Some Birds Are Far Away

May 16, 2026.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Jennifer Powers

My oldest son Finn became obsessed with birds when he was two years old. He remained obsessed for two years. Bedtime stories about talking trains and farm animals were replaced by negotiations over how many plates we could look at from the “Field Guide to The Birds of Costa Rica.”

It surprised me that he didn’t gravitate to the flashy and colorful birds like the toucans and hummingbirds that attract me. He often lobbied to visit the much drabber pages on owls or wading shore birds.

As a newer mother determined to nurture my son’s budding interest in birds (and perhaps no doubt motivated by the secret desire that he eventually become a field biologist like me), I invested in a pair of kid-friendly binoculars. They were yellow and made of plastic. They had a flimsy strap to hang around your neck, but they did magnify the world and bring distant birds a little closer into view.

Now came the hard part. How do you explain to a two-year-old what binoculars are for and how to use them?

Molting

May 15, 2026.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Henrick Karoliszyn
Featured Art: “Friends” by Mia Broecke

Janice tells me about the bearded dragon. She explains that Melvin, wheat-yellow with the face of a perpetual grump, stopped eating crickets. As he’s lazing about under his heat lamp, she swears his outer layer is transforming into a shade of brown right before her eyes. She calls it “emotional molting,” though I don’t think that’s a thing, and I didn’t know what feelings would cause the reptile to change colors.

Janice is my sister, but she doesn’t feel like my sister. She feels like a stranger in a train car issuing favored life updates (her pet changing skin tone). She talks about the weather in Chicago (“shrinkage-level-emergency” cold) and the weather in her apartment (“boiling toad in pot” hot), and a trip she planned for Saint Kitts (“Henry Cavill” degrees in December). She talks about disappointing politicians in clipped, bumper sticker fashion. She talks about the disappointing Cubs in long-winded run-on sentences. She talks about the disappointing Netflix series based on a book she loved like it was a false prophet.

She doesn’t talk about Mom anymore.

The News from North Korea

November 23, 2025.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Jim Marino

We’re three bites into not-quite-Christmas pie when my mother breaks into the epic tale of Dad leaving her for another woman. Sometimes it’s a blonde, sometimes a spurious redhead, depending on how inspiration moves the teller. Like all great oral epics, it’s founded on a myth. My father’s been dead almost four years. The other woman he left my mother for was an inoperable brain tumor. But who wants to hear that?

“All those sexy young dental hygienists, and in the end? He leaves me for a patient.” Mom wags her fork like a finger, emphasizing, demanding attention, making just one point more. “This little Puerto Rican with big fake tits and fake blonde hair and two impacted molars. Consuela. And would you believe the worst part?”

My husband wears the Jesuit-school poker face I envy so, eyebrows raised as if he’s just been told some modestly interesting fact. Eddie, approximately 2.4 years old, is busy experimenting with whipped cream between his fingers, and my sister Judy, who drove Mom the two days from Miami, still looks a little dazed. But Larry from work hangs on Mom’s every word.

Vernonox

November 6, 2025.Reading time 21 minutes.

By Rick Andrews

<BEGIN AT MARK 1>

Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. You’re too kind.
Thanks so much, everyone. <GESTURE TO CROWD>. There’s an
excitement in the air tonight. Can you feel it?
Let’s give it up one more time for our amazing speakers,
shall we? Let them hear it, folks!

<LET APPLAUSE DIE DOWN>

You know, people ask me why I started Vernonox. They
come up to me in the lobby, they recognize me at bars, in airports.
People all over the world stop me on the street and say “Michael—
Michael D. Powers—why did you start Vernonox?” I tell them
there are three reasons.

A Woman, Splayed

June 1, 2025.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Alison Theresa Gibson

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2014. Snow in alley, Baltimore. “Cirlce” series.

It was a cold Thursday in April and frozen leaves slipped along the ground. Easter was over, the southern hemisphere was descending into winter, we were hunkering down for the darker, colder months. I was walking around the lake, like I did most days, wondering if I should visit my mother that afternoon. My father had been dead for six weeks and I had only seen her once since the funeral. The sun was cold but golden. Currawongs sang their pyramid of song, the soundtrack to every morning of my life.

The man was standing at the back of the toilet block. The ground was dirt around his feet. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the ground, but not on the dirt. He wasn’t contemplating the lack of grass. His eyes were on the body.

She was on her stomach, legs splayed, greyed hair splayed, fingers splayed. She was splayed. He was standing. He was staring. The sun had risen fully and offered light but no heat.

The graffitied brick of the toilet block had hidden the sound of my approaching footsteps. Frozen leaves were scattered at my feet and I didn’t move, afraid of their crunch.

He crouched near one splayed foot. He ran a finger along the inside arch. When he whistled, the currawongs paused for a moment, then restarted with gusto. He looked into the branches of the surrounding trees and whistled again. Again, they called back. The splayed woman didn’t move.

I inched my phone from my pocket and dialled triple-0 without looking. His finger was tracing the arch of her foot, his head was back, his whistle faltered.

‘I’ve already called the police,’ he said. He could have been speaking to the splayed woman. ‘They’re on their way.’ He stood, his hands sliding back into his pockets. The currawongs’ calls were growing louder, more ferocious, like they were distressed by the absence of his whistle. ‘She’s been here all night,’ he said.

March 4, 2025.Reading time 43 minutes.

Mothers in the World Above and Below

By Abby Horowitz

Featured Art: “Persona-03” by Mateo Galvano

Your mother haunts the hardest; that’s what Selah’s told whenever she starts to whine: why hasn’t she come yet to pick me up?

Her mother haunts the hardest, so Selah is at the care center the whole day long, so long that Ms. Drae takes pity on her and gives her second servings of afternoon snack. The other kids trail after their parents up to the parking lot and off to home and there’s Selah again, all alone in a playground full of nobody, or at least nobody that she can see isn’t it possible that she’s got her own ghosts? Oh, get out of your head and get onto those swings, Ms. Drae tells her; then her eyes sink back down to her phone.

Selah swings, she jumps, she slides. Lady-like, please, Ms. Drae calls when Selah’s robe slips up by her thighs, but Selah ignores her. Let the world see her underwear; if only there were someone to look. She takes a clump of dirt and rubs it onto her leg. Look! she says, running up to Ms. Drae, A bruise! But Ms. Drae only rolls her eyes and shoos her away rather than tell her (again) what of course she already knows: you can’t have bruises if you don’t have blood.

Survival of the Unfit: A Retrospective

March 3, 2025.Reading time 56 minutes.

By Jodie Noel Vinson
Excursion to St. Fé—Thistle Beds—Habits of the Bizcacha—Little Owl—Saline Streams—Level Plain—Mastodon—St. Fé—Change in Landscape—Geology—Tooth of extinct Horse . . . Flocks of Butterflies—Aeronaut Spiders—Phosphorescence of the Sea—Port Desire—Guanaco—Port St. Julia—Geology of Patagonia—Fossil gigantic Animal . . . Causes of Extinction

(Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle)

Tongue crimson in morning ulcerated—stomach constricted dragging—Feet coldish—Pulse 58 to 62—or slower and like thread. Appetite good—not thin. Evacuation regular and good. Urine scanty (because do not drink) often much pinkish sediment when cold—seldom headache or nausea.—Cannot walk abv ½ mile—always tired—conversation or excitement tires me much

(Charles Darwin, note to Dr. Chapman)

Charles Darwin had “taken the horizontal,” as he would have put it as a seasick young man on board the Beagle. He lay in bed, snowy beard cascading over the coverlet that shrouded his six-foot frame. Emma could see her husband was in so much pain he was “longing to die.” Their daughter Henrietta, hovering bedside, lamented how “this terrible nausea still goes on.” Darwin, before passing away on that April afternoon in 1882 at age seventy-three, answered with the equanimity of one who has lived in daily discomfort: “It is not terrible. But it is nausea.”

At this point, Darwin had been ill for over half his life. “I was almost quite broken down,” he described his chronic ailment in a journal, “head swimming, hands trembling and never a week without violent vomiting.” The naturalist took copious notes on his malady over the years, during which his stomach caused him “incessant discomfort, I may say misery,” as he once wrote to his cousin William Fox, predicting: “I shall go to my grave, I suppose, grumbling and growling with daily, almost hourly, discomfort.”

Tilting

November 27, 2024.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Matt Cantor

It’s been a full year, now. 

It’s October 7th.

I stand at the platform at Kenmore, waiting for a D-train so I can get home to have dinner with my parents. I’m not waiting very hard. They’re going to ask all sorts of questions about what I’ve been working on. 

“Don Quixote,”  I’ll tell them. 

“Hasn’t somebody already written that?”  they’ll ask me. 

“Lots of people have already written lots of things.”—like it means anything, or makes any sort of difference in the direction that I want it to. 

Flights

November 24, 2024.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Jill Schepmann

Featured Art: “Spring Returns and So Do I” by Leo Arkus

I walk out of class, my mis-spoken and fragmented explanations of the day racing. A greatest hits of my unworthiness as a teacher. I think of earlier in the day, walking around the lake with a friend. The building I’ve just left is called Lone Mountain, which stands on a hill, in a city of hills, dramatic, grand. And I trick myself again into believing that I belong here. Sometimes, Lone Mountain makes me witness the fog coming off the Pacific to swallow San Francisco’s avenues. Sometimes, the glass buildings downtown. Once, on a rainy, windy day, I looked out my classroom window to see two giant cypress trees grown as one split and fall away from each other, their branches pointed skyward until they came to rest in sudden-found angles, fossilized insects on their backs.

As I descend the mountain, I think of going home to my new girlfriend in Oakland. Oakland is also new to me. Susannah is making pasta for us. This caretaking, too, is new. I walk a little quicker thinking of the way she comes to unlock the door when I’m too long finding my keys. Her warm lips. Cupping her elbow in my palm. Her cheek resting against mine. I quicken. I quicken.

Echo-Delta

November 15, 2024.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Teresa Burns Gunther

“Echo-Delta,” his wife shouted from the dining room. “Can you order Chinese?”

Ed sighed and checked his watch. He’d given up begging Tanya not to speak this way. Tango, as she’d taken to calling herself, spoke in the NATO phonetic alphabet now: a side-effect of her new life mission, to change the medical-insurance-industrial complex one military letter at a time. Ed waited the last seconds until his office clock read 5:00 before leaning his hands into his desktop, where a client’s financial records were arrayed, and pushing himself up.

He grabbed his cane and made his slow way to the kitchen, wincing at the jolt of pain in his left leg, pain that poked a shaming finger. Since the pandemic, his accounting firm had allowed him to work from home, which was convenient given how the accident had left him.

Survival of the Unfit: A Retrospective

November 1, 2024.Reading time 68 minutes.

By Jodie Noel Vinson

Excursion to St. Fé—Thistle Beds—Habits of the Bizcacha—Little Owl—Saline Streams—Level Plain—Mastodon—St. Fé—Change in Landscape—Geology—Tooth of extinct Horse . . . Flocks of Butterflies—Aeronaut Spiders—Phosphorescence of the Sea—Port Desire—Guanaco—Port St. Julia—Geology of Patagonia—Fossil gigantic Animal . . . Causes of Extinction

(Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle)

Tongue crimson in morning ulcerated—stomach constricted dragging—Feet coldish—Pulse 58 to 62—or slower and like thread. Appetite good—not thin. Evacuation regular and good. Urine scanty (because do not drink) often much pinkish sediment when cold—seldom headache or nausea.—Cannot walk abv ½ mile—always tired—conversation or excitement tires me much

(Charles Darwin, note to Dr. Chapman)

Charles Darwin had “taken the horizontal,” as he would have put it as a seasick young man on board the Beagle. He lay in bed, snowy beard cascading over the coverlet that shrouded his six-foot frame. Emma could see her husband was in so much pain he was “longing to die.” Their daughter Henrietta, hovering bedside, lamented how “this terrible nausea still goes on.” Darwin, before passing away on that April afternoon in 1882 at age seventy-three, answered with the equanimity of one who has lived in daily discomfort: “It is not terrible. But it is nausea.”

At this point, Darwin had been ill for over half his life. “I was almost quite broken down,” he described his chronic ailment in a journal, “head swimming, hands trembling and never a week without violent vomiting.” The naturalist took copious notes on his malady over the years, during which his stomach caused him “incessant discomfort, I may say misery,” as he once wrote to his cousin William Fox, predicting: “I shall go to my grave, I suppose, grumbling and growling with daily, almost hourly, discomfort.”

A House So Vast

July 18, 2024.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Adrienne Brock

Featured Art: “Autumn Window” by Scott Brooks (Passion Works Studio)

Before her father died, Amanda’s daughter used to crawl up onto the big bed and draw dramatic imaginative landscapes with her mother: tiny-shaped figures escaping from aliens using elaborately constructed slides or hot-air balloons. Immediately after the day of his funeral, they had tried to continue the tradition, but rather than adding onto each other’s fantastical scenarios, these two could only manage coloring bland shapes, inert and unanimated. Síomha had never been cuddly, not even as a baby, but in the middle of filling in a green rectangle with bright purple marker, the seven-year-old had pulled her mother’s arm around her and clung to it until her breathing slowed in sleep. Puffed breaths passed through the girl’s lips as if the child had summoned her father’s spirit to hold him in place on the Earth.

Before, Amanda had noted, warmly if resentfully, the uncanniness of her daughter’s unconscious impressions of her husband. She was ambivalent, taking a kind of painful joy in all of the ways in which Síomha literally embodied her father. But when they were out together, she felt the urge to scream to passersby, “I swear she’s my kid!” Or watching father and daughter play effortlessly, their humors and interests almost identical, Amanda felt as if she were watching her friend win a promotion for a job she’d wanted herself. On bad days, there had been a feeling that father and daughter were aligned against her. Now, it was immediately apparent that this feeling had been not only a result of her own stupid, stubborn inability to feel really at home, but it had also been a waste of time. A missed opportunity. Instead of vaguely threatening, these little ways in which Síomha resembled her father transmuted for a while into the only animate containers of his presence. His things remained in the house but were inert. His coffeemaker never needed to be cleaned anymore. A book was left on the bedside table, but the bookmark didn’t move, nor did the book travel around the house as it would have before, finding itself deposited in random locations on a sightseeing tour of their rooms, its owner calling out for the location of the lost tourist. At the side of their bed, her husband’s clothes hung suspended from wire hangers in the wardrobe. When someone walked quickly from room to room, the clothes would move slightly, and glancing in from the corridor, Amanda would have an illogical glimpse into what might have been: her husband had just taken something out of the wardrobe. He must be getting dressed. They were on their way somewhere together, and she would go so far as to open her mouth to speak, to ask what time it was, if he had rung the sitter. For weeks following the funeral, Tom’s phone would buzz with reminders about upcoming bills, and Amanda would feel the absence of a hand that might have reached for it, the absence of the sound of him upstairs, the absence when she returned home after work of smells from the kitchen from some experiment that would have become dinner.

The Elko Butter Chase

November 29, 2023.Reading time 37 minutes.

By J. Dominic Patacsil

Lakey Sturgis took a palmful of margarine from the brown plastic tub between her feet and ran it over the cheekbones of her grandson’s face. She smeared the pale-yellow spread across the boy’s sloped forehead, deep into the wrinkles of his ears, working her way down the turkey skin of his throat to his bare chest, then beyond.

Just a little more, she said to Peep, who batted long, effeminate eyelashes back at her. Nuggets of the margarine stuck to them, and for a second, Lakey was reminded of nights long past when she lived in Greenpoint and Hans was still living. She looked into her grandson’s globby lashes and saw her twenty-year-old self going to bed without caring to wipe away the makeup she spent so long painting on for nights of swing dancing and manhattans at Truffani’s. That was before Hans’ job brought them to the desert, before their daughter was born. Now Lakey was sixty-six and dying, far from any place she called home.

Wolf

February 11, 2023.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Julia Strayer
Selected as the winner of the 2022 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Madeline ffitch

Featured Art: Monte Constantino, Night by Alex Spragens

I lost her the night of the squalls, when wind raged hard enough to rip trees from the ground—my husband helping neighbors with a collapsed roof, and me with blood that wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t stop. I carried her for four months. I had imagined her face.

I walked the dark house alone, not wanting to sit, hearing crying that wasn’t mine while the moon trailed after me. I searched out the front window for my husband’s headlights because it wouldn’t feel real until I could tell him, but my breath fogged the glass, and I couldn’t see. Finally, I slept because I was too tired to do anything else.

Empty and quiet. My body. The house. Except for the walls, which were run through with mice and scratching.

They say children choose their parents. What does that say of me? What does that say?

In the wild, a wolf mother will carry a dead pup around in her mouth, showing the body to the rest of the pack, before she buries it.

The Year After Jeff

May 8, 2022.Reading time 46 minutes.

By Andrew Polhamus

February

The evening after Jeff hangs himself my friends and I meet up at Stephen and Danny’s new house. We converge in a neighborhood of brick rowhouses and form a circle of denim in a tired living room. There are six or eight of us, not here to sit vigil, but for lack of better ideas and a nagging feeling that we shouldn’t be alone. We speak in the circular logic of boys, too old to be thinking this way by our mid-twenties, but too inexperienced to handle it any better.

“He could’ve called me,” says Kurt, who is taller and more handsome than the rest of us and was closer to Jeffthan anyone. I’m annoyed with myself for noticing how nicely Kurt’s good looks carry grief, turning him from a jock in a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of a hardcore band into something romantic and world-weary.

“He always used to call me,” Kurt says.

“He didn’t call you because he didn’t want to,” I say. “It wasn’t you.”

“It wasn’t that he didn’t want to,” Michael says. “He just didn’t.”

“We don’t know what he wanted.”

“Well, we know he made up his mind.”

“I think we have bed bugs,” Danny says, his heavy Italian brows furrowing. The conversation drifts to pest control for a while.

Winter

March 4, 2022.Reading time 51 minutes.

By Faith Shearin
Selected as winner of the 2021 New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest by Jerald Walker

The last day of my old life, the one in which I knew my own identity, was Halloween 2018. I was out walking our dog, Wookiee, a small, flat-faced shih tzu with an underbite, through the streets of our Massachusetts neighborhood, when I felt the presence of my husband, Tom, though he was away, on a business trip in Colorado. It was evening and I was flanked by children wearing masks, capes, and wings, all of them carrying paper sacks of candy. I paused beneath a maple tree decorated with cloth ghosts, near a lawn littered with fake tombstones, and the dog sniffed the air where my husband’s apparition formed. I saw Tom materialize for a moment and he was young again: slender and dark, his hair a mass of black curls; he was opening the window of his dorm room at Princeton; I felt as if he was trying to show me something; I was aware of a rush of velvet air and the full intensity of his love before he vanished again, into the blowing leaves, and pumpkins, and the sounds of children knocking on doors. I was expecting him to fly home in a few hours and thought perhaps he had fallen asleep on a plane and begun dreaming of me; he sometimes came to me in dreams. But when I checked my phone I found no text; instead, there were a series of phone calls from a number I didn’t recognize, which turned out to be a hospital in Colorado, the last from a chaplain who said: your husband has had a heart attack and is being prepared for emergency surgery. I do not know if Tom was awake or under anesthesia when his ghost found me; I don’t know if he was fully alive or if his spirit was already seeping away. All night his Australian colleagues held vigil in the hospital, sending texts while fashioning boomerangs from coffee stirrers. By the following day, Tom’s sisters and mother and I converged in a waiting room, along with his friend Bob, who had flown home to Virginia from the Denver conference, then back again, when he heard Tom was in surgery.

How to Peel an Orange

July 10, 2021.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Stephanie Wheeler

Featured Art: Peeled II by Samantha Slone

The dryer was making a monstrous sound. The repairman stood with his hand resting flat on top.

“I feel the vibration,” he said. He was a fat man with a three-day stubble sprouting in uneven patches on his face. His uniform shirt was belted into his trousers around the front and haphazardly untucked in the back. Hazel could see his milky eyes shifting rapidly through smudged glasses. She hated him a little.

Hazel nodded. “And you can hear it, too.”

He squinted his eyes, then squeezed them tight, concentrating.

Hazel decided that she hated him a lot.

“The grinding sound,” Hazel said, straining to make her voice heard above the din. “It’s quite obvious, really.”

“Ah, yes. The grinding. I hear it.”

Hazel’s cell phone chimed then, and she looked at the screen. The name Walt appeared in white letters, glowing.

Before He Made Love He Made Light

July 8, 2021.Reading time 28 minutes.

By David Lerner Schwartz

The reverend kept talking about Christ, how he’d died for this and that. Seated
in the farthest pew, I only thought about the dancer. I both wanted her and
wanted to ruin things. We hadn’t boned yet. Did that make me a sinner or not?

My days were listless—I had just moved to a new city to teach history. I cried
most mornings. After the gym. Something about lifting weights, or hurting. A
release? Or a punishment. I don’t know. I guess people believe we can be saints.
I have blond hair and blue eyes, and when had that hurt anybody? I could
probably at once punch my own face gone and raise an abused kid into a happy
adult. What matters deep inside is a rolling boil.

The campus church was small but beautiful. Since it was an Episcopal high
school, the faculty and students were required to attend each morning. I woke
up early and got into a routine: the gym, a good cry, chapel, class. Toward the
end of the sermon, I studied the old stained-glass skylight behind the cascading
wooden beams. They’d put a mosaic bird in one of the panes for a kid who had
died. Apparently, at his funeral, a swift flew into the church and perched on his
casket. Jesus.

The organ, then the reverend again. He had such a shitty voice. This was a
world of too much talent, so why did he have to sing? He strained when he had
to go high, and his voice had little bass, so it got swallowed by the low notes. We
ended on “Come Down, O Love Divine.” I waited until the third verse, which
was my favorite. The first two were bullshit. My only friend here—Carter, an
English teacher—agreed, and we locked eyes across the sanctuary. “And so the
yearning strong,” I sang, “with which the soul will long, / shall far outpass the
power of human telling.”

La Malinche, La Llorona, and Cristine Ortiz

May 13, 2021.Reading time 47 minutes.

By Michael Leal García

On that nightmare afternoon at Plaza Mexico, Aaron never saw the gunman open fire. He just heard a series of pops—something he would only later recognize as gunfire—before Cristine knocked him over, their four-month-old son in his arms. After checking that Lil Aaron was fine—the boy still fast asleep—he felt a weight roll off his legs. There, Cristine lay motionless. Read More

Memoir: I Went, Running

May 21, 2020.Reading time 24 minutes.

By Caroline Manring

Featured Art: Bird by Emmett Reese

. . .as if loss were a fire he was purified in again and again, until he wasn’t a ghost anymore.
–James Galvin, The Meadow

Running is the only thing that made sense to me after miscarrying at fifteen weeks pregnant. I had almost lost my own life as well, and spent three weeks in two different hospitals, linked by a trippy ambulance ride with an EMT who thought I couldn’t hear him singing along to U2. Pretty much everyone thought I was unconscious for much of my hospitalization. I wasn’t, of course, and between waves of Fentanyl I noted or hallucinated many searing moments, which, though warped by fear and pain, were still less bizarre than the daily life I had to get back to, eventually.

Even after I came home from the hospital, crying because I had to be wheeled out to the car, and even when I slept most of the day, propped on our eglantine couch with the help of ten or so lesser drugs, anything other than the thought of running again was absurd: people walking across the street? Ridiculous. They weren’t screaming. Sunsets? Ruthless. They ended everything, over and over and over. Someone else’s baby? An abrupt and tenacious violence; a violation of the possible, an extravagant body made radioactive by my pain, like a fur coat soaked with blood from a bucket I hurled myself.

Coyotes

December 13, 2019.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Terri Leker
Winner of the 2019 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest, selected by Claire Vaye Watkins

The coyotes moved into the woods behind my house just after I learned I was pregnant. On a quiet June morning, while my husband slept, I pulled on my running shoes and grabbed a leash from a hook at the back door. Jute danced around my feet on her pipe-cleaner legs, whining with impatience. It would have taken more than this to wake Matt, but I hushed her complaints with a raised finger and we slipped outside. A light breeze blew the native grasses into brown and golden waves as we wandered, camouflaging Jute’s compact frame. She sniffed the dirt, ears telescoping as though she were asking a question. When we reached a shady thicket of red madrones and live oaks, I unclipped the leash and wound it around my wrist.

It was over with Richard, had been since I’d found out about the baby. Anyway, I had come to believe that adultery sounded more illicit than it actually was. Between managing my schedule with Matt and making time to rendezvous with Richard, an affair often seemed more about time management than sexual gratification. I was meticulous with the calendar, but I would have known that the baby was Matt’s regardless, because Richard’s sperm could not locomote. He had told me so early on, while showing me the master bedroom of his faithfully restored North Oakland Victorian. His unexpected disclosure had interrupted my admiration of the exposed brick walls, so unusual for the earthquake-conscious Bay Area. Matt was having dinner just then with friends, thinking I was helping my mother set up her new television (she would be dead within a few months, but we all pretended to be optimists then), so he was eating eggplant parmesan at the Saturn Café as I lay with Richard on his king-sized bed, hearing words like motility and capacitation. Richard’s sober tone had suggested that I might comfort him in his sterility, which I did, if the definition of comfort was a passionate encounter that lasted as long as one might spend unboxing a 48-inch HDTV and connecting it to both Netflix and Hulu. But Matt and I had tried to have a baby for three years, so I took the pregnancy as a sign to recommit myself to my husband, who, predictably, jumped up and down on our unmade bed when I shared the news, attempting, in his white-socked excitement, to pull me up with him, not realizing that doing so might judder the bundle of cells loose, delivering me back to Richard and a childless but aesthetically pleasing life.

Special Days

March 15, 2019.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Scott Koenig

It’s so bright even though the blinds are closed. Streaks of white light gash the wall. The wall Dad painted blue last month. Your favorite color is red but you like blue, too. There’s the humming of lawnmowers in the distance. Open those blinds.

Out there it’s green everywhere. Up above, it’s blue. There’s a white car in your driveway, too. Not our car, you think. Whose car is that. Green grass down here, around the strange little white car, and blue sky up there. The colors are so pure it kind of hurts. It’s nice, though. Do your eyes hurt? You could open the window to smell the grass but Dad got mad last time. Up on the hill where green turns into blue are big brown houses. If you squint they look like blobs of oatmeal raisin cookie dough when Mom lines them up on a baking sheet. And between the houses are thin lanes of grass where the older kids go sledding on snow days. The older kids with the colorful backpacks and the best Pokemon cards. Andy said one of the Meyer boys had three holographic Charizards. There’s no way. You aren’t allowed to go sledding on the hill yet. You just got allowed to ride your bike up to the black mailbox. The green mailbox after that is too high, too far up the hill, too dangerous, Mom always says. You know you can do it but you aren’t allowed. But soon you’ll be allowed to go all the way up – to the top of the hill. Then back down super fast into the coldy sack. Like how the older kids do.

The man across the street is bent over by a bush, the man whose house is white and black and pointy and looks like a castle. He’s bent over by a bush using those big shiny scissors. The scary ones. The kind Dad uses a lot. Is Dad outside? Look down into your part of the green. Dad isn’t in your part of the green yet. Maybe later. There’s still the humming. Humming is an outside activity, Mom always says. Sometimes she hums but she does it quieter than you. And mostly outside. Her humming is nicer than lawnmower humming. Especially because when there’s a bunch of different lawnmowers all at once it sounds like buzzing. Like bugs, kind of.

Bodies That Drift in the River Flow

May 28, 2017.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Scott Gould

Featured Art: by Oscar Bluemner

Sometimes you know things before you know things. Mrs. Tisdale comes to the door, and I know something is wrong. I know. From the top bunk of my bed, I watch her coming up the sidewalk, walking fast but walking like a woman who is already lost, her skirt moving quickly around her, like a wave to anyone who spies through the window.

I know the doorbell won’t ring. She is not a bell person. She is too good a friend of my mother’s to announce herself that way. She knocks once and opens the door. What she doesn’t know is the bell doesn’t work anyway. It is shorted out somewhere along its line and my father has never pulled the wires and traced down them to find the problem. I hear Mrs. Tisdale’s voice flow up the staircase, so faint I can barely make it out, strained and pitched higher than normal. Her voice sounds like an animal she is trying to keep on a leash, trying to make it heel. Because her voice wants to run away from her. I hear my mother fall back on her nurse’s voice, that healing tone. I climb off the top bunk and move closer to the doorway.

“Now, Roberta, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” my mother says. “Let’s not worry until we have something to worry about.”

“Something’s gone wrong,” Mrs. Tisdale says. “I feel it.”

A Creature, Stirring

October 9, 2016.Reading time 35 minutes.

Winner, New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest
selected by Elena Passarello

By Gail Griffin

Featured Art: The Kitchen by James McNeill Whistler, 1858

It is Christmas night—or, more accurately, two in the morning of December 26th. I am on the small porch at the side of my house. My cat is in my lap. The door to the living room is closed. Every window inside the house is wide open, because the house is full of smoke—a vile, stinky smoke. The porch is winterized, but I have opened one window about six inches because of the smoke escaping from the house. And what I am saying to myself is Well, at least the temperature’s up in the twenties.

The cat is unusually docile. He knows that something fairly strange is going on, and he is cold. I murmur to him that we’ll be all right, over and over. With sudden, crystalline clarity I know that I am absolutely alone in the universe, except for this small animal.

Will it reassure you or just make the whole scene weirder if I tell you that the smoke is from burnt cat food?

Audition

September 27, 2016.Reading time 37 minutes.

Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest
selected by Charles Johnson

By Leslie Rodd

Featured Art: Nymphs and Satyrs Playing Musical Instruments by Claude Lorrain

San Francisco, 1969

Outside the jazz club where I’ve been audience, player, and piano tuner over the years, it’s quiet at this sunstruck ten o’clock, and I have a shivery thought of a guitar and a girl that began inside my head last night. No rocking, no rhythm, no foot-stomping or window-shaking. Only the fifty measured strides I’ve counted from the corner where the 30 Stockton dropped me off, past the police station to the alley, the dip in the pavement and the sloping rise, the manhole cover to my left, yes, here it is, the last of my landmarks, reassuring me I’m in the right place. A thought of a girl, who used to make my music glow.

I rap the metal tip of my cane against the partly opened steel door, the tradesman’s entrance.

“Easy does it there, fella,” a man calls out to me.

“Jimmy McGee,” I identify myself.

He says, in a voice that’s smoother than Roscoe’s, “Come on in, Jimmy. Mustafa Monroe, at your service. Roscoe’s on-again bass, as of yesterday.”

Black Telephone

September 23, 2016.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Robert Long Foreman

Featured Art: Death: “My Irony Surpasses All Others” by Odilon Redon, 1888

Michael, you are gone, and in this house where you once were there is an antique telephone as black as your coffin. Heavier than it looks, it is as full as the hole the men dug for you, early one morning, as they talked about summer and things they saw on TV.

Old things weigh more than they look—dead, leaden things like you and the black telephone.

You have been gone three weeks, and now my mother is gone, too. When she left for Providence she left me here with Michael, whom you left behind like a copy of yourself when you went. He doesn’t ask where you are anymore. Instead he says, nine times a day, that he’s going to call you on his telephone.

He found it at the flea market where my mother took him, to take him off my hands and take me off of his.

When I’m not looking, he lifts the receiver and talks to you. He doesn’t say your name, and I don’t ask who is on the line. I know it’s you.

A Meadow

February 14, 2016.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Lee Upton

Featured Art: Autumn (L’Automne) by Arthur B. Carles

The wife isn’t supposed to know, but Lucy knew. She knew about her husband and her best friend, Maria. Had known for nearly two years. And now Maria’s brother—a stranger—was coming to visit. Did he know about Maria and Owen? Did he think he was visiting to reveal the affair, to confess on Maria’s behalf? Lucy hoped not. She would resent that.

Lucy got the news from Owen before he left for work. He turned at the front door and told her—as if he almost forgot something so important. He didn’t want to be late, and so there wasn’t time to talk. She followed him outside.

“He’s coming? When?”

Sisters Peeling

December 6, 2015.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Julie Henson

Featured Art: A Fisherman’s Daughter by Winslow Homer

Late in the night after my father’s memorial service, my sisters and I stopped our small caravan at a Speedway in the stretch of US-40 between Greencastle and Indianapolis. It was early November.

“Come with me,” my sister Emily said, leading me to the back of her car and opening the trunk. She pointed to a box in the corner. “You want some?” she asked sounding like a drug dealer, which at one point she had been. I saw her slipping back in easy—my dad’s ashes were valuable and sort of dangerous—I felt like it may have even been against Indiana state law to have them, let alone scatter them, though I never checked. When I said nothing, she prodded, “You want even just a little? There’s so much to go around.” Sarah, our oldest sister, was waiting in the passenger seat—she had already been dealt her ash-inheritance. It was late and it was cold; I wanted to go to sleep. Emily looked at me intently. The way the gas station lights slanted cast a shadow across the top of her face, and I could not make out her expression.

“No,” I finally said. “I’m trying to quit.”

The nozzle on the gas pump clicked, and she sighed, shut the trunk.

The Truest Thing

September 1, 2011.Reading time 35 minutes.

by Emily Nagin

Selected as runner-up of the 2011 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Don de Grazia

Feature image: Martin Johnson Heade. York Harbor, Coast of Maine, 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago.

In January, Nancy burst out laughing during the Shapiro funeral. She started laughing during a eulogy, though the eulogy itself was not funny. It was about deer hunting. The man giving it was stocky, red-cheeked, and blond, his buzz cut so close that from a distance, he looked bald. He spoke directly into the lectern, as if it had asked him to recall his father’s life. From her spot at the back of the chapel, all Nancy could see was the top of his head.

Her coworker, Lenny Faberman, sat across the aisle from her. Out of the corner of her eye, Nancy could see him fidgeting with his cufflinks. Last week, Lenny had caught Nancy crying while she embalmed an old woman. He’d stood in the basement doorway for a full minute, then said, “Did you know her?”

Nancy sniffed and wiped her eyes on her upper arm. She shook her head.

How Someone Can Not Recognize You

November 1, 2009.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Aja Gabel

Featured Art: Paris Bridge by Arthur B. Carles

Six days after my father dies, seven blind masseurs hold hands and leap from the Han River Bridge in downtown Seoul, into the shallow water beneath the lighted apex, their bodies a disruption in a mirror they’d never seen. I read about this in the newspaper I collect from the front of my father’s house, all damp and bleeding ink from the past week’s frost. In my father’s office I spread the papers out on his desk and trace my fingers down the pages, to see if I’ve missed anything. I’m looking for murders, plane crashes, natural disasters, economic collapse, impending apocalypse. I stop at the society pages, the comics, the crosswords. For several minutes I consider an eight-letter word for “felicity.” The only answer I can come up with is, “felicity.” Sometimes it happens that way.

The Korean masseurs’ story catches my eye because they have a large color picture of the bridge. It must be one of those time-lapse photos, where the car lights ghost into a gold blur and the surface of the river is steely and reflective. Four vaulted columns rise from the river and hold a statue of a torch, under which I imagine the masseurs must have jumped. How could they have jumped from anywhere else on that bridge? But then, how would they know? How would they know that that was the center? Did they feel the wind die down under the canopy? Did they hear it slice through the steel cables? Did a sighted woman lead them there and say here, here is where you would jump if you were going to jump, not that you are, and then they laughed, and took off their glasses, wiped their eyes of sleep, or of drink, said thank you, you’re kind, leave us now, we just want for a moment to enjoy the view.

My Father’s Photograph

September 20, 2007.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Jenny Boully

Featured Art: by Creative Commons

I no longer have the photograph that I wish to write about; when I was younger, I gave (very foolishly) the photograph to a boy I thought I was going to marry. I did not really give this boy the photograph, but rather, in that naive youth, when I believed in the reunion of what was rightly mine, I said that he could hold on to the photo album in which the photo was enclosed.

In the picture, my father looks much older than thirteen; he is wearing a suit and stands next to his adopted parents. There is a white house in the background and a car poses alongside them. It is the first time that I have seen my father as a boy, and the car, of a make and model that I’ve only seen in old movies, makes the photograph and my father automatically ancient.

Water We Made Ourselves

September 12, 2007.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Sara McKinnon

Featured Art: by Creative Commons

My mother said to do it standing up. To make it damp. To push it up and down. To press it back and forth. To keep moving. To start on the inside. To turn it over. To keep moving. I saw my mother do it on the kitchen table. She wasn’t standing up. She didn’t make it wet. My father had to be at work by seven thirty.

I never listen to my mother. And when my boyfriend’s father dies, I pay another woman to do it for me. I drive across town in dark glasses. I walk up the steps to his front door. His shirt, under plastic, in my arms. I help him to pull it out. I watch as he puts it on. I stand in the hallway with my hands on his shoulders. I turn down the collar myself.