Lore

March 16, 2024.Reading time 39 minutes.

By S Graham

Featured Art by Beth Klaus

Every night I tag a surface with the word LORE.

Last night: the wall of a mansion abandoned mid-construction.

The night before: the back garage of a boarded-up health spa.

Tonight: a section of the fence that marks the end of our skinny seaside town.

No one really comes down to this fence, no one except for surfers on their way to the beach and cyclists heading south. Beyond the fence are kilometers of forest before the next town. In front of it is where Lauren’s body washed up on the sand.

The fence was her training ground. Her minimalist tags run along it, as well as our father’s nickname for her in other styles: bubble throw ups, pichação pieces, the occasional wildstyle.

After adding my mimicry to the painted patchwork, I look at the precision of her lines and the sloppiness of mine. The contrast makes me petulant in the way I often was when we were kids and she was better at something, better at everything. But then my heart swells with pride and I have to get away from her symbols and signs.

Keno King

May 19, 2023.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Dwight Livingstone Curtis

Featured Art: Static and Distance by John Sabraw

The tweakers who live in the tent next door are looking for something. I can hear him opening and closing zippers, and she’s whispering at him and getting angry. I hope they find it soon.

It’s like this every night. Quiet hours in the tent city are from 10pm to 6am, but the tweakers don’t care. The overnight security guard, Sean, has stopped enforcing the rules. When the tent city opened in January of last year they had a day guard, a night guard, and a social worker from the Poverello Center. Now it’s just Sean. He spends the nights outside the fence, ignoring the awful sounds that come from within our borders.

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.

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.

Laura’s Brother

October 31, 2015.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Ryan Ruff Smith

Featured Art: The Blue Passion-flower by Robert John Thornton

Laura’s brother has been crashing on my couch. He’s an addict—a recovering one. The hardest part of recovering is to keep doing it. Laura’s brother recovers for a while, and then he stops recovering, and then he runs out of money and picks it back up again. As of today, he’s been recovering for two months straight, which is a big milestone. Laura’s really proud of him. I’m proud, too, but I’d never say it, because I’m afraid that it would sound condescending and weird. I’m afraid that I would say something like: I’m really proud of you, Jim, and I believe in you, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you kept this up and, one day, maybe you’ll even find your way off my couch.

Don’t get me wrong. I am proud of him. Because I know that it’s really hard for him not to slip up. I mean, it’s hard for one. For anyone who is struggling with addiction. Which is what he has. Which is hard.

I get that.

The thing is, there’s this smell. I would never say this to him, but my whole apartment smells a bit funky. Not because he’s an addict—a recovering addict— it’s just a person smell, but since he’s on my couch every night, and most of the day, it accumulates, and it’s not the most pleasant. He bathes and everything, maybe not as often as he could, and usually pretty late in the day, but it’s not like he’s trying to smell. He makes an effort, but I do wonder what kind of soap he uses. Here, I have mixed feelings, because I don’t necessarily want him using my soap—not that I’m stingy, if you come for the weekend, go nuts, use all the soap you want, it’s just that he’s been here for two months—but at the same time, I’m afraid that he’s not using any soap at all, in which case, maybe I’d rather have him use my stuff than have this stench in my apartment all the time.

Zigzag. Yeah.

June 22, 2012.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Scott Kreeger

Featured Image: “Flowers on a Footpath from Bijutsu Sekai” by Watanabe Seitei

Zigzag down the stairs. Yeah. Zigzag to the trash can and toss the bag in. Yeah.

Zigzag through the gate and into the pool area. Yeah. Zigzag between the chaise lounges. Yeah. Zigzag down the steps and into the pool. Yeah.

Zigzag too cold, too cold. Yeah. Zigzag out of the pool. Yeah.

Zigzag out the gate. Yeah. Zigzag onto the bike. Yeah. Zigzag past apart- ments 4, 3, 2, 1, and into the alley. Yeah. Zigzag down the alley and out to the street. Yeah. Zigzag wait for traffic. Yeah.

Zigzag across the street. Yeah. Zigzag off the bike and into the store. Yeah. Zigzag past the smiley man behind the counter. Yeah. Zigzag smile back, wave, say hello. Yeah.

Zigzag to the candy. Yeah. Zigzag to the Zagnut bars. Yeah. Zigzag pick out a Zagnut. Yeah. Zigzag Zagnut. Yeah.

Zigzag say that again three times fast. Yeah. Zigzag Zagnut zigzag Zagnut zigzag Zagnut. Yeah.

Throw It Up

June 21, 2012.Reading time 58 minutes.

By Suzanne Richardson

Featured Image: “The Fallen Angel Spreads His Black Wings” by Odilon Redon

Heroin made Tristan’s breath sweet like mangoes. When we kissed it felt like licking the inside of a kiwi: fragrant, indulgent, the tangy saccharine rolling around my tongue. I didn’t know why he tasted like that, but I liked it. At the time I didn’t know I was sleeping with a heroin addict. He would sit up in bed and scratch his arms and face for hours. I would call his name, shake him even, but he wouldn’t answer. In all four years I’d slept with him, he had never acted that way before. I would put on a robe and pace the apartment, or sit on the couch, and think about my family. My brother. My parents. I had never felt this scared with them despite our differences. Sometimes I would grab fruits or vegetables from the fridge and nervously practice peeling, or dicing until dawn. I think I did this out of some compulsion to better myself even in the darkest of hours. My mother could always chop and dice things perfectly. I taught myself to peel mangoes in one motion so the peel piled into one long strand in the sink drain. I couldn’t think of anything that would make him act that way. One night, lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling, I recalled a conversation I’d had at a party with an EMT.

Intervention

May 31, 2012.Reading time 54 minutes.

By Shannon Robinson

Featured Image: “The Card Players (Les Joureurs de Cartes)” by Paul Cézanne

I called my mother and told her about my plan. My brother, Christopher, was visiting Ottawa for just a few weeks from Berlin, where he’d lived for the past ten years. He rarely visited, and I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for us to talk to him, as a family, about his drinking problem. I explained how we would each write a letter beforehand, expressing our concerns, and then read them out loud to Christopher, one by one.

“Okay, dear,” she said. “That sounds fine.”

I was reading students’ workshop fiction when the phone rang. It was my older sister, Leigh.

“So Mum called me. She was really confused. She says she doesn’t know what you were talking about.”

The Rush of Losing

October 19, 2011.Reading time 22 minutes.

by Daniel Larkins

Selected as winner of the 2011 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Don de Grazia

Featured image: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. At the Moulin Rouge, 1892–1895. The Art Institute of Chicago.

10. The race is over before it ends.

7. Tim leans forward. His blue dress shirt is untucked, unbuttoned, and his stomach shoves the undershirt out of his pants. When he loses it’s like a win, because when he wins he doesn’t want to keep on betting. Losing answers the question, Why continue? When he loses, he likes to think he can parlay that into a victory, persevere to make up for the loss.

All the TVs are muted. In his shoes he can feel the rumble of Holland Tunnel traffic from a couple blocks away. His twin boys are twelve and his fingertips are black. His nails are short and dull. His wife Meg used to have monthly manicures and the designer kitchen she wanted, but no more would she get a stupid room for hanging pots and pans and whatever else she liked to hang from racks and nails.

Tim leans forward. He has a hangnail, and it bleeds and stings, and his left hand balls into a fist on his thigh and his other wraps around a rolled-up Racing Form. It’s a tool, a bat, a weapon.

Hurricane Season

September 19, 2011.Reading time 5 minutes.

by Julia Jackson

Feature image: Winslow Homer. Breaking Storm, Coast of Maine, 1894. The Art Institute of Chicago.

Itchy in November, right before Thanksgiving. It was my first winter sober, when you were living on the top floor of that six-story apartment building overlooking the river, back before the neighborhood was converted into condos.

“Hurricane season,” you said when you saw me looking out your window in that blank way. “When the temperatures drop, us drunks get restless.”

Your hands got busy stacking up wood in the fireplace. I’d seen people who had come into the same meetings every week suddenly stop showing up, seen the way that the ones who did come back would raise their hands, announcing their day counts, differently this time. “I’ve got five days.” “Nineteen days.” “I’ve got forty-one days back,” they’d say, the “back” added to show that this wasn’t their first time at the rodeo. It didn’t look like it was any easier, though: their hands shook like any newcomer’s, their eyes wandered the rooms the same way, rabid.