In the Wine Press: Short Stories

In the Wine Press: Short Stories
by Joshua Hren
Angelico Press, 2020; 158 pp., $16.95

Joshua Hren is a leading figure in the current revival of Catholic arts and letters. His stories are intense. Not easily accessible, they merit reading and, almost necessarily, rereading to appreciate their depth.

In the Wine Press is a collection of thirteen of Hren’s short stories. These stories are unique and present some of Hren’s best writing. Most have been previously published in literary reviews, including Adelaide, The Agonist, Clarion, Dappled Things, and Windhover.

The stories take us into realms where characters interact, think, and feel. Each story needs to be read, reread, savored, and thought about—an effort beyond that required by most short stories, but one that is worthwhile.

For that reason, I’ve selected one story, “Some Other Exit,” as exemplary. It is about Richard and his wife (whose name we do not know, though she is the central character) worrying about and searching for their estranged son, Keith.

Hren’s style applies rich layers of language and metaphor, as in an impasto painting—creating a thick, palpable surface that is essential to the underlying insights. For instance, in the opening paragraph, where the wife goes to find her accountant husband (who is counteracting his worry by overworking) in his office:

She walked with calculated clicks that made her feel weightless, her heels hardly touching the red carpet as she floated down the very long hallway of AIPOT Bank’s seventeenth floor, and, having survived that claustrophobic bringer of heart palpitations—so different from the high ceiling, open-concept design of their house . . . she peeked in through the cruciform window of the last office door on the left. Her husband sat there, still, giving the screen an attention so rapt she could not help but feel it as affection.

“She”—the protagonist—has been a faithful Catholic:

all the years she spent trying to ascend the cathedral of limestone, whose steeple, rusted with a faded mint, could not compete with the supreme peak of the AIPOT building. How she tried to not just believe in but obey the God who hung there, the steeple cross empty but ready, as if awaiting someone else. And she had.

She opened her home to Catholic groups, including one manic woman who claimed that eleven years after 9/11, the end of the world would come. And then, painfully:

And an End had come, in two thousand and twelve, as that was the year her now absent eldest came home from having served as acolyte and emptied the snot of his nose on her neck, cleaving and clinging, ringing out his hands with snorts of air, caught air coughed out into her face as he told her what the priest did to the little server boy. . . . She pressed her fingers over his ears and said unintelligible things, things indistinct to maybe all but God, who had grown illegible to her in a matter of minutes.

This son—Keith—now estranged but regularly calling home at 2:00 a.m. to leave them messages that he is alive—has now become the face-pierced, tattooed, “scowling neon singer of a band called CORIOLANUS.” And she (her husband offers to go, but both realize that Keith will respond less hostilely to his mother) determines to go to a CORIOLANUS concert to try to reconnect with Keith.

She goes—mildly disguised at first, but then, removing her beret, letting her red hair spill out into the yellow light. The concert is—to this reader—close to a vision of hell, and Keith takes out three grenades—one of which he says is active. The language becomes more intense—in prayer (she is praying in run-on, run-over sentences as we all do when desperate), and in confusion. She throws herself in an X (or cross?) shape toward her son. Something cosmic occurs—what it is, the reader needs to determine.

The first time I read “Some Other Exit,” I was baffled by the words. The second time, I understood the words and was merely baffled by the story. It was only on the third reading that I realized that this is a truly great story.

So it is with Joshua Hren’s best work. Read it and be blessed.