Crack the Spine Literary Magazine

AUGUST 21, 2018| ISSUE no 241 Literary Magazine crack the spine poetry Benjamin Harnett Betsy Kassoff short fiction R. Daniel Evans Rachel Peralez ISSN 2474-9095 creative non-fiction Laurau Leffler flash fiction Robert Laughlin J. Edward Kruft cover art Dave Petraglia micro fiction Elanda-Isabella Atencio Of Bacchus and Bulls short fiction by R. Daniel Evans Elaine set up a tall canvas on her easel. Merce Cunningham, the dancer, would soon ring the doorbell. Though challenging, Elaine decided a full length portrait of his entire body seemed to be the best way to paint him. It would be another in her series of people she knew and liked. A dancer would have a lithe body, and she smiled at the thought of how she used to loathe anatomy class in art school. Now all those days of struggling with skeleton and flayed figure drawings would pay off. Merce rang the doorbell and soon she heard his steps on the four flights. He had a quirky smile and greeted her with a chaste kiss on the cheek. After all, he was one of Village types who only slept with other men. What did it matter? All the bullshit against fairies by Bill and Pollock was just to boost their own male egos, Elaine thought. Merce, easy to get along with, chatted about his choreography, and how happy he was to be free of dancing with Martha Graham. Meanwhile, she moved his limbs this way and that, finally coming to a pose that struck some sort of chord about his shy grace and how much he could control his body. It took the rest of the afternoon just to sketch in some charcoal outlines on the canvas—how large to make the figure in relationship to the surrounding space, what to emphasize in his face and his torso. It seemed he could hold the pose for a long time without complaining, unlike most models. But naturally that’s what dancers did, follow instructions perfectly. At the end of the session, he promised to come back the next day. After he left, Elaine thought about some of the other people she’d painted. Then she drew Merce’s figure the way she remembered it, without looking at the canvas. She sat and sketched with her back to the wind as it crept through the broken window. Her thoughts circled back to Bill. Her friends had been foolish to complain about de Kooning being fourteen years older than her. What did it matter? Now he was her mentor, her teacher, her lover. What other Dutchman had wanted to become an American simply because he admired Gorky, Stuart Davis and other abstract painters? She thought of his handsome square face, his broad, bull-like shoulders and the prematurely white hair with bangs that flipped off his head, first right then left, like a wide paint brush dancing on a canvas. His looks were so different from hers, nothing at all like her haunted dark eye sockets, narrow jaw and perpetually turned-down lips which she revealed in her self portrait. They would always be a peculiar couple, no matter how many years they might spend together. She knew he loved her, he had told her so, even though he could be bossy and demanding. Elaine enjoyed hearing him talk aout art, the challenges artists faced, and the artists he admired. She guessed that the room in the walk-up would remain sparse for some time. Even with the lowest rents in a run-down section of the city, down by the Bowery, they still couldn’t afford any furniture other than stuff they found discarded on the sidewalks. But she would make an effort to court the critic Harold Rosenberg on Bill’s behalf. She liked Harold, and if Bill gained recognition, the gallery could sell his works. Elaine loved him and wanted him to succeed, to become famous. Suddenly, Bill walked into the apartment. “Christ, where’s the coffee?” “Over on the stove.” With a stick of charcoal, Elaine pointed to a corner. Bill slammed the pot on a counter. “It’s cold. Can’t you keep the burner lit when you know I’ll be home soon? And I guess we’re out of booze, right?” She nodded, stood and then grabbed a match to relight the gas burner. “I’ll reheat the coffee. Did you talk to that gallery dealer?” He pivoted, then slapped the air. “Let’s not talk about it. What did you do this afternoon?” “More sketches. Some still life objects, my face, those glasses on the table.” “Let me see them,” Bill said impatiently. She held out her sketch book. He turned the pages, sometimes fast, sometimes slowly. “You haven’t been listening to what I’ve told you. You have to combine precision of line with the grand sweep of your pencil. You can do better.” “These are weak,” Bill continued. “Let’s get rid of them.” He tore up some pages and stuffed them into the garbage bin. Elaine’s mouth fell open, but she didn’t say a word. At least he had already sold some of his paintings, and she thought him a great artist. So maybe he could teach her more about drawing. She had already painted a partially blurred portrait of Bill, and one of Fairfield Porter, with his legs stretched wide apart, despite the fact his suit and tie looked more than respectable. Like her, Porter was not only an artist, but also a critic, one she admired. She had mixed emotions about writing reviews. Someone in their art ‘Club’ had to promote important living artists like Bill, Pollock, and the others. Poet Frank O’Hara wrote short critical pieces, and so did Fairfield Porter. But it wasn’t enough. Elaine then thought of her portrait of O’Hara. It showed a standing figure, and she liked the way she had captured Frank’s arrogance and self-possession, an attitude revealed by his bold stance, confronting the world, and even by his freely-painted white pants, done in broad brushstrokes. At the last minute Elaine had decided that the face didn’t resemble him, and had blotted it out with a bright splotch of pink paint, like a bandage slapped on him by an angry celestial being. Even such a bandage couldn’t stop Frank’s outrageous chatter about his own life and everyone else’s. Poets usually didn’t talk about themselves. When she had painted Allen Ginsberg, he had sat in his Buddhist pose on the floor and had chanted his own poetry and William Blake’s terse poems. Porter had talked about art after his posing sessions. One afternoon Porter said, “I like your gestural style, it’s so expressionistic.” Elaine had asked, “Do you mean like the German Expressionists?” “No,” Porter said. “It’s much more like the abstract painters down here in the Village. Like Bill or maybe sometimes like Gorky.” “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Elaine admitted. “If you compare your art to poetry, it would be like Ginsberg’s.” “To me,” Elaine said, “a painting is primarily a verb, not a noun. A painting is an event first and only after an image.” “That’s a very eloquent way to express it,” said Porter. He wrote down her remark and later she read it, only slightly revised, in an art journal. While she laid out her tubes of paint, brushes and rags to wipe the brushes clean, she thought about last night’s fight with Bill. Drunk again, he had lashed out at one of her portraits. Which one had it been? Elaine couldn’t remember. She drank too much herself, feeling the cheap wine swimming in her bloodstream. But she didn’t say, “Maybe we spend too much money on wine.” Bill had pointed a brush at a portrait. “Why the hell don’t you paint a total abstraction? Why are you always connected to the figure or some boring still life?” “What are you saying?” Elaine turned around, took a large swig from the mason jar she used as a glass. “Your own pictures show all those fat woman with the horrible teeth, leering like hyenas.” “They aren’t fat!” Bill slammed his fist on the plank table. “They are too,” Elaine spat back. “Buxom, that’s the word for them.” “Okay, buxom. Maybe a well-built woman would be better than a skinny bitch like you.” Bill laughed. “You should know. You sleep with your models.” “Well, you sleep with our friends, and that’s even worse,” he shouted. “How about Harold Rosenberg?” “That was just so he’d write good reviews of your stuff, so you’d get a decent gallery.” Sleeping with Harold wasn’t simply about promoting Bill’s career, Elaine thought, as she squinted into her empty glass, wishing it was full. But Bill didn’t have to know everything, and anyway, he slept around much more. She lit another cigarette, even though the doctor said she smoked too much. “Let’s not argue about who we sleep with outside of this apartment. What the Hell difference does it make?” Bill gave her his smile that could melt an ice mountain. “You’re right. We don’t care. It’s 1951, and we can do what we want. There’s nothing so boring as middle-class values.” She felt exhausted and stretched out on the cat-shredded sofa. Elaine had been friends with Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife, for a few years. She thought herself a better artist than Lee, but at least when Lee visited, she had another woman to talk to. Lee breezed into the apartment, her slacks slightly paint-stained, though not as badly as her shoes. With her hair cut short and the navy blue pea jacket, she looked sort of like a sailor. Elaine smiled at Lee and closed the door. Lee asked, “What are you grinning at? Me?” “Oh no,” Elaine lied. “I’ve just been looking at my last Bacchus painting and I think this time maybe I got it right. Come over here and look at it. What do you think?” “Okay, put me on the spot before you even offer me a cup of coffee, Elaine. But yes, it’s more abstract than most of your portraits. I like it better the more I look at it.” “I’ll paint a series of them,” Elaine said. She liked the blues and greens, laid on in great swatches of thick paint. “Well, we are revolutionary. Someday people will look at our work and understand what abstraction is all about, that’s it’s the process of painting,” said Lee. Lee is so full of bullshit…she loves to pontificate, thought Elaine. “Yes, we deserve to be in museums and become old fossils, right?” She put a cup of coffee in Lee’s hand, but noticed that Lee left the cup on a table and then walked around the room. Lee stopped ever so briefly in front of the portraits, but seemed more concerned with some canvases by Bill, which lay stacked in a corner of the apartment. “Bill’s onto something important,” Lee cooed. Nice the way you came over to look at my new stuff, Elaine wanted to say aloud, with a sarcastic knife’s edge. But she kept mum, not saying anything. Lee smiled. “Wasn’t the show Sidney Janis just gave all of us a great one?” “First I thought so,” Elaine replied. “But he called it ‘Artists: Man and Wife.’ Wasn’t that a put-down of the women in our show—you, me, Barbara and Sophie. That sounds like we’re just wives attached to men, who are the real artists.” Lee sat down on the thread-bare sofa. “I never thought of it that way. I know we live with men who think that women can’t really paint, but I hoped the show would prove we don’t just paint crap.” Quiet, Elaine sipped her coffee. Maybe if Lee stopped imitating Pollock’s style, she could paint something original. Elaine thought, Women have talent, and we’ll succeed just as much as the men, given time. The next day Merce would return, and the portrait would continue taking shape. She knew she had to be careful, not to mess up what could be a good picture. Years later, Elaine thought about how so much had changed in her life. It was a Spring afternoon as she waited for her dealer to come over and view her latest works for her next show. She knew that Sidney Janis would either shrug in distaste or else love her latest paintings. He had been supportive for over thirty-five years, and now she wanted him to show her series of bull paintings, inspired by the Paleolithic cave images she’d seen in Spain. Her visit to Spain and the cave in the Pyrennes proved art revolved in cycles: from the cave pictures to 1987, painting had returned to the simple and profound. The doorbell rang and she left her studio to let Janis in. He shook the rain off his fedora, draped his Burberry coat on the coat rack, and nodded to Elaine. If nothing else, Sid Janis always looked like a god-damned businessman. “Come see the bull paintings in the studio, Sid.” She led the way across the small living room, turning on lights as they went. An electric bulb on a stand, shielded in its aluminum cone like a cocoon, lit up the bull paintings in the studio. Janis marched around the room, a martinet on parade. But Elaine knew he would quickly make up his mind—he always did. “Yes, I like them,” Janis said. “They’re almost as good as your basketball players. That was an even better idea.” Elaine nodded. It was best to agree with gallery owners; they always thought they had to be right. At least her art was now appreciated by a dealer and more importantly by buyers. It had taken years, but in the end, the struggle had ended with success. Tired, she sat down in one of the two chairs in the studio. She heard Sid talk on, but didn’t pay attention to the words. Instead she pictured Bill in her mind: his now overwhelming forgetfulness, the shock of white hair that still flew off his face, his rubber-band wide smile and the surprising softness of his fingers when he rubbed her back. In the past ten years, Alzheimer’s had robbed him of so much vitality. She thought of his old concern and affection for her. For that was all that existed by this time: their art and their love. Men At Work: Dion, A Contractor I can’t imagine building a house I wouldn’t live in myself. Textured paint is standard for our interior walls, but unless a customer specifically asks for ceilings to match, we do something else: panels, planks and beams, popcorn, you name it. I lived in a house with a textured ceiling for two years, and it was awful. Since high school, not a day has passed that I’m not worried about my family or my business. Those worries are with me from the time I open my eyes in the morning, and for two years, I started the day with a Rorschach test, seeing all kinds of nasty things take shape overhead in the dawn light. flash fiction by Robert Laughlin poetry by Betsy Kassoff all the ways life is interrupted books dropped under couches cold cups of tea filed in bookshelves staring at rooms I have entered with purpose but no longer know why I realize as the phone rings that I have forgotten who I’m calling can I speak to the person who knows who I am the lines of the garden are blurry with overgrown vines the blackberry brambles cackle in triumph I pick up the book the phone the garden shears I try to remember the sense of it the way it was but the thread is dropped the pattern hazy the path that was so clear now animal tracks which fade into nothing can I make interruption the opportunity to renounce nostalgia to allow myself to drift in fog hear the quiet splash of nearby oars and not know if we will meet or glide silently past each other on our way to separate destinations can I let the wind and current take me can I let now be enough Life, Interrupted The thoughts left. They drowned in the desire to change. They died in the need to evolve. They lost their senses. They allowed the antidote to inject. They changed their intention. They watched themselves adapt. They showcased the mind. They rejected negativity. They were praised. They hid things insides themselves that broke out. They burst forth. They took the shape of love. They took the shape of you and I. We are magnificent. We can’t leave. We present our love. We are each other’s only home. micro fiction by Elanda-Isabella Atencio It's in the Eye, Not the Mind The Bull short fiction by Rachel Peralez When I got out of the Marines, riding bulls was all I could do. It was the only thing I remembered how to do when I walked out of discharge in a pair of blue jeans, toting my floppy King James Bible. When I was a kid, Daddy used to take me to the rodeo every spring. I knew the bulls were everyone’s favorite part. Folks lusting for conquering and blood. The cowboys straddled the gates, gripping dented Dr. Pepper cans that sloshed with brown spit. They’d push a bull into the chute, and the cowboy would lower himself right behind that muscled hump, and chuck his spit can to the side and work those ropes tighter. The bulls’ eyes all looked the same. Small and wild. My daddy asked me the same question every time. “Merrill, when you see a herd of cattle out in the pasture, which one has shit all over its ass?” “The bull,” I’d say. “That’s right, son.” He slugged from his Coors tallboy. “Cows never do. Cows are fine and sweet. Like your momma.” The bulls’ muscles bunched and heaved in the pen. I didn’t tell Daddy, but I thought they were the finest creatures God put on this earth. The cowboy licked his lips and tipped his hat. We didn’t wear helmets in those days, even after Jay Jr. went blind after being kicked in the head. The crowd hollered and whooped, and warm April air filled with dust and the smell of cheap beer. The American flag popped in the breeze. Daddy kept pointing at girls warming up their barrel ponies in the side arena, but all I could see was that cowboy arching his back and tapping the bull with his spurs. He was powerful. He was powerful like our preacher standing at the pulpit. He raised his hand, and the buzzer would sound. The bull sometimes would just trot out to the center of the arena and stand there under the sodium lights. The cowboy would tear at its hide with his heels. Sometimes the bull would hurl itself out of the gate and spin and buck until the cowboy tumbled into the arena dirt, and then chase him with stubbed horns and pink eyes. The clowns danced and bolted into barrels. As soon as I was old enough, I was sitting on those bulls and watching, just watching the other boys with their hard hands and soft lips. The preacher said what I had was a weakness. “And if you do feel lust in your hearts and desires for things you shouldn’t be desiring, it’s weakness. And what do you do if you have weaknesses, people?” Brother Lee asked. The congregation was always quiet. “Repent.” “Amen. You repent. And who do you need in your hearts to repent?” “The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” “That’s right. That’s right. Because if you don’t have him in your hearts today, I can tell you where you’re going right now.” He looked at me when he said it, shaking his thick finger and rocking on his heels behind the mic stand. Daddy squeezed my leg. “God is good,” Brother Lee whispered into the microphone. “All the time.” My voice sounded small. Until that moment, I didn’t know what lonely meant. The first bull I ever rode bull shivered under me as I lowered my weight onto him. I yanked the ropes around my hand, just like I’d practiced on the tipped-over oil drum in my backyard. I guess I was about thirteen. The muscles in the bull’s back rippled, and it lowed, long and deep. His black hide was specked in dirt and shit. His spine pressed into my tailbone, and little shocks shot up my back. I looked at the cowboy on the gate, then at the crowd to see my daddy. I couldn’t find him in the sea of hats and Carhartts. “You about ready, son?” the cowboy sitting the chute asked. My heart flooded my ears with rushing blood. “Yeah.” He was handsome. His blue eyes softened. “First ride?” “Yeah.” I raised my hand. The bull crow-hopped out of the gate and shook his wooly head. My shoulder nearly jerked out of its socket. Eight seconds is a long time to hang on. My head whipped up and down and my teeth cracked together. The rope pulled the folds of my leather glove together and pinched the flesh of my palm. The crowd milled in the stands, and I thought I saw my daddy’s snuff-flecked grin. He had given me half of a Budweiser before my first ride. The bitter froth tickled my nose, and I choked. Daddy slapped me hard between my shoulder blades and laughed. “Go on, boy. Puts hair on your chest.” The bull slammed down, and my hand turned loose. I flipped over its thick neck and tumbled into the dirt. I popped up and dashed to the fence. The bull trotted back to the chute. I thought I’d never find my balls after that, they were so far up inside me. I learned killing better than bull riding. That’s the tragedy of it, I suppose. Killing came natural. Killing came easy. Bull riding hurt me, but I just wanted to be close to these animals, these hunks of muscle and froth. I wanted to be close to the cowboys. I hadn’t even finished high school when I joined up. I had been drinking and taking pain pills that I stole from Momma’s drawer. I swilled cheap whiskey and looked at the underwear models in the JC Penney catalogue in my bedroom, stroking their stubbled jaws through the glossy pages. Their big hands just raising their T-shirts above rippled bellies and half-hard cocks. I imagined myself twined around them, inside them, inside me. Daddy caught me once. He picked up the catalogue, and his jaw throbbed. I was drunk. The space heater hummed in the corner, and my throat snatched. He flipped to the lingerie section and shoved high tits and sulky lips in my face. “You been stealing your momma’s magazines? To look at this?” He pressed the pink pages against my cheek. “You been drinking too?” “Yes sir.” I smelled the sharp, sour beer on his breath. He whipped the magazine up and ripped up every page, sprinkling the pieces on the floor. “Don’t you ever do this again.” He crouched in front of me and leaned in. “You were looking at girls. Girls in their panties. You just want to look like those guys, right?” His voice trembled. “You want muscles too, huh?” He grabbed my shoulder and dug his fingertips into my skin. “Don’t you, boy?” “Yeah, Dad. I just want to get big.” “Sure, sure. Clean this shit up.” He rubbed my buzzed head and lit a cigarette. I hated him. I hadn’t been to school in months. Me and the boys would hop in my truck and tear through country roads with them in the bed. We downed cases of beer, and their hair whipped around their faces as I careened around curves and opened it up on long stretches of empty road. The oxys pulsed behind my eyes. Once we pulled over to shoot beer cans off the fence with an old .22, and we shot a cow on accident. Shot her right in the head. Her skin rippled and her legs went stiff. She flopped over, her calf scooting around her and bawling. The calf dashed to the herd and back to its momma. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. I looked at my buddies. “Well shit,” I said. They peered at me drunkenly, wetly. Bubba started to cry. Nearly eighteen years old, and he’s crying about a cow. “It’s just a little baby.” I flicked his ear. “Bubba, shut the fuck up. It’s a cow. What are you? A fag?” The others guffawed and slapped his back. His huge chest hitched and he grabbed the .22 from me and hurled it into the ditch by the pasture. He balanced on the side of the truck, opened the door and squeezed into the cab. He curled onto the passenger seat, propping his knees against the window and stared. The calf bleated and bumped the cow’s body with its head. We could hear a truck coming from the back pasture. The rest of the boys piled into the bed, and I sped off. The cops caught us for speeding not thirty minutes later, and we were all arrested. Reckless Driving. Driving Under the Influence. Destruction of Property. Possession of a Controlled Substance. Passing a Physical Barrier. Speeding. Bubba’s daddy was friends with the drawling, sag-jowled prosecutor. He stood in front of the judge with a chipped grin. “I think that if these boys agree to serve our country in the Armed Forces, they could probably avoid jail time, your honor.” The judge nodded and acquitted us of all charges on the condition that we join up. Bubba went to the Air Force. Jessie and Jared went to the Army. I went to the Marines. The few. The proud. I thought the service and sniper school would pull the weakness out of me. The weakness for strong hands and scruffed faces. The weakness I tamped down with painkillers and booze, then with seven-hour stints lifting weights, then with scripture, then with sniper school. But it didn’t. I always knew I needed something more. Something in me snapped like a long strand of chewing gum when I made my first kill. I felt like the pillar of fire that swept through Sodom and Gomorrah and turned Lot’s wife to salt. God loves killing. God hates queers. It was beautiful. I had been lying on my belly for fourteen hours, waiting. Just waiting on a roof, counting children through my scope. The high desert wind whipped the smell of shit into my nostrils. I ate a package of animal crackers from my rations and checked my rifle. I was high up, and the wind was controllable. Fine conditions. My spotter licked his palms. “It’s so fucking dry here. Goddamn, my hands are fucking splitting,” he said. “How did you make it through sniper school? You are so goddamned loud.” He preened his eyebrows. “My looks.” I looked back into my scope. My spotter jotted down some numbers in his notebook. Then I saw him. He walked into my sight and readjusted an AK he had strapped on his back. The Lord had delivered him unto me. It was my chance to earn a crown. To truly become a man of God. To show the father that I was more than my sickness. I squeezed off a perfect head shot. My spotter rushed to his sight. “Shit! You got him.” The Iraqi kids didn’t even notice until they were covered with Uncle Hadji’s brains, then they screamed and scuttled around like those little cockroaches you get in the pantry sometimes. I killed so many Hadjis from my nest the boys in my troop called me “The Artist formerly known as Charles Whitman.” Moto Marine. No one suspected me. I got tattoos of naked girls cloaked in fire. I followed my brothers to whorehouses and bragged about nothing. One time, when I was on leave, I went to a twink club. To test myself. A slender boy with black curls came over to me at the bar. He leaned over to push his empty glass to the bartender and brushed his hip against my side. His lips curled into grin. “Buy me a drink? Mine’s empty.” He traced his fingers over my knuckles. I choked on my beer and jerked my hand away. The soft warmth from his skin lingered on mine. My blood ran hot through me, and I wanted him too. He leaned in and wrapped his arms around me. His cologne mixed with gin and sweat. His thigh against mine. I closed my eyes and saw the redness behind my eyelids. I hauled back and smashed my beer bottle against his scalp. His black hair slicked over with his blood. I grabbed his head and bounced it off the bar. Some of his teeth pinged off the floor. I scooped them up. I kept those teeth in my pocket. A canine and a molar. There is power in the blood. The white bull was my salvation. Sent by the Lord our Savior to cleanse me. It was a sign. The night before that ride, I had a dream. I was back in the Marines. I was at home there. I was in the barracks talking to Rodriguez. Rodriguez with his slender wrists. Rodriguez with his curved calves. Rodriguez turning in his rack. It must have been boot camp because we all had a case of the limp-dick. Everyone knew they put saltpeter in our drinking water to keep those hard-ons at bay. Lord knows, it’s harder to break a man completely if he can still fuck. Rodriguez was standing in the middle of the room in his skivvies and bare feet. He was telling us how we had to fight it. He said he would go into the bathroom and just think about naked girls and jerk it for an hour. Oh that’s what you’re doing in there you devil dog you horny-ass Mexican. We were all laughing, and Rodriguez stuck his fist in his shorts and poked his thumb out through the fabric. Watch out he’s packing heat. We gripped each other’s shoulders and grinned into the curves of our brothers’ necks. But I knew better. I knew because, at night, when everyone else was dreaming about their girl back home, I held him close while he grabbed my hips through my cammies and pressed his tongue against my closed lips until I opened to him. He twined his fingers through mine and called me “Papi,” through warm puffs of breath. Then the door to the barracks swung open so hard it smashed against the wall. We all rushed to the ends of our bunks and stood at attention. In came my daddy. He carried a .30-30 in the crook of his arm and was in full dress blues. The whites of his eyes were yellow, and he carried the stink of a tanner with him. Flies hummed around his face and lit on his shoulders. One crawled from his ear and sipped the moisture from the corner of his eye. He stopped in front of Rodriguez and slid a cartridge into the loading gate. He pulled the lever, pointed the rifle at Rodriguez’s forehead, and shot him down. His head snapped back, and the smell of brains and shit rose in the back of my throat. The smell of a field-dressed deer carcass. I looked down where Rodriguez had fallen beside me. “Ain’t that something?” I saluted my daddy. “Private, close your mouth. What, are you waiting for my dick to fall in it? No such fucking luck. Jesus Christ you are one ugly sonofabitch. Close that cocksucking mouth.” Then I woke up. At the rodeo, The Indian sitting the gate grinned at me with two silver teeth and said, “He has the son in him you know.” The bull pressed my leg against the chute and flicked his purple pink tongue into his nostril. I wondered if he meant sun or son. Either way it was true. When I slung my leg over his back, I knew that this ride might take me into that land of dust where the buzzer doesn’t stop his horn in your side or hooves in your chest. To ascension. The bull raked his tipped horn against the gate and trembled. My heart crashed against my ribs, and I couldn’t get a breath. I pulled the rope tight and looked at this pale beast that may have come straight from the parts in the bible where there’s seven-headed dragons. Even his hooves were white. He raised his chin and rolled one pink eye back to look me square in the face. A fly crawled from the corner of his slick nostril to rub its legs clean. I raised my hand. The buzzer sounded, and everyone was quiet. Even the broncs stopped moving and watched as this great bull pushed his body into the air. He and I and the moon were all that was. His muscles bunched beneath me, and he swung right and snapped his hind end up touching the back of my head. When he landed, I bit off the tip of my tongue and blood dripped on his pale hide. I didn’t feel it. This surging thing whipped and pulled my body and came crashing down like waves against rocks. We didn’t know it at the time, but the buzzer had gone off long ago. The pick-up rider was loping beside the bull on a blanket Appaloosa and had his sunburned arm out for me to grab. My hand was stuck. I looked at the rider, and he looked at me, and we both realized that I was up shit creek. His little pony pushed her shoulder into the bull’s flank with her ears pinned, and the rider wrapped his arm around mine. My hand started to turn loose when that bull turned on that pretty red pony and hooked her with his horn. She didn’t make a sound as she fell into the dirt. The bull pushed her down with his wooly head. There was so much blood. I couldn’t loosen the rope and felt, in a way, that it was me digging in her flesh. I became excited. Just like when I executed a perfect kill in that empty desert. Head snapping back, eyes flung into the skull, a quiet slump into the dirt. Or when, back in our racks, me and Rodriguez sneaked into the head to just pet each other and kiss until I couldn’t anymore and beat the shit out of him, listening to the crunch crunch of my fist against his slick face. We told the C.O. that it was over a girl. Jesus God, the mare screamed like a woman. I could hear her fragile legs snapping and saw her take her last breath before my mount finished her. Before I finished her. I realized then that the rider was still wound up in my rope. A shard of bone was just pushing through his forearm and shining under the orange light. He screamed and my heart beat the same red blood as his, but I couldn’t see him. He looked so small. A weakness here under these gladiator blows. My bull spun on him and lifted him like a sacrifice with his horns. I could smell the salt and the cheap beer on his mouth as his head lolled back. He had no bottom teeth. I knew that he had to die. This bull was sent to me, for me, to eradicate the unholy desire. I could see moths flipping in the arena lights. I was his rider. I spurred him. The sound of the crowd reached me through the roar in my ears. My bull pitched onto his knees. I could smell the wildness on him, and it reminded me of when Daddy would come and get me from school and take me into the woods, where we would lay on our bellies by a stream and wait until a deer wandered by us to drink, and Daddy would kill him and whoop because he could feed us kids, and maybe Momma would let him back into the house, if he brought home that red, red flesh for her. She loved all of the organ meat the best, so Daddy was so careful and would root through the gut sack until he found every piece of the sweetbreads. He handed them to me to put in a plastic grocery bag. We would hoist that buck and let it bleed. Daddy would cut a sliver off of the loin and rinse it in the cold stream so we could eat it raw. It was chewy, and the blood was still warm in it. Daddy would pet my head with hands still damp from the stream and say, “This is what being a man is. Taking care of your family, son.” All around me was heavy, white flesh. My face was warm, and I saw paramedics springing over the side of the arena. “Jesus Christ. He’s breathing. Get this fucking bull off him.” Soft hands slid against my chest and arms. I heard a popping diesel engine and saw the combine they used to drag the arena. The broncs were milling in the holding pen. Red and yellow, black and white they are precious in his sight. The Indian who sat on the gate stood over me as he tightened a lariat around the great white bull’s horns. I saw the fuzzy, red end of a tranq dart sticking out of its neck. His Wranglers cut into his belly and groin, and I could see his cock pushed to one side as he straddled the bull’s neck. He shouted at the fat woman on the tractor and suddenly the bull’s head jerked and his pink eye rolled half open. The red dirt gathered around his open mouth. His thick tongue dragged in the dirt. The combine bogged in the tilled earth, and the weight settled on my hips. I swayed my head and saw the medics rolling the pick-up rider onto a plastic yellow gurney. The event veterinarian put down the tranq gun and went to the heaving pony. Her sides puffed and contracted, and her legs skewed around her. He knelt over her and took a syringe filled with pink liquid out. The mare groaned as he punched the needle into her neck and rubbed her head. She sank into the dirt with a quiet swish. The vet motioned the backhoe over to drag her out of the arena. Children in cowboy hats peeked through the bars on the fence. That bull had the sun in him. By the time they got me to the hospital in Lawton, I was fairly certain that that sacred bull was waiting for me behind some gauzy curtain. I probably wasn’t even going to get to speak to the Lord. He would just wave me onto the back of the beast that brought me here to begin with and shut his book. “I never knew you. Your appetites were too great.” “And now what, Lord?” “You must cut the bull into pieces, lay on the altar, and call upon my holy fire.” “But how, Lord?” He wouldn’t answer. He can’t bear to be in the presence of sin. When I woke up, I was filled with light. I could be forgiven. He had given me another chance. A nurse came in with a clipboard. She smiled at me and took out my I.V. “You are one lucky son of a gun, Mr. Merrill. You just have a minor concussion and a pulled groin. That bull was after you, huh?” She smoothed the sheets around my legs and grinned again. “You’ll be out of here very shortly. Do you have insurance?” I shook my head. “Well, go ahead and get dressed, and I’ll be back in a bit with some paperwork.” I grabbed my clothes from the chair, dressed and left. It wasn’t like in the movies. No one even looked up as I walked out, let alone try and stop me with pleas about my condition. The nurses all seemed fixed to one screen or another, as still as water flowers in their pink and blue scrubs. I nodded at a few of them as I left, draping my jacket over my bent shoulder. I could down all of them from the parking garage across the street with an M82, even when they started running. Pop pop pop and their heads would bust like watermelons. I was good at killing. Killing is what God demands. I used the payphone outside of the hospital to call a cab to the rodeo grounds. Lay the flesh on the altar. Kill the demon inside me. When I got to the grounds, I went to my truck and pulled it up beside the bull holding pen. I cranked my windows down, pushed my seat back, and snoozed in the thick warmth of the Oklahoma spring. All night, I heard bulls pushing against panels of the holding pen and lowing to one another in the dark. I got out of my truck and propped my foot up on gate. The sodium bulbs hummed around us, casting a ruddy sheen on their slick, summer hides. Their eyes glistened like Rodriguez’s after a hard run. I figured any moment they would start talking to me about jerking off in the head. The thought made me laugh, and I reached through the bars to rub their red curly heads. They just rolled back their eyes and pressed their swollen sides together like sausages in a can. I sat astride the edge of the corral and draped a loop of yellow, nylon rope over the edge. The bulls shifted and swung their heads into each other making hollow echoes in the quiet night. I took out my knife. The knife I carried with me from the moment they issued it to me. A K-Bar. Sturdy. Reliable. I looped my rope just behind the ears of the closest bull and pulled his head close to my knee. I took my knife and pressed the tip into the soft folds just under his jaw and ripped the tough hide straight above my shoulder. I closed my eyes. Rodriguez’s face, bruised by my fist. The black-haired boy in the bar. Calvin Klein models. Skeptical whores. Dead Hadjis. I hated them. I hated them the way God hates sin. The arc of blood splashed the rest of the beeves. The slit-throat bull buckled, and his weight pulled me off the fence into the surging mound of cattle. They panicked now. Their sweat turned sour, and they bellowed as a one-horned zebu pinned them into a corner and rooted into their bellies. I grabbed the fence and hauled myself up. The white bull caught sight of me and rocked his head from side to side. His muzzle was slick, and he darted his tongue into his nostril as the others trembled and pressed into one another. Oh here was my penance. I hung by the crook of my elbow while the others milled by. The bull pushed through the forest of black eyes until we stood face-to-face. He huffed bits of wet cud onto my cheeks and pressed closer. He raised his chin and snuffed the air in front of my face. His ears flicked. I lifted my knife and dragged it in a crescent under the bull’s chin. He just laid his jaw on my shoulder and the hot blood poured down the front of me. It soaked through my underwear and pooled in my boots. The dirt turned to mud under me, and my heels slipped under the pressure of the animal. Soon I was lying under this white beast, and I could feel the weight of the sacrifice pressing me under the thick glop. I prayed under the hooves and bellies while my mouth filled with dirt and my cuts with grit. My pockets were full of teeth. I reckon I was ready to face God. To hold up my cupped hands filled with the pale one’s blood and let spill onto my head. To be washed in the blood. To show my fathers that this was not my lot. Perhaps my sins are too great. My hatred too strong. My weakness too deep. It’s hard to hide from God when you’re naked in the fucking garden. The Complex Sandy Loam sat naked in the communal hot tub. His nakedness was intended so others wouldn’t bother him, and mostly, it worked. The lone exception was Mr. Peterman in 2F, whose own nakedness offended Sandy, both for Peterman’s tangly back hair and for his enormous uncircumcised cock, which reminded Sandy of a mole, an animal his childhood dachshund would dig up and deliver dead to the back door, terrifying Sandy. As Peterman climbed into the churning waters, he gave Sandy the requisite nod. Sandy made no acknowledgement. Peterman spread his flabby arms across the back of the tub. “They been hunting again up the road a piece,” he said. “Heard the gunfire early this morning. You hear it?” Sandy ignored him. “They got signs posted every-goddamn-two-feet: ‘Private Property: No Hunting,’ but them sonsabitches don’t care. Well, we’ll see how much they care when a sheriff’s deputy hauls their sorry asses off to jail. Sonsabitches.” Sandy turned his head sharply, so that Peterman’s repugnant image became peripheral. “Heard the damndest thing today,” Peterman continued. “Seems they passed a law in Kansas that cops can’t have sex with people they pullover. Can you believe it? Can you believe that that wasn’t a law already? Well, it wasn’t.” Peterman scratched his nipple; Sandy could just see it from the corner of his eye, and it made him want to puke. In fact, Sandy thought, it would serve Peterman right if he did puke, right into the hot tub. Sandy, he’d jump right on out. But Peterman – Peterman – he was such a creep that he’d probably just go right on soaking in it, the fat fuck. But the more Sandy thought about how it would serve Peterman right, the more the physical urge to puke dissipated. Peterman went silent, and that made it worse for Sandy. At least when he was yammering on and on, Sandy had a target for his hatred, every word spewing from Peterman’s mouth like a nail driven into Sandy’s temple. Peterman’s silence made his hatred amorphous and abstract, which were never things Sandy learned to sit with. He wished he had a gun. He would shoot Peterman in the head and laugh as he watched Peterman’s body slowly slide down into the tub, until his hideous head fully submerged and a beautiful burst of red swirled through the water. Better yet, let one of Peterman’s abhorred hunters scope Peterman’s head from behind a duck blind. Bang! One clean shot, and no witnesses. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am! No sense anyone going to prison over a tub of bilge-water like Peterman. No sir. Peterman cleared his throat, and Sandy imagined the particularly viscous phlegm that undoubtedly resided around Peterman’s uvula, and the urge to puke overcame him again. “I don’t suppose you happened over to the farmer’s market in Callicoon today, did ya’? The reason I’m asking is I wonder if they still got any ramps. It’s a little late in the season, so prolly not.” The possibility suddenly struck Sandy that at that very moment, Peterman was sitting before him with a great big hardon, bobbing and weaving not 24 inches below the water’s surface. Disgusting! “Then again, it was a late spring this year, so who knows?” Peterman continued. “Maybe they got ramps still, and maybe they don’t. I don’t suppose it would kill me to take a ride over and take a look for myself. Course, I prolly shoulda done that first thing in the morning. If there was any ramps, you better believe they’d be all sold out by this time of day. You know how people around here love them some ramps. Yep, if I’d been smart, I’da gone right over after I heard all that gunfire this morning. Sonsabitches.” A worried Sandy wondered: what if Peterman were capable of a frictionless orgasm? It seemed to him it would be completely in keeping with this twisted and cruel world to waste such a talent on a non-person such as Peterman. And on the off chance that he was a hands-free-ejaculator, then maybe he’d already spread his revolting seed into the tub and therefore, he, Sandy, was now stewing – maybe – in millions upon millions of Peterman’s imbecilic and very-likely-toxic spermatozoa. Puke came to the back of Sandy’s throat, but reflexively, and disappointingly, he swallowed it. “Well,” said Peterman, rising from the water, “good talking to you. I’ve had my fill of this heat. Take care now.” Sandy took a quick glance at Peterman’s junk. It was not erect, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been. Sandy had noted very recently how quickly his own erections disappeared after a toss. Further, Peterman’s sudden departure all but confirmed in Sandy’s mind that he had, indeed, come. Sandy couldn’t help but notice that the water’s heat had rendered Peterman’s scrotum the spitting image of a burlap sack coveting two avocados. Standing on the deck, his hands on his hips, Peterman stared at Sandy just long enough to make Sandy look at him square-on for the first time. “You know,” said Peterman, “you’re the only person in this whole goddamn complex who I like. The rest of ‘em, they’re a bunch of sonsabitches. But you, yeah. I like you,” he smiled, and then turned and waddled off toward the building, baring his butt to Sandy like Ganymede, the giant moon of Jupiter. “I’m in 2F. Come by some time. We’ll play two-handed pinochle,” he called over his shoulder. And with that, Peterman, that slack-jawed moron with the IQ of, probably, 20, and who smelled like cheap bourbon mixed with shit, and whose mother probably didn’t even like him, was gone. Sandy sighed a long sigh at the luck. And after all the air had left his body, it became very quiet and still and Sandy Loam realized how so very biting and profound was his loneliness. flash fiction by J. Edward Kruft Black licorice twists in cellophane from the rack in front. A bag of grass-seed, with fertilizer “built-in,” that left my hands green. A hummingbird feeder of cheap plastic, with fake flowers to dispense a “nectar-like” food, “fortified” with “electrolytes” just like “the real thing.” This and many other things can be had. Out front they have done wonders with concrete, tarted up the flat facade with a lot of wood. Brett’s True Value is our new hardware store. It is also the measure of a man. When I think of what can make me happy, I feel so sad. Brett's True Value poetry by Benjamin Harnett The Roar of Life (Meditation at a Korean Day Spa) (Meditation at a Korean Day Spa) I’ve come to the Korean bathhouse to die. My phone, keys, and wallet are locked in a metal box. I’m stripped to skin, my hair knotted at my nape. I stand under the communal shower with the water as hot as I can stand it, and then I walk, barefoot, naked, into the mugwort tub. Its scent is homely but complex –barley and wood and dirt and blood. If meditation had a smell, it wouldn’t be lavender or ylang ylang, it would be mugwort. I step through the steam and sink between two women: one is white and middle-aged, sitting still, head lolling on a small brown towel, eyes closed; the other is older, black with short silver curls, gazing outward. Our eyes meet briefly. We don’t smile. We don’t speak. Still, there is an acknowledgment of corporeal presence, hers and mine, so close we can touch, sharing this small pool and its rumble of bubbles, its earthy steam, before we both submit to the heat. Gravity feels sudden. My head rolls back under the pressure; my eyes go languid until they close. “Forty-nine,” a woman calls. My eyes open. She’s Korean, in a plain black two-piece bathing suit and flip-flops. She walks by the mugwort tub and opens the door to the sauna. “Forty-nine!” she says again. Another woman rises from the cold pool. “Here.” She is white, brown hair tied back from her face, the rest of her scrubbed clean. She looks like no one, like everyone. She walks past the mugwort tub, and I see her: a blurry black flower tattooed on the small of her back; a scar, white and thin as a chalk mark, across her abdomen. C-section, I think, years healed. This woman, her scar and her motherhood, the way her back is starting to curl over itself, the blurry past tattooed in that flower, the dimples in her thighs - I see her. She is a stranger, but I recognize her all the same. I recognize the women in the tub next to me, too. The women in the showers, the saunas, the steam rooms, too. They are the mothers, grandmothers, aunts, actresses, lawyers, artists, criminals, abuse survivors, geniuses. But that doesn’t matter here, not in these tubs, in this water. Here, we are only bodies. Dozens of bodies, stripped, languid, unencumbered. The freedom to be outside of clothes, outside of caste, outside of sex; the directness of the nudity takes all ego away. All gender. We are forms in steam, nothing more. “Seventy-three,” says another therapist, same black two-piece, same flip-flops. The numbers are always out of order here. Mine, one-twenty-four, is written in block letters on a rubber bracelet around my wrist. The chaos of the system used to bother me. Where is the sequence? How can I prepare? But now I understand: My number will be called. It doesn’t matter when. The mugwort tub feels too hot now, and I feel a new pressure rise near my heart. I stand slowly, wobbly, and pull myself out. The plunge pool is waiting, empty, unloved. I step on the ladder and the cold feels like fire on my feet. I step down, down, all the way down, and a burst of air pops out of my mouth. I swallow my yelp, then hop and plunge under, my hands still holding the metal ladder. I break the surface and pull myself up and out of the plunge pool, sharp, calm. I don’t bother drying off before I drip into the steam room. It’s dark here, hot steam thick and looping through the air, women lined up on two walls. I sit on my brown towel and let gravity return. My head rolls forward. I close my eyes, inhale, exhale. This is not actually a spa. There is no peppermint in the steam. It smells of nothing, of everything. My own body is the only thing I can see. I run my finger along a new scar on my hand, a burn many months healed. I think of my oven, my loaves of fresh bread, the three little mouths I feed. Soft, pink, trusting. Each of my children is vulnerable, in different ways, I know. My littlest, strong and robust as any two-year-old can be, has a vein in his neck that bulges when he laughs or cries. I see it appear and disappear, a roar of life that’s inside him. The promise of death. Condensation drips from the ceiling, landing on different parts of my skin. My shoulder, my thigh, the top of my head. Each time the water lands on me, I am pulled from my mind back into this steam. Back to the scar. I use my hands now to bake – to turn flour and water and yeast into strong loaves, into nourishment. I’ve learned patience this way. I’ve learned science. I’ve learned life. “One-twenty-four,” the woman in the black two-piece says through the steam. I know she’s calling for me without even glancing at the number on my wrist. I stand and follow her out the door. She is tiny and quick in her flip-flops and I stagger behind. She leads me into the treatment area, so morgue-like: six stalls with plastic beds, hoses and buckets and soaps and towels and oils. This is the reason we all come here. I climb on. My therapist hoses me down with tepid water and soaps up her mitts. They are rough and yellow. She starts on my back. At first the mitts feel sharp and uncomfortable, but soon comes the change. I feel it happening. My body stops reacting to sensation. There is no pain. No pleasure. My mind quiets. She uses her mitts to exfoliate, but it’s more than that. I become a corpse. She rubs and rubs and rubs, giving no thought to sensitivity or tenderness. She works into the places on my body that even I avoid: my tailbone, my armpits, the bottoms of my feet. It is all the same to her. It is all flesh, all unreactive. She sprays water over my body with the hose. My arm slips off the plastic and she replaces it, firmly, like a stubborn drawer that won’t close. When I was a teenager, a good friend died in a car crash. C comes to me now, his auburn hair and big brown eyes, his smile, his voice sly and rustling in my head over the distance of twenty years. His parents had him embalmed and dressed in a suit in his casket. I hated them then, for making him look so unlike himself. His was not the first dead body I had seen, but he was my first him. I had kissed those lips. I had danced in those arms. With him, I had shared countless beers and cigarettes and bowls and jokes. I stood over his casket, stunned, and couldn’t resist taking his hand. What I felt wasn’t him. It was swollen clay. It was hard. I jerked back, horrified, apologizing to my dead friend over and over. I can’t touch you. I can’t touch you anymore and I am so sorry. The woman flips me over and puts a cloth over my eyes. All is darkness and muffled sounds. I am aware of the energy around me – the movement of other bodies, the warmth and the cold, the needs and desires – but I am free of it. The woman uses her mitts to scrub my breasts, my belly, my most delicate skins. I am relinquished. Now, as a mother, I understand what C’s parents needed from that suit. Here lay their son, tall and strong and on the edge of adulthood, but their son and a baby, always. I understand because my own four-year-old’s vulnerability is like C’s car crash. My son was born sick: by chance, by accident, with an errant gene. Once, he turned blue on the carpet. His lungs and heart stopped, just there, just in front of me. Minutes passed. I saw his eyes disengage, the wide grimace on his face slacken. I saw his skin puff up as the oxygen stopped coming. This was death. I remembered C in his suit, swollen and sewn together and re-made and untouchable. In real time, my husband was pumping air into my son’s lungs and I wanted just to hold him but I couldn’t. I’m so sorry, baby boy. Over and over. I’m your mama and I can’t hold you. The woman stands me under the shower and wipes me clean. I am back on the plastic bed, face down. She begins to stretch the muscles and knead the knots with oils. I’m so sorry, baby boy. When my son was unconscious in the hospital I found a cheap Chinese massage parlor near my house in Brooklyn. I would go almost daily, holding my cell phone in my hand to catch any vibration. My husband could call from the hospital. I always expected news. I never expected good news. The man who rubbed my shoulders did not know my child was on life support seven miles away. He rubbed and I would beg for him to use all of his strength, to push so hard he could push the very life out of me, if only for a moment. He would tsk and laugh at me, my need not translating. The woman flips me back on my back, replaces the towel over my eyes. She pours water in my hair, scrubs my scalp with her fingernails. She ties my hair in a towel, wraps me in a robe, takes me to the salt room, a dry but soft heat. I lie on a blanket of pink stones. Long ago, when a person died, it was the family who tended to the body. Someone cleaned us, washed our hair, wrapped us in sheets, put us in the ground or set us on fire or pushed us out to sea. I feel that kind of dead now, cleaned and tended-to. My son stayed with me. He survived the big trauma and all the little ones that followed in such quick succession. Now he is a palimpsest – his bright, joyful smile written over that grimace, life almost effacing death. These stones are warm. The room hums. Everything is just dark enough. Eventually life will roar inside me, undeniable. I will realize I am hungry, or I need to use the bathroom, or have a sip of water. My mind will return with its anxieties and annoyances. My daughter’s temper tantrum earlier this morning. My son’s approaching surgery. The ugly and uglier news on the radio. My next birthday, my next decade, life moving so fast. But for these minutes, before I gather my phone and my life from the metal lockbox, I think of my grandmothers, and their grandmothers, and how we nourish and we hold, we gather scars on our hands and our abdomens, we all lived and will die, and life is as perfect as that. creative non-fiction by Laura Leffler Elanda-Isabella Atencio Elanda is a taurus who loves to sit in her trees in Portland, especially with green tea. A writer, a singer, a yogi, she likes to dip her toes in as much life as she can. She is the editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine Independent Noise. R. Daniel Evans R. Daniel Evans was a founding editor of Philadlephia’s Painted Bride Quarterly. He has been published in several publications, including Cleaver, Jonathan, HGMFQ, Art/Mag, Periwinkle and Pangolin Papers, which printed three of his stories and nominated one for a Pushcart Prize. Benjamin Harnett Benjamin Harnett is a historian, fiction writer, poet, and digital engineer. His works have appeared recently in Pithead Chapel, Brooklyn Quarterly, Moon City Review, and Tahoma Literary Review. His story “Delivery” was chosen as Longform’s “Story of the Week.” He holds an MA in Classics from Columbia University and in 2005 co-founded the fashion brand Hayden-Harnett. He lives in Beacon, NY with his wife Toni and their pets. He can be found most days on Twitter. He works for The New York Times. Betsy Kassoff Betsy Kassoff is a psychologist, the mother of a college-aged daughter, a teacher, a psychoanalyst, a lesbian activist, and a writer living in San Francisco. J. Edward Kruft J. Edward Kruft received his MFA in fiction writing from Brooklyn College. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in several online and print journals, including Crack the Spine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and MoonPark Review. He hates the word “slacks” as a synonym for pants and viscerally cringes whenever he hears it. He also hates when people pronounce “probably” as “prolly.” He lives in Astoria, NY and Livingston Manor, NY with his husband, Mike, and their adopted Siberian Husky, Sasha. His recent fiction can be found on his website. Robert Laughlin Robert Laughlin lives in Chico, California, and received his BA from California State University, Sacramento. “Men at Work: Dion, a contractor” is Mr. Laughlin’s first fiction sale to Crack the Spine, but he has published six poems in earlier issues. Apart from his ongoing Men at Work flash fiction series, Robert Laughlin has published 200 poems and 100 short stories; two of his stories have been chosen as *storySouth* Million Writers Award Notable Stories. Laura Leffler Laura Leffler is a writer and art historian. Her non-fiction has appeared in various literary and art journals and parenting magazines, including Art Journal, Art Papers, Connotation Press, Manifest-Station, Mothers Always Write, Motherwell, and Rosebud Magazine. She is in the final stages of editing for her first novel “The Big Want,” a glimpse into the ugly underbelly of the New York art world. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children. Rachael Peralez Rachael Peralez completed her undergraduate degree at University of Texas and her MFA in creative writing at the University of New Orleans, where she received the award of Best Thesis for a collection of her short stories. Her work has recently been published in the Eunoia Review and Five on the Fifth literary magazines. Dave Petraglia A Best Small Fictions 2015 Winner, Dave Petraglia’s writing and art has appeared in Bartleby Snopes, bohemianizm, Cheap Pop, Crab Fat, Crack the Spine, Chicago Literati, Five:2:One, Gambling the Aisle, Hayden’s Ferry, Medium, McSweeney’s, Mud Season Review, Necessary Fiction, New Pop Lit, North American Review, Per Contra, Pithead Chapel, Points in Case, Prick of the Spindle, Prairie Schooner, Popular Science, Razed, SmokeLong Quarterly, Up the Staircase, Vestal Review, and others. His blog is at www.davepetraglia.com         Contributors WWW.CRACKTHESPINE.COM BECOME A MEMBER OF CRACK THE SPINE CRACK THE SPINE LITERARY MAGAZINE