Month: March 2024

You Sound Just Like Your Mother

by Benjamin Davis

 

My father took to killing mice about as well as can be expected. Especially after one got half-snapped in the middle of the night, he woke to the tick-tick-tick of a trap being dragged back and forth across the kitchen floor. It went on for hours, he said, I had to wait in my room with the fan on.

He took it so hard he went and panic-bought three buckets, six planks of wood, and a hundred dollars of peanut butter. They’re ethical traps, he told me. They climb in for the peanut butter, then you release them into the woods. Later, the exterminator would ask him if he’d thought to spray paint them before letting them go to make sure it wasn’t the same mice coming back for more. He hadn’t.

We had dinner together every Wednesday night. Just inside the door was a whiteboard he used for unmemorized phone numbers and reminders. This time, it only said: 11. The house shook when I shut the door, so my father called, Hello?! from his bedroom, as he always does, as if this time, surely, it’s someone here to murder him. I found three more today, he tells me, erasing the board. Next week, it read: 17, and the whole house smelled of peppermint. I found him in the basement, chucking cotton balls under the sofa. Mice hate peppermint.

When it got to 23, he gave up and called the exterminator. When he came, my father told him all about the peanut butter and buckets and peppermint while the exterminator made his spray paint joke. They both chuckled in that friendly way anyone might when trying not to ignore the adorable brutality of the situation.

I wanted to help the mice understand. He tried his best, I could tell them. If only they hadn’t chewed up the legs of one of the couches or scurried around keeping him awake at night. He’s not a killer, my father. I’d tell them that. He tried everything he could. Maybe I could say to them about how he needs his sleep because he struggles with mental health. Or somehow point out how much worse he could have been. He could have spray-painted them, after all. That even though they might have felt at war with some great big undefinable thing that it’s only my father. Maybe they’d find it in their hearts to forgive him—still as they may be.

 

Benjamin Davis (he/him) has stories and poems in several literary journals including Booth, Moon City Review, Wigleaf, and Slippery Elm Press. His poem collection, The King of FU (Nada Blank, 2018), was such a smashing success it shocked the indie press who printed it into an early grave. He is now writing his first six novels. Find him on Chill Subs.

 

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The Plumber’s Anger

by Jessica Purdy

 

The plumber woke up to find his anger fit in his pocket. His finger grazed it when he reached for his car key. His anger was too big to fall through the hole in the fabric. Last night his anger had been as big as a chunk of chainsawed tree trunk. This morning it was a nugget the size of a sickly green crabapple. It’s not hard to love anger, he thought, but when it feels so weighty and cumbersome you can’t haul it very far. Coming outside after a workday of forcing food and poop through stuck pipes he thought to raise his fist to the wind. It was making him cold. The wind was an affront. Birds kept landing around him. He didn’t notice a single one. The duck even slid into the river from the sky as if to call attention to its own drama. Some of the birds carried their colors as torches, but still he never saw. The plumber threw his anger into the wind as if that would dislodge respect. Anger that hard made a splash and left on his hand a residue of poison that mixed with the day’s grime. At home, he placed infected towels into an empty birdcage after drying his fingers. Filled the water dish. Put more food pellets in. By morning a curious toxic bird will love him with its little red nugget of a heart.

 

Jessica Purdy holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry from Emerson College. She teaches Poetry Workshops and Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University and through the EXCEL program in North Berwick Maine’s Middle and High Schools. Her poems have been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Her poems, flash fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Radar, The Night Heron Barks, SoFloPoJo, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Lily Poetry Review, One Art, Hole in the Head, and Museum of Americana, among others. Her books STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House were both released by Nixes Mate Books consecutively, in 2017 and 2018. Sleep in a Strange House was a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry. Her poetry manuscript Lung Hours was a finalist in both the Codhill Press’ Guest Editor Poetry Series and The Dryden-Vreeland Prize in 2023. Her two recent chapbooks are: The Adorable Knife poems based on The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Grey Book Press), and You’re Never the Same: Ekphrastic Poems (Seven Kitchens Press).

 

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Six Kilograms of Flour

by Rita Taryan

 

Marika, a widow, had two boyfriends. One was old, married and intelligent: Örzsy. The other was young, single and stupid: Egri. Of course she preferred the mature Örzsy. She could have a conversation with him, whereas with Egri (though he was in his thirties) it was like talking to a child. But it wasn’t just that. Örzsy was an incredible lover. He had a way of looking at her that made her feel undressed, even in an elevator or a restaurant. Marika was very fond of Örzsy, which is why she sat down and asked herself how she felt about the fact that Örzsy was not only having sex with her, but also with his wife and two other mistresses. Marika waited for an answer from herself. She waited several months while still seeing Örzsy every other weekend Sunday. This had been going on for a year. Was she alright with that? Was this normal? Well, she dug deep into her conscience and discovered something remarkable, which was that picturing Örzsy with his wife or with his other mistresses evoked in her the same feeling as looking at a six kilogram bag of flour on a supermarket shelf. In other words, she didn’t care. And that was that. Marika went on seeing Örzsy every other weekend Sunday. They had passionate assignations. Sometimes he’d call her when he was with his other women. He’d sneak away just to have a stimulating five-minute conversation with Marika—“an interludial,” he’d call it. So Marika and Örzsy had many years together. The terms of their relationship never changed. And he always made her feel that she was important to him. Then one day, Örzsy died. He fell off a cruise ship on the Aegean Sea between the island of Naxos and the island of Syros. It wasn’t foul play. It was an unhappy event. And Marika was left with no other option but to see only Egri, who was by then old. He was still single—but also, still stupid.

 

Rita Taryan is a Hungarian-born Canadian-American. She teaches at Fordham University in New York. Read Rita in Panel Magazine, Hobart, ExPat Press, Room, and elsewhere.

 

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Emergency Vet

by Steve Cushman

 

He remembered sleet and the dregs of a cherry Slurpee, her hands bloody with the bird, a Robin who’d flown into the truck’s windshield.   He remembered thinking birds don’t fly into windshields and yet here they were.  Shelly had shouted, stop, fucking stop, Ray, and he stopped because what choice did he have?

He remembered her back in the seat beside him, asking Siri, where is the nearest emergency vet?

And Siri saying, the closest emergency vet is Northeastern Ridge Emergency Veterinary Clinic, which is five miles away.  They are open 24 hours a day.

Come on, she kept saying.  He remembered thinking she might have been talking to the bird, coaxing it, maybe giving it a pec rub, trying to somehow bring it back.  Or was she talking to him?

He remembered he’d been thinking of the right way to end this between them.  Three years and while he hated to admit it, he felt nothing for her anymore.  Nothing may not have been accurate.  He still felt fondly for her, and wished her the best, whatever that might be, but he no longer wanted to spend every moment with her.  No longer needed to feel her body against his to feel whole, alive.  His breath no longer caught at the sight or scent of her long, dark hair.

He remembered thinking, why are there so many fucking red lights on Battleground Avenue?  He remembered thinking, we will never get there or anywhere really unless we run every one of them.  But he was not the sort of young man who ran red lights.

Turn right on Westridge, Siri said in her sing-song voice.

He remembered wishing Shelly would say something to him, anything, beside Come on, Come on.  He remembered thinking this bird is dead and why are we rushing to have someone tell us what we already know?  He remembered the rain and how it kept falling, pelting the window, the roof, like a thousand ting-tings a minute.

When they reached the clinic, it was empty as he knew it would be.  Closed for renovations, the sign out front said, and underneath it, in smaller letters:  For your pet emergencies, try Friendly Emergency Vet.

He remembered saying, I don’t think we can keep going like this.

She held the dead bird to her chest and said, I know. I know. Me neither.

 

Steve Cushman is the author of three novels, including Portisville, winner of the 2004 Novello Literary Award. He has published two poetry chapbooks, and his first full-length collection, How Birds Fly, won the 2018 Lena Shull Book award. A new collection, The Last Time, was released in 2023. Cushman lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, and works in the IT department at Cone Health.

 

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Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.

Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.

Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.

Submissions

Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.

Upcoming

09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • Chiwenite Onyekwelu
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD