NOR: Embrace Your Conjunctions
By Ava Moreci
Kevin does not know how to tie his shoes yet.
His red sneakers have Velcro straps, and the day we met, even those were waving in the air.
I knelt down to secure them after I took attendance. “Miss?” he said, when I stood again, his shoes fastened tight. What’s that say?”
A large painted mural was beside our line-up spot. I read the words for him out loud: Welcome Student Scholars!
“Scholars?” He echoed. “I’m not a scholar! I’m six!”
By Margaret M. Byrne
Featured Art: “While Shadows Sleep” by Edward Supranowicz
Piggot’s Point, May 11, 1975
Nothing ever snuck in through the second-story window at 333 North Bollingbrook, the foster home owned by the Grimmer sisters, Lucy, Lila and Lily, who swore on the Bible to care for “them poor motherless boys” at the price of one thousand and sixteen dollars per boy per month, “and worth every penny as boys eat so much and are so much work and d’ey got so much boy dirt and da price of food has gone up so much—and all d’em city fees.” Paid with a bank deposit by the Commonwealth—always on the first.
Nothing found its way through the crack in the two-over-two window, shut tighter than Miss Lucy’s lady parts. Not a bird. Not a moth. Not a squirrel or a mouse or a cat. Not even a skeeter.
Nothin’.
Until tonight.
By Siamak Vossoughi
Featured Art: “Mirage in the Sky” by Gina Gidaro
Dear Yara,
I figure you ought to know something about the year you went from two to three, and how I would go quiet sometimes when we were playing or reading or walking somewhere together. Some days I’d see the kids in Gaza in you and I’d take the moment we were in and hold it as the last moment one of them had before being killed. I’d breathe through it, telling myself to do two things, as evenly as I could, fifty-fifty: Stay in the moment with you, because you deserved that. And recognize it was true, that each one of them had, in the moments just before, been just as alive as the aliveness in you. And something would happen to the moment with you then. It would hold all of who you were, and I would come as close as I could to touching that. I’d get as close as I could to understanding the thing the mothers and fathers there had lost.
Keep breathing, keep breathing, I’d tell myself. As big as the feeling of the death of children was, it was important to stay small. It was wonderful to stay small with you, because there was plenty that was still big. There would be days that year when I would be reading about Gaza just before you came home from daycare with your mother, and it would seem like a long way to travel to go from where children were dying to playing with you, but when I got it right, it wasn’t a long way at all. It was love both ways. If those children deserved to live, then let’s you and me see what kind of funny business Blue Bunny and Ruffles the Dog can get up to. Those children were in our games all that year. They were there because I was thinking that someday I would tell you about them the same way I was telling you stories of the animals who were lining up for school. I didn’t know when that would be. This was also the year that you started having nightmares. You’d wake up early and tell us that a scary monster had been chasing you. I would quietly admire your ability to articulate your fear. But I’d wonder too if you were getting it from me. I’d wonder if you could tell the way I was carrying around the kids I was reading about at the same time that I was playing with you. If you were, that seemed like a decent way to start having nightmares. I remember when I was nine and the men who I’d learned had tortured my father in prison in Iran replaced monsters in my dreams. I said goodbye to monsters then. Now you were saying hello to them, but your bravery made me wonder if you knew the world could be worse. That year we tried to let you in on it as carefully as we could. Back in November, we went to a family peace march on Beacon Hill, led by Jewish Voices for Peace. We taught you what peace meant. There were kids there holding up signs saying Stop Bombing Children. I knew you might be one of them in a few years, and I didn’t mind that I’d have to tell you about war by then. It was the same as sharing a lot of beautiful things with you that day, like the view of the Cascade Mountains from the top of the hill and the circle of people gathered outside the library. I thought about how to have the right balance between anger and sadness when I told you. I looked forward to your anger because there is a time in a person’s life when anger can rightly feel like strength, and five, six, seven, or eight is right about in that sweet spot. It’s because anger is likely to be an appropriate feeling at that age, at least the kind that’s just discovered the foolishness or ugliness of the world. But I looked forward to your sadness too, because sadness carried me farther than anger did. There were more stories to come out of it for me. There was more singing too. I thought about how I was going to have to pay close attention to how sadness or anger helped or got in the way when you learned about war and everything else, but the nice thing was knowing that if I ever wasn’t sure which one you needed, I could always ask.
Read MoreBy Swathi Desai
The email from Kalpana’s niece showed up at the top of her personal inbox. There were no other addressees and only one Cc appeared displaying her niece’s email address. The subject line read: Something You Should Know. Kalpana thought the subject odd, but she closed the email without reading it; she didn’t have time this morning. Her day was filled with meetings; the email would have to wait until tonight when she returned home.
The last time she received an email from Jyoti was after her high school graduation, about ten years ago. Unlike this email, that one was sent en masse, to relatives and family friends thanking them for their generous graduation gifts. All of the addresses, some fifty or sixty of them, were clearly displayed in the recipient line. Kalpana recalled that Jyoti excelled in both academics and the arts, graduating from high school at sixteen and wanting to use her talents to “make the world a more beautiful place,” as she’d written in her thank you email. She added that she would be thinking of them all as she went off to study architecture at Cornell.
Read MoreBy R.M. Harper
I smoothed the dress across my chest as the Pride Parade smiled, danced, and sang its way past San Francisco City Hall. It was the kind of summer day the world paints the Bay: seventy degrees, a kissing breeze, and not a cloud in sight. Parents carried children on their shoulders to watch the floats pass by. Would it be easier for them, knowing what they could be, or are we moving backwards through the decadence of our time?
Violet cheered the Chicanx parade group passing twirling, smiling, holding hands. Her outfit alternated pink-black, nails and denim skirt, fishnets, scales of silver eyeshadow, six-foot-two, a neon angel in combat boots. We were in the MFA program together at Saint Mary’s College, in East Bay. She was a good friend and a great Dungeon Master. I was glad she had offered to come with me: it was my first Pride.
Entering the Civic Center I took in the panorama pink and plural. There were booths all along the Civic Center selling stickers, candy, cock rings, clothes. The crowd was making its way toward the main stage where drag queens smiled scarlet to the heartbeat drum of the stereo bass. A masc voice called out to us as we passed by.
Read MoreBy Michele Lombardo
My fourteen-year-old daughter lounges atop the Queen-sized bed wearing pink nylon hiking shorts, woolen socks, and nothing else. Torso, out. Boobs, out. I’d been in the bathroom for three minutes and now, somehow, this. Arms folded behind her head, she smiles, a sly tilt in her expression that signals danger. My husband faces the wall of the cramped hotel room, his back to her, like she ordered him to stand in the corner. Whatever this is, he’s losing. Lately, we’re all losing.
Jake pivots to me. “Try to convince her that wearing a shirt in front of her father isn’t too much to ask.” As though he’s the only one being victimized here.
Emma studies her nails like a Cartel boss deciding our fate. “You don’t have a shirt on. You never have a shirt on. Why should I have to wear a shirt when it’s hot out? You have nipples, do you not?” Her father is, indeed, shirtless.
Read MoreBy Heather Buchanan
The patent for the fire hydrant was lost in a fire.
There is a convincing theory that Frederick Graff, Sr. invented this life-saving device in 1801. He was the Chief Engineer of the Philadelphia Water Works. He came up with the idea of replacing wood pipes with an iron pipe system. He developed 37 other waterworks throughout the United States. He served the city of Philadelphia for 42 years and a stone gazebo with a bust of him was erected at Fairmount Water Works. It seems only natural that he would be the person who invented the fire hydrant. But the proof went up in flames along with 9,957 other patents and 7,000 patent models in 1836 when the U.S. Patent Office burned to the ground. At first, the Post Office was suspected of arson. It shared the building with the Patent Office and was already under investigation for awarding dishonest mail contracts. Rumors spread that they started the fire to destroy evidence. But, since the Post Office managed to save all their documents, investigators decided it was more likely an accident caused by someone improperly storing hot ashes in a box in the basement.
There was an attempt to recover these patents by getting duplicates from the original inventors, but this process was slow-moving and expensive. The endeavor was abandoned in 1849. Only 2,845 of the lost 9,957 patent records were restored.
Read MoreBy Matt Cantor
It’s been a full year, now.
It’s October 7th.
I stand at the platform at Kenmore, waiting for a D-train so I can get home to have dinner with my parents. I’m not waiting very hard. They’re going to ask all sorts of questions about what I’ve been working on.
“Don Quixote,” I’ll tell them.
“Hasn’t somebody already written that?” they’ll ask me.
“Lots of people have already written lots of things.”—like it means anything, or makes any sort of difference in the direction that I want it to.
Read MoreBy Lesa Hastings
Everyone has to start somewhere. I began as a child stalker, or rather an accomplice to my mom’s propensity for stalking.
We first saw the man we called “Tony 86” parked in the dirt lot rest stop adjacent to the motel my dad would go to after fighting with my mom. After he left us, it became the meeting point for my parents to exchange me and my brother for the occasional weekend. Mom called it a fleabag motel for lowlifes.
“Late as usual,” Mom said. Dad was late enough I wondered if he was actually coming. He was late a lot, but this time he was really late. I’d never stayed in a motel before and made up stories about the people we’d see coming and going while waiting for Dad. Minutes passed as I watched a couple argue on the second-floor balcony, then embrace in a farewell, the woman walking away with the man holding her hand as long as her arm would stretch, until she moved out of reach. Mom had stopped nagging about Dad being late, distracted by something.
Read MoreBy 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.
Read MoreBy Marissa Yuan
-After Chelsea Bieker
I see him when I look in the mirror, my father, the coach of my 5 a.m. 800-meter runs, who sacrificed to finance my education and once presented a twenty-five-slide PowerPoint on how to live my college life in the U.S. He carried a black-and-white photo of our family in his wallet. People say we look the same.
He was the first in his village to go to college after China’s Culture Revolution. He brought honor to and redeemed his once politically shamed family. By his mid-thirties, he already made tenure and was named vice president, the youngest in his university’s history. I remember him waking up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, punching the air and yelling, “You can’t get me!” My mother once gave me a peek into his childhood: being hung up-side-down to the ceiling with a rope tied to his ankles while my grandfather beat him until he had broken all three broom sticks. Wrinkles cover my father’s face now, his temples all gray, sharp shoulder bones gathering under his shirt. At my wedding, he hugged me long and tight, with tears of joy and pride, though I had walked down the aisle by myself and never asked him for the honor. I freeze-frame this minute. It was the moment I want to see him in and remember.
Read MoreBy Andrew Polhamus
February
The evening after Jeff hangs himself my friends and I meet up at Stephen and Danny’s new house. We converge in a neighborhood of brick rowhouses and form a circle of denim in a tired living room. There are six or eight of us, not here to sit vigil, but for lack of better ideas and a nagging feeling that we shouldn’t be alone. We speak in the circular logic of boys, too old to be thinking this way by our mid-twenties, but too inexperienced to handle it any better.
“He could’ve called me,” says Kurt, who is taller and more handsome than the rest of us and was closer to Jeffthan anyone. I’m annoyed with myself for noticing how nicely Kurt’s good looks carry grief, turning him from a jock in a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of a hardcore band into something romantic and world-weary.
“He always used to call me,” Kurt says.
“He didn’t call you because he didn’t want to,” I say. “It wasn’t you.”
“It wasn’t that he didn’t want to,” Michael says. “He just didn’t.”
“We don’t know what he wanted.”
“Well, we know he made up his mind.”
“I think we have bed bugs,” Danny says, his heavy Italian brows furrowing. The conversation drifts to pest control for a while.
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Co-winner of the Movable / New Ohio Review Writing Contest
By Kandi Workman
Featured Art: He’s Got the Works, by John Schriner
“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil
1
“Drop ’em dead like a dealer.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
He turned his slim face away from me, looked toward the muddy Elk River flowing with ease, shifted himself around on the cement ledge, kicking his dangling legs back and forth, bouncing rubber heels off the wall. We’d been sitting there for a while, talking, enjoying the late afternoon in early Spring. In the low light from the sun, the black-lined ice cream cone tattoo on the right side of his face, high on his cheek bone, just under his eye, stood out. I sometimes forget it’s there.
“Drop ‘em dead. That’s when your sales go up. It’s really fucked up. Addicts find out your shit killed somebody, they want your stuff. That’s just how it works.”
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By Caro Claire Burke
Featured Image: Shadows II by Sam Warren
It had been the loneliest summer of my life, which is maybe why I was so looking forward to seeing Beth.
I’d been living in the city for about four months by then. I still wasn’t quite used to the foul-smelling puddles, the fire escapes that blotted out the sky, the way the subway would be whispering along then suddenly scream to a stop, forever lurching me into the lap of some nameless and scowling person. And Beth was nice, I remembered: she’d been the type of girl in college who was always the first to laugh, the first to dance; the type of girl who never complained when we ran out of cold beer and had to switch to room temperature. She was a good sport, I remember a buddy saying once, and I’d agreed.
It was a clear Friday afternoon. I was headed to my mother’s house for the weekend, and the idea of leaving the city for a full two days had left me feeling light. I decided to throw my weekend bag over my shoulder and walk the fifteen blocks to the coffee shop Beth had suggested.
Read MoreBy Jill Christman
“It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love.”
~ John Lennon
This morning I made a single-cup drip coffee and poured too much water through the small yellow cone. When I lifted the cone to peek, strong, black coffee filled my white mug to the brim.
Nay, not the brim, I thought. Past the brim. I hung onto the edge of the counter and brought my eyes down level with the top of the mug, marveling at the way in which the coffee arched up out of the mug, a bitter mountain, the strength the surface tension pulling the coffee molecules beyond what seems possible. I would like to die on a coffee mountain, I thought, straightening my legs. I hadn’t yet had even a sip. Maybe it was time. The house was so quiet I could hear the muted ticking of the wall clock in the kitchen, thumping her plastic hands around inside her plastic face, bearing witness to the wonder of the coffee rising up and out of the mug, ticking off the seconds of our lives.
This is when I heard another voice in my head. Mr. Cosmos, my fifth-grade science
teacher at the round school in Newbury, Massachusetts circa 1980. He’d given us all big cups full of water and little cups full of nothing and told us to pour water into our little cups until our cups runneth over. That’s the way Mr. Cosmos talked. Children, he’d say as if we were attending boarding school in mid-century England, Children, are you ready? Pour. Pour your water. Pour your water out—and let your cups runneth over.
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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.
Read MoreBy Gwen Mullins
Two weeks ago, over a dinner of fried chicken, purple-hull peas, and buttered corn, Red McClendon’s family talked about the girl, Vera Martin, who disappeared one night after she left the Shop-Rite on Sand Mountain. Red’s son Jackson worked part-time as a bagboy at that same store, but he claimed he couldn’t remember if he’d been at work the night the girl went missing.
Red saw the girl’s picture on the news, a curvy young woman with thick, dark hair that hung in braided ropes down her back, her skin smooth and tan as river stone. Something about the way she tilted her head in the news photograph reminded him of Rosie, his own daughter. Red did not think too much about Vera Martin’s disappearance at first. He, like most of the folks he knew, assumed she would turn up in one of the trailers pocked with scattershot at the foot of the mountain, strung out on meth, or maybe in a Marietta hotel room with a man old enough to be her father, or her teacher. Red’s own sister ran off with three different boys before she even finished high school.
“Jean Anne always came back, after her money ran out or when she got tired of eating frozen burritos from the Chevron,” Red said.
Red’s wife Loretta pursed her lips, busied herself with grinding pepper over her dinner. She always got quiet when Red brought up the less savory aspects of his past.
“But Vera Martin was a nice girl, from a good family,” Rosie said.
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By Tania De Rozario
Winner, New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest: selected by Ira Sukrungruang
Featured Art: The Last Supper By H. Siddons Mowbray
1993. That’s when it happens. Two months after your twelfth birthday. It’s a sweaty afternoon. This day which blisters with possibility. This day you learn that there are demons inside of you.
You’re on your way home from school. You know something is wrong the minute you get off the bus. Your mother waits at the bus stop, teary-eyed. Your relationship has grown monosyllabic, but the tears feel like a warning, so you ask.
What’s wrong?
It is when she smiles that something inside you unravels. You realize hers are happy tears. But her smile is vacant. Placid. A Stepford Wives smile. The tears fall but there is nothing behind them. She’s a mannequin crying on command. A talking-doll with electronics scrambled.
You don’t have the language for this yet.
She grabs you, holds you tight: Nana has been saved!
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By Caroline Manring
Featured Art: Bird by Emmett Reese
. . .as if loss were a fire he was purified in again and again, until he wasn’t a ghost anymore.
–James Galvin, The Meadow
Running is the only thing that made sense to me after miscarrying at fifteen weeks pregnant. I had almost lost my own life as well, and spent three weeks in two different hospitals, linked by a trippy ambulance ride with an EMT who thought I couldn’t hear him singing along to U2. Pretty much everyone thought I was unconscious for much of my hospitalization. I wasn’t, of course, and between waves of Fentanyl I noted or hallucinated many searing moments, which, though warped by fear and pain, were still less bizarre than the daily life I had to get back to, eventually.
Even after I came home from the hospital, crying because I had to be wheeled out to the car, and even when I slept most of the day, propped on our eglantine couch with the help of ten or so lesser drugs, anything other than the thought of running again was absurd: people walking across the street? Ridiculous. They weren’t screaming. Sunsets? Ruthless. They ended everything, over and over and over. Someone else’s baby? An abrupt and tenacious violence; a violation of the possible, an extravagant body made radioactive by my pain, like a fur coat soaked with blood from a bucket I hurled myself.
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By Kay Gram
Featured Art: “Cradle of Kleptocracy” by Madara Mason
[arms & legs]
Be my arms and legs. You’re strong. You can do it! Mom would say. Mom’s body was small, fragile, needed time to move, moved differently than other bodies. I always thought she was beautiful. She was—blonde, blue eyed, narrow nose, all symmetrical. Mom had a determined presence that demanded respect and she had mastered the performance of a Eurocentric female beauty. Outfits were planned, makeup was worn, perfume was sprayed. We were late to everything. Sometimes she fell down.
* * *
Mom was diagnosed with Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, a rare and incurable neuromuscular disease, when she was thirty and pregnant with me. In our life together, she wasn’t able to lift heavy objects, things like pots or pans or dog food bags, her own body. She couldn’t run or dance or move very fast. She used a brown wooden cane, shiny wood, golden handle. When walking was too much, a wheelchair. I was her arms and legs. Elle was her arms and legs. We were good at being Mom’s limbs. Sometimes she held onto us when she walked and we took turns pushing her wheelchair. When she fell, we helped her back up. We loved Mom, her body, went to her for comfort, to cry, to laugh, for attention. Who could listen better? Care more about our days, our lives, our futures. Of course I miss her. She haunts me. Or her pain does.
* * *
By Caro Claire Burke
1.
The mother and father received the news on a Friday afternoon and were in the car driving south an hour later. They drove until midnight, then checked into a Courtyard Marriott for five hours before hopping back onto the road at dawn to cover the last hundred miles. They were silent in the car, which was strange: in their twenty years of marriage, they had never run out of things to talk about. There were, of course, things to talk about now—perhaps more than ever before—but neither the mother nor the father could find the words to start the conversation. By the time they navigated through the college town and parked at the police station where their son was held, they were both exhausted, irritable, and fit to burst with all the questions they’d swallowed on the way down.
The police officer behind the desk looked up as the entrance bells went off. “You must be the boy’s parents.”
The father stepped forward to shake the police officer’s hand. “That we are. Where is he?”
The officer was jovial to a fault. “Just down the hall a ways.” He turned toward a door in the back and waved an arm at them to follow. But the mother and father were silent, almost frozen, and at that silence the police officer turned around, his hand on the doorknob. “Hey, now,” he said. “Now’s not the time for that. Your boy is pretty shook up. He could use some support. Between you and me, these cases happen all the time. My guess? Your boy will be out of here in no time, clean record and everything.”
Read MoreBy 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.
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By Rebecca Haas
Featured Art: Angel by Luc Tuymans
The station wagon’s engine’s going faulty. We’re driving 20 mph on the right side of the highway, half in the slow lane, half on the shoulder. Mom’s got both hands clenched on the steering wheel, leaning over the dashboard like she’s urging the car forward with sheer will. The car moves in rhythmic gasps, pausing in between the surges, catching its breath. Mom whispers, quiet so the little ones can’t hear. Bad, bad, bad. This is baaaaaad.
She turns to me and says, “I’ve got the gas pedal pushed all the way to the floor.” Like, can you believe this shit?
We’re just outside of Gainesville, Florida, headed back home to Cincinnati. For ten years—since my brother Kevin was born—we’ve gone on a family vacation to Florida. Mom said it’d be no different this summer, even after the divorce. But we didn’t go to the coast, where we used to go when Dad was with us. We went to Central Florida, to Ocala, where Mom’s sister Florence lives.
“You’re batshit crazy driving four kids down to Florida by yourself,” Flo said.
The air coming in the car windows feels like steam from a hot shower and smells like Kevin’s farts. Sweat has my bare thighs glued to the pleather front seat. The baby’s asleep on a quilt in the way back. My sister Kate is sprawled out on her stomach over most of the back seat, reading Mom’s book, Flowers in the Attic, which she shouldn’t be reading because she’s only eight. Behind me, Kevin is squished against the door so no part of his body will touch Kate’s skin, his feet dancing a jig on the back of my seat.
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By David E. Yee
Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest selected by Colm Tóibín
Featured Art: The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 by Joseph Mallord William Turner
I remember watching the Cotton family’s kitchen burn, felt only a ripple of urgency. Knew it was the kitchen because the houses on this stretch are all the same split-levels built north of Ellicott City, the semi-rural bit just past 70—two main avenues laced together by branches of side streets, neighborhoods pocketed along them. I kept waiting for the flames to reach out like arms through the windows, but there were just these little tips of orange licking the gutter. Our plots were far enough apart that the heat didn’t warp my siding, but the pungent smell of that old wood burning, the paint peeling, felt toxic, jarred me from an otherwise peaceful Monday night.
Firefighters got it out in five. I had my face in the blinds, shifted to see the Cottons—father, mother, two boys—standing shoeless in the grass. It was warm for a September evening, but they huddled, heads tipped skyward as the tail of the smoke crept up past the alder trees lining our backyards. The Chief handed Mr. Cotton a phone, and he just stared at it like he was waiting for a call, didn’t dial, gave it back to the Chief when he was done talking to his crew. The crowd of neighbors gathered on the opposite curb began to thin as the trucks pulled away, and I went back to dusting my living room.
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By Barbara de la Cuesta
Featured Art: by Farrukh Beg
A late afternoon after work, Rosa puts the flame down under the rice and beans and sits with her feet up in Laureano’s recliner. The knock on the front door Rosa thinks must be Mondo’s social worker, the only person she knows who doesn’t just walk in the back door. Mondo is in detention again for defacing a wall, or an overpass, something.
But it isn’t the social worker, it’s little Esmeralda, daughter of the Mexican grocer on Moody Street, who comes in politely, sits opposite her with a notebook, and asks Rosa can she ask her some questions. Hah, like the social worker, Rosa thinks, then corrects herself. This is a child she used to see sitting on the floor of her father’s abasto sorting red beans. The girl tells Rosa she needs to write a biography of an older person for her fifth grade class.
Ah, Rosa, with her aching feet, feels old.
Not old, old; just older than me, says the child. She used to be in Rosa’s catechism class at St. Justin’s and was notably better behaved and brighter than any of the others.
Hokay, says Rosa, not yet realizing what will happen to her.
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By Scott Gould
Featured Art: by Oscar Bluemner
Sometimes you know things before you know things. Mrs. Tisdale comes to the door, and I know something is wrong. I know. From the top bunk of my bed, I watch her coming up the sidewalk, walking fast but walking like a woman who is already lost, her skirt moving quickly around her, like a wave to anyone who spies through the window.
I know the doorbell won’t ring. She is not a bell person. She is too good a friend of my mother’s to announce herself that way. She knocks once and opens the door. What she doesn’t know is the bell doesn’t work anyway. It is shorted out somewhere along its line and my father has never pulled the wires and traced down them to find the problem. I hear Mrs. Tisdale’s voice flow up the staircase, so faint I can barely make it out, strained and pitched higher than normal. Her voice sounds like an animal she is trying to keep on a leash, trying to make it heel. Because her voice wants to run away from her. I hear my mother fall back on her nurse’s voice, that healing tone. I climb off the top bunk and move closer to the doorway.
“Now, Roberta, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” my mother says. “Let’s not worry until we have something to worry about.”
“Something’s gone wrong,” Mrs. Tisdale says. “I feel it.”
By Patrick Crerand
Featured Art: ‘blue sneakers’
My father never exercised. He chased me upstairs after a fresh word at the dinner table once or twice—quick sprints that ended with a face-slap photo finish—but no trips to the gym, hardly even a ball game on TV. On weekends, he wore sneakers—not tennis shoes—always sneakers, as if that’s what one did to hide silently from the world of sport.
But that day—my sixth birthday—after he made the cake and gave me the Frisbee, he said to my surprise, “Let’s see if it spins.” I was out the door in the backyard before he had laced up the first shoe. Neither one of us was very good, but there we stood, spinning the bee in front of the sugar snap peas he had planted, when we heard Aaron, the boy next door, scream in a high, inhuman pitch—a cartoonish noise I thought only diving eagles made, or the ricochet of bullets in old westerns. I almost laughed. My father knew better. He straightened and ran toward Aaron in the side yard between the houses. He leapt over the chainlink gate with a quick hop, following behind the crying boy until he caught him by the arm and saw where Aaron was pointing. “What?” my father asked.
“My sister,” Aaron screamed.
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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?
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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.”
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By Tamie Parker Song
Featured Art: Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Ivy (Tsuta) by Kamisaka Sekka 神坂 雪佳
Our house is a toilet full of shit and fistfuls of toilet paper, long past flushing. It is the bones of kitchen cups smashed with cigarettes. It is the way we don’t turn on the lights anymore. The way we do not light the fire. It is dead flies in the windows; a pantry with food cans several years old. The house used to be Mom, music on the record player; hair cuts in the kitchen, blueberry pancakes for breakfast, light. Now it is cupboards we keep opening, hoping. Then fishing grabs for us, pulls us under, and we stop even opening the cupboards.
We are commercial salmon fishermen on an island in Alaska seventy miles by plane or boat from the nearest town. Only our family lives on this island, and the crew who works for us, and even though everyone is watching me no one is watching out for me. I have been fishing my whole life, the only girl on an all-male crew. I am fifteen.
Dad eats tubs of frosting and bowls of raw cake batter. He wears the same clothes for six weeks at a time and does not bathe. Mom has stopped coming to the island, and Dad can’t or won’t cook, so I start eating with the crew. DeWitt eats with us sometimes, and sometimes with Dad. DeWitt fishes almost exclusively with Dad, while I trade around and fish with different crew. I try not to think about leaving DeWitt at home. He is only thirteen. But something in my body is trying to pull itself away.
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By Tamara Dean
Featured Art: Willows and White Poplars by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot
In the shower she takes a swig of beer, sets the bottle on the edge of the tub, and begins prying leeches, flat and large as house keys, from her cold toes, the top of her foot, her ankle. She places three in a line next to the bottle, where they lie motionless, though alive. Thinned blood threads over her feet. When she and Neil moved to the country four years ago, miles downriver from his family’s farm, he taught her to peel off leeches rather than douse them with salt, which he said might make them vomit and spread disease.
An hour ago, when she capsized, she didn’t feel the leeches take hold. She was alone. It was dusk. She looked up to greet a pair of bats when the kayak teetered, hit a tree recently fallen from the riverbank, and flipped. After a long moment, she surfaced. Sputtering, dog paddling, adrenaline-jarred, skin-tightened, throat splicing eddies, heels churning mud. She held the kayak and wrestled to free it from the current and the willow it was pinned against. She imagined herself the puny accident bystander who suddenly has the strength to pull a giant, unconscious passenger from the wreckage. Even so, she worked half an hour to bring the kayak ashore, roll and empty it. Near dark, she returned for the paddle. More splashing, spitting, gulping, sinking in mud. More leeches latching on.
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Featured Art: Rain Sculpture, Salt Creek Cañon, Utah by William H. Bell
It’s the end of summer and the neighbors have gathered in Evan’s yard, young mothers with babies lounging in the shade on the front porch, older kids racing around the lawn, the men clustered by the grill in back. It is dry and hot, not yet Labor Day, but across the street the upper leaves on the maple in front of Natalie’s house, that precocious tree, are already tinged with red. Natalie wishes it were May again, not August. She longs for the promise of summer rippling outward like the surface of a pool.
Inside, another group of women has pulled up chairs around the kitchen table, mothers Natalie recognizes from around the neighborhood but doesn’t really know, the wives of Evan’s friends. Natalie is still the newcomer, the outsider, Evan’s new girlfriend. The women are bent forward in conversation, a closed set.
“Oh my heck,” one of them is saying. “Here? Really?” She has dark hair with bangs and long-lashed eyes, like a doll’s.
Another woman waves her hand. “It’s public information. Just Google Megan’s Law, you’ll see.”
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By Maya Sonenburg
Second Prize, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest
selected by Charles Baxter
Featured Art: The Eventuality of Destiny by Giorgio de Chirico
I am this heart, this brain, only these, right now—no other. This is what Susan (that’s her name now) tells herself every morning upon waking. She opens her eyes and sees the flaking ceiling above her, sees the wash of sunlight coming through leaves. She touches her chest, feels her heart beating steadily—no rush of fear—and exhales. She’s alone. She touches her head, hair just starting to gray and she’s not bothering to color it. “This can be my new disguise,” she thinks, “my new self.” One of the million selves she’s been in the last twenty-odd years. She rubs her eyes and before she can silence herself again, she remembers days when she thought more, remembered more: a million legs all running toward the Pentagon or induction center or federal courthouse. Flowers in the barrel of a gun. A Viet Cong flag. Giant puppets of Kissinger, Nixon, McNamara. Or their heads atop the bodies of gigantic hawks, perched among the blackened trees of a burned landscape. Bring the war home. A placard of a napalmed child. If people see, they will join us and this atrocity will have to stop. A million hands waving. A million arms, fists raised in salute. They were the million legs and hands of her—her legs and hands—the million-limbed body of resistance, then revolution. Why does she allow these things to come back to her today? Because it’s spring and her curtains are the color of a daffodil she handed to a child once at a demonstration? She remembers when the remembered voices were always with her, singing off-key but loudly together. She never felt alone. But then suddenly she was alone, amputated from everyone and everything she knew. Most mornings she silences these memories of memories, she manages to.
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by Dave Kim
Feature image: Edgar Degas. Beach at Low Tide (Mouth of the River), 1869. The Art Institute of Chicago.
My mother’s boyfriend was a man named Bang. I never learned his first name. He’d been an officer in the Korean army before coming to the States, and he would yank me out of bed at six-thirty every morning to do jumping jacks. I was a doughy nine-year-old and he was trying to make me leaner and tougher. If I got angry, he would dare me to hit him and stand up for myself, get it out of my system. On Sundays we’d go to his boxing gym to watch the men pound each other to pieces, which terrified me at first and then made me dream of days when I’d be big enough to put on gloves and whomp Bang in the gut. I needed a good ass-kicking, he would tease me in his throaty Korean. Anytime I wanted, I could challenge him. Mom didn’t get involved.
The three of us went to Santa Monica Beach one Saturday afternoon to ride our bikes on the Strand. Bang would take me fishing on the pier sometimes and when we rode past it that day, I thought about how much I would rather be out there with a basket of calamari and a cherry Icee, watching our poles nod on the railing. It was one of those perfect afternoons when the California coast looked way better in real life than on the glossy postcards they sold on the boardwalk. Couples were stretched out on the sand, half-hidden under candy-colored parasols. The sky was ablaze in orange light. But I didn’t care about the scenery. All I really saw was this endless bike path and its dashed yellow divider. The back wheel on my hand-me-down Schwinn was grazing the brake pad with every rotation and I lagged at least a hundred yards behind.
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By Aja Gabel
Featured Art: Paris Bridge by Arthur B. Carles
Six days after my father dies, seven blind masseurs hold hands and leap from the Han River Bridge in downtown Seoul, into the shallow water beneath the lighted apex, their bodies a disruption in a mirror they’d never seen. I read about this in the newspaper I collect from the front of my father’s house, all damp and bleeding ink from the past week’s frost. In my father’s office I spread the papers out on his desk and trace my fingers down the pages, to see if I’ve missed anything. I’m looking for murders, plane crashes, natural disasters, economic collapse, impending apocalypse. I stop at the society pages, the comics, the crosswords. For several minutes I consider an eight-letter word for “felicity.” The only answer I can come up with is, “felicity.” Sometimes it happens that way.
The Korean masseurs’ story catches my eye because they have a large color picture of the bridge. It must be one of those time-lapse photos, where the car lights ghost into a gold blur and the surface of the river is steely and reflective. Four vaulted columns rise from the river and hold a statue of a torch, under which I imagine the masseurs must have jumped. How could they have jumped from anywhere else on that bridge? But then, how would they know? How would they know that that was the center? Did they feel the wind die down under the canopy? Did they hear it slice through the steel cables? Did a sighted woman lead them there and say here, here is where you would jump if you were going to jump, not that you are, and then they laughed, and took off their glasses, wiped their eyes of sleep, or of drink, said thank you, you’re kind, leave us now, we just want for a moment to enjoy the view.
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By Michelle Herman
Featured Art: The Last Dance by Mackenzie Siler
It wasn’t that I didn’t like her. I liked her fine—that’s what I would have said if anyone had asked me. But I knew better than to get too attached to the women who dated my next-door neighbor, John. Women cycled through his life pretty quickly, and so far all the ones I’d met had been crazy, anyway—too crazy for me, if not for him. John pursued crazy; he thought crazy was charming. And while she didn’t necessarily seem crazy, I’d learned that you couldn’t always tell at first (that actually you could hardly ever tell at first).
Did she like me? It was impossible to judge. She was friendly enough, always polite if not warm. Certainly she was more guarded than I (but then just about everyone I have ever met is more guarded than I). I could not have read her even if I’d tried. But I didn’t try, because we weren’t friends.
And then she cracked her skull—she almost died—and suddenly we were.
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