The Dans

February 27, 2026.Reading time 27 minutes.

By Molly Reid
Featured Art: “Frederick” by Denise Loveless

We arrived at Alex’s with our phones tucked discreetly away, each of us carrying something: dip, wine, flowers. I brought my famous seven-layer Jell-O salad. It took all day to make; each of the seven layers had to set before adding another: lime / banana / cherry / grape / strawberry / blueberry / raspberry. But the labor was worth it—translucent rainbow squares that were neither too pretentious nor too generic. Retro. Low in calories.

Alex had laid out games and cocktails. There were candles burning, a record playing—she knew just how to woo us.

We sat around sipping our first drink—something Alex mixed especially for the occasion, a bright green concoction that tasted like candied Christmas trees—catching up on what we’d missed in each other’s lives over the last few months. The lost and gained jobs, the shows and movies we’d binged, the microdosing of mushrooms—or cannabis or K or LSD—the Pilates routines and intermittent fasting. Melissa bought a house—the first of us to own property. A twitch of jealousy moved through us all, though we were enthusiastic in our congratulations. It had a pool.

Midway

February 26, 2026.Reading time 25 minutes.

By Elizabeth Wiley

An Oklahoma county fair, in case you’ve ever wondered, pretty much comes down to strippers and livestock and sad-eyed freaks and Jesus, all of it thrown into a deep fryer and scooped out hot and dripping. It was a lot going on for a town where normally nothing did, but the fair always made me dizzy. Not just the Scrambler and the Bullet or the drooping strands of yellow lights, but more like the spirit of the place.

Mama didn’t see it that way. She called this annual traveling road show an atrocity and said the rides were half-bolted together by half-wit vagrants, which was true enough. And yet each November it seemed like we ended up going anyway, just like everybody else in town. What else is there to do once football is over and basketball hasn’t yet started? She did at least insist we go on Thursday, when the crowd wasn’t as big and the trash wasn’t quite as trashy. Tickets were half-price the first night too, which was probably her real reasoning.

But what Mama said went, so we showed up on a Thursday, just as it was about to get dark. For the first few minutes, when the haze of daylight still lingered, I could sort of see what she’d meant. Because if you looked at it closely, the fair wasn’t much. The carousel squeaked and the man selling candy apples had dirty fingernails and the prizes in the midway were made out of paper and tin. Kevin and Daddy headed straight for the livestock tent. Mama went to the baking competition, which was sort of a torture for her since the oven in our trailer didn’t even turn on, forcing her to make whatever she could on the cooktop. And I found myself alone to wander the midway, alone and unfettered for the first time in my life.

Turtles

February 24, 2026.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Celeste Amidon
Featured Art: “Olwyn (she/they)” by Jemma Leigh Roe

Sylvia was a waitress at the Desert Jewel Casino in Scottsdale, Arizona. She wore a little black dress with a white bowtie to work every night, where she served food and drinks—pork dinners and Tequila Sunrises and cheddarstuffed meatballs and Irish car bombs—to bachelors and addicts and men with catheters snaking down their legs.

She had just graduated from the University of Arizona Sierra Vista with a 2.4 GPA in psychology. Not knowing what else to do, she moved into her parents’ basement with the blind cat and the washing machine. Her mother said she was welcome any time, but her father wanted her to pay rent, so she got a job at the casino. When she wasn’t working, she was playing solitaire or combing the cat’s fur with a pink brush from the dollar store. Sometimes, she tried to meet people, at a live music event or on an internet date, but those nights always ended so miserably she could not eat the following day. She hated Scottsdale—the dialysis centers and the nursing homes and the golf courses and the dry heat—but she liked her job. She liked working the graveyard shift and sleeping all day. She liked how men stared hungrily at her from across the room. She liked how the black nylons made her legs look. She liked the endless music box noise of the games.

Most of all, she liked Wes. Wes worked as a slot attendant. He had long blond hair and tiny diamonds in his earlobes and a blue sea turtle tattooed to his forearm. She liked to watch him walk on the casino floor, how he played the drums with his fingers in the air as he went. She liked to watch him in the break room, the way his shoulder blades hooked over the backs of the plastic chairs like bat’s wings.

Meat Bird

February 14, 2026.Reading time 21 minutes.

By Marika Guthrie

Everyone in Shirttail called her Familiar. Not because that was her name, no one knew her name. And not because eventually the men of Shirttail would become as familiar with Familiar as the inside of their own palms. No, they called her Familiar because she felt familiar to them despite not being born in Shirttail or spending a day of her short life there before arriving unannounced to squat in the late Larson Boucher’s chicken coop.

That trashy little blank-faced girl over at Larson’s place sure seems familiar, got shortened to, that familiar-sorta-girl living in Boucher’s old meat bird coop, got shortened to, that familiar girl, and within five days they had talked her over so hard she was whittled down to Familiar.

The meat bird coop was twenty-three paces east of Larson Boucher’s twobedroom house, which was set behind Boucher’s Gas & Garage. The station had died years before the man. Wild Turkey brought premature death to them both in equal measure. Boucher’s Gas & Garage was on the south end of town, spitting distance from the “Welcome to Shirttail” sign, erected by the Rotary Club. Proximity to that marker made Familiar an outskirts problem, not an intown scandal. Still, “town” wasn’t but three blocks away, and the residents of Shirttail watched from the sides of their eyes and talked out the sides of their mouths.

Prognosis

December 1, 2025.Reading time 51 minutes.

By Richie Zaborowske
Featured Art: “Frills” by Alex Brice

Afraid that her husband Clint would find out, Debra began withdrawing cash out of their savings account and hiding the money in a wool sock in her underwear drawer. She got herself a divorce lawyer, a good one from one of those law firms with three last names. After searching around online, she found a landlord who, after she placed two months’ rent down as a deposit, didn’t ask too many questions. Then, when she finally had everything in place, when the only thing left was for her to find the courage to tell Clint she was leaving, on his way home from happy hour at Smitty’s Tap, Clint blew a stop sign and rammed his Ford F-150 into the side of a milk truck.

A police officer told her about the accident. Knocking on her door as Debra was dumping a pot of spaghetti noodles into a colander in the kitchen sink. Clint had never been to jail. But he was no stranger to law enforcement. So, she wasn’t exactly surprised when she opened the door and a police officer was standing on her porch.

“Your husband’s been in a wreck,” the officer said, in one breath, as if he had been running. The officer was young; cropped haircut, big ears. Haltingly, he explained that Clint was in a coma. Showed her a picture of the scene on his phone; the side of Clint’s truck crumpled like tinfoil; a blast of glass strewn across the road.

Animal Control

November 19, 2025.Reading time 39 minutes.

By Anna Sheffer
Featured Art: “The Bride” by Alex Brice

The buffalo’s tail swished. Clumps of sod mashed around in its mouth. Dana watched through the sliding glass door, safely hidden behind the curtains. If she wasn’t so afraid, it would have been funny, spying on this creature demolishing their yard as if it were an inconsiderate neighbor. But the welcome pamphlet had said these animals were unpredictable—not to be approached under any circumstance—so she was on hold with the nature preserve, listening to jazz flute riffs while wrapped in the curtains she had bought less than a month ago. 

Libby materialized, round four-year-old stomach protruding in front of her. A plastic horse figurine dangled by its mane from her closed fist. “Mommy, what are you doing?” She had been playing quietly in front of the TV just minutes ago; why couldn’t she go back to whatever she’d been up to? 

Before Dana could reply, Libby peeked around the curtain and let out a delighted squeal. “Look, mommy, a buffafwo! Did you see it?”

Addicted to Plastic

November 3, 2025.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Victor McConnell

When I relocated from Los Angeles to Denver, some of my physician competitors thought I was foolish. I opened my new clinic in Cherry Creek, fitting out the office with clouded glass, marble floors, hammered copper light fixtures, and every other top-of-the-line finish I could think of. Coming from Beverly Hills gave me a marketing advantage right off the bat—the rich suburbanites and the Cherry Creek locals all wanted to know how things were done out there, who I’d treated, and so on. I became a regular at the Denver bars with the wealthiest clientele and had a standing lunch reservation on Fridays at Hillstone; I even befriended a bartender there who, for a small kickback, would gently recommend that some of his regulars come see me. The divorced women in their forties and fifties were the best targets. My practice grew quickly enough that, within five years, I was in the process of setting up a satellite clinic in Aspen and was making plans to relocate there full-time before my fifty-fifth birthday. Five years there, I figured, then retire by sixty.

I was thinking about that, the life I’d envisioned in Aspen, midway through my hearing in front of the Colorado Medical Board. I had a feeling they were going to revoke my license even before one of them asked me if I thought my actions were consistent with the Hippocratic Oath. Given that the guy who asked was one of the nine board members without an MD, I wanted to ask him what he knew about taking the oath.

THE CANYON OF UNKNOWN WATER

October 31, 2025.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Kent Nelson
Featured Art: “Close Up – Spatial Neighborhoods” by Alex Brice

Henry shoved his drift boat from the trailer into the river, unhitched the winch line, and wedged the anchor into a crack in the cement ramp. He drove his Tundra and boat trailer up the ramp to the parking lot. He’d already loaded his gear into the boat—fishing rod, all-time favorite foods, stove, lantern, camping crap. He put his parking permit on the dash, locked the cab, and pocketed the key—no sense letting people steal what his daughter could use. He’d sent Catherine the spare key and a note that said the truck was at the Spring Creek put-in on the South Fork of the Snake River, which, given his habits, wonts, and desires, was the place he loved most in the world.

The note went out in the mail Wednesday morning, August 17th, from Idaho Falls. Catherine wouldn’t get it in L.A. until at least Friday or Saturday, if she checked her mail, but probably Monday. The truck wasn’t going anywhere without a driver.

How to Test White Guys

June 1, 2025.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Paloma Martínez-Cruz

The first is named Steve Stahl. You have no claim on him; the concept is beyond imagination. Enjoy quiet contentment as you color your tree trunk brown using a box of crayons that sits between you. Steve surprises you the day he announces, “I brush my teeth” and pecks you on the cheek making a smacking sound with his lips.

This means something.

For the end-of-year dance recital, the teacher’s aide pairs you with Juan, a dark brown boy who speaks only Spanish. The teachers choreograph a preschool version of the Mexican hat dance, and you see that a blond girl has suddenly materialized to be paired with Steve Stahl. Had she been in your class the whole time? How is everything about her so yellow? Steve Stahl gets right down to the business of dancing with her, which is just as baffling as her sudden appearance. How is he unwilling to boycott the dance or at least throw a crayon at the teacher’s aide in an act of defiance?

Butter

June 1, 2025.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Meghan Chou

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2014. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

I first saw her aboard the JADE PRINCESS, a cruise ship several miles off the coast of New Hampshire. She wore ribbons in her hair and a leather choker around her neck that read GIVE ME A REASON. The two of us made up the entire wedding party. I played the roles of daughter and maid of honor and she, her father’s best man. The other guests were staff on their dinner break and a couple gamblers, vying for a seat at the blackjack table.

The captain kept the ceremony short (on autopilot like his ship). Ma had already been married twice, yet for Husband #3, she still felt giddy and hopeful. Where I saw folding chairs and a wrinkled backdrop, she saw romance. Where I saw a cardboard cutout of her last boyfriend, she saw the love of her life. When the time came to exchange vows, I handed Ma the wedding band for her five-second fiancé, a mood ring from LOST & FOUND that glowed black in my sweaty hands. The best man gave her father a light-up jelly ring and our parents sealed it all with a kiss.

“Faye,” she introduced herself at the reception, my stepsister before I learned her name.

“Lenny.”

Providence

June 1, 2025.Reading time 39 minutes.

By Logan McMillen

i. Kansas City, Missouri— 1983

Every morning before the store opened, Rubén tempted George into smoking a cigarette by the loading docks—which had a clear view of the highway and the sunrise. Today was no different.

“You’re the devil,” George said—with his lighter already pulled out.

George owned the home improvement store where Rubén worked.

The missionaries were quick to find a job for Rubén. And even though it wasn’t in his field of study, or anywhere near his relatives in New Jersey—Rubén liked it. It gave him a casual sense of purpose.

“We don’t really follow that one,” Rubén said. “Do we?”

Rubén often pretended that he didn’t know anything about Mormonism, even though he’d been “practicing” for over two years. He thought of the religion mainly as a way to stay social in an unfamiliar place. That and he felt like he owed the missionaries something. If they wanted his soul, so be it.

The Surgeon’s Wife

June 1, 2025.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Dena Pruett

He tells us he is like that boss, you know, the one from the movie.

“That’s all.” He’ll trill as he flutters past in a mockery of the boss, the movie, us.

We can tell how a surgery went by the particular way he wears his white coat. On good days the coat is on, collar crisp, the sides flapping up and out as he strides forward, fast and sure. On bad ones, the coat is in his hand, tight and bunched, ready to throw at a chair as soon as he steps into his office.

The rhetoric is as fluid as his fashion. God works through his hands. It’s all divined, preordained. He is but a vessel, an instrument of something higher, more profound than him. Or, it’s everyone else’s fault. The residents are lazy. The nurses and P.A.s slow. The tools not sharp and swift, just out of reach. The patient—too weak. We forgive him these days. He just cares for his patients, the practice. We imagine that deep down he holds himself accountable, feels too much, and this is all mostly bluster.

The Names of Those We Love

June 1, 2025.Reading time 38 minutes.

By Kenyon Geiger

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2012. Oil on canvas, 16″ x 20″. “Cirlce” series.

It was finally settled: the competition was rigged, and Mrs. Klein would not be receiving her lifetime supply of free groceries after all. She set the letter down on her countertop with shaky hand and shaky breath. This was not a surprise. Aside from the mystery of how the competition was supposedly rigged, the news brought with it a strange comfort for Mrs. Klein. She was used to things not working out.

Her mother always thought of everything as God’s will, all part of His divine plan; this was atypical for a Jewish woman, at least in Mrs. Klein’s experience. Her mother reminded her more of the parents of the evangelical friends Mrs. Klein had at school; they often talked like that, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Of course, she wasn’t Mrs. Klein then, back when she was in school. She was Rebecca, a little girl with her entire life ahead of her.

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.

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.

Seeing It Through

July 18, 2024.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Allegra Solomon

The young couple was leaving the theater and walking to a nearby bar. Behind them, the marquee read: Eyes Wide Shut—One Night Only. They’d gone with some of their friends and co-workers from the library. It was an independent theater with only two show rooms, and the couple frequented it to the point of the cashiers and ushers knowing their names. On the theater’s Instagram, they noted that every Friday in February they would play a different romance film in the spirit of Valentine’s Day. The Friday before was a special triple feature of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight. The Friday before that, Love & Basketball, and the Friday before that, In The Mood for Love. Why they chose to end on Eyes Wide Shut, the man couldn’t understand. He said this as he threw out the woman’s empty Sprite cup. She’d hardly noticed it left her hand.

It’s so funny, the woman said. Seeing them get all riled up like that. Cruise and Kidman. And they were married at the time. You think they ever argued like that?

God, no, the man said. Never. Either never, or all the time.

In Our Nature

July 18, 2024.Reading time 36 minutes.

By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

Petrified wood is a lesson in belief, not so much a belief in what you see but in what you feel. Touching it, rubbing your fingers over its impossibly stony skin, you have to remind yourself that what it once was has changed entirely. A sequoia transformed into a rock wall. The language of trees turned to silence. Given the right conditions, the elements moving perfectly into place, it’s only a matter of time.

The Wild

I met Pete the summers I spent working in West Yellowstone, Montana, the tiny town situated just outside the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park. I was a freshman in college and had never lived away from home. A senior in high school, he hadn’t either. I’d also never had a boyfriend. Pete tied and sold flies over at Jacklin’s Fly Shop and dreamed of being a fly fishing guide one day. More experienced outdoors than I was, he naturally held a youthful energy for the place while developing a kind of wisdom I always envied. Each time we drove through Yellowstone Park, he recited to me the scientific names of the wolves, elk, and buffalo, those gorgeous Latin words decorating our conversations: Canis lupus, Cervus canadensis, and the comically redundant Bison bison, which always made me laugh. He even knew the scientific name of the lichen growing on the rocks (Pleopsidium), and older fishermen remarked to me how adept he was on the river, especially for an eighteen-year-old. I was proud, of course, of finding someone so unique. Instead of flowers, he brought me the best flies he’d tied for the week, and I stuck them in my ball cap and wore them all summer, woolly buggers and caddisflies flapping against my head in the breeze.

Sanctuary

July 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alan Shapiro

Early mornings as I turned onto the gravel road to the bird sanctuary,
you’d start panting, pacing in the back seat, whining,
impatient to be let out and hit the ground at a dead run,
head cocked slightly to the side as if to query the sight or scent
of what I couldn’t see or smell of what you never stopped believing you would catch,
and never did. Always ahead of me or behind but never stride for stride,

you plunged, rustling, into and out of brush, you barked or didn’t,
you sniffed the freshest rumors of what had happened there while we were gone.
When you’d disappear, I’d call. And you only reappeared when I’d stop calling—
you must have thought my Here boy, come here boy was how I told you
not to worry, take all the time you need. Which is to say,

we each had our own experience of the experience we shared.
Our separate truths grew up inside those finite mornings.
They leaned on each other. But the mornings themselves?
Nothing outside them proves our ever having once been in them,
traceless as the sound of my calling after you
who rustled only as far into the understory as my voice would reach.

My Body is a Cemetery

July 17, 2024.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Eliza Sullivan

In the shower, she moves my head under the water. Rinses the shampoo out and untangles the knots. An ant crawls out of the pink linoleum.

She’s cold, her wet chest pushes against my back. Her knees against the backs of mine. She’s always trying to talk about it.

Have you ever tried talking to anyone? she asked at dinner.

Is there anything I can do for you? she whispered in the theater.

I love you, she says, every day. I love you, do you know that?

And then she’s kissing me but he’s at the other end of the tub. Hairy legs spread. You’re supposed to hold your breath when you drive by cemeteries or lock your doors or something so you don’t invite ghosts and I don’t have a great relationship with my mother who gave me that advice but I can’t breathe.

She sees him too. Gently, she moves me away and back under the water. She sighs.

Hand-Me-Downs

July 17, 2024.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Shaun Haurin

Opal had an annoying habit of leaving stuff she no longer wanted on our doorstep. What’s more, she refused to call ahead or send a warning text. She wouldn’t even ring the bell. (She once gave us a partial gallon of rainbow water ice on a warm spring day, and it wasn’t until a neighbor kid spotted it staining our stoop like an oil slick that we became aware of the leaky treat, accompanied by a sticky caravan of ants.) “It’s just Opal’s way,” was how my wife explained it to me the first few times I opened the front door and nearly tripped over one of her sister’s “offerings.” “Tell her we have enough junk of our own,” I would say, or some cranky comment along those lines. “She can take it to a flea market.” Wendy would just roll her wide-set eyes and smile her eternally camera-ready smile. “You’re missing the point, Tom. She doesn’t want to sell her stuff to strangers. She wants family to have it.” “But what if family doesn’t want it?” I’d press. At which point Wendy, who was likely late for an audition, would cut the conversation short. She was done defending her sister. Not that Opal wasn’t a bona fide blackbelt when it came to verbally defending herself.

On bad days, I thought of my sister-in-law as a mangy stray for whom depositing her gleefully eviscerated prey was a sign of great respect. On slightly better days, I thought of her as a kind of half-assed Santa Claus. Not in a million years would we ask for the sort of gifts we were routinely given: A trash bag full of bucatini pool noodles (we didn’t have a pool); a cast-iron fondue pot (Wendy was lactose intolerant); an “autographed” portrait of Kevin Costner atop a horse, dressed in full-blown Dances with Wolves regalia (it was a portrait of Kevin Costner atop a horse). Opal once left us a heaping brown bag of bargain-basement lingerie—assuming the basement was located at the bottom of a brothel. It was coarse, iridescent stuff, as if its wearer’s chief concern was not getting lost in the dark. Its intense color seemed to come off on our hands. Never mind that Opal was twice Wendy’s size. It’s hard to imagine any woman being taken seriously in that sort of underwear, let alone lusted after, coveted, craved. But maybe being taken seriously wasn’t the point. Opal was good-looking, but her sense of humor tended toward the shadier side of the street. In fact she looked a lot like Wendy—Wendy with a perpetual sneer and a little extra face between her features. Once, at the beach, we came across a guy armed with a Sharpie who was drawing caricatures of passersby on balloons. After a few seconds of scribbling, his zany, inflated medium squeaking like a set of handlebar brakes, he handed us Wendy’s likeness. She and I looked at each other and shared the same tipsy thought aloud: Opal.

Go Seek

July 16, 2024.Reading time 35 minutes.

By V. F. Cordova

Paula has some thoughts about what happened at the playground. There are spooky things with children, she says. Kids holding conversations with unseen ghosts, kids with memories of dead people’s lives, siblings with totally opposite versions of childhood memories. It’s theoretically possible in a multiverse scenario, Paula says, that a child could be in both one place and an infinite number of places at the same time, time itself moving simultaneously backward and forward.

I suggest that Paula write a paper on this. I picture her snickering, face illuminated by her phone’s glowing rectangle. The Phenomenology of Freaky Shit, she texts back. I smile.

Or was I just wasted? You. Were. Not.

That she wasn’t there, that she’s not a mother, is no impediment to Paula’s theorizing. But if she’s expert in anything, it’s the outer-bounds of my alcohol tolerance. She’s gotten drunk with me more times than anyone. Our college years were one long rumspringa from our repressive all-girls Catholic school days. Later we both got serious and left town for our doctorates—hers philosophy, mine history—but we kept up weekly phone dates to “wine and whine.” For years we worked as adjuncts in obscure towns, bitching to each other about the apathetic students and the bad take-out and how the drive to the closest airport would be as long as the flight back home. We got tenure-track positions around the same time. Paula’s still at hers, across the country in California. It’s hard to find the time to call now, but we have this text-chain going that, printed out, could bridge the distance.

Sweater Weather

November 21, 2023.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Cara Lynn Albert

The Featured Art is “The Illusion of Memory” by Greta Delapp

You drive to Cassadaga not because you really believe in psychics and spiritualists, but because you’re thirty-eight and feel like you’re running out of options. Because it’s January fourth and you just spent another holiday season alone while your family asks about the absent husband.

The was-never-present in-the-first-place husband. The would-rather-fuck-the-eighteen-year-old-dog-walker husband.

He’s been gone for two years, and good riddance. You pull a cashmere cardigan over your shoulders, a Christmas present from your aunt bought half-off at JCPenney, because it’s one of the few days out of the year where Central Florida dips below sixty degrees. Angels and bloated polar bears dance over crabgrass-infested lawns. Plastic icicles hang from gutters, though it hasn’t fallen under freezing here in three decades.

Lone Star Jubilee

November 14, 2023.Reading time 56 minutes.

By Cyn Nooney

Tanya says Hollis beat a boy last night. Tanya says the boy crawled through the girl’s bedroom window and good thing Hollis caught him. He beat that boy so hard he soiled himself, Tanya goes on, taking a drag from her cigarette. She saw it with her own two eyes, heard all the whooping and hollering, then the boy curled up beneath the window, jeans streaked with shit. We’re at work when Tanya tells me this. She’s standing near my desk, her back against the easel where I lay out the company newsletter. I’m twenty-three, she’s thirty-eight. She works in purchasing. I’m in PR. Her cubicle is catty-corner to mine. As she talks Tanya adjusts the underwire in her bra with long, tapered fingernails painted the color of strawberry frosting. My boobies are sagging by the minute, she says, Hollis used to spray ‘em all over with whipped cream then slurp up every last bit, but now he never touches them let alone glances their way.

It embarrasses me when she talks like this, but I keep a straight face, so she’ll tell me more. I like to know what’s coming down the pike. She has a young son, Hollis Junior, and a daughter named Mercy who just turned fourteen. Mercy is the one with the window in her room that the boy crawled through.

Praying I Wouldn’t Be Last

November 12, 2023.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Maya Afilalo

The Featured Art is “Blossoming” by Greta Delapp

The summer after ninth grade, I had my first kiss. All school year, I’d been on a mission to no longer be “prude”—the kissing equivalent of a virgin. It seemed other girls were always talking about their conquests. Who they had kissed, and where, and whether the boys felt them up over or under the bra. I longed to be part of these conversations, to offer my own tale of triumph, to sagely weigh in on others’ dilemmas. Instead, I stood to the side, quiet, fiddling with my razr flip phone. That summer was the Summer of Death: Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays. Others, whose names I didn’t recognize. I was fourteen years old, and death was no deterrent to my desire.

I wondered if my lack of suitors had something to do with my appearance. Through middle school, I had sported frizzy curls cropped into an unfortunate bob. Every day, I wore a Life is Good T-shirt or a hoodie or both. Adidas track pants. I had what my well-intentioned cousin once called “only a little bit of a mustache.” When high school started, I made an effort. I traded my swishy pants for jeans, my shapeless T-shirts for fitted tops from Old Navy. I got my ears pierced. I kept the bob, though I began styling it with John Frieda mousse that came in a tall silver can. It was my cousin who showed me how to apply the mousse. He was my age, also curly-haired, had been kissing girls for years.

I Am No Beekeeper

September 15, 2023.Reading time 32 minutes.

By Arya Samuelson

Selected as winner of the 2023 New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest by Barrie Jean Borich

My housemate sleeps all day, makes art all night, and paints giant bees. “I want people to feel my paintings,” she says, stroking the palm of her hand against a still dripping head-to-toe canvas.

I keep my hands in pockets. We’ve only been at the art residency for a week, and she has already transformed her garage studio into a whimsical world of texture and wonder and touch. My art is trapped inside me. Weighs down my womb with rocks.

Bandits

May 25, 2023.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Terry Dubow

Featured Art: Day 4 by John Sabraw

When the phone rang at two in the morning, Michael leapt out of bed so as to not wake Natalie, his exhausted wife who’d been working far too much and far too late for a fifty-three-year-old. In the hallway outside his bedroom, Michael looked down at the screen of his phone and saw his son’s face staring at him. It was a photo of Ezekiel as a little boy, which was how Michael liked to picture his son, who was no longer little. He was actually quite tall. Six foot two at least. And old as well. Nineteen with a flop of uncombed hair and a tattoo on his forearm that he still tried to hide from his mother even though there were few if any secrets among them.

The Man with the Yellow Hat

November 21, 2022.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Dustin M. Hoffman

The man with the yellow hat dragged his monkey out onto the balcony and locked it inside the wire-walled kennel. He’d reached desperation. The monkey he’d named George had finally followed his curiosity to disaster. The monkey had nearly killed a man. From behind the sliding glass door, he studied the monkey’s stillness, wondered what terrifying curiosity he could be conjuring now: a swing from the powerlines, steak knives chucked from their sixth-floor apartment.

Cool fingers trailed up the back of his neck, bumping down his hat brim. “Don’t you think he’s learned his lesson?” the scientist, his girlfriend, whispered into his ear. She joined him at the glass door.

The man clenched the syringe in his pocket. After two years of fostering, the man had become certain that the monkey he’d named George couldn’t be trained. The scientist imagined the man kinder, so much more patient. But there was a frailty he hid just as carefully as his balding scalp under the hat. His patience, his compassion for defenseless animals, was rubbed threadbare. So, he carried a fatal needle for the monkey, the quick solution, finally. She was wrong about him. Everyone was wrong.

The Mentor

July 28, 2022.Reading time 48 minutes.

By Lexi Pandell

Selected as winner of the 2022 Editors’ Prize in Fiction by Patrick O’Keeffe

Featured Art: When Lunches Synch Up by Mallory Stowe

In a shingled house at the edge of the Berkeley Hills—near campus with its bulletin boards covered in smeary flyers for an upcoming Angela Davis lecture and another of a white woman toting a machine gun, and close enough to the Greek Amphitheater that the roar of a concert reverberated through the thin windows—Jane Gardener sat with six other women at a kitchen table. This was a dinner party. She’d forced herself to go with the intention of socializing. Yet she couldn’t stop thinking about how, though Lori said these dinners were about learning from other women in the restaurant industry, her presence felt like a charity. The stench of feet persisted despite the hand-dipped incense wafting in the corner. How could Lori purport to care about food, yet burn out her nose with cheap nag champa?

All of them were restaurateurs, except for Eartha, the German woman Jane employed as sous-chef at Dîner, whom she had invited to help her survive the affair.

“Isn’t spending time with friends supposed to be enjoyable?” Eartha had asked.

They weren’t her friends, though. Not really. Once, there had been more women in this coterie, some she’d actually liked. But, one by one, they had married and turned their attention to their home lives.

Seven Ways to Get Blindsided in a Restaurant

November 30, 2021.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Melissa Bowers

5.
I am in a restaurant when I learn Rob has a wife. It shouldn’t matter, since I’m already a wife, too—Timothy sits across from me, cutting a chicken strip into toddler-sized bites between swigs of his craft beer—but something catches in my chest at the sound of Rob’s name. Maybe it’s because Timothy and I are hardly speaking at the moment, or maybe it’s because of the person delivering the news.

Amaya is supposed to be a ghost from the past. She is not meant to materialize inside the life I have now, this many years after college, as she exits Timothy’s favorite burger place. I don’t notice her until she sidles over and leans against the edge of our table, runs an invasive finger around its glossy tiles, slowly, as if she’s trying to seduce them one by one. We exchange pleasantries: Nice to see you. Yes, it’s been forever. What are you up to these days?

“By the way, Rob got married,” Amaya tells me. “She looks a lot like you, actually—brown hair, kind of wavy. They have a daughter.”

She winces a little when she says it, in sympathy or solidarity, as though we both have the right to feel jealous. Then she tsk-tsks and sets her lips in a thin, apologetic line, flutters her fingers over her shoulder: “‘Bye, honey.” The finality of her hips swaying toward the door.

“That was the Amaya?” Timothy asks through a mouthful of ground meat.

I raise my eyebrows.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “We’re fighting.”

Love, Dungeons, Magic, Dragons or Some Combination Thereof Will Save This Marriage

November 29, 2021.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Marvin Shackelford

Featured Image: Power Shots by Sam Warren

My finest moment, the occasion that defines me as a person. Okay. You have to imagine the cliffs. Sheer and bleached in the light of a moon or two and rising from the foam of a screaming ocean. The sky is bleeding down in a magical haze, and a horde of monstrous creatures roars nearer. That happens all the time. This isn’t metaphor. They’re armed and armored and charging from the landward side, and the petulant face of a dead god breaks open out over the waters. His teeth drip with death and his eyes are storms, literal lightning and thunder and hailstones, bearing down on where I stand at the edge of the world. He’s starting to take physical form. He’s getting real. I’m the focal point of the material plane for once in my miserable life, and I thrust the crystal, that plain-looking clear-color gemstone pulled unwittingly from a dragon’s trove, I drive it straight into my heart. Breastplate undone and hair flinging in the wind and my lover wailing as I drop into his arms. Our enemy screams and begins to fade. I’ve saved the world.

Domestic Chess

November 29, 2021.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Andrea Bianchi

Featured Image: Pink Rat by Ellery Pollard

1. His first move is checkmate.

2. A punch that expels the laughter from my stomach as I stand before him at the end of our chess game.

3. “Wipe that smirk off your face,” he hisses beneath the Saturday morning chatter and jazz of the coffeeshop. “You’ve been gloating. Taunting,” he says. And yes, after our first sips, I did tease him to try for a victory, challenge him to a game of chess. Wanting to imitate another couple, heads bent intimate over their own little world of 64 checkered squares, at a tiny table just a bishop’s diagonal from the sofa where we sat.

4. He waits there afterward, tense on the cushion’s edge, when I return from the restroom, from a respite after his loss of the competition, his loss of composure. But his eyes pierce my smile as I pause in front of him. My stomach at the same plane as his arm. And then his fist connects level with the center of our lives.

5. It breaks the rules of play—and of the law, and of our love. Our months of happy Saturdays at the beach. Dinners beneath twinkling lights. Fights, arguments, yes. But afterward, mornings under the sunlight-checkered bedcovers, where we fed each other breakfast and curled together with our cats, as we mapped out plans for our shared weekends, then our first shared apartment. Our relationship’s next moves.

Landfall

July 9, 2021.Reading time 50 minutes.

By Jeremy Griffin

By the time Nicole arrives at the clinic, the parking lot is already full of folks waiting to drop off their pets before hightailing it out of town, out of the path of the hurricane. All morning she’s been battling that crampy twinge in her hand—dystonia, Dr. Epstein calls this, involuntary muscle contractions—and she hoped that she would be able to spend most of today hiding in her office. A foolish hope, considering that all of the pet-friendly hotels within a 100-mile radius have already sold out. Unlocking the front doors, she marshals a smile as the sleepy-eyed clients slump into the lobby with their cat carriers and their leashed dogs.

Inside, she leaves the receptionist to check everyone in while she goes around the building flicking on lights. In the kennel at the back of the building, she feeds and waters the dozen or so animals already boarding and begins taking the dogs outside one by one. Technically, this is a job for the assistants, but as owner Nicole takes a sheepish sort of pleasure in micromanaging. A canopy of clouds hangs low in the sky, the wind already churning ominously. By tomorrow afternoon, the rains will be here, thick and driving. Initial projections had the hurricane cutting west, into the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps Nicole shouldn’t have been surprised when the projections abruptly shifted, the storm now expected to hook northeast, right through the Carolinas. That’s her life in a nutshell, isn’t it? A sudden change in trajectory, something to brace for. You’re just feeling sorry for yourself, her mother might scold, caustic old bird that she was, and she would be right. But her mother is long gone, and so who cares if Nicole is feeling a little morose this morning? It’s her clinic, she can feel whatever she wants.

She waits until all the other dogs have been walked before taking out the rottweiler that Animal Control dropped off yesterday. It was found near the airport, a scrawny female with patchy fur and a missing chunk of ear. Upon being hustled into the van, the animal bit one of the officers on the hand. “Fucker cost me three stitches,” the fellow said when he dropped the dog off, holding up his bandaged hand for Nicole to see.

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.”

Rhizomes

December 9, 2020.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Tamara Matthews

Featured art: Golden Egg by Maddy McFadden

I didn’t want to start a fire.

I didn’t want to walk out the door with the letter that morning either. I didn’t want to shut off Ken’s 5:45 AM alarm and find his side of the bed empty. I didn’t want the lingering cologne in the bathroom and the trail of beard tips tapped from a razor along the sink’s edge. But what I wanted was beside the point.

This is how we lived during our separation, coming and going through the house we still shared. Ken avoided me, and I tracked his traces like a botanist searching for a rare species of plant. I tracked him to the coat rack where his bomber jacket was missing, and there he disappeared, destination unknown. Read More

Love and Homeostasis

November 29, 2020.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Jessica Fiorillo

Featured art: Shame, and Then by Maddy McFadden

The fever itself wasn’t serious. It came on as a subtle achiness, a stiffness of the limbs when I’d push off the couch or rise up from bed after a broken sleep. I took my temperature and it was normal, maybe up a half degree. I kept trying to rotate my eyes down to the thermometer’s window, just enough to catch the reading before it beeped. I thought about a story I’d read about the decreasing temperature of human bodies. That the average of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit was set 170 years ago when bodies ran warmer and California was becoming the 31st American state.

I wondered if my half degree was actually a full degree higher than my usual set point. I tried to remember the last time I took a reading, when I wasn’t feeling my body shift. But that’s the thing about temperatures – you only take them when you suspect that something’s wrong. Often, there probably is. Read More

Memorial Day on Fire Island w/ Laughing Buddha

November 15, 2020.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Ed Falco

Arthur is, look, you don’t want to, fine; and Bee’s, good, I’m glad.

It’s about a billion degrees out. They’re on a clothing-optional beach. Arthur had to practically drag her.

He gets up and walks away, which makes her mad. She’s all about how men retreat to their caves. Arthur stops and puts his hands on his hips and looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. There’s a half dozen guys on blankets to the left and behind him chattering. They’re all young and nude, built like Greek gods. One guy’s putting sunblock on another guy like he’s practicing the art of sensuous massage. Next to them’s what looks like a straight couple, the girl’s young, topless, with a bikini bottom. She looks good. She’s in fact gorgeous. The guy’s probably at least twice her age, well into his forties. He’s tanned a golden bronze and built solid, stretched out, arms under his head, got on one of those skimpy bathing suits Olympic divers wear. No belly at all if not quite a six-pack. The girl’s sitting up looking off at the horizon, her hand wrapped around his kneecap like she’s holding a stick shift. Arthur goes back to their blanket.

You’re back.

Look, if you don’t want to, okay, but I’m going to.

Go right ahead. Who’s stopping you?

All I’m saying is, we’re here, right?

Prime Cuts

November 8, 2020.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Lara Palmqvist

Their fights had always been drawn-out and passionate, thrilling in their possibility. The subjects of their arguments ran the gamut; Malcolm and Clare could employ almost anything as flint to spark the heat between them, setting their hearts leaping and their sharp tongues running wild: the empty soda can rolling around the Subaru, the knife marks grooved in the laminate countertop, the lack of remaining hot water in the morning, or that time, years ago, when the dog bowl had been left dry on a sultry day. The rhythm to their relationship was marked by peaks of tension, a pulse that proved their marriage was still alive—unlike those of some of their friends, whose flatlined politeness was so painfully false, resentment straining up beneath pert compliments and cute smiles. Malcolm and Clare were authentically in love, four years married and still willing to weather the turbulence of melding two lives together. Yet it was also true their latest fights seemed rote, their jibes more personal. The cause was lack of material, Clare felt. She blamed their unchanging surroundings.

“Your manner of blinking,” she said, interrupting Malcolm as he sat reading the golf report in his favorite recliner one February morning. “It’s bothersome.”

He glanced up, eyes fluttering, bewildered. “Excuse me?”

Clare set her turmeric milk on the coffee table. “There’s some kind of stutter to the way you blink.” She flicked her fingers off her thumb in two short bursts. “Like this,” she said. “I’m not sure you’re aware. It’s making me anxious.”

Clare spoke from her heart—she was genuinely bothered by Malcolm’s mannerisms, more so with each passing day. He’d developed a habit of repeatedly clearing his throat in the mornings that made her grab fistfuls of her dark hair and pull until her scalp felt strained. Just last week she’d noticed new strands of gray growing in along her part.

“I see,” Malcolm said. He creased the paper, eyes now flat and focused, strained wide.

Clare didn’t want this—she didn’t want him to suffer.

Fourteen Meals

June 12, 2020.Reading time 42 minutes.

By Stephanie Early Green

Featured Art: Happy Couple Jason Douglas and Mallory Valentour

The first meal we share is ribeye steak with scalloped potatoes and three wilted strands of asparagus cowering on the side of each plate. He takes one bite of potato. I pretend to cut my steak but don’t eat any. I don’t want to ruin my lipstick, or get steak-fat caught in my teeth. We talk about our families, and how we both value the concept of family, and how we both hope to have families of our own someday. We agree that we have a ton in common. We find out that we both enjoy country music and have corny senses of humor. We tell each other knock-knock jokes. Mine are better, but I laugh at his, while still trying to look pretty. It’s difficult to laugh out loud and not look a little ugly, a little wild. The trick is to keep your eyes open, and gently scrunch your nose, but not open your mouth too wide, so as not to expose your gums. When a man sees a woman’s gums, he is put in mind of a horse, or a chimpanzee. That’s what my grandmother always said, anyway, and she was a smart woman.

After dinner, we kiss. His breath tastes like white wine and scalloped potato. I hope my breath smells minty fresh, since I snuck a breath-mint while no one was looking. When the date is over, I’m ravenous. I go to my hotel room and order a burger, no bun. It comes with French fries, even though I didn’t order them. I eat the burger with a fork and knife while sitting on the vast hotel bed. I watch a trashy reality show in which women drink and cry and hug and scream. I would never make such a spectacle of myself on television, shrieking and clawing, mascara running down my cheeks. I’d sooner die. As I take the last bite of hamburger, a blotch of ketchup falls on my white hotel bathrobe. Later, I fall asleep with the television on, and have strange dreams. When I wake up, there’s a French fry on my pillow, curled sweetly next to my cheek.

Smart Girl

June 2, 2020.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Sydney Rende

Featured Art: Cicada by Scott Brooks and Mallory Valentour

My ex-boyfriend calls from Florida to talk about his pubes.

“Are they weird?” he asks.

We go to schools in different time zones. Over the summer he broke up with me on the patio furniture in his backyard. I cried into his lap. He carried me to my car, then went inside to eat dinner with his family.

Now he plays lacrosse on scholarship at a school with palm trees and a rape problem.

“Why would your pubes be weird,” I say. My roommate, Jenny, shuts her laptop and listens from her bed.

“You tell me.” He’s angry with me for not telling him about the strangeness of his pubic hair. Why would I care about his pubic hair? One time he shaved the peachy space between his eyebrows with a disposable razor. I thought that was weird, but I never told him.

“The guys on the team are saying my pubes are weird,” he says. “Like I have too many.”

“Did you tell them you’re from New Jersey?” I ask. Jenny moves to my bed, holds her ear to the phone. She covers her mouth so he can’t hear her breathing. I want to tell her that her breath is the last thing on his mind. His pubes take precedent over her breath or my breath or even his own breath, and he needs to sort out the pube situation before he asphyxiates.

“Tell them how cold it gets at home,” I say. “How you need all the hair you can get to stay warm in the winter.”

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.

The Uber Diaries

October 2, 2019.Reading time 36 minutes.

by Kyle Minor
Essay originally published in New Ohio Review Issue 24
Featured Art: Evacuation by Corran Brownlee

Indianapolis, Indiana. Somewhere near Keystone Avenue and 62nd Street my iPhone pings. A college student from Hyderabad, India. He is pleased when I tell him he’s my first customer. He tips me two dollars.

I pick up my second customer in front of a bar in Broad Ripple. He gets in the front seat. His hair is grown to thigh length, and he is on some kind of party drug that makes him want to touch things.

“Please stop rubbing my arm,” I say. He apologizes.

Near Rocky Ripple, he takes off his shoes and socks and rubs his bare feet on the windshield.

His feet leave little rabbit marks. He is a large man with very tiny feet. When I drop him off at the donut shop, he doesn’t leave a tip. Read More

Subject Matter Experts

June 14, 2019.Reading time 55 minutes.

By Laura Jok

Featured Art: “Untitled” by Elizabeth Boch

You are twenty-six. Donald Trump is running for president. The company that you consider your current employer sees you as more of a friend. The insurance plan that you bought for yourself is hilarious. There is a hole in your back molar about which you are not thinking, which is growing, about which you are not thinking, and you are in love with a stranger who can always be replaced, should he turn out to be a disappointment. You teach other people how to do their jobs like you are some kind of expert.

A lowly contractor, you design employee training programs for companies too apathetic to do it themselves. You produce modules: scripted lesson plans, slides. You shoot instructional videos, for which you lure desperate actors. When resources are scarce, you narrate the training, play it back and edit. It does not sound like you: more like someone who knows what to do. You fall into this habit of talking to yourself.

The name of your company is an acronym that no longer stands for anything. In India, where the parent company is based, it is illegal to call anything unaffiliated with the government “national.” About this point in particular, the Indian government is exceptionally litigious. The closet between the green room and your cubicle is filled with worn-out fatigues left over from the last contract with the U.S. Army. When the bigwigs are on a call with Mumbai, you rub the fabric between your fingers. It is not synthetic. It is the real thing.

You used to be a promising costume designer: made it to Off-Broadway, became too disaffected to continue. It isn’t that you weren’t as good as you hoped. It is that no one is as good as you imagined.

The subject matter experts provided by the clients dodge your calls and lie to you. One is in the hospital recovering from a massive coronary and is under no circumstances to be disturbed. Another asks that you arrange your content acquisition calls around his daily psychotherapy sessions. A third prefers to communicate by copying and pasting chunks of text from Wikipedia into the bodies of emails. Every SME wants only one thing: to retire. To get rid of you, they need only pretend that what you are asking for does not exist.

Bit

March 15, 2019.Reading time 5 minutes.

By LaTanya McQueen

Because of her own curiosity she said yes when he asked her to put the bit on him. The bit, or gag, was an iron mask shaped like half a moon with a hook that went around the front of a person’s head. A spiked collar connected to the mask through a lock at the back of the neck.

He collected historical artifacts like these, the iron bit and scold’s bridle women were once punished with wearing, the shackles and chains forced upon slaves, items all from a not-too-distant era. When she asked him why, he told her he had a fascination for history long forgotten.

“Forgotten?” she asked and he shrugged in response.

She was used to men wanting things like this from her, to be blindfolded with her wrists cuffed and legs tied. She’d been expecting a day to come when he’d ask her if she would wear the bit, because hadn’t their relationship been leading up to this? Men, both white and black alike, were always asking in various ways to put her in this position, one of servitude, of serving. They wanted her on her back with her legs spread, body motionless, a mouth open only for moaning or what he’d force in. So many of them held this secret desire within themselves but eventually, with time, they always found a way to tell her.

She picked the bit up. As she felt its weight, she imagined what her fore-bearers must have experienced as the iron was fastened on. “Where did you get this?”

“eBay,” he said. The simplicity of his answer made her laugh. She asked him if it was real.

“I think so. Go ahead. Put it on,” he urged, and she did.

Sidekicks

March 15, 2019.Reading time 49 minutes.

By JP Gritton

I guess you’re wondering how I ended up with a woman like Syrena, in the first place. Truth is, it’s Mike’s fault. He’s the one to blame. Or to thank, I don’t know which. It was Mike Corliss who turned to me on this too-hot afternoon beginning of September. The four of us ought to go out sometime. Double Dutch, I mean. And I remember him smiling at me while my guts turned somersaults. He was a different man those days, full of piss and vinegar. He had a smart mouth on him, and he wasn’t afraid to use it either, which is why Laughton Starbuck kind of had it out for Mike.

“Where’s your protective eyewear, Corliss?”

“My protective eyewear?”

“That’s what I asked you.”

“My protective eyewear’s protecting the dashboard of Sheldon Cooper’s truck. That’s where I left it this morning.”

Sheldon, he used to call me, ’cause he knew it got on my nerves. To everybody else I was Shelley.

I was just a journeyman carpenter back then. I drove Lij’s truck to work and home every day, give my best friend Mike Corliss a ride. Half the time, he’d forget something on the dash: that blue bandana, that pack of smokes, that pair of goggles.

I guess I looked up to Mike, who was a couple years older than me and besides that had a way about him. He told a story better than anybody I know, though you never knew how much was true and how much he’d half-made up. He told me how a honeybee flies through the rain, missing every drop. He told me nobody’d ever saw a giant squid, but even so scientists know they exist ’cause sometimes, he said, a whale or a shark will wash up on the beach, a great big bite took out of it.

At Bay

March 15, 2019.Reading time 42 minutes.

By Tamar Jacobs

I was chopping peppers when Ronnie came home. I’d been thinking to go to Safeway to see if there were any open bags of candy I could take from, or maybe walk down to the water to feed my birds, but then I saw him and all those ideas went up like smoke from my head. I hadn’t seen him in two years. He got out of the car and stepped into the sun, one whole big part of his skin a new lake of blue. I saw later up close it was all made of little tattoos lifting and blending together, but from behind my side of the kitchen window that day, it looked like he’d been afflicted with some kind of blue sickness. Down his arm and up his neck and some up on his forehead right above his eyebrows and a little trickle from just one eye. He’d gone away, got dipped in color and come back. I found this extraordinary and mysterious, and it kept me up at night thinking about it, touching my own skin wondering what it might feel like to go blue.

After Ms. Eva got done bumping into everything around her with her car like always when she parks, and they slammed their doors closed and went inside her house, I squeezed my eyes shut and chopped as fast as I could, felt tiny sharp prickles of cold pepper water punching into my fingers. I could not look down, because if I did the pepper water became the licking tongues of snakes trying to kiss me away from my knife, trying to slither out from under the blade I was hacking on them with. But as hard as I could I refused to see and they gave up moving and I heard Ms. Rose roll over the loud spring on the couch and I tried even harder because I could not let her hear me chopping in a crazy-sounding way or she would know I’d been skipping pills again. I would not feel sorry about those snakes. Would not, would not, no, I told myself.

I would not then, but when I sleep, I can’t stay as careful about my thoughts as when I am awake. That night while I slept feelings began to creep in about those snakes I killed. They were just being themselves. Being snakes. And there I had been chopping them to pieces trying to pretend I thought they were peppers.

First Date

March 15, 2019.Reading time 15 minutes.

By James Lineberger

In the sixth grade I asked
Sissy Morgan
if she would go to the picture show with me
on what was supposed to be
my first date but when I said it her eyes got wide
and her mouth fell open and she just backed off till she ran into
a chair and had to sit down and didn’t say a word.

But during recess I could see her at the swings
giggling and whispering to her girl friends
and all of them staring at me
but if it was a trick or what I didn’t know
cause while I was waiting for the school bus
she came up to me and said
well all right but she would not go to
the Paramount which all
they showed was double-feature westerns with people like
Sonny Tufts or Charles Starrett
and if there was anything she could not abide it was Charles Starrett doing
The Durango Kid.

But when I told mama she said not
to worry because
we could go see Forever Amber at the Visulite
with Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde
which was kind of like Gone With The Wind mama said
and the name was because of the color
of her eyes which ought to be just the kind
of story that a little girl would go for
and what we will do
mama said was I will drive y’all to the Visulite
and meet you out front again when
it is over.

Love Story in an Alternate Universe in Which Small Talk Is Answered Honestly and in Detail

March 15, 2019.Reading time 26 minutes.

By Daniel Paul

I run into her on the street. We haven’t seen each other in a few years. “The weather is really nice today, especially for winter,” I say.

“I know,” she says. “It’s been so gray and depressing lately that I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I hate living here. Or at least I hope I hate living here. Otherwise it means that I just hate living in general.”

“No,” I reassure her. “I’m sure you just hate living here; this city is terrible.”

“I feel a bit better today,” she continues, “though it’s probably only warmer outside because of climate change, which makes me feel like enjoying a day like this is stealing joy directly from future generations . . . which I guess is okay, because I don’t want to have children: babies look like aliens, and I can’t even keep a houseplant alive; honestly, sometimes I don’t even want to keep the plant alive; I’d rather lord over it with my power to decide its fate, though that’s probably just a way of rationalizing the fact that even if I did want to keep a plant alive—to feel like I was contributing to the cycle of life and warmth even if just in my living room—I’m sure I would fail somehow and it would die anyway.”

Parliament Lights

March 15, 2019.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Jonathan Durbin

It is too early to be up when the girl rises to pack. Winter rain taps the window but otherwise outside the street is silent and dark. No joggers or dog walkers or idling delivery trucks. No cars, not yet. No sign of Mike Lavoie.

The girl wishes for a cigarette but there isn’t time enough to smoke. She isn’t allowed anyway. There is no smoking in the shelter, the boy made that clear. If she smokes there they’ll be forced out and then where will they stay? Her mother’s? Nowhere is safe. Not anymore. The boy rolls onto her side of the bed, his hair thick with night grease, and mutters into her pillow. It sounds like You know better.

Their luggage lies open on the rug at the foot of the bed. The girl and the boy agreed to take just the one suitcase. Any more luggage and they’d be weighed down, that’s what he said. They might have to leave the shelter in a hurry. But the suitcase is half-full and they’ve barely the things they’d want for a long weekend. A fraction of their socks, a sampling of their underwear. A small quota of tees and jeans and hooded sweatshirts. Her things and his things thrown together, mixed up inside.

They argued about this last night, like they argued about it the night before and the night before that too. The girl cannot imagine how they will pack everything into a space so small. Fear of mistakes has led her to dither and ask the boy’s opinion about silly things. Which Nalgene bottle he prefers. If they should buy instant coffee or grounds. If it’s all right for her to bring whiskey.

Stop worrying, he has told her again and again. The shelter is equipped to last a long time. Months, maybe a year. Mike Lavoie has stocked it with tins of tuna and bags of salt-cured pork, iodine tablets and a generator and fresh batteries for flashlights. Oxygen canisters and Ibuprofen and cases of disinfectant wipes. Two motorcycles with full tanks of gas, and all the bullets and rifles they’ll need to hunt or defend the land.

Rabbit Summer

February 13, 2019.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Jane Marcellus

Winner, Editors’ Prize for Prose, selected by Dinty W. Moore

He is standing there in a spattered white lab coat, holding up a bunch of carrots. I am standing here in the doorway, hoping I’ve come to the right place.

“You must be Jane,” he says. “Guess who these are for?”

From a few feet away, I notice his eyes. They are brown—so brown that I cannot see his pupils. I keep looking at his eyes, trying to nd them, trying to make certain that it is me, here, that he is looking at. His gaze makes me aware that I am actually a person standing here, in this spot—a person with a name, which is Jane, which he knows. I am not used to feeling seen. I am used to feeling invisible. It is unnerving—blinding even—to be seen by a person whose pupils I cannot see, a person who knows my name.

I am young, although I do not know it. Twenty-one. I confuse feeling seen, and this odd feeling of being blinded, for love.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m Jane.”

The job is feeding lab rabbits and washing beakers in the college biology labs. It is my third job this summer, on account of an argument with my mother. For the past four summers, I have worked at one of the jobs she got me. She is a legal secretary for the state of Oklahoma, and she likes to get me typing jobs. Since the summer I was seventeen, I have gone along with this. I can live at home and make more money there than waitressing or busing tables. I save the money to pay for the college, which is in Connecticut and expensive, even with the scholarship. I am not sure I deserve the college, so typing has seemed like a kind of penance. But it is beginning to feel dangerous. I will graduate in another year. I sense relief rising in my mother like a prayer. Finally, I will come home for good and she can get me on with the state. I will be a secretary, not for the summer but for life.

Tough Love

January 31, 2019.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Paul Hansen

I was one of those kids that spent a lot of time on the internet. Chat rooms, message boards. ASL, S2R, and some gender tricks too. That stuff was normal in the Nineties. And it was all good clean fun until I fell in with some gun nuts when I was fifteen years old, the type of people that encrypt shit. Way down in the web. Amateur blacksmiths and whatnot. I got so into it I ended up putting together a makeshift muzzle loader out of Schedule 80 piping, cold American steel, something I saw on the blacksmithing forum. I tried it in the basement but it didn’t work so I got a slightly bigger ball bearing for ammunition, about the size of a marble. I took it to the backyard, propped it on some dunnage, put a flame to the fuse. And by god, it worked. There was this huge discharge, a cloud of smoke. It shot wildly though. Fucking hit my kid brother square in the leg. He was clear across the yard. Dad came running from the house. There was so much blood that none of it seemed real and after Dad stopped the bleeding he came at me and that’s the deepest fear I’ve ever felt.

But that all happened fifteen years ago. I’m an adult now, turned thirty recently. Lacey’s my girlfriend these days. We met at a support group for those that’ve been injured by firearms: Tuesday night, St. Vincent de Paul, where I was the only one whose wound wasn’t visible. It’s like Lacey says: “Pretty baby’s hurt on the inside.” When she was ten years old she was making herself a necklace out of scrap—a little bit of twine, whatever else—then she found the perfect final piece, this shiny gold thing. All it needed was to be flattened. She grabbed a hammer and that was that. It was a live .22 round. Went off in her face. Took a half-dozen surgeries to put her back together. As a result she’s permanently blind in the right eye, with a spiderweb of ice covering the whole thing; little scars that don’t look like much until they’re pressed together.

Bliss

January 18, 2019.Reading time 48 minutes.

By Amber Wheeler Bacon

Sarah worked with Beth at a public library downtown. Chris was a biology professor at University of Louisville. They met at Beth’s birthday party.

At the party, Chris quoted Winston Churchill and Hemingway in the same conversation, and Sarah couldn’t tell if she liked him. When she went to smoke a cigarette on the back porch, he followed. Muted voices came from the re pit at the side of the house, but they were alone on the porch. He took the lit cigarette from her fingers and flicked it over the railing. When he kissed her, she blew the last of the smoke into his mouth. They ended up at his apartment. The sex was drunk and sloppy. They kept laughing. Everything seemed hilarious back then.

Sarah woke up buzzing the next morning, as if Chris had flipped a switch somewhere inside her. Driving home, she had the thought that she would put up with a lot from a man who made her feel this way.

A month later, they walked in Cave Hill Cemetery behind his house while red sauce simmered on the stove. Sarah told Chris about her father’s death when she was twelve and how she still sometimes visited the funeral home. “It’s on my route to work and back,” she said. “When the parking lot’s packed, I can’t resist.”

She was embarrassed when Chris took her hand and squeezed it.

Real Things

November 3, 2018.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Nicole Hebdon

Lorna tells her fiancé that we met in the cemetery. “Chloe was writing a paper on the War of 1812 graves,” she says. “And I was taking photos for my photography class. It’s a haunted site. Paranormal investigators have looked into it and everything.” This is partially true.

The Riverside Cemetery is known for disappearing children and hovering orbs, but I wasn’t writing a paper. I was writing an article for the supernatural edition of the school magazine.

And we didn’t meet there.

Lorna’s fiancé, Caleb, tells us how he and Lorna met, and she folds her hands in her lap, like a child at Sunday school. Whenever one of Lorna’s roommates stands to get a wine cooler, or giggles purposelessly, he starts his sentence over, so I’ve heard his story approximately three-and-a-half times when he finally lets someone else talk.

They met in high school. They met in high school. They met in high school. They met . . . Lorna and I met at an abandoned mini-golf course. The castle’s peak looked like a crumbling monument, and I was sure it would lead me to another gravesite for my article, but past the thick cattails, there were toppled bridges, a sputtering stream that emptied into a square-shaped pond and Lorna wearing a university T-shirt.

Weanie Tender, PO

October 28, 2018.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Jennifer Christman

Like the dry, hot winds of Santa Ana itself, the sound came in waves. Pop-pop- pop-pop-pop. Weanie Tender didn’t know from where. Weanie Tender didn’t know from what. Staccato bursts of varying lengths and speed, then brief respites. Now, however, is a different story. There’s a constant vibrato. Take any moment—take this moment—Weanie can hear it, by God. Pop-pop-pop-pop- pop. He can feel it. He need only focus his mind to detect what’s on the order of a cosmic palpitation. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Weanie is a low-level PO. He wants to be a detective someday.

“Force’s under attack,” says his partner, Dom, wolfing Chick-n-Minis from his own private 20-tray, steaming up the cruiser. Bag-of-bones Weanie is crumpled in the passenger seat.

“You hear it now?” says Weanie, drawing in a sharp, short breath.

He and Dom are on break outside the Chick-fil-A on Bristol. Weanie can’t sit still lately. He jiggles his legs and wrings his hands, listening, deeply, to what he’s now thinking must be an engine running—that’s it, an engine running rough, like an outboard motor, and snappy, pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. But that would require a boat, and water. And the city, the entire county, is landlocked. And the seismic index is low. Weanie checks daily.

Coach O

October 23, 2018.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Robert Hinderliter

Featured Art: by Owen Jones

Coach Oberman watched from his office window as a group of students prepared the bonfire by the south end zone. Two kids stacked tinder while another knelt beside a papier-mâché buffalo they would throw on the fire at the end of the pep rally. Oberman couldn’t wait to watch it burn.

He’d just gotten off the phone with Mike Treadwell—coach of the Ashland Buffaloes—who’d called to wish him luck in tomorrow’s game. Mike had been Oberman’s assistant for three years before taking the job at Ashland High. And now, after back-to-back state titles in his first two years, he’d been offered the defensive coordinator position at Emporia State University. This would be the last time they’d face off.

“I’ll miss seeing you across the field,” Mike had said. “Although I sure won’t miss trying to stop that Oberman offense.”

This was pandering bullshit. In their two head-to-head contests, Mike’s Buffaloes had routed Oberman’s Hornets by at least four touchdowns.

“I just wanted to say thanks,” Mike had said. “I couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”

He’d said it like he meant it, with no hint of sarcasm, but Oberman knew there was venom behind those words. In Mike’s two years as assistant, Oberman had treated him badly. Mike had a good mind for the game, there was no denying that, but he was a scrawny wuss with thick glasses and a girlish laugh. He didn’t belong on a football field. Oberman had banished him to working with the punter and made him the butt of jokes in front of the players. When Mike’s brother-in-law became superintendent at Ashland and handed Mike the coaching job, Oberman had scoffed. And now Mike was moving on to a Division II college while he was stuck muddling through another losing season with an eight-man team in Haskerville. He knew the irony wasn’t lost on either of them.

Return

October 14, 2018.Reading time 35 minutes.

Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest
selected by Mary Gaitskill

By Analía Villagra

He was gone for eleven years, and Jackie is still getting used to the idea that Victor is out. Exonerated. His release had warranted a few sentences on the local NPR station, so Jackie knows that he has been at his mother’s place, three blocks away, for a week. She has not yet run into him on the street. Each time she leaves her apartment she scans the sidewalks, and when he does not materialize she feels equal parts relief and disappointment. Thursday afternoon she goes out of her way to walk past his building, willing him to be on the front steps or looking out the window. She slows down. Would he even recognize her now? Her hair is short, with a few stray glints of gray, no longer halfway to her waist and shimmering black. Her eyes have shadows beneath them. Her hips have spread. She’s thirty years old, in good shape she thinks, unless you’ve spent a decade fantasizing about a nineteen-year-old body. Jackie blushes. This is the first time she’s admitted to herself that she wondered—hoped? assumed?—that Victor thought about her while he was away. Eleven years. Maybe he’ll recognize her, maybe he won’t. She can’t decide which is worse, so she stares down at the sidewalk and hurries past the building.

She goes to the Y to pick her daughter up from camp. Graciela is running around the outdoor play area with a group of other kids, their hair wild, their clothes and faces filthy.

“Mama!” Grace shrieks when she sees her.

Jackie waves. She locates the teenagers wearing staff T-shirts, and they hand her the sign-out sheet without pausing their conversation. Jackie half-listens to the latest counselor drama while Grace gathers her things.

Of a Burrito de Buche

March 19, 2018.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Patrick Mainelli

Featured Art: Committed to Tradition (Uberlieferung verpflichtet) by Monika Baer

I’m not drinking anymore. It’s not a court-ordered thing or medical imperative. I didn’t crash a car or assault a neighbor or luridly graze my cousin’s leg at the reception of her wedding. No one has ever even told me to “take it easy there” as I poured three, four, five fingers of scotch over ice. As a drunk, I’m purely congenial. Maybe I’ve tipped over a plate of food here and there, fallen asleep on the toilet once or twice, sung in competing volume with the Midnight Mass choir, but who hasn’t? After a nightful of drinks I am more inclined to turn embarrassingly casual with my affections than to become anything close to mean or combative.

So this is a self-imposed drought. Denial might be the word.

The shit thing is it’s July. Beer’s favorite month. Because after mowing a lawn or trimming a tree there is no reward like the reward of beer, and because to swim in the lake, to rest tired and near-naked on the shore, and to not drink a beer feels an affront to God’s finer generosities—July demands a beer.

Wings of Wind

March 14, 2018.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Eliot Fintushel

Featured Art: West Wind by Duncan Grant

“He goes on wings of wind,” is what a psalm says, one of the psalms. Another one says, “Happy is he who shall grab your babies and hurl them against a rock.” When I try to explain these scriptures to Miriam and Cassie, they look at me like I’m stupid. Do you call that a friend? In the Jesus times, friends even kissed each other on the lips for hello—Miriam would be caught dead first. Cassie, okay, actually, even on the lips, which I am going to tell you about it, except for the fact that she is damned to Hell.

Like, I’m the one who is stupid! This is what the Bible says about sinners like Miriam and Cassie: “They have their reward.” Namely, shit.

Miriam wears this, like, Nazi dirndl, which she thinks is cool, with her curly once-upon-a-time blonde hair and with sunglasses with red rims, and she looks like melted cheese with a worm in it, but she walks like she thinks she is a beauty queen, you know, with, like, her one heel right in front of, like, the toe of her other foot, in a straight line, supposedly, except that it’s crooked!

Love’s Been Good to Me

September 14, 2017.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Andrew Robinson

Featured Art: Zurich by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

The girl from Zurich is deathly quiet. But even in a king-sized bed her presence prickles me awake. Her fetal body rises, falls, a pillow wedged between us. A natural end approaches now; I’m sure she knows it too. We met six months ago, flotsamed onto the misfit table at a Chinese wedding. There was nothing to do but drink, and seven wines into the night we decided to go slumming at Orchard Towers—Singapore’s neon throwback of tacky sleaze. Sailors go there for the prostitutes, and bankers for the irony, but for her it was the Filipino bands. I love to dance to them, she said, they always try so hard. But she wouldn’t go there without a man, and so, still in my suit at 4 a.m., I held her as she cried on the sticky dancefloor. Cried with drunken empathy for the Indonesian whores she was dancing with. At their age I was still in school, she said, And they have to sell themselves to these fucking men. She feinted at the sweaty marines, bewildered with Burmese whisky and shore leave, and she had me at that. I’ve always been a sucker for compassion—it doesn’t always serve me well.

Then as she sniffed into the smoky bathroom I texted her something about goodness—I don’t remember what—which showed up as her Facebook status the next day. But like the young marines, she was shipping out in the morning, her company posting her to Paris. And it wasn’t until her stint was up—four months later—that we got to meet again. And all that texting and mailing and chatting online, it didn’t serve to warn us that after just a few weeks it wouldn’t be working the way we’d hoped. And now it’s coming to an end—no relish of redemption here—my thoughts rise on a sleepy surge of affection. The girl from Zurich: I’ll remember her—I will.

Your Mother Wouldn’t Approve

May 29, 2017.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Krystal Sanders

Of the way you spend Saturday morning in your room, instead of helping Papaw with the lawn work. You watch him on the riding mower, in customary slacks and suspenders, coasting back and forth beneath your window as if the ragged scream of the machine will summon you like a siren to your manly duty. You raise the binoculars Papaw used when he was stationed in West Africa during WWII, long before his shoulders bowed and his skin darkened with liver spots. They are clunky, large in your hands even though you’ve had a growth spurt and you’re well on your way to catching up to Peter, who’s a whole six feet and had college basketball scouts watching him at every game last season. It was Peter’s senior year of high school, your freshman year. The fall had been glorious, riding the cloud of popularity as Peter Thompson’s younger brother. The other kids, the teachers and coaches, cafeteria ladies, librarians, all looking at you with an expectation that was not yet a burden. You joined the Fellowship of Christian Students, which Peter was president of, and took the Advanced Placement classes he’d taken. You had more friends than you’d ever had before. Through the lens, Papaw’s face jumps up at you. You’re intimately aware of every wrinkle, every nose hair. He guides the mower in long, straight lines, first in front of your window at the corner of the house, on the second floor, and then away toward the county road. The motor’s howl falls to a low growl, builds back up as he returns exactly two feet to the left, is eventually reduced to a low grumble at the back of the house.

Your mother wouldn’t approve of the way you watch the world, binoculars pressed to your face, aimed into the neighborhood across the county road. The man who owns the nearest corner lot, 5371, has some kind of shepherd. The dog roams along its chainlink fence, pants in the heat, takes a shit. You catch a glimpse of motion deeper in the neighborhood and sit up straight. You focus on the door that caught your eye, at 5377 striding out of the back of her house in shorts and a man’s plaid shirt. She is headed to the metal trash barrel at the back of the lot. You know she will stand there for a long time, and then go back inside. You imagine burying your fingers in the tangle of her long hair. She is barefoot, and the thought of the stiff crunchiness of the yellow grass against the tender arches of her feet almost makes you moan.

Loving by Numbers

May 28, 2017.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Frances Orrok

Featured Art: by Nick Fewings

10
my dog, climbing trees, apples, my sister
On two separate car journeys, one with my mother, one with my father, I ask each of them to choose the last thing they’d give up. At ten, my questions take this form with some regularity: exaggerated parameters, carefully explained rules. “It can be food or water or something solid, but it doesn’t have to be. You only have twenty-four hours to live.” Both ask if they can think about it. Both remember to answer by the end of the journey (a hastily added rule).

My father: “the capacity to love.”
My mother: “to know I am loved.”

11
anywhere outside the classroom; mud, cold, leaves, not sports, lists
I start smoking in ditches. I ask my father if he’d still love me if I went to prison. “Of course.” He doesn’t hesitate or ask what crime I will have committed. I think about this and watch the back of him digging. I don’t doubt his words but I am curious. “What if I joined the IRA?” There is a long pause and he straightens out for it. The Irish Republican Army is in the news a lot. They drive fear into every school child, make public transport and Saturdays anxious. There are no longer bins on the streets, litter blows frightened of b-o-m-b-s. “There will always be things you could do to make loving you harder. That’s not the same as not loving you. Difficult doesn’t mean no.”

Year of the Rat

May 28, 2017.Reading time 26 minutes.

By Lucas Church

Featured Art: Chinese Zodiac Animals in Harmony by Kerima Swain

On my birthday, the twenty-fifth anniversary of a space shuttle disaster, I move in with Uncle, who lives next to a trash heap. The heap is privately owned, not the county dump, not open to just anybody, and it’s haloed with crows. I squirrel myself upstairs while Uncle watches the video of the spaceship disintegrating into smoke, repeating. I mention in passing an ex-boyfriend with fists like cans of beans, that he’s looking for me, probably. Outside the crows bicker while I hide under the covers, the house full of Uncle’s sobs back to the television.

The shuttle exploded hours before I was born. A question of timing, my mother said.

Fast forward to our routine each morning: Uncle sloughs to the door and asks if I am okay, if I need anything. I always say no, but offer to clean his pool, where trash from the heap sometimes catches. Uncle doesn’t ask about Ex, though he’s gleaned I’m running from Ex’s jealousies and agendas, but rattles out something about decisions, good and bad, where they end us all up.

After weeks of this dance, he finally needs something: We lack pudding. Uncle has a sweet tooth. Or maybe we could go for dinner, he says, talk about things, hit some of the friendly bars, etc. Two guys on the prowl then silence and we all feel embarrassed for him together.

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.”

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?”

Safety

February 4, 2016.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Catherine Carberry

Featured Art: Abstract – Two Women With Tennis Racquets by Carl Newman

When we came to Montana we weren’t going to be cooks, but that’s how we ended up. Blair got me the job, she’s the real chef. In the kitchen, after the Eggs Benedict disaster, I mainly swat flies and hang amber strips of flypaper from the ceiling. The goal is to keep moving to outpace the flies. They’re everywhere and some of them bite.

Blair and I work together on this farm, feeding the owners and workers. Two of the workers are Mexican and the others are drifters with invented names: Bill, Bird, Slim Jim, G. The Mexicans are called León and Ernesto and say they’re brothers but they’re pulling our leg. They don’t know that when Blair and I lived in Whitefish for six months before our money ran out, we told people we were
sisters. We thought it would help us somehow, that the sister game would give us some footing and a tangible backstory, but it didn’t attract too much attention and Blair never found a ski instructor who would love her. By that time, it was too late for either of us to go back to our husbands. Just as we were losing momentum, Blair saw a sign posted for a cook on a farm only nine miles away. The job came with some money and a private trailer. She talked to the owners and convinced them to take both of us for the same pay. We’ve been here since then, avoiding the question of what we’re doing and when we’ll leave.

Old Married Couple

January 27, 2016.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Robin Messing

Featured Art: (Untitled–Group of Flowers) by Mary Vaux Walcott

They couldn’t part with things, so in the end, they lived with everything. Two toaster ovens, two coffee makers, two waffle irons, two sets of dishes, two couches, two coffee tables, two beds. Their former spouses would not have tolerated it. But together, something different happened.

Ben toasted an English muffin in his toaster oven, and Sophie toasted a piece of leftover challah in hers. Ben poured coffee from the percolator pot that his former wife, Edna, had bought decades before at a hardware store on Avenue J. Sophie brewed coffee in a Mr. Coffee pot that her former husband, Sam, had purchased after their glass percolator pot, slippery with soap, splintered in the sink when Sophie dropped it.

Sam died first, four years earlier. Six months later, Edna passed, both from cancer. Two years ago, Sophie and Ben married—a small ceremony in a shul on Coney Island Avenue.

A Million Tigers Who Aren’t Mad at You

January 16, 2016.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Sandy Nietling

Featured Art: Abstract–Flowers in the Left by Carl Newman

My Mexican boyfriend cannot tell me if he’s ever killed a person. This is not because of a language barrier on either side. I asked my question clearly enough, and he is a good conversationalist with a decent English vocabulary. Still, Raf furrows his dark brows for a long moment, apparently needing time to puzzle through the facts as he knows them. Finally he frowns. “I’m not sure.”

When I ask my American boyfriends if they’ve killed someone, they laugh the way that they’re meant to laugh. Then, while they’re busy being surprised or trying to work up a clever response, I can worry about the papers I have to grade or how much longer the sliced pineapple in the refrigerator will last before I have to give it to the orioles in my backyard. That’s why you ask about death in the first place. It’s supposed to buy conversational elbow room, but Rafael has done the unexpected and provoked my attention instead of letting it drift away. It is not until later, in the dark of my bedroom, that he is relaxed enough to explain his crime.

Rock Harbor

November 30, 2015.Reading time 52 minutes.

Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Maud Casey

By Susan Finch

Featured Art: Early Morning After a Storm at Sea by Winslow Homer

When Bob Miller slipped and fell from the rooftop deck of his ex-wife’s houseboat into the inky black of Rock Harbor, it almost appeared as if he’d done it on purpose. The fall took him feet over head, his flailing arms tightening into a V like he was performing a cartwheel. His fingers spread open in sunbursts, his legs stretched wide and long like a dancer’s, and his toes tensed into sharp points. As he tumbled the twenty-five feet into the shadowy water, his whole body seemed to expand and explode into a star.

The entire party saw Bob’s fall or, at least, when the police conducted the official investigation, partygoers would claim they had. And in truth, the spinning and twisting of Bob Miller’s body end-over-end was so spectacular that in hearing the story later in whispers passing across the marina from slip to slip, everyone felt they had seen it. Those who knew Bob assumed he’d been dared to do it. He had always been a bit of a showoff and couldn’t say no to a challenge. When he was thirteen, he’d purchased a dirt bike and had performed stunts for his friends on the weekend, vaulting over a campfire, navigating the narrow wall between the cornfield and the river, and once, after a double-dog-dare, he’d launched the bike from the hayloft of his father’s dilapidated barn and taken a nasty spill on the landing, fracturing his femur.

This Bed You’ve Made

November 20, 2015.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Samuel Ligon

Featured Art: The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy) by Vincent van Gogh

We killed Kitty’s husband with a harpoon her grandfather had given her, but it could have been a skillet or the steel ashtray from her kitchen table. The band would sit around that table at night, smoking and drinking and filling the house with music, and as it got late, Billy Wayne would make Kitty feel bad about who she was and what was best in her, calling her ignorant hillbilly trash and blaming her for everything that was small in him. He married her when she was fifteen, two months after he discovered her in Spokane, though everybody knew she didn’t need to be discovered. She only needed to sing the sweet, sad songs we wrote, and America’s heart would melt.

Our first single, “A Stone of Ice,” told the story of Billy Wayne trampling Kitty’s love with whiskey and womanizing, leaching all the goodness from her once pure soul. Every song we sang was about him. We wrote “This Bed You’ve Made” a month before he died, with the chorus that would make Kitty famous:

                       This bed you’ve made of cheating nights
                       This bed you’ve made of sin
                       This bed you’ve made of drunken lies
                       Is the bed I’m in with him

We Are All Beyond Disgusting

May 2, 2015.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Jill Kato

Featured Image: Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) by Winslw Homer, 1876
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

I like to get to the ship early. You’ll usually find a couple of old-timers waiting by the bar, itching to sip a Tom Collins or a whiskey sour on the rocks and get their vacation started right. This is the best time to build rapport and I’m their gal. At this point, they’re still excited about their trip and have a thick wad of cash in their billfolds. Their wives are in their cabins getting settled or making appointments at the spa or booking excursions for when we dock. The bar is quiet and they have me all to themselves. They can pour out all their troubles, and I can pour them all the liquor they need, at heavily marked-up prices. I haven’t even finished restocking the tabasco and maraschino cherries when a salty dog of a guy walks in. His name is Jerry and he’s on board to celebrate his wife’s sixty-fifth birthday. I ask him what he does, and he says he used to own a manufacturing company in the fashion district but now he’s retired. Left the business to his son. He says he built his company from scratch. Even though his shirt is ugly and has hula girls on it, I tell him I like it. I tell all men I like their shirts. I garnish his glass with an orange slice and tell him I admire men like him, self-made men who do things like run their own companies. And I do.

Last Call

October 12, 2014.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Penny Zang

Each night, after work, we changed our names. We were trying on new identities, seeing which ones fit. Serena and I would throw off our aprons and get undressed in the car, wiggling into tight black pants and shirts thin as napkins. Sometimes we wore red lipstick, sometimes eye glitter. Then we’d find a new bar with the same tattered barstools we were used to balancing on, the same veil of smoke and low light that felt like home. To the men who approached us, we turned into different girls, ones who knew how to charm even without the promise of making a tip.

Our new names were decided on the spot, never the same name twice. They were names we’d once used for our baby dolls, names we’d wished our moms had given us: Isabel, Deanna, Lily. Everything else came later—our stories, our new personalities—fueled by beer and tequila, a practiced game of improvisation. Sometimes men invited us home or out to their car. Sometimes the night just fizzled and we’d stumble out to the street in the wrong direction, too lost to even know it. We’d stop to eat greasy pizza and compare notes, our throbbing feet the only part of us that wanted to give up.