pudding House Press. She has also been published in The Bear River Review, Delmarva Review, The MacGuffin, The Main Street Rag, Mount Hope Magazine, Summerset Review, Third Wednesday, Peninsula Poets, and Eleven Eleven, among others. She has studied with Peter Meinke and Sterling Watson, and has attended the Bear River Writers’ Conference for more than ten years. Jean Wolff Born in Detroit, Michigan, Jean Wolff studied fine arts at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, receiving a BFA in studio arts. She then attended Hunter College, CUNY in New York, graduating with an MFA in painting and printmaking. She’s since had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally, published works in 45 issues of 34 magazines, and is part of the artistic community of Westbeth in Manhattan.   Contributors Poetry Editors Michelle Donfrio Olivia Kiers Short Fiction Editors Laura Huey Chamberlain Naomi Danae Creative Non-Fiction Editor Suke Cody Editor-in-Chief Kerri Farrell Foley Flash Fiction Editor Preston Taylor Stone Crack the Spine Staff WWW.CRACKTHESPINE.COM BECOME A MEMBER OF CRACK THE SPINE CRACK THE SPINE LITERARY MAGAZINE