Crack the Spine Literary Magazine

JANUARY 2, 2020| ISSUE no 257 Literary Magazine crack the spine Poetry Evalyn Lee Dwaine Rieves Short Fiction Katie Runde Rick White ISSN 2474-9095 Creative Non-Fiction Andrew Bertaina Cover Art Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier Flash Fiction G. Paul Randall Damyanti Biswas Micro Fiction Joe Neal Parameter, Commit,  Push, Child short fiction by Katie Runde Coding is a language full of words Bridget used to understand: parameter, commit, push, child. Her Web Development 101 assignment is to make a mock web page for a pizzeria, and hers looks like it was made in 1998 or hacked by the Russians or both. The text is a tiny, unreadable font, the only picture is a tiny black and white pizza icon, and there is a long, skinny red box floating in the center. It’s a disaster, and every time she tries to fix one element, another gets weirder looking. Kyle, who sits in front of her, finished his site in the first twelve minutes of class. It’s cleanly designed and includes an online payment system and GPS tracker for the delivery driver. He calls his faux pizzeria Domino’s; there are no points for creative names. Kyle wears a tweed jacket and bright white Jordans, which Bridget thinks are an odd combo. She wonders whether his outfit is specifically-Kyle-odd or a trend with kids his age, though Bridget and Kyle are technically part of the same generation. Bridget thinks the tweed looks itchy. Kyle’s jacket makes her feel chafed and hot just looking at it. She’s been wearing sweatpants every day since her baby Annabelle was born three months ago, though she’s made sure to put on clean ones for this class the last three weeks. She also washes her hair before class, then twists it into a knot on top of her head so it never totally dries. Bridget knows better than to hope The Voice in her head telling her Go home to your baby. You thought you could do this and you can’t shut up. This Voice always emerges when Bridget veers away from things that come easy. The Voice thrives on uncertainty, discomfort, and awkwardness. She’s gotten snarkier with each class session of Web Dev 101. Bridget is supposed to go back to her job as an event planner at a fancy hotel soon. She is very good at turning sterile ballrooms into Rustic Dream weddings or comic book conventions. She’s so good at her job that The Voice never interrupts her while she’s working. It’s the only place she really shuts up. The idea that anyone in the world has parties or convenes for an entire day around a common interest could be true now, in theory, like the idea that we might all be living in a simulation, but what are we all supposed to do with that information? Bridget’s not sure, but she thinks maybe she wants to do work away from other people, not in constant contact with them. She thinks she might want work that follows more predictable rules, and not other humans’ whims. She’s all whimmed out from Annabelle. She wants to at her baby breathing while she figures things out. She wants to be around on Saturdays, not chasing around a drunk best man or fixing the scratchy sound system in conference room B. And she thinks she might be more interested in building things people will use now, instead of planning ephemeral experiences. When she told her friend Melissa’s tech-bro husband Matt she’d signed up for this class, he said she should keep making canapés for her little parties. Bridget knows what tech-bro Matt does is harder than her dumb fake pizzeria site, but that’s not the point. She wants to use a part of her brain that’s not a loop of milk, milk, poop, snuggles, love, desperate, startling love, fear, disorienting, draining love, teeny tiny laundry, milk, milk, poop, snuggles. She wants to finish this one project before she loses her nerve, before she wastes the focus she can already feel evaporating. Kyle and Matt were doing this in their basements for ten thousand hours while you were doing prom committee, you shallow dumb dumb, The Voice says. Why are you still soft and exhausted? Bridget knows that bitch will never shut up, but she can try and drown her out. She untangles her ear buds from the diaper bag (Kyle’s headphones are the bigger, noise-cancelling kind) and plays the Dixie Chicks. Wide Open Spaces. Fix the fonts first. Just the fonts, you can do the fonts. Goodbye, Earl! Since Annabelle was born, Bridget has not completed one task: the laundry sits wet in the machine, half a chopped onion stinks on the counter, tumbleweeds of hair and crumbs accumulate in the corners. Her husband loves Annabelle so much he weeps weekly, and he takes videos of her every little grin and coo. He does anything Bridget puts on a list for him, but sometimes he can’t find the cumin at the Ralph’s, or he boils the spaghetti so long it disintegrates. The world never required him to remember the litany of mundane details Bridget has memorized, like a second language she already knows, but that her husband has to constantly look to her to translate. She texts cumin is in aisle three!!! and leaves out a reminder that the spices are in alphabetical order. She adds thumbs-up and sunglasses happy face emojis after her text so she won’t sound mean. The class session is ending, but Bridget is still squinting at her screen trying to fix the fonts. Annabelle was born after a labor so long and difficult they almost lost her, and Bridget had a postpartum hemorrhage that almost did her in, too. In her walks around the block now with Annabelle, Bridget hums “You Are My Sunshine” and sips black iced coffee. She texts her mother, who lives a thousand miles away from California: there are some flight deals soon to LAX!!! Finally, Bridget gets one font on one div of her page to look better, after she cuts and pastes a whole chunk from the example code. She knows that’s cheating, so she vows to do it over later. The Voice says You don’t have the hustle, you don’t have the ten thousand hours, and Bridget skips ahead to “Not Ready to Make Nice.” Kyle gathers up his stuff and leaves, and as the instructor pushes open the door to leave, too, Bridget blurts out, “I’ll get this done by tonight!” “Yeah, any time before the next class is great,” he says. The Voice tells Bridget, Your questions are stupid, three or four times during every class, but Bridget asks them anyway. Her breasts swell as she commits her changes to her repository, and she feels the wet press of milk against the pads inside her nursing bra. It took two years for Bridget to get and stay pregnant while her Instagram feed filled up with babies babies babies, while she sat through a Kaiser Permanente class on fertility drugs and sat on the toilet crying, cramping, and bleeding over and over. She miscarried once while she was at work and the hotel was hosting a convention for Beauty Belle, one of those makeup-selling pyramid schemes. She had one of the ladies make her over after she cried, and now that woman calls her every month to ask if she wants to sell Beauty Belle, too. The classroom fills again with the students in the next class logging on to their laptops. Her shirt dampens under her arms too, now, so she has wet bra wet armpits while she stares at her screen. She has soothed Annabelle in the middle of O’Hare airport, on the way to see her mother, with “You Are My Sunshine” and milk milk milk, while men in football jerseys and business suits stared at her. She has been in love for fifteen years with one person and has found ways to reinvent herself over and over. New cities, new seasons, new sadnesses, new secrets. When she told her husband she was going to take Web Dev 101 because she wanted to try something different, he told her to go for it, he told her she could do anything. When she tried to quit after the first day of class, he made her go back and brought home a rotisserie chicken, a bagged salad, and her favorite boxed wine. On the drive home, Bridget counts the days left of her maternity leave again and keeps the alone-grown-up party going with the windows down and “Taking The Long Way.” She lets her hair down from its half-frizz-half-wet bun, unzips her sweatshirt, and tosses it into the passenger seat. It releases Annabelle’s powdery, sweet scent. All her old work dresses pinch her soft new pockets of stomach flesh when she zips them up. She has a fringe of new, fine hair along her forehead that grew in with the surge of postpartum hormones. She has no idea how she is going to manage a state high school robotics convention and a Modern Minimalist wedding at the hotel in the same weekend. She doesn’t know whether Annabelle will stop shrieking and pursing her lips when she tries to give her a bottle or whether the daycare they signed her up for is really a secret child abduction ring full of choking hazards and ringworm. She knows she is going to work on this damn website tonight, so she stops at the Starbucks for an iced coffee for her and one for her husband. Later, she will give up on getting Annabelle to sleep and let her linger in the swing listening to the jungle sounds while she works on her website and makes faces and does monkey oooh oooh eeeh eeehs. She will take a crumpled grocery list out of her husband’s hands as he’s squinting at it, whisper, “Domino’s,” in the same voice she uses when she’s trying to seduce him, and then go work on her site with the bedroom door closed until she hears the doorbell. While her husband sings “You Are My Sunshine” to Annabelle, she will scribble a whole page of possible names for the faux pizzeria while she eats her third slice of Domino’s, laughing to herself before she types Rustic Dream Pizza between the h1 tags. Bridget’s mistakes finally emerge, one by one, those stubborn shapeshifters. Each catch is a teeny tiny victory burst, a small, private triumph she celebrates with a “ha! gotcha!” under her breath before hunting for one more. It takes a week, but her page comes out looking like a respectable, if unremarkable, 2003 site: pale gray background, one stock photo of a pepperoni pizza, a box with the hours and address in normal-sized fonts, and a link to the menu. When she shares her work with her Web Dev 101 class online, Kyle comments, “Throwback, cool,” on hers and she comments, “Great UX! Domino’s, huh?” on his. ~ ~ ~ A week after Bridget goes back to work at the hotel, she gets home late and tries her hardest to start a fight with her husband about the half-chopped onions, the laundry still wet in the washer, the hair and crumbs accumulating in the corner, indulging in pissed-off snaps and snide comments to see how they land. Instead of apologizing or promising to do any of the chores, her husband presents Bridget with a rotisserie chicken, a bag of salad, and a box of wine. She doesn’t have the energy to escalate things any further. When she has to work on Saturdays, she sneaks into her office to read Annabelle The Rainbow Fish before bed on FaceTime, and Annabelle grabs her husband’s phone and smushes it up against her fat, wet cheek, muffling the sound and then hanging up all of a sudden when she pounds the red “end” button with her fist. Bridget keeps a folder titled “Web Dev Practice” on her computer, but every time she opens it, The Voice says, in a shrill whisper, not today. Bridget has accumulated binders full of ephemeral experiences info for any event at the hotel: contact lists full of florists, companies who rent slushy machines or chuppahs, DJs for sweet sixteens. Even with the time she spends pumping breast milk, she has more free time in her day at work than she remembers having before Annabelle was born: time between meetings, time waiting around for vendors, time she used to spend emailing seven people about a cheese selection she should have just announced would obviously be an aged, a soft, a firm, and a blue, unless they wanted an unbalanced cheese selection! For months, all Bridget does during these stolen moments is scroll through pictures of her baby on her phone and watch the Instagram stories of an influencer family traveling the world with their toddlers and taking them to Bali, Amsterdam, and the Great Barrier Reef. For months, she obeys the not today whisper when she hovers her mouse over the Web Dev Practice folder. ~ ~ ~ Bridget gets her period again even though she is still nursing Annabelle, a surprise she is so unprepared for she has to go home, to change out of her stained dress, and swallow four ibuprofen. There are no events or meetings scheduled that afternoon, Annabelle is still at daycare, her husband is out of town, and Bridget is alone in her house. While she waits for the Advil to kick in and for her tea to cool off, while her email box fills with questions that can wait until tomorrow. The Voice rushes across town to try and find Bridget hiding at home, but it doesn’t catch her before she opens the Web Dev Practice folder again. ~ ~ ~ Bridget arrives for her Advanced Mobile Apps class early, and Kyle sits down next to her, even though there are other seats free. He’s wearing his blue Best Buy uniform shirt this time, and his hair is cut shorter, revealing the fairer, unfreckled skin where the longer hair used to cover his neck. He sits up straighter and wipes his palms on his khakis. He’s wearing a wedding ring now. She’s in her work clothes, too. Melissa suggested she buy this dress because of its deep pockets and concealed side zipper, and Bridget loves the bright, seasonless blue shade and the thick cotton spandex blend fabric that stretches when she moves and stands up to sweat. She’s wearing a prism glass-beaded necklace Annabelle loves to grab at when it reflects the light. When they get to the part of class where they can work independently, Bridget pulls on her own big noise-cancelling headphones and puts on “Wide Open Spaces.” She and Kyle get to work, building things that people will use, following the same complex series of if/then/else rules, committing their changes over and over again. Temping Time is unholy. I have seen the clock faces wildly and extracted the rotten teeth of their ever pressing demands. You see it consuming everything bit by bit and look away, resigned. Calendars, schedules, deadlines. Termites at the load bearing beams of your life. Not me. I reached in there with pliers and gave it a yank. The streets of my life are still diced neatly into blocks but my days flow free, no longer owing to the hours or minutes. Back in the old days I used to steal the hands from clock faces. Collect them, all shapes and sizes, a myriad of styles, glue them down in rows like little jail doors, or bar codes. On the walls, the backs of envelopes, in the pages of journals. I would take them every chance I got. Restaurants and libraries. I'd liberate them from clocks in boutiques and thrift stores. I've prowled your house at night while you slept. In the morning you rose to a timeless panic, staring into the faceless Zen of a mute timepiece. The void expression of a face with no eyes, no nose or mouth. Its armless antics mocking the hierarchy of all your plans, and you were, in that moment, free. Why didn't you recognize that? Now, the clocks are all digital. I would love to hack a virus that pries the digits off your iWatch. I don't quite know how to go about it. Days happen. I am married to the quotidian moments, and as each one passes I mourn her loss and then marry the next. The moments are measureless and pass outside of time. I marry the morning and then leaver her for a younger, prettier afternoon. By evening I am already cheating on her. I am not mad. Madness is for you people, you seem to like it so much. Mad is what you are when you live like I used to live. I abandoned my flat long ago, wrote the last I.O.U. on an eviction notice. Lost in the authoritarian maze of fear, debt, and schedule, I recognized that it was a confine. Self imposed, so you could just walk away. I panhandle for food money. It's no big deal. I use the second hand from a wristwatch to poke little track marks on my arm, so people think I'm a druggie. That way I fit in. Time travel, the way I do it, would just freak them out. My clothes are ill-fitting, mismatched, soiled. My smile is endearing, I am alert but non-aggressive. I ponder the pity I feel for you and invoke its sorrow in my public display. A few coins come my way. My heart breaks for you, really, stuck as you are like a moth on flypaper to the cruel whippings of measured time. The nights are like days but for the sun and her ways. The hum of traffic, car horns pepper the quiet like pathogens in the blood of a moonless sky. I curl up in a pocket of silence carved out of the essence of the sounds. Insects scurry and rustle the leaves. They sing to me beyond comprehension, cricket and cicada. They sing all the moments into blissful slumber and I wake some few hours later to the poke of a nightstick. The billies have come to give me the what-for. They stand over me like totems, their uniforms emit the stench of fabric softener into the virgin morning air. It is unlawful to be free, so they take me in. The holding cell is clock-less so there's nothing here to steal. In the afternoon I appear in court as my own counsel. I try to explain that everything is made out of stories and without the stories there is only purity, innocence, simplicity. The stories themselves are made up of back-stories, like strands of hemp woven into rope, and are often fantastic, completely untrue, even. In this sense, every mouth is a womb of lies, we are all perjurers. I offer to rewrite the city's vagrancy laws, or even pick up litter from the side walks, for the term of my community service. The charges are dismissed and I am released before evening. The sky begins to yawn with a brand of light that's unkind to surfaces. I thrive in its dreariness. I press my last few crumpled bills into someone's filthy palm, and shoplift some items from a food mart. Bread and lunch meat, cheese and a bag of grapes. I eat some and hand the rest off to some alley people. I head down to the bus station where I intend to spend the night. I like its rows of benches, like church pews, and I sit and pray for those lost to the tyranny of schedule. The buses arrive and depart in a fever dream of endless migration. My eyes rest upon a large wall clock. Its minute hand is the size of a Bowie knife. Like the numskulls all around me, it lurches from point to point with a dedication that is a marvel to witness. I take a corner bench and lie on my side. I fit sleep like a puzzle piece into the jigsaw of clatter and rush. In the morning I am gone, and the wall clock is relieved of its jerking, spinning arms, bleached of its very function. Offering liberation to any and all who settle their eyes upon its featureless, gray face. n its featureless, gray face. flash fiction by G. Paul Randall poetry by Evalyn Lee I put words, oars, on the page, Paddle the soul canoe, Navigate the cosmos without a blessing. It is tapu, I am different from myself, Sky water is blue, the islands of tree branches Bare a different past and it feels Like the last hours have advanced, Touching me, always, it isn’t enough To paddle hard, I am scared, To tell the truth, this restless Slaughter, I dig my paddle In the water, ink dark, like my heart. Soul Canoe We all think that we’ll never hit an iceberg. We all believe that we’re the best captains ever, and we shall not hit an iceberg. Then all the other captains who’ve hit an iceberg, which is everyone else, reply in unison, “We all did.” But the sea is large, and the journeys are long, and we come to think that we will never hit another iceberg. We think, ‘We’ve hit one, we know what to look for.’ Then all the other captains who’ve hit two icebergs, which is everyone else, reply in unison. micro fiction by Joe Neal We All Did Jam short fiction by Rick White It was definitely the TV that started it. The volume turned up to 11, an odd number - I mean what kind of lunatic does that? You know when every little thing seems to go wrong in your day? You reach in to the fridge and there’s loads of crap in there that’s well past its sell by date fucking hummus and tomatoes and stuff but you just want the raspberry jam and although it’s stuck right at the back of the fridge you think you can manoeuvre it out of there without moving anything else, if you’re careful. So you try and guide it gently towards you but it all goes wrong and you end up pulling loads of stuff out with it which then all splatters on to the kitchen floor in a congealed, out of date mess. The jam hits the floor as well and shatters, the thin glass membrane falling away as the sticky red gunk inside oozes out. While the TV blares away at 11. Fuck. Now you’re crying. This is not some kind of metaphor, it’s what actually happened. I’m in the bathroom sobbing over it right now. Amelia, my daughter wanted the jam. She never wants what I offer her for breakfast, which I guess is perfectly normal for a three year old. My boyfriend Luke is now making her some white bread toast smothered in some of the salvaged jam. Sugar and empty carbs, possibly shards of glass. He’ll even cut the crusts off for her, he knows it annoys me but he fucking does it on purpose so he can gaslight me later about how he’s just trying to hold things together while I ‘have one of my meltdowns’ in the bathroom. I sit on the toilet and pee, staring at a cracked bathroom tile which will never be properly white no matter how much I scrub it. When I’m done I stand up and flush the toilet and while it flushes I have to turn round three times on the spot. The end of the last turn has to coincide perfectly with the flush cycle completing itself otherwise I will need to start again. I turn on the tap to wash my hands. As I scrub the back of my left hand I count up to three in my head, three times. Then I repeat the process for my right hand. Then it’s the same for the palms, the fingers and the wrists. I scrub methodically, making sure the sequence is exact. I must complete the sequence three times. I take a moment to compose myself in the bathroom. The last thing I want is for Amelia to see me upset. I walk out, down the narrow hallway of our little flat with the black and white photos of us on the walls, the absence of any male presence at once a source of courage and a stark reminder that I am on my own. Back in the kitchen Luke and Amelia are laughing together as they eat their breakfast. Luke is leaning over the table trying to snatch Amelia’s toast in his mouth like a dog. She screams with laughter - laughter which I now feel he is stealing from me. Luke doesn’t officially live with us. He lives with his parents even though he’s twenty-five and blames their generation for the fact he can’t buy a home of his own. Still lets his mum do his washing for him though. I pick up keys, purse, phone and hand sanitiser from around the kitchen and living room and shove them all in to my handbag. I don’t need to be too precise with any of this. Luke can never be allowed to see any of my rituals. That’s partly why I keep him around - a bit of light relief. find the remote control and turn off the TV. ‘Come on guys we’ve got to go or we’ll be late.’ I try to affect an air of cheerfulness. Try to be a part of their fun. Luke is still snapping away and barking. It’s actually quite funny. Or rather - I realise that it is funny, but I am not entertained. ‘Amelia’ I say. ‘Don’t let that nasty dog eat your toast, you don’t know where he’s been.’ She’s getting hysterical now and I start to panic as I know she’s getting over excited and is liable to throw a tantrum in the car. ‘Luke. come on now we really need to go.’ He ignores me. ‘Luke?’ ‘Yes?’ He says, breaking character with an exaggerated sigh. ‘We’ve really got to go or we’ll be late and please don’t wind her up.’ I’m trying to say this in a casual offhand way but it’s not coming across. ‘It’s fine we’ve got loads of time. Let her finish her breakfast at least.’ He shrugs and turns his back to me, sips his coffee and says, ‘Amelia darling, mummy says it’s time to leave so you’ve got to eat all your toast up now, yeah, for me?’ Amelia nods her head and eats her toast like a little angel and once again I am standing here like the overbearing authority. The bad cop. Finally I get Amelia’s coat and shoes on and we’re out of the flat, down the stairs, in to the cold November air and heading for the car. Luke’s catching the bus to work. He’ll be back tonight if he feels like it. Otherwise he’ll make some excuse and sit at home in his bedroom playing computer games. I envy him, I really do. He gives me a kiss before he leaves and says, ‘Try not to get too anxious today babes. Text me if you need to talk yeah?’ Text you. Because that’s what every single mother on the verge of a psychotic episode needs; to have to compose a text message which accurately describes the vast, pitch-black underground cave network of her emotional state, whilst at the same time not sounding too anxious. Cheers babes. It’s a short drive to nursery and one I usually enjoy as long as Amelia stays quiet in the back. The morning sun and the crisp frost on the naked tree limbs gives everything a little sparkle. I like winter. Everything stops. Nothing’s really dead, it’s just suspended in time - waiting to come back to life - taking a moment to be still. I glance back at Amelia in the backseat, her big wide eyes are taking in the whole world around her. There’s no trace of worry and I think - I hope - that she is comfortable, comforted. When I was little I thought that we had ghosts in our house. I was convinced that things I’d put in certain places were being moved. I used to arrange all of my toys and clothes in very specific ways. Everything had a place. Then I’d find that things weren’t where I’d left them. I asked my parents about it but they just laughed it off and thought nothing of it but as time went on I became obsessed with the idea that there were people living in our walls who came out at night to steal my things away. After a while it wasn’t just my toys I worried would be stolen, it was my parents as well. I drop Amelia off at nursery and I make sure she’s got her coat on properly. It’s a freezing cold razor blade of a day - the kind of day that has clarity. A good day - or at least it would be - if not for the fucking raspberry jam. The smiling nursery school teachers, indefatigably cheerful and full of life, are always there to greet her but it’s the hardest part of my day watching her go, because I’m always convinced I won’t get her back. I couldn’t stop the ghosts in the wall from touching my things. And I couldn’t stop them when they decided to steal my dad away. I was 13 when it happened - cancer - he went quickly. I was convinced it was because of me, because I hadn’t tried hard enough to keep him safe. ‘Give me a hug to last me till you get back.’ That’s what he’d say every time I had to leave his hospital bed. I’d give him the biggest hug I could manage, really believing that it would last. He knew of course that it might be the last time I’d see him and then, eventually, it was. Dad once gave me a little shell which he’d picked up on the beach in Anglesey while we were on holiday. I kept it with me all the time and became completely fixated with it after he was gone. It was white and very small, perfectly smooth with the faintest residue of salt left behind. When I ran my fingers across it I felt like I was back on that beach with my dad when the sun still shone, keeping him with me. I don’t know where that shell went. And now every day I have to watch Amelia leave me behind and act like it doesn’t totally scare me to death. I have to pretend like I don’t think she’s never coming back. ~ ~ ~ After I drop Amelia off at Nursery I would usually drive to work. But not today. Today I have different plans, plans that have to be meticulously executed and managed. It’s one thing to be in control of your own Universe, and I do everything I can do do that. Things like the TV turned to 11 and the raspberry jam don’t help but I can find ways to balance those out. Balance, that’s the key. It’s when you let other people in to your Universe, that’s when things get complicated. Because you just don’t know how things are going to play out. I do everything I can to keep things in order. I clean, I count, I check. But no matter what I do people just come along and fuck it all up. People are unstable atoms; an excess of internal energy causes them to become volatile. In order to become stable, they must bond with other atoms. This process can be chaotic, but it must be controlled. I park my car at the hotel. But before I go in to meet the man who is my own unstable atom I make my way, as I always do, to the nearest chemist. I buy a can of diet coke and a sandwich with less than 200 calories, for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I also buy a pair of nail scissors, sealed inside a small plastic pouch. They are only tiny, but I know that they are sharp. Later, after we’ve fucked in the seedy afternoon dimness of the hotel room, I’m in the bathroom once again. Only this time I am calm. Richard, the man I came to meet, Amelia’s father, is lying in bed on the other side of the door. I left him lying there naked, sheet pulled up to the waist, sparse and wiry chest hair on pale white skin. He’s not good looking, not in the same way that Luke is, but he fits in to a box. Luke is beautiful, he really is. Tanned and toned and chiselled and big. But his beauty is transient, purely material. In that sense he's disposable, or at least that’s how I see him. I feel bad for thinking of him that way but I have to. Sex with Richard is ok, fairly pedestrian really but I like it because his attention is solely on me. I please him, I know I do. I when I say that I don’t mean it in the same way that I please Luke, which frequently involves recreating some misogynistic and degrading act that he's seen in porn. I mean that I please him. Just me. I think of my relationships with the people in my life like Venn diagrams, everyone must fit in to their own bubble. Luke intersects with me, and partly with Amelia, which is ok. Richard intersects with me only, never Amelia. Also fine. ‘Babe are you coming back? I’m lonely here.’ He calls from the bedroom. I shudder at the use of the word ‘babe.’ It’s bad enough when Luke uses it. ‘Two minutes.’ I call back. ‘Give a girl chance to freshen up.’ He thinks today has happened by chance. That I just so happened to like his Facebook photo a few days ago, late at night, when I knew he would see it and start messaging me. Thinks it’s merely coincidence he just happens to be in town a week later. Men are so gullible, so unobservant. He doesn’t notice any of the ways in which I pull his strings and when we make love he doesn’t notice any of the six tiny white scars on the inside of my left thigh. One for every one of these hotel room afternoons that have happened since Amelia was born. I’m making the seventh one now. Delicately drawing the fresh blade of the scissors across my skin, careful not to go too deep. I love these stolen afternoons, these secret trysts. But the pleasure must be balanced with the pain, there must be a reminder that this is not allowed. The blood is flowing quite freely but I wipe it away with a tissue. I know I haven't gone too deep. The bleeding stops and I repackage the scissors in their plastic wrapper. Then I pull on my robe before going back in to the bedroom, padding across the plush carpet. This is a nice hotel. ‘Shall we order some room service?’ Asks Richard, stirring contentedly in the huge white bed. ‘I’ve got to go.’ ‘What?’ Oh I thought you could stay for a bit?’ He really does sound disappointed but I have to go. He needs to stay in his bubble. ‘I would love to but I do need to get back.’ ‘Well look, if you do need to go that’s fine but just sit down for a second, there’s something I need to say to you first.’ Shit. Something I need to say. This doesn’t sound good at all. ‘Ok.’ I say, feeling the first cold waves of panic start to creep up my spine. I sit down on the edge of the bed and I’m suddenly aware of a wetness between my thighs. ‘I want to start seeing Amelia.’ The. Fucking. Jam. This is all my fault. This morning everything was ok, everything was in bubbles but now it’s all shattered to bits like that stupid raspberry jam. How didn’t I see this coming? ‘What?’ I say back, aware that I’m talking but not feeling the word leave my chest. ‘I know this will come as a bit of a shock.’ ‘We agreed. It was what you wanted. It was what you said you wanted.’ I can’t breathe. ‘I know.’ He sits up in the bed and looks me straight in the eyes, he's trying to keep the connection, trying to keep me calm. ‘I know that we agreed, that we both agreed it was for the best.’ ‘What about your wife?’ Not that I give a shit about her but I’m clutching at straws. ‘It’s complicated. But she knows.’ ‘She knows? What do you mean she fucking knows?’ ‘She knows everything. She knows about me and you, she knows that Amelia is my daughter.’ ‘Has she seen her? Has she seen Amelia?’ My voice is wavering, out of control. ‘She’s seen your Facebook page, so yes, she's seen Amelia.’ ‘I have to leave, I have to go now.’ ‘Look I know that this is a shock but we can make this work, people do it all the time. I have a right, I’ve paid for her all these years.’ ‘I have to go.’ I get up and start picking up my clothes. ‘Fucking hell you’re bleeding.’ ‘It’s fine.’ ‘No, really. I’m sorry but you’re bleeding down your leg.’ ‘It doesn’t matter! Fuck you it doesn’t matter.’ The tears come as I get dressed, stinging my eyes as I pull my jeans on over the blood that is smeared down my leg. Small drops of red are just starting to bloom on my blue jeans as I run from the hotel room. Leaving Richard remonstrating meekly behind me. I’m in my car now, driving fast to get back to Amelia and now I’m in a bubble. All of the bad thoughts, all of the worst things that I try so hard to keep on the outside are trying to get in. I don’t do well on my own, everything starts to close in on me. As I speed along the motorway I’m aware of the thin membrane of glass and metal that is currently the only thing keeping me locked in, locked inside this car. Locked inside my own head. I think of how easy it would be to shatter it to bits, just like the fucking raspberry jam. To let all the bad stuff just ooze out on to the floor and leave it for someone else to clean up. Make it in to someone else’s mess to worry about. I look up at the blue November sky through my windscreen and I feel myself floating up in to it. Looking down on myself in my own little bubble, separate from everything, not fully in one place or another. Just apart, an unstable atom. I need to get back to Amelia. I need to give her a hug to last her. I need to learn to let go. I need to Snail at the Bank A peanut-sized snail oozing its way up the glass counter, of all things. Did they allow snails here, snails that grew? For this one swelled even as he watched, the size of a marble now. It was red-black, like agate beads they’d found in the last haul, in one purse or the other. Or a bloodied eyeball. It pulsed, for fuck’s sake. What snail did that? He rubbed his eyes. The women ahead remained the same. The one in front of him stood like a glock, her bleached curls sitting on top of a square jacket. He wanted to reach out and squeeze her middle, check if she’d show a waist. The girl ahead of her, who stood right at the counter sliding her fingertip across her phone screen, unseeing of the now walnut-sized snail, was cigarette-thin. Had all women lost their waists this morning? Not his problem, like Johnny said, he just had to do as he was told, never mind the snails and the women of this world. He was to keep his hands in his pockets, the hat firm on his hair sticky with sweat, and look at the floor. Open his mouth only if Johnny said. Simple. He wanted to turn back and check on Johnny but he didn’t need the bother. So what if he’d taken a hit this morning, the new cocktail the boys had got their hands on, while watching Desperado on loop. Just a whiff, not too much, to take the edge off things, not see shit like the bloody snail now the size of tennis balls he used to fetch back at the club before they threw him out. Why are tennis balls yellow, he’d asked that old dirtbag, his father, who hadn't gone fishing since the year he came back from the river with a bleeding stump of a leg, but instead sat painting the bottom of his skiff each morning with fish, snakes, loony shit. Why not white or black tennis balls, or red? But his father had growled just pick ’em balls, no questions and so when he’d lost his job he’d gone to the local boss Johnny like his father said, collected packets and dropped them, making of it a casual thing, oh mister, sorry I’d forgotten, here, they sent you this to keep, have you a message I can take back for Johnny? He needed to keep it together. To just hold things and pass them on as he’d always done. Not think of what was in his pocket, not freak no matter what, just like he never had, not even when his father had held a crocodile on his head for his fifth birthday, a blow-up doll; or even at the real thing, the baby croc his father had caught one afternoon and brought back, writhing and ticking like a clock, its eyes glassy, its throat leathery-frail and transparent, pulsing with each call to its mother. The cigarette-thin girl left, and the glock woman waddled forward, keeping her hand on the counter, quite close to the snail that now looked like a bloodied fist. It left behind a trail of slime, like nosebleed when he had a cold. He held his breath, and began the count. He would count till the woman left, till Johnny called out from behind him, the seconds as they ticked off before Johnny got to the manager, opened his bag like a wide jaw waiting to be filled, till the crash of the glass, the splatter of the fist-sized snail, till the air filled with banknotes riding eddies of conditioned air, till the moment when—he imagined Johnny watching pop-eyed, slack-jawed—the pistol in his pocket turned into a machine gun and instead of doing what he was told, he, with his hair flying now like a shampoo ad, trench coat billowing in slow motion, shoulder kicking back till his bones creaked, sent cartridges littering the floor in staccato, clinking music. flash fiction by Damyanti Biswas You should see the moon tonight, hear the cows talking. Usually, it’s lunar seas and craters, the view through a hole in the barn’s rooftop tin. The near side leers like a lush post-two martinis. I answered because the cows were bawling. Found an old girl’s leg caught within a gate, pinned in. You should hear the freed hussy quote Marvell. Had we but world enough and time… Something about raw love and running. The great bull keeps snorting. He can’t believe what Marvell was missing. You should see the moon tonight, hear steers quoting critics, some calling the harsh dishonest. So, yes. I’m helping a troubled heifer with calving. In calving, you reach inside, grab the legs and pull. You time your tug to contractions, anticipating the big one. Assistance honest, never coy. Ideally rhyming. The poets are squirming and the bull looks guilty. You should see the moon tonight, feel the old drunk’s gawking as the new momma delivers. The calf glistens in a slimy beginning, the mother tonguing its coat, air clinking in the bull’s call for another round of Marvell. Below the hole in the roof, not a cow’s bemoaning time or the moon you should see tonight. The hussy has moved on to Millay and the bull’s once more lusting. The new calf stands, shaking on its legs, the moon looming over the parts that fought the tugging. You Should See the  Moon Tonight poetry by Dwaine Rieves A Reverie of Trees and Childhood There seem to be two types of narratives predominant in non-fiction. One, and by far the most prominent is the tragedy narrative: the ways in which the world has failed you, warped you, a bad parent, a bad relationship, a bad religion. The narrative of recovery. I can’t write that type of story, so I’m destined to write in the second and far less illustrious way. I’m forced to write about myself, my confusion, my failings, my foolishness, all of which are entirely my own, not the world’s. I’m forced to scatter words on a page, hoping they come to rest in some recognizable pattern, like light passing through stained glass. A typical life life doesn’t result in any natural sympathy from the reader, nor does the drama of that life generate an arc for the writer. Rather, you’re tasked with extracting meaning from the flow of days, like a child bent to a patch of grass, trying to find a four leaf clover. No such clover exists, or it didn’t in my childhood, when I searched for them in the front lawn of a neighbor, Andy, so probably Andrew, like me. I remember the slack skin on Andy’s neck—cloth on a sail. He was in his seventies and kind to the children who lived on the small cul-de-sac where I grew up. He warned us away from the mushrooms, which occasionally sprang up among the clover, dark and secret. We’d hold the clover up in our hands, inspecting it, and if we found nothing, let it disappear in the wind. At the end of the cul-de-sac, an impossibly large Sycamore stood, the light sifting its branches. The sycamore swayed in the slightest breeze, branches snapping together, and the clacking of tree limbs now reminds me of childhood—of peeing outside, riding Big Wheels, eating hot, fat blackberries and climbing trees to escape sun scorched days. Once I reached the top of the silk tree in the side yard, I’d sit in the crow’s nest, looking out at the bits of tattered grass, the dried ground, the black street glittering like a serpent sunning itself. I loved trees in my childhood, the sycamore keeping watch; the silk tree scored by a wood pecker’s beak, the loquat I climbed and fell from, the pine, piercing the veil of the sky as if it were a gothic spire. I experienced them as living and breathing entities, their individual quirks as much a part of my childhood as toys—a knob intended for my right foot, a branch designed for the curve of my elbow, a spire meant for dreams of castles. I have forgotten trees in adulthood. I visit the Redwoods every now and again, those majestic trees, a thousand years old—trunks like the feet of brontosaurus. And still, they are not the dream trees of youth, not the trees with notches and nubs of branches from which I oriented myself to the world. We moved away when I was nine, across town to a new house, where the trees were all connected to posts, replica saplings in front of replica houses—block after block of trees without meaning, without identity. The trees were lost to me. What I didn’t know, couldn’t have known is that the trees would be lost to me forever, that I’d never be able to experience a single tree as one might experience a close friend. It seems to me, at thirty-six, that life is a catalogue of such moments, of a lesson learned time and again—the sound of doors closing. Once, when I was eighteen, I stood in my doorway, heart pounding, while a girl with whom I was very much in love called out down the hallway and someone else answered and walked with her instead of me. She and I never walked through the serpentine paths of my college campus, past the birds of Paradise, past the rose garden and down to the water where butterflies landed and flexed on flowers, among the densely packed white Ceanothus, tanbark oak, manzanitas and chapparal. We never sat by the pond and told each other how it felt to be eighteen and falling in love. And still time passes and some walks are taken. It was underneath the boughs of oaks, and a quilt of sky pricked by stars that I kissed someone for the first time. It was the same stretch of road that my second girlfriend, soon to be my wife, walked with me hand in hand, the two of us, so young, so in love. And now, fifteen years gone by, she and I are separated, and I drive out to California alone. I stop at the bend in the road at Westmont and look again at the sky, as if I can recapture all that has been lost to time. ~ ~ ~ I’ve visited home many times since we moved back east and driven by the old cul-de-sac. It seems so small now, so impossibly small. It doesn’t look anything like what I remember. Andy has been dead for decades and everyone else is also gone, moved on to different houses, different lives. I saw the sycamore tree, still towering at the end of the block, still waving its yellow green leaves in the passing wind, still shedding its bark. It too meant nothing at all. I drove on, not searching for clover, not searching for anything now, just holding tightly to the bits that remain. creative non-fiction by Andrew Bertaina Andrew Bertaina Andrew Bertaina’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications including: The Best American Poetry 2018, The ThreePenny Review, Tin House Flash Fridays, Redivider, and Green Mountains Review. More of his work is available at andrewbertaina.com Damyanti Biswas Damyanti’s short fiction has been published at Litro, Bluestem magazine, Griffith Review Australia, Lunch Ticket magazine, Atticus Review, and other journals in the USA and UK. Her work is available in various anthologies in Asia, and she serves as one of the editors of the Forge Literary Magazine. Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier is a Canadian gal, an internationally published visual artist, writer and photographer. Her images are produced intuitively using digital photography. Find out more about her work at https://www.kcbgphoto.com Evalyn Lee Evalyn Lee is a former CBS News producer currently living in London with her husband and two children. Over the years, Lee has produced television segments for 60 Minutes in New York and the BBC in London. It has been Evalyn Lee’s honor to write for Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, and Lesley Stahl while covering a wide range of stories, including both Gulf Wars and numerous investigative pieces. She has studied English literature both in the U.S. and in England and had the opportunity to interview writers, including Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Dick Francis, and Margaret Atwood, about their work. At graduate school at Oxford University, Lee studied with Joyce scholar Richard Ellman and literary critic John Bayley. Most recently she has worked with American novelist Joyce Maynard and the English novelist Louise Doughty. Lee’s broadcast work has received an Emmy and numerous Writers Guild Awards. She won the Willow Review prize for short fiction for 2016. Lee is currently at work on her first novel. Joe Neal Joe Neal received an MFA from Cornell University, and his fiction has appeared in I-70 Review, Salamander, Harpur Palate, and Superstition Review. G.Paul Randall G. Paul Randall is author of a single published poem, and many short works of poetry and fiction to be found on his blog. Dabbling in poetry and the arts all his life, he began writing much more frequently in 2016, mostly poetry. He lives in Galveston, Texas, US, where he has been detained, nearly against his will, for the purposes of employment, by a small independent book store since 2000. Dwaine Rieves Dwaine Rieves is a research pharmaceutical scientist in Washington, DC. Katie Runde Katie Runde’s fiction has appeared in Storyscape and Pithead Chapel, and her nonfiction has appeared in Bello Collective and the LA Review of Books. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson College and lives in Iowa City. Rick White Rick White is a fiction writer from Manchester UK. Rick has previously had work published in Storgy, Soft Cartel and Vice Magazine among others. Rick is 34 years old and lives with his wife Sarah and their small furry overlord, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Harry.   Contributors Poetry Editors Olivia Kiers Elizabeth McIntosh Creative Non-Fiction Editor Suke Cody Editor-in-Chief Kerri Farrell Foley Short Fiction Editors Becca Wild Konstantin Rega Crack the Spine Staff WWW.CRACKTHESPINE.COM BECOME A MEMBER OF CRACK THE SPINE CRACK THE SPINE LITERARY MAGAZINE