Press 53

A sit-down-chat-loving publisher of short fiction and poetry collections, located in Winston-Salem, NC.

Flash Friday

Today is your last chance to get a ton of Press 53 short story collections for only 99 cents (!!!) including Bastard Blue, the debut collection from Murray Dunlap. Read a story from Dunlap below, and have a happy weekend!!

In the Attic

The thing you should understand first is that the man from Tucson doesn’t love me and I don’t love him. So when he showed up on my Alabama doorstep with a suitcase and a bottle of wine, Husband thought everything was just fine. They shook hands and grabbed each other by the shoulder. You see, the man from Tucson—who became the man in our attic on a folding cot—was friends with Husband before everything happened. They met four times a week at the local gym and worked out. They spotted each other. That was before the night that I kissed him and before the night he invited me into his bed. They were friends and we were friends and I was married, but it all sorted out just fine. Now, however, while Husband cooks lasagna, the man in our attic seems to think we’ll have another go, right here in our home.

The first night goes something like this: Husband makes lasagna with three kinds of cheese and the man in our attic, let’s call him Tucson, has his hand on my knee under the table and it’s headed north. All very predictable, all very clichéd. Until Tucson says to Husband, “What do you say we leave this pretty lady for a spell and you and I go out for a man’s drink? A glass of single malt, neat, and a good cigar?”

And Husband says, “You’re on.”

So I’m home alone and not a clue what Tucson is up to. You should remember that I don’t love him and he doesn’t love me so it doesn’t matter, but when the phone rings I jump a mile.

“Hello,” I say.

“On the cot in the attic, there’s a picture of you coming out of the shower with the biggest grin.”

“You kept it.”

“I like to see you that way.”

“Grinning or naked?”

“Wet.”

I say nothing.

“I also have a pistol. A simple six shooter. Anyone could learn how to use it.”

“We don’t keep guns in the house.”

“That’s smart,” he says.

Then Tucson hangs up. I was never sure if Husband wanted to go out or if he was just being polite or if he already knew everything and had other plans altogether. Between the two of them, Husband could always lift heavier weight.

Both men show up safely at midnight. Drunk, but otherwise unharmed. Husband won’t tell me what they talked about but keeps making pistols with his hands and saying draw! followed by the imitated sounds of gunfire.

That was the first night.

On the second night, after sleeping late, and after a painfully silent lunch, Tucson suggests we smoke a little grass, and Husband—of all people—agrees. Now I don’t know much about pot or getting high, but I went to college and learned a few things, so I know right off that what we’re smoking isn’t plain old marijuana.

Within an hour I fall into a blinding fog and can’t be sure whose hands are under my shirt. It seems like Husband, and I sort of recognize his voice. Then I feel a third hand, and a fourth hand, so I fight for the wherewithal to push people away. But those hands keep grabbing and my skirt won’t stay down, so I kick somebody hard in the balls. That’s enough to get some distance and I climb the stairs into the attic. I pull the string for the light and there it is, perfectly exposed on the cot next to my dripping wet breasts and stupid grin. I pick it up. I didn’t expect it to be so heavy, so dangerous. I guess I don’t know what I expected, but it frightens me and I put it down. The breath on the back of my neck stops me from turning around.

“Do you love me?” the voice asks.

“Who are you?”

“Does it matter?”

And in that moment I guess it doesn’t, because we climb into the cot and make the rafters shake. In the morning, I wake up alone in the attic. Husband can’t remember anything, but noisily complains that his balls ache. As for Tucson, he and his pistol vanish. No note, no naked picture. Nothing.

So when you come to visit us, we’ll put you up in the little study off the kitchen and it’ll be just fine. I upgraded to a trundle bed and threw the cot away.

We no longer use the attic.

Poetry Wednesday

We mark the halfway point of the week with a poem here at Press 53, and today’s is from Richard Krawiec’s collection She Hands Me the Razor. Happy Wednesday!

Evidence

the Christmas fir leans

against the last budding branch

of the sheared stump of the apple tree  

 

tawny blades of grass 

stiff with white frost fail to contain

the clumped spears of the wild onions  

 

like mica  ice flashes

star points from the green leaves

of the wind-shaken mulberry bush  

 

before a small wooden chair 

a pink corn cob stripped of kernels

evidence something survives

Spotlight on Prime Number Magazine

We’re back from the long weekend with a short creative nonfiction essay for you! Read “My Affinity for Burros” by Kase Johnstun below, and check out the rest of Prime Decimals 37.2 here!

An Affinity for Burros

I stood on a street corner in Morelia, a city of more than 750,000 people in the heart of Michoacán, Mexico. Thousands of Nissan Sentras and Toyota Corollas buzzed by, weaving and honking and braking in riotous traffic. Morelia was a clean city, much cleaner than Mexico City, and roman-arched viaducts stretched above the roads and houses like thousands of grey-bricked rainbows hovering in the sky. My friend from home and study-abroad roommate, Brandon, stood next to me, and seven young boys stood around us. We drank local beer that we had just bought from a local tienda and waited for a combi, the most common and inexpensive way to get around the city, to pick us up and take us to discothèque. The old Volkswagen buses zoomed through the streets, braked very briefly at their route stops, collected passengers, and then sped away, resembling the bus on Harry Potter that weaved through the London streets, nearly killing all passengers and pedestrians with every turn. 
 
Arturo, our host family’s oldest son, stood out as the coolest of his friends. Every semester, his family would host students from the United States, from Canada, from Europe, and from other Latin American countries, and every semester he would parade his worldly guests out in front of his friends’ eyes. They adored him. Respected him. Looked up to him. He not only had the most interesting house guests, but he had spent months studying their languages and had a strong proficiency in English, French, Portuguese, and German, turning his friends admiration into worship. When we tried to practice our Spanish with him at home, which was the intent of the immersion-based program, he would pretend like he couldn’t understand us and somehow convince us to speak only in English so he could practice. It would have been a solid bet that he did this with all his guests. His friends would talk to him, he would translate to us, we would talk back to him, and then he would translate back. Nothing in the conversation could be said without going through his mouth. This amount of knowledge creates power. We knew it. His friends knew it. Morelia seemed to know it. Arturo was the shit, or la bamba, and there was no way around it. At that time on the street corner, I couldn’t help but admire how he mediated three or four different conversations, kept up with it all, and kept his audience laughing. 
 
It could have been any street in any town in any country, and it would have been the same. 
 
We laughed at the things all young men share in common. We translated vulgarities, and when we couldn’t come up with the exact word to describe a part of the female anatomy, we mimed it with our hands. Beer and women can bond any group of young, stupid men from any part of the world. We are simpletons, and a good buzz and talk about the opposite sex is all we needed to create cohesive connections. 
 
Midway through a joke, I spotted an older women and her son walking toward the combi stop. She walked with a cane in one hand and her purse in the other. Her bull-legged gate made her coming toward us very slow, but her son of about thirty years old stayed right by her side and patiently walked with her. I’d seen him before—every day at Canyonview, a school for students with disabilities, the school where I had worked for the last two years. His eyes were spread wide, his nose stubby, and his forehead broad and wide with only a small tuft of black hair remaining on the top of his head. He had Down syndrome, and as he walked toward us, he stared at the mixed group of gringos and Morelians that stood at the combi stop with beer in their hands. When he and his mother got within ten feet of the group, he said hello to us, and then the laughter and slurs erupted from Arturo’s mouth. 
 
“Baboso! Lo que mires?” 
 
“Pinche idiota!” 
 
“Usted es tan estúpido como un perro!” 
 
The boys rained down slur after slur on the man who could not walk any faster and had to walk patiently with his mom. They insulted his face, said he slept with his mother. Slapping and patting their legs, they laughed hysterically at their jokes. 
 
His eyes dropped down, and if they could have, they would have sank into the gutter and drifted away, but he just kept walking on by us and taking the verbal beating. 
 
I saw my Canyonview students and friends in him, and my heart broke: I saw Nate in him, Jenny in him, Jeremy in him. 
 
My eyes drifted back and forth from my new friends to the man and his mother. My ears started to burn with anger and my hands shook in nervous fear. It was one of those moments that the more reserved of us hate. We want to say something. We hate what is happening around us, but we tremble with the inner turmoil of what to say, how to say it, and if we should say it at all, just to the let the moment eat us up inside for fifteen years afterward. 
 
The boy walked passed Brandon and me, and simultaneously we said, “Buenos dias, amigo.” Brandon must have had the same fire in his gut. And “Buenos dias, amigo” was all we had in our weaponry. But it was enough to turn the slurs our way. 
 
“Joto!” 
 
“Puto!” 
 
“Maricon!” 
 
The young men pointed their aggression toward us, and we swallowed it just long enough to let the man and his mother pass. They walked away, and I swigged on my beer and took in the coming insults about my sexuality, my intelligence, and my affinity for burros. 

Flash Friday

The weekend is finally here, and it’s a long one! Get your flash fiction fix before you head off traveling or relaxing this weekend; check out this story by Steve Mitchell, and read his collection, The Naming of Ghosts, for only 99 cents (this month only!!).

Flare

he’d built the fire in the middle of the living room floor, between the coffee table and the overstuffed chair, not far from the television. By the time I stumbled in, the flames were pretty high and it was hard to tell whether she’d used my clothes or her own. I backed into the bedroom, still bleary eyed, pulling the comforter from the bed and running at the fire like a drunken matador. I fell toward the flames, wrestling them into the blanket, inhaling great gobs of smoke and blackening my hands, rolling on the floor with the flames until I was sure they’d died; then I sat up, straight legged in my pajamas, catching my breath by the smoldering mound of ash and comforter.

It was one of the great things about Evie, she was always surprising me. I never knew what she’d do next and I never seemed quite prepared for what she came up with. The chunks of glass in my iced tea, the razor blades in my shoes. The blue-black glint in her eye and her roundhouse swing. The fights melting into rapturous lovemaking, her body bucking under mine, arms pinwheeling her head, clutching at my shoulders or the bedsheets, her breath ragged in my ear; or, the disastrous sex, bruised and raw, giving way to a new bloodletting, always somehow unique, both of us managing to find new weapons or use old ones in new ways.

The smoke alarm finally clicked off and the silence surprised me. I looked up; everything else in the apartment seemed intact, only the front door was ajar. I got up to close it, running my fingers lovingly over the scarred doorframe and the pitted wall of the entrance hall, remembering how she’d shoved me to the floor by the door and mounted me there, my body wedged tightly into the corner; or how I’d ripped her blouse open from the back and pushed her onto the shapeless couch. Her teethmarks on my chest, the bruise on her neck.

I was scooping the smoking corpse of the fire into a metal trashcan I’d retrieved from my office when the doorbell rang. I let it ring while I finished the job, let it ring until it became a knock, tentative at first then more emphatic. His hand was in mid-air when I threw the door open.

He looked like an accountant or a coroner, all sandy-boyish hair and sweater vest. He blinked at me with an innocent confusion. I don’t know whether it was my scorched pajamas or my sooty face. I studied him, imagining Evie standing over the bed as he slept, plotting his dismemberment.

“Evie sent me for her things,” he said. Then, extending his hand, “I’m Adam.”

“Yeah, I bet you are,” I replied, shoving the smoldering trashcan into his arms and closing the door.

Evie. Man, I love that woman.

53-Word Story Contest: See You in September!

The 53-Word Story Contest with Meg Pokrass is going on hiatus for the summer. We’ll be back in September and better than ever! In the meantime, check out Meg’s book Damn Sure Right (you can get it this month only for 99 cents) and keep coming back to the Press 53 blog for your daily literary fix!

53-Word Story Contest Winner (5/16-5/21): Kevin Peterson

Congratulations to Kevin, whose story “Bathroom Breaks” was chosen by guest judge Kevin Morgan Watson as last week’s winner. Kevin wins the Press 53 publication of his choice, plus a chance at having his story published in Prime Number Magazine. Read the winning story, below.

Bathroom Breaks

Miller blinks. Temples throbbing. It takes him several minutes to gather himself, trying to recall last night. He cannot. He shoves away the shower curtain that had been yanked from its rings- his makeshift blanket.  He presses his face against the cold tile floor, dreading having to again ask his friends, “What happened?”

Poetry Wednesday

We’re halfway through the week, and that means a short break to consider some great poetry. Here’s a poem from Deema K. Shehabi’s collection Thirteen Departures from the Moon.

At the Dome of the Rock

Jerusalem in the afternoon is the bitterness of two

hundred winter-bare olive trees fallen

in the distance. Jerusalem in the soft

afternoon is a woman sitting at the edge of the Mosque

with her dried-up knees tucked beneath her, listening to shipwrecks

of holy words. If you sit beside her under the stone arch

facing the Old City, beneath the lacquered air that hooks

into every crevice of skin, your blood will unleash

with her dreams, the Dome will undulate gold, and her exhausted

scars will gleam across her overly kissed forehead.

She will ask you to come closer, and when you do,

she will lift the sea of her arms from the furls

of her chest and say: this is the dim sky I have

loved ever since I was a child.

Spotlight on Prime Number Magazine

In keeping with National Short Story Month, here’s a flash fiction from Sally Houtman, which appears in the latest update to Prime Number Magazine. You can find poetry and creative nonfiction there, too!

That Night in Miri’s Kitchen

Don’t turn around. That’s what you said. That night in Miri’s kitchen. Me wrist-deep in sudsy water. You barefoot in faded jeans. In the air, the smell of woodsmoke. The rise and fall of voices down the hall. Over nibbles we’d exchanged quick glances, my sister’s friends around the fire. Later, in the kitchen, you came to get a beer, then lingered. All movement stilled. My senses sharpened, aware only of my breathing and the rain. The rain the rain the rain, so hard against the window. You moved in close behind me, hands warm against my skin, your voice so clean and spare.  Don’t turn around.
 
Fast forward. Four months later. You beneath a storefront awning. A woman waiting in a car. Overhead, the same old dirty, laden sky. And all that day, the rain. The day you told me you were leaving. Said it just like that. The rose you gave me in its vase at home, its head bent forward, heavy on its stalk, but still alive. I stood, feet planted on the footpath, neither here nor there and you already gone. And I understood life’s fickle pull and slip, the way a thing could be hollowed out of one thing, yet be so filled with something else.
 
Now you are in another city, one that cracks and rattles underfoot. And me here left with my fugue of memories. Foreshortened daydreams. The drumbeat repetition of regret. And the rain. I watch the drops that vein my window on their predetermined course. Each fixed to its task, its fate still ahead. And I think that had I known that night in Miri’s kitchen, that you were already knee-deep in someone else’s forever, halfway to someone else’s somewhere else, I would have never turned around.

Flash Friday

Read “The Deadline,” by Stefanie Freele, below, and then read the rest of her collection, Surrounded by Water, for only 99 cents! Happy Friday! Happy Short Story Month!!!

The Deadline

As he calculated his figures over and over again, once, twice, then three or four times, as many times as he could, inserting numbers here and there, in between, over and around, adding extras, deleting none, his world turned darker, as if his vision was lessening, dimming, darkening like night, edging closer like wolves around a wounded animal, until he could see no more, just blackness, utter nothingness, not even the page in front of him, or the pencil lead, or even the pencil eraser, in fact not even the pencil itself, he could be writing on the desk for that matter, but he continued to write those numbers, augmenting his spreadsheet, stretching his report, writing, writing, writing, until he felt he’d gone mad, mad from insanity, mad from lack of sleep, mad from pushing the pencil beyond where it ever went before, and he pushed and pushed until his wife turned on the light and said, for the love of God, you’ve got to come to bed.

And so he did, wearing the same pajamas not removed in three days, he lay there blinking until his wife slept the sounds of sleepiness and he crept toward the chocolate, unwrapping the dark pieces and tucking them into the sides of his mouth with the first one under his tongue like medicine to return to the desk with the red emergency flashlight spreading a spray across his pages.

He handwrote, with the hurry-zoom of the chocolate, with the rapid beat of his jiggling knee, with half a cheek on the chair and pajamas pinching his middle. Not pinching like he couldn’t breathe, but pinching in a way he knew he should unpinch and he would feel much better, but that would take time and he had none of that. He wrote page after page after paragraph after line after word after word after word, until the pencil broke with a down-push and he reached for another and stuffed two pieces of cracked chocolate in his mouth to ensure he’d meet the target by morning. Not the morning of daylight, but the morning on the East Coast, the morning that came far before his morning, the morning that would be there before his sun would hit the kitchen and glint off the fruit bowl.

 The cat jumped across the page causing the pencil to skid and he flipped the meow to the side, but she sparked an idea that caused him to circle back to page 73 and edit that section he wasn’t really happy with anyway. He underlined and crossed out and zig-zagged across words that were once valuable. A noise behind him interrupted the flow; was it the wife going to the toilet? He gripped the pencil with his go go go hand and flew back to where he was before only to forget where the thought was taking him, so he bounced the opposite knee for inspiration, ground chocolate between his teeth and said, for the love of God, I’ve got to finish this.

The flashlight blinked twice, the light turned yellowish, it weakened, it diluted. The figures. The report. The word count. Five hundred words to go. He went back to the beginning and sprinkled adverbs lovingly, quietly, generously, adverbally until he only needed 350. He added buts and therefores and thens. He raced through with liberal adjectives, magnificent, enlarged, contentious. He summarized and quoted and connected and segued as much as he could until the flashlight flickered and petered, leaving him in the darkness again, not the darkness of an empty heart, but the darkness of an empty wallet. 

Finishing the page, with 27 words to go and the clear sound of his wife sneezing from the bedroom, he let himself squeeze the final sentence, not like a man squashing a full balloon, but like a man forcing breath from already emptied lungs. He heaved down the last word, placed it on the paper he couldn’t see, adjusted the pinching waistband and called back the cat. Not the command of get over here this very second, but the command of, I’ve lost my mind, don’t leave me now.