Fritura Sunday

June 1, 2025.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Diego Arias

I sat at a Taco Bell reading a book about cultural marxists, contraception, and immigration. Someone gave me this book and told me it would define the election, but all I could gather was the author yap on and on about country clubs and labor unions and working-class business practices and shoestring budgets. I very much wanted to dump the book in a garbage can and never read anything about it again, but I was waiting for someone and had nothing else to do. I looked up from my carne asada steak taco and watched a man in the corner enjoy a soccer game on his phone and take savage bites out of a large, engorged chalupa. As he bit into the fried casing’s manila envelope colored flesh, a bright red sauce squirted out and spread across the table. Holy Cucamonga, this was a wild, satanic place. Men with the legs of flamingos and heads like snakes from Central American jungles rummaged through middle American taco concoctions like a teenager in a 1950’s drive-in theater parking lot. They fondled these damn tacos and burritos in uncomfortable, godless ways. What sort of place was this? What kind of man visits a Taco Bell in the middle of the afternoon and orders twelve of these grease torpedoes only to consume them in one twenty-minute sitting? What sort of liver processes that kind of modern nutritional content?

SHASTA GIRL

December 6, 2024.Reading time 27 minutes.

By Noah Pohl

Featured Art: “Bumblebee” by Leo Arkus

(March 27)

Today, I came to work eleven minutes late. My co-worker Lenny said he didn’t know if he could cover for me, even though he thought I was “cool” and “down to Earth” and “pretty for twenty-four,” whatever the fuck that means.

Lenny is sweaty. He sweats near the hot dogs sometimes, and that’s not cool. I try to avoid Lenny when he’s in one of his moods. He cries loudly in the Target bathroom because of his impending divorce, but he’s also extremely hairy and his eyebrows are out of control. Since his wife left him, he kind of resembles a giant, lumbering piece of sage. I know because I smudged my apartment last night to keep the bad spirits away.

I also made sure my Target Pizza Hut uniform was clean ’cause I dumped Alfredo sauce on myself yesterday like a total dope. It smelled like hot garbage. Then I got quarters from one of the girls at the registers so I could do my laundry. No more free laundry.

I mean, I feel like that’s a metaphor for something, I just don’t know what.

A Peacock on Niner Hill

March 21, 2024.Reading time 54 minutes.

By Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

Featured Art by Debbie Norton

The union was strong, but not strong enough to make Detroit Steel keep a dying man on the payroll. John shouldn’t have known this, but he often overheard his parents talking in the room beneath him until late in the evening. He was a respectful boy and was never trying to eavesdrop, but in a house that’s small with heating vents that weren’t so much vents as just holes in the floor (or ceiling, depending on your perception), there wasn’t much of a way to avoid it. He knew the other men at the mill were keeping an eye on his father, Bernard. They were propping him up at his station and bringing him water and coffee throughout the day, whatever he needed to keep him going. “I don’t know why they do it, I don’t need no special treatment,” his father complained to his mother at least once a week. But he still hopped in the car of whoever showed up for him in the morning, usually Jay Mingus’s dad Jimmy who had a 1947 Studebaker with a long front hood and wild wrap-around back window. The fathers of most of John’s friends had older cars like that, bought when they first returned from the war and were fresh hires at the mill. Some bought new ones every few years, like Joseph’s dad who bought a 1957 Buick a few months back even though his old one, which Joseph’s mom had now, was only three years old. The Bondurant’s didn’t even have one car, let alone two. His father always told John it was because he liked to walk to work and couldn’t imagine missing out on the fresh New Boston air, which John assumed was a joke like when he told him his Purple Heart was from getting stabbed with a fork in the chow line. No one, not even John, who loved his town with a ferocity rivaled only by his love for Roy Rogers, would describe the air of their town as fresh.

Lonely, Lucky, Brave

May 3, 2022.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Jillian Jackson

When I hit on the scratch ticket I was at Castle Island with Hannah. We used to go there every Friday. After Hannah finished walking dogs and I finished up my shift at the café, we liked to pack a lunch and watch the planes flying into Logan airport. We always ate turkey sandwiches that I stole from the café and drank wine out of cans. We finished a family-sized bag of salt and vinegar chips.

That afternoon Hannah was wearing my favorite cardigan, a Good Will find, pink and covered in sparkles. She had on pink lipstick that had smudged a little bit on her bottom lip. We were watching the planes, our bare feet in the cold sand. It was April and we were glad we could sit there without our jackets on, even though we were a little cold when the wind picked up.

“It’s time,” Hannah said. She reached into her bag and dug out the tickets. She dealt them like cards at a poker match, back and forth, one and one. All ten.

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.”

We Are the Bachelorettes and We Insist

November 8, 2020.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Susan Finch
Winner, Editors’ Prize in Prose: selected by Mandy Berman

Featured Art: Woman in Silver V-neck Long-sleeved Dress by Inga Seliverstova

As bachelorettes, we solemnly promise the next forty-eight hours will include three brunches, two happy hours, fifteen moderate disagreements, one unforgettable fight, eight matching T-shirts, one bar crawl, one pedal tavern, one sprained wrist, three twisted ankles, sixteen hangovers, too many tearful promises to count, and one sober regret. We are the bachelorettes and we insist.

We must begin with brunch, and in order to fit three brunches into forty-eight hours, we will congregate Friday morning. After all, brunch is the most important meal of the day. We can eat French toast and French fries, and getting tipsy or emotional (i.e., Lydia has too many feelings after bottomless mimosas) will not be frowned upon. Not every restaurant serves brunch on Friday, so we must select carefully, find a place that has an all-day breakfast menu, and really, why shouldn’t a restaurant serve breakfast food all day. It’s not so hard to whip up a couple of poached eggs, is it? We will reserve the table for 10:30; the proper time to eat brunch is 11, but we already know that some of our bachelorettes will be late—particularly Tara, the bride’s sister. She’s a musician and runs on her own schedule, and of course, Felicia. She hasn’t been able to get anywhere on time since the new baby.

Event attire is outlined in the invitation—brunches are for sundresses or rompers paired with cute cowboy boots or wedge sandals. We do not do flats—flats are for business casual events or maybe if you’re trying to let someone down easy. Matching T-shirts will be provided for the pedal tavern that begins promptly at four. The shirts may be knotted at your hip or tucked in with a cute belt, but please do not leave your shirt untucked. Evening wear will have two themes: Friday red and Saturday sparkle, and the bride, of course, will wear white. No one else should plan to wear white or anything white adjacent —no cream, no ivory, no pearl, no silver, no soft grays, no misty light blues or sugary beige. Don’t pack it. Don’t even think about it. We don’t want anyone to steal the bride’s thunder. After all, we are the bachelorettes, and it is our job to insist.

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.”

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?”

Neighbors

December 11, 2015.Reading time 69 minutes.

By Suzanne McConnell

Selected as winner of the 2015 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Maud Casey

Featured Art: Gardener’s House at Antibes by Claude Monet

I wake to the phone ringing like an alarm. It’s the middle of the night. I clamber out of bed, hard-won sleep, into the living room, grope for the receiver. “Isabella,” my neighbor Viv says in her throaty, demanding voice. “I’ve lost my keys. I’m at the booth two blocks away. Come downstairs and let me in.” The phone clicks off.

I light a cigarette, and now I hear her raving like a maniac coming down the street. I move to the kitchen window and stand in the dark in my nightgown, trembling with rage, waiting for her figure to catch up with her voice shattering the night, and now I see her at the edge of the streetlight.

Crimes of the Video Age

September 16, 2013.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Bradley Bazzle

Selected as runner-up for the 2013 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Stuart Dybek

Featured Art: Decorative Study: Satyr by Aubrey Vincent Beardsley

In the spring of 1985, Ben lived with his friend Marco in a second-floor apartment near the college where they were sophomores. For fun they watched girls sunbathe down in the small back yard across the alley. They kept a potted ficus by the window to obscure their faces.

One day, while they were staring at the girls through the ficus leaves, Marco said he had an idea. He went down the hall and came back holding the VHS camcorder Ben got for Christmas and kept beneath his bed.

Marco said they should use the camcorder to film the girls. “That way we can watch them on the VCR at night,” he said, “when it’s more fun to watch sexy stuff.”

“No way,” Ben said.

“But we can pause it and look really hard.” Marco described in loving detail the way the girls’ bikini bottoms pinched their thighs and the way their breasts drooped to the sides when they lay on their backs.

Ben liked that stuff too, but he wondered if filming the girls didn’t make him and Marco weirdos. Instead of explaining this to Marco he said, “Don’t touch my stuff. Camcorders are expensive.”