Avery 5 is now available for pre-order.
Avery 5 is now available for pre-order!
It is beautiful, it is on
our website, and you can pre-order it from PayPal. (the link is right next to it.)
As if you weren't excited enough--that is, as excited as we are--we got permission from our beautiful authors to provide a sneak preview of each story. Here they are, in the order you'll read them:
"The Boy Who Jumped and Lived" by Steve Almond:I had just settled down for a long dusk nap when I heard the muffled bang of—what was it, musket fire? No, this was Sligo. This was how Sligo entered a room. “Max is in trouble,” he bellowed.
We were grad students in philosophy, Sligo and I, soon to be booted from the academic dole. There was nothing we could do about this, so we had each come up with distinct solutions. His involved panic. Mine involved moving in with my girlfriend, Lil Thorn, who had a job.
I opened one eye and there was the Sligo Forehead, a luminous bulb of skin. The attached Sligo hovered over me, panting in the rough-throated manner particular to devout smokers. His new affectation was muttonchops. The whites of his eyes were ringed like purple onions.
"The USSR" by David Plante:In Jane’s apartment, off the Brandeis campus in a clapboard tenement, she and Peter were sitting at a wooden table by a wide, curtainless, misted window. While Peter was telling her about his plans to go to the USSR in the summer with what the Soviets called a delegation, Jane, with the tip of a finger, cleared a square on the window pane to look out on a darkening Friday afternoon.
“May is almost here,” Jane said, “and it’s snowing.”
"Apnea" by Stephanie CarterOne night in a bar, catching up after years, my friend P. told me the story of how his roommate had died—in their house, in his sleep. By the time P. found out, the ambulance was gone and the police had left. A line of yellow caution tape hung across the doorway of the dead man’s room. Beyond that, P. could see that the man’s mattress had been removed, and even the carpeting on which the mattress had rested. The dead man had been an ascetic, P. said: the room hardly looked different, and yet it was. The line of weedy plants in front of the bare window, the stacks of library books on the floor; nobody was coming back for them.
My friend P. stood outside the police tape and tried to remember when he’d last seen his roommate alive.
"Devices" by Chelsey Johnson:ONCE THERE WERE AN ARTIST AND AN INVENTOR.
The artist and the inventor live together in the first floor of a building that used to be a saloon in the 1800s and now has been painted dark blue with purple and red trim so it looks like a saloon in a traveling carnival. They are right up next to the sidewalk, and the inventor is always drawing the curtains shut and the artist is always opening them. The artist needs light. The inventor needs privacy. In other words, they are deeply in love. But both of them are a little bit more in love with the artist.
"He Seldom Deigns to Beat This Sickly Child" by B.B. Sevilla:My wife has a reoccurring dream wherein every person is born self-aware.
In Lana’s dream world, every human consciousness is in possession of the same certain fact: That any person anywhere lives at certain risk, for everybody can and anybody might disappear after thinking some particular, predetermined thought. Since nobody wants the thought, nobody ponders the nature of it.
The threat would not appear to be political. Indeed, the terror lies in the apparently arbitrary nature of the phenomenon, for leftists and conservatives are equally prone, as are juveniles, poets, and pedophiles.
And so.
“The only way to be sure,” she says, “is to hone the only discipline that matters in this world. We try—the smart ones, anyway—we try our level best to match the previous day’s thoughts exactly.”
I met Lana when she was still a liberal.
"Buying the Boat" by Lawrence Mark Lane:This was the second time I’d seen the boat. This time, I saw the black spray paint across the side of it: FOR SALE $500.
I pulled over, parked, and got out. I circled the boat. I crouched to regard the boat’s underside. I stood on my tiptoes to examine the boat’s interior.
Five hundred dollars!
The boat was twenty-two feet long and twenty years old. It had an inboard motor, 220 horsepower. Its yellow outer paint was faded, its trailer tongue evenly rusted, its seat vinyl cracked and faded from what I guessed had once been a warm beige color to a sickly marbled off-white that brought to mind coffee-stained teeth.
"Uncle John" by Brian Platzer:Uncle John was famous for being able to balance a long metal pool-cleaning stick on his chin and keep it up in the air for as long as he wanted. John wasn’t my uncle, and as far as I knew he wasn’t related to any of the six- or seven-year-olds who sat in the bleachers watching his act. But he was in charge and broad-shouldered with thinning blond hair and a short red bathing suit, and he would discreetly glance at the nametags inside our shirt collars when he saw us around day camp in order to pretend to remember our names.
As he performed, our eyes fixed to the ten-foot stick. Uncle John tossed it from his nose up into the air and then he caught it on his chin. Afterward he delivered the morning announcements: “Lunch is meatball sandwiches. Today the temperature is seventy-eight degrees. Beware of bee season. There are bees everywhere.” Each day he found a new final item to terrify us with. Reports of lunch and the weather were always followed by threats of bees, strangers in camp, or shards of glass on the kickball field.
"There Are a Lot of Things You Don't Do" by James Kaelan: “It’s a nice enough room,” Morton said as he turned on the light in the entryway.
Elizabeth walked past him and set her suitcase beside the bed. “It’s fine,” she said, and went to the window. It was dusk and Morton could see past her to the foothills where the clusters of oaks looked like bruises on the hill. Elizabeth had worn the same pair of jeans for three days and the denim was loose at her waist. She hadn’t eaten much during the trip. When she put her hands on her hips with her fingers in her back pockets, her arms looked thin and weak.
“Do you want to take a shower?” Morton asked.
“No.”
“We could take one together.”
"For Out of the Heart Proceed" by Jensen Beach:Two days before he was supposed to move to Cleveland with his mother and her husband, I took my son to the mall to buy his first winter coat. Gene sat quietly in the passenger seat. I could feel him building to another one of his questions. Lately he’d been coming up with impossibilities like, “What is funny?” or “Why don’t birds have teeth?” We’d spent hours driving around, or sitting in parks if the weather was nice, discussing the answers. Just as the mall came into view a couple blocks ahead, Gene asked if I knew what ninjas were.
“They’re warriors,” I said, “from Japan.”
“Ancient Japan,” he said.
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s the same, only older.”
”Falling” by Claire HeroDale and Fran really believe they can gamble their way to happiness. They say as much every afternoon when they come into the Sunny Café, right after Fran gets off work and before Dale goes on. They work at the same factory, but Fran works first shift and Dale works third. They come in every afternoon and drink coffee. Dale orders a hamburger, “no onions, write that down,” and right away they start up with their talk of lottery tickets and slot machines and how they’re sure to hit it big someday.
I never bother with that kind of thing. Gambling, I mean. I don’t tend to worry much about money, and besides, I know enough about how such things work to know better than to waste my time. You’ve either got it already or you work for it. There’s no other way.
”Red Block Letters, Floating in the Sky” by Barrett Edward Swanson Do I hate the boy? No, but he’s deaf and Miriam—his mother, my daughter—weeps in the bathroom because she knows I’ve asked Doctor Pagoda to do it today, so I think, what the heck?
“Hey,” I gargle more than yell. An accordion-like machine huffs and sucks, shoveling oxygen down my thick tobacco-black throat and into my lungs. The boy plays his video game, his face softened by the blue of the TV. He shows no response.
“Your mother never planned you. Your father even packed the night she told him about you.”
”Beyond Any Blessing” by Stuart NadlerA week after my grandfather was fired, I came to see him at his home near the city. He had been a rabbi at the same synagogue for six decades, and although I had expected for years that he would be fired, the news still came as a surprise. A member of the Board of Directors drafted a letter of termination, and had a copy delivered both to my grandfather and to me. They assumed, I suppose, that he was becoming too old to bear the news himself.
I had my own set of keys, and when I came that afternoon in September, two days removed from the end of the Jewish calendar year, and a week from the end of the baseball season, I could hear the clamor of my grandfather’s radio from the doorstep. He never missed a ballgame, even though his hearing had been nearly gone for most of my life. In the front hallway the woman who cooked his meals met me and smiled. Her name was Marlena, and although we had passed each other in this way for years, we spoke very little. She stopped when she saw me, refusing as always to make eye contact; she backed up against the wall, a stack of folded linens in her hand.
“He’s in there,” she said.
”House of Wind” by Alyssa KnickerbockerNovember, the month of forgetting. Mona puts on layers, can’t recall what the sea looked like on a sunny day, what Ben’s hands felt like on the bare skin of her back. He is vanishing in stages, like a photograph bleaching in the sun. Already gone: The shape of his face, the exact color of his eyes, the way his voice sounded when he called her name, slamming the door as he breezed into the trailer with the paper-fresh scent of winter air and sawdust, varnish and crushed grass.
At night she butterflies open her legs, puts one finger, then two, into the warmth between them, but no. Nothing stirs.
And there you are. Once again,
get here and check it out!
-meaghan
