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.

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.

Essay: Little Giants, The Story of a Fire Hydrant and Other Heroes

October 24, 2025.Reading time 58 minutes.

By 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.

June 1, 2025.Reading time 25 minutes.

5 things getting attacked by a dog taught me about mid-level B2B sales management

By JB Andre

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, A List of the Reasons of Why I am Getting Into Computers, 2025. Oil pastel, pen and marker on paper, 14″ x 11″.

First I want to start off by saying that I am OK. An ambulance ride, eight stitches, and a lot of painkillers later, I am safely at home with my beautiful, loving family. Shoutout my amazing wife @CamillaSpringer for taking such good care of me after my hospital stay. I also want to take this time to share my gratitude with friends and family who have reached out to wish me a safe recovery—and to those who haven’t: it’s not too late! I have decided to post about this following the success of my more personal article: “What I learned about leadership when my Grandmother died.” To all of my readers, again I thank you for your well-wishes. Please don’t forget to like, share, re-post, and comment. Follow me if you don’t already for more great business content!

Yesterday morning, I was walking my labradoodle puppy (say hi Max!), or, I suppose, we were coming back from a trip to the park, and crossing the parking lot to our apartment (for those of you shocked that we still live in an apartment, check out my article “The risks of homeownership for early-career entrepreneurs”). About halfway across the parking lot, I saw a nasty-looking dog. About 70, 80 pounds, brown, a mutt with a broad, square face like something between a pit and a shepherd, but low to the ground and stocky. I recognized this dog and knew it was trouble (check out my post “Max got attacked by a dog but he’s OK: Resources on pet care and picking an affordable veterinarian”). It was walking up to us slowly, but I have to admit—I ran! Which brings me to my first of five tips.

Paste

June 1, 2025.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Joe Plicka

“Unknown / Man / Died Eating / Library Paste / July 14 1908”

— epitaph on a headstone at Pioneer
Cemetery in Goldfield, Nevada

We were called to Braddock, arriving after midnight to find a woman, recently widowed, laboring with her fourth child. She stood in the kitchen near a burning stove, unclothed and sodden, gripping a thick cord dangling from the rafters. As her pains grew, she called for her oldest daughter to bring a syrup she’d somehow procured from a druggist in Cleveland, an anodyne she was willing and able to try in the absence of her late husband, whom she fairly cursed for his commonplace insistence—when he was alive, of course—that a daughter of Eve not “thrust aside the decrees of Providence.” The druggist, however, had mixed the compound with blackstrap molasses rather than rose honey and the poor woman found the flavor unpalatable. She cried for flour paste, which her daughter fetched from a printer’s devil down the road. This paste she mingled with her bitter cure in an empty sardine tin and continued to taste it with a wooden spoon, even as she birthed a healthful boy with the most immoderate hair one ever saw on an infant.

— Mabel Gaskin, midwife, 1850

Survival of the Unfit: A Retrospective

March 3, 2025.Reading time 56 minutes.

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

(Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle)

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

(Charles Darwin, note to Dr. Chapman)

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

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

Tilting

November 27, 2024.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Matt Cantor

It’s been a full year, now. 

It’s October 7th.

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

“Don Quixote,”  I’ll tell them. 

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

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

Echo-Delta

November 15, 2024.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Teresa Burns Gunther

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

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

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

Survival of the Unfit: A Retrospective

November 1, 2024.Reading time 68 minutes.

By Jodie Noel Vinson

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

(Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle)

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

(Charles Darwin, note to Dr. Chapman)

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

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

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.

Masking

November 20, 2023.Reading time 42 minutes.

By KT Ryan

The Featured Art is “Dead or Dreaming?” by Greta Delapp

Month 1: June

“Promise me you’re not gonna die,” my eight-year-old Ellie said.

It was a simple request during her bedtime tuck-in. All she needed was a one sentence guarantee that the operation to remove my brain tumor would go well. I couldn’t do it. What if something went wrong—a spinal fluid leak, paralysis, even death? Ellie’s arms formed a vice-grip around my body. I kneaded Ellie’s pillow, worried that she’d never be able to trust an adult again if I promised success and then something bad happened.

With twelve hours to go before I went under the knife, I resorted to chanting the same thing I’d been saying since my diagnosis one month earlier: that my surgeon, Dr. T. was “the best of the best.” It had worked well up until now.

Skin Check

November 17, 2023.Reading time 30 minutes.

By Steph Del Rosso

Featured Art by Reagan Settle

The mole was the color of charcoal, shaped like a raindrop sliding down a car window. Mona had gotten the call from her dermatologist in the bathroom stall of a dive bar. Two women were arguing at the sink.

“I can’t tell where his opinions end and yours begin,” said one.

“What are you talking about? I’ve always hated neoliberalism,” said the other.

“Unfortunately, we’ve detected melanoma,” said the dermatologist. “The good news is, we caught it early.”

But Mona hadn’t heard her above the whir of the hand dryer. She plugged one ear with her finger. “Sorry, could you repeat that?”

“We caught it early,” said her dermatologist. “And that’s helpful with melanoma.”

The word cut through the bathroom din like an un-tuned chord. Mona looked down at her bare thighs on the toilet seat.

Speak Up

November 28, 2022.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Jesse Lee Kercheval

Selected as winner of the 2022 Nonfiction Contest by Melissa Febos

1.

I dream I am teaching and it is not going well. I still have these dreams though I retired a year ago. Counting grad school, I taught 38 years so this particular nightmare is hardwired into my nervous system. In my usual dream, I am talking, then shouting, at students who are talking to each other and not paying any attention at all—something that never happened in real life, unless a dream counts as life. In this dream, though, it is the students who are yelling at me. I can see their mouths open, their tongues wagging, every one of their white teeth, remarkably straight after years of expensive orthodontia—but it is a silent movie. I touch my ears, a reflexive movement to check if my hearing aids are there. Yes, but somehow they seem to have swollen, tripled in size, and to be plugging my ears like fat kids’ fingers, making sure all I hear is the sounds of my body, heart, lungs, that we hear without using our ears at all.

Doppel

March 22, 2022.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Max Bell

Selected as winner of the 2021 Fiction Contest by Anthony Marra

Featured Art: King Lake, California by Albert Bierstadt

I hear every word. I know exactly where I am. Dr. Shelley, sitting across from me in her white lab coat in her air-conditioned Westwood office, has told me that I have cancer. The pain in my chest does not signal the cancer’s home but its most recent lodging. Each scan and test reveals that it is too late for any combination of surgery and chemotherapy. I should not have ignored the signs. I delayed it all for too long.

Dr. Shelley pauses after delivering the news, searching my face to deduce how soon she can relay more information, how quickly she should speak, how she should modulate her voice. No speed or timbre seems apt. I do not worry about how she will sound after the silence. Taking offense at anything in this moment, or in any other, suddenly seems a waste of valuable time.

Why have the movies lied when depicting the cancer revelation scene? The world does not dissolve into a warm haze. Everything is clear, sharper than before. It’s as though I am someone with astigmatism who’s found the perfect corrective lenses. The sun strikes through the glass of the office’s wall-to-wall window, accentuating the details of each object in the room. The ridges of the lone paper clip on Dr. Shelley’s desk are as clear as the dotted brushstrokes of the purple-red sunset that casts a shadow over the sand in the reproduction of Lemmen’s Beach at Heist, which hangs in a dark brown frame next to her college degrees. I can read the spines of the books on Dr. Shelley’s shelves, the letters on each embossed in muted gold on leather that looks like tanned human skin.

Stomach Pains

November 30, 2021.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Danie Shokoohi

When the doctor found the tumor in his brain, when the surgery was first scheduled but not yet scalpeled, before the poorly fitted tracheostomy tube which introduced the sepsis, your father forbade you from coming to Connecticut. He didn’t want you to see him like that, he said. That when your grandfather died, your father could only picture him ill and threadbare in a hospital bed. He did not want that for you, if he didn’t make it.

“No.” You lifted your laptop from the coffee table and clicked your internet browser. “Absolutely not. I’m pulling up Delta.” The ticket would be expensive from Iowa City, but you would pay anything to be there.

He told you that you could visit when he was well again, for Thanksgiving, maybe. “Look, Kimmy,” he said. “I got some bad apples, but we can still make applesauce out of them. It’ll be okay. The surgeon’s good. I’ll have to do some PT, but I won’t lose any cognitive function. That’s pretty good applesauce.”

You wanted to tell him there was nothing applesauce about a brain tumor. That you didn’t care how small, or how easy the recovery, or how experienced the doctor. You wanted to tell him that twenty-two was too young to be fatherless. If it was your Iranian mother, you would have had permission to scream and rip hair from your scalp and weep. But he wasn’t one for big sentiments, your father. He was American. So you laughed because you knew he wanted you to laugh.

After the phone call, you drove to the grocery store and picked out a jar of applesauce. It sat in your cupboard through his entire sickness, and you ate a spoonful a day as if it could keep him safe.

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.

Güerita

December 1, 2020.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Julian Robles

Featured art: Disappearance at Sea II by Tacita Dean

for Esperanza Duque

I came to Guerrero because they told me my father had been here, once when he was my age, and later, when he fled. But we came to Pie de la Cuesta for Tía Juana. I couldn’t tell her no while she was sitting there with her blouse still unbuttoned down to her waist, and those lines folded sideways through her armpits. The right side had been more complicated during surgery, so the scar splayed from her chest almost to her back. Seeing me dressed for the beach all week reminded her of what she had lost years before: Pie de la Cuesta, a needle of coastline only she remembered. Adán drove us here so she could show me. And now we were here and Tía Juana was far behind us, alone, almost buried in the sand. 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

The Last Innocent Moment

November 25, 2020.Reading time 32 minutes.

By Janine Kovac

Featured Art: Ballet at the Paris Opéra by Edgar Degas

Today we are a cozy family of three—Daddy, Mama, and daughter. We are taking a road trip from our home in Oakland, California to a town called King City so Daddy can perform his signature role as the Sugar Plum Fairy cavalier. It’s our last trip together before the twins are born and Chiara-Noelle has told me in her three-year-old way that she is not pleased about this pregnancy. She wanted a sister, not two brothers and she can’t understand why we can’t just make what’s growing inside me be something else. Read More

Holding On Is [ ]

June 14, 2019.Reading time 25 minutes.

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.

* * *

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.

The Blue Goodness

February 23, 2018.Reading time 51 minutes.

By Maureen McGranaghan

Franklin ducks into the janitor’s closet and mutters into the iPod Greg bought him. The Goodness is here. It is definitely here. Last night, the blue tarp stopped flapping, and it got very quiet. Then the Goodness filled the whole house like heat from the radiators. Greg and Kate stopped fighting and went to sleep. Now it is everywhere: The Blue Goodness

Franklin hears his name on the intercom. He is being called to Mr. Volpe’s office, so he puts his iPod in his pocket and emerges from the closet.

Mr. Volpe greets him, fiddling with his watch chain and rubbing the bald spot on his head. His voice sounds like rocks grinding against each other. Franklin thinks about the rocks when he speaks. How many?

“Your brother—is he sick?” Mr. Volpe asks.

Four rocks. Small. “Yes. He is. He has walking pneumonia.”

“Tell him to get an excuse.”

“Okay.”

“Have your mom write an excuse.”

Kate won’t do this because she says Roger deserves to have the book thrown at him, but Franklin says, “I’ll tell her.”

Sneakers

May 28, 2017.Reading time 7 minutes.

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.

The Killing Square

October 1, 2016.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Michael Credico

Featured Art: Unfinished Study of Sheep by Constant Troyon, 1850

It’s the manipulations that end you. I was told this by Sam Shaw after he learned he’d been promoted to the inside. We were on the outside of the outside in the designated smoking area. I was smoking. Sam Shaw said, “What’s suffering worth?” He broke off the shards of animal blood that had froze to his overalls.

I shook like I was caught in electric wires. The cigarette butt hissed when I let it drop into a snowdrift. I could hardly feel myself living, felt like I was alive as a series of smoke breaks.

Sam Shaw said, “Nothing’s dead-end as it seems.”

“Easy for you to think,” I said. “You’re on the inside now.”

I warmed my hands with the heat of the conveyor’s gear motor, clenched and unclenched until my circulation was good enough that I could reach for my cutter and hand it off to Sam Shaw without either of us losing a precious something. Sam Shaw cut into a plastic clamshell that contained a dress shirt and tie combo. He pulled the tie too tight. I told him he couldn’t breathe. He called himself a real professional. I lined up the next group of animals.

“You ain’t dressed for this no more,” I said.

Sam Shaw looked at me and then the cutter. “Take it easy on me,” he said, taking an animal by its pit, cutting it with no regard for the stainlessness of the shirt.

Etymologies

February 19, 2016.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Krista Christensen

Featured Art: Abstract — Woman by Carl Newman

It is out of a need for precision that I search for words, wading through thesauri and dictionaries and -pedias, crawling into the tunnels of -ologies and -onomies and -ectomies, mining deep for a more accurate reflection of self than dry medical terms like bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy.

I’m not even sure how to pronounce that last word, though it’s a thing that’s been done to me. Perhaps the two o’s bleed together into one sound, like the two o’s in moon, my two ovaries like white orbs hovering in one sky: oophorectomy. Or possibly the two o’s mirror the guttural softness of the pair in brook, like the one tinkling through the lot behind my home: oophorectomy.

When I look it up, I find that both o’s get equal play. Medical dictionaries give the pronunciation oh-uh-for-ec-toh-mee. A perfect irony that even in sound, the two o’s are piled on top of one another in the beginning of the word, as if there are more than enough to go around. There’s a sense of excess, of plenty and abundance, when really the word is all about what’s missing, about evacuation, about empty space. An O, a zero, the absence of value.

Nothing is ever straightforward in female anatomy. Even using the term hysterectomy, a casual term in comparison, brings up more questions than it answers. Repercussions of this surgery are nebulous, confounding: it could mean that a woman has lost just her uterus, but kept her ovaries, and so would not need to make the choice between synthetic hormone therapy or instant menopause. Even if a woman loses just her uterus, it’s possible she’d keep her cervix, that her vagina wouldn’t be sewn shut at the top, that she wouldn’t become a dead-end, a U-turn, closed for business.

For me, the word hysterectomy doesn’t begin to cover it.

Where My Father Went

April 24, 2015.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

When the funeral director hands my father’s ashes to my mother, she puts the little cardboard box into her pocketbook—the one with all the zippers and buckles. My mother says she’ll hold off on scattering the ashes until maybe the next time my brother comes down from his farm and we’re all together. Maybe we’ll scatter them in the ocean.

“But, for now,” I ask, “Where are you going to put him?”

“In my bedroom closet,” she says.

My parents never shared a bedroom. My father’s room was the converted attic, my mother’s, the converted garage. As far away as they could get from each other within the same house. Putting him in her bedroom closet seems, at once, too remote and too intimate, but I don’t say anything.

Two years pass.

My brother only visits on Christmas and Thanksgiving, which is not the right time to scatter the ashes. It’s never the right time to scatter the ashes.

Someone Else

April 23, 2015.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Image: Roses by Vincent Van Gogh, 1890
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

When my mother was dying, we started calling her “Grammy” as if she’d become someone else. She was eighty-five pounds. She looked like a shrinkydink of herself. She wore a diaper and a hospital gown. The diaper looked enormous on her. It was one of those pull-up ones. If you yanked up her diaper when she was trying to stand, you could lift her right off her feet. “Whoa,” she’d say to you. “Whoa there.” Grammy was a good sport. She was nothing like my mother.

She was on morphine, so a lot of the time, she made no sense. “You know,” she’d tell me earnestly, “I gotta get me a Louie-Louie.”

“Okay,” I’d tell her, but I didn’t have a clue what she meant. “I’ll buy you one.”

“Don’t get it too small,” she’d say. “Oooh,” she’d kind of shiver with excitement, “That will be lovely.” Lovely. As if my mother would ever say a word like that.

The Undersized Negative

November 28, 2014.Reading time 74 minutes.

By Robert Glick

Selected as winner of the 2014 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Aimee Bender

Sometimes the day after Mom’s miscarriage, a chemistry teacher with chin-only stubble interrupts class to tell you he is dying. There were so many reasons not to be anywhere. I, Dr. Watermelon, convened everyone at the abandoned house, which I insisted on calling the sketch house, on account of the Etch A Sketch I had found in a toy chest. My buddy Filbert plopped himself down on one of the oyster chairs; the air clouded with dust mites and dried skin. “Finders, keepers,” he said. We demanded answers of the Harris family from phone bills and colanders, from the oregano scent of the bathroom cleaner, from a postal sack half-full of gas caps. The throat to the fireplace was choked; perhaps a bird’s nest. Rob and Ron each kept one eye perched on the doorless front door, wary of the patriarch Dustin Oskar Harris barging in to reclaim what he once owned. They thought the sketch house itself was sketchy, as if its waxy kitchen linoleum had been responsible for mawing open and swallowing its former occupants. Ron suggested that we get sizzled on the freon from the fridge. Rob agreed; they were repurposers. “Highly toxic,” Filbert said, reluctantly we transitioned to flicking matches at the shelves—flyfishing magazines, nautical books – knowing damp, expecting sulfur, anticipating cartwheels of burn through the air. Filbert, nicknamed for the teratomic testicle lodged like a moon above his kidney, had a talent for fire: me, not so much. I was a Pisces; I went as long as I could underwater.

Filbert’s lit match flew through the air and landed on my crotch. I didn’t want to move. I felt crowned, blinkered by a halo of marsh fog. I observed the flicker of little flame, a prickle of warmth on my jeans. “Huh,” I said. That was my best eloquent admiration for the trajectory of heat and light.

Envy

September 30, 2014.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Patricia Horvath

The sign on the door says: Children Under 18 Not Admitted to the Chemotherapy Suite Under Any Circumstances.

They call it a suite, this room at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital where chemotherapy is administered, as though its occupants were members of some elite group, which in a sense I suppose they are. For reasons that elude me, the chemotherapy suite is located on the same floor as maternity services, and the elevator is often crowded with an odd mix of cancer patients and pregnant women. The cancer patients are generally hairless, elderly, their skin ashy, their bones prominent. The pregnant women are all flesh and smiles.

On Jeff’s first day of chemo, three months earlier, a couple made out during the entire ride to the eleventh floor. Teenagers practically, they wore tight jeans, cropped vinyl jackets. Her back hard against the elevator rail, her distended belly pressed into her partner. They made little moaning noises as they kissed. I tried to give Jeff my “What the fuck is this?” look, but he was too preoccupied—or maybe too polite—to notice. The other passengers looked away. I watched them not watching and then I stared at the floor.

No Try, Only Do

September 19, 2013.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Alan Rossi

Featured Art: Forêt de Compiègne by Berthe Morisot

I gave Saul a room. Two years prior, he had left me for Utah. He left me for the wild, for backcountry slopes. He wanted to be in glossy magazines and have his ponytail flowing out behind him in pictures, carving some mountain, dropping through powder. He spoke like this, dropping through powder. I tried to tell myself I couldn’t be too mad: he paid more attention to skis and skiing forums than he did to me. In Utah, he grew his hair long and beautiful and got in some of those magazines, though mainly he just put up pictures of himself on the Internet. I know, I looked at them all, wondering if he was thinking of me when he was hiking up the slopes, skis on his back, or whether he might get a distant glimpse of our life together when he was on top of one of those mountains and looked east. He was gone for two years, but to me it seemed a lot longer. I often thought about all the other girls he probably had sex with and how people probably loved him and how he was living this wild, free life, and I was still in East Tennessee with my brother and mother and the probably comparatively lame Blue Ridge. So when I found out he was coming back because he had seriously injured himself and could no longer carve or ride or hike or otherwise put his health in danger in backcountry powder, I was happy and told him he had a room waiting. I wanted him to come back in the same state he had left me in: miserable and alone.

But it Moves

May 21, 2013.Reading time 54 minutes.

By D.J. Thielke

Featured Art: Ely Cathedral: Galilee Porch from Nave by Frederick H. Evans

Science is nothing to be scared of, I promise my eighth-graders. Science, I say, is what gives us words for what the earth, the universe, already know in a language of cells and change.

They are busy copying my name off the board.

I tell them to think about time, think about how we talk about the abstract idea of it like something physical: a road we’re traveling on. The road of life, we say. Moving past something, leaving it behind; or stepping into the future, looking forward to something. The future is ahead, the past behind, this is how we place ourselves.

But, I say, earlier cultures spoke about time as a road that you walked backwards on. They faced the past, its landscape visible and familiar, while taking tentative, shaky steps into the unknown behind them. The future, a darkness over the shoulder they had to carefully, fearfully move toward.

My students are quiet for a moment.

Then one says, So, life is a highway?

The Down

November 18, 2012.Reading time 39 minutes.

By Molly Ficek

Featured Art: Bath of Venus by Sir Edward Burne-Jones

My mother is immersed in membrane when I find her. Eggs cover her body, some cracked and spilling their spoils, some whole, resting on her belly, her breasts. White flecks of eggshells gravel her skin and the runnings of yellow yolks have dried, look like the peelings of a summer burn. Her head is underneath this mess when I look over the side of the tub.

“Mom?”

She surfaces, wipes film back into her hair, the glossy middle of the egg from her cheek. She blinks.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

She looks at me as if it’s quite obvious, which I guess it is. She is taking a bath in chicken eggs, dozens and dozens of them.

“I heard it’s good for your skin,” she says.

“Um…for your hair, maybe. Egg whites are supposed to be good for your hair.”

“Hmm,” she says, inhales a big gulp of air, and sloshes down under the eggs, the water beneath them. She waves her hand up at me. Eggs spill over the sides of the tub and drop onto the bathroom floor, cracking open.

Luna de Miel

May 10, 2011.Reading time 68 minutes.

By Melanie Unruh

Featured art: The Herwigs by Edouard Antonin Vysekal

I like to practice what I’m going to say in therapy each week. The opening line is always the most important part because it has to be something attention-grabbing that still makes me sound stable.

I slept pretty well this week, except for Tuesday, when I stayed up all night watching a marathon of The Wonder Years. They played the one where Kevin touched Winnie’s boob.

It’s been six months, eighteen days, nineteen hours, and six minutes—give or take—since I last saw James.

This week I only made twelve lists.

My cat bears a striking resemblance to my therapist, but this isn’t because of their matching whiskers so much as the fact that they both make the same frowning concerned face when I tell them about my life. Boots and Dr. Andrews, who has tried without success, to get me to call her Maggie, are not formally acquainted.

Living with the Dead

September 1, 2010.Reading time 38 minutes.

By Patrick Hicks

She was naked on the embalming table and I just couldn’t stop staring at her nipples. This happened two years ago when Ginny Pazinger ran a red light while she was text-messaging a friend. One of those big SUVs ran into her car and she spun around the intersection like a top. Shattered glass and chunks of vehicle burst into the air, explosion-like. My family has been in the funeral business since 1882 so we expected Ginny’s body to be banged up pretty badly, we thought it would be a closed casket for sure, but her remains were in good shape thanks to the side airbag.

Failight

November 6, 2008.Reading time 23 minutes.

By René Houtrides

Featured Art: Tree Trunks (study for La Grande Latte) by Georges Seurat

When he was thirty-eight years old, he decided not to see. It was a clear decision, and he was aware of its unfolding inside him. He was standing in the small, small bedroom—luckily, he was not claustrophobic—with the bunk beds, the high-piled desks, the tiny walking corridor within the room. He was stretching his arms outward and realized he could not straighten them without meeting an obstruction. A lamp to his right. A heavy window curtain to his left. It was only possible to walk into the room, climb into one of the beds, sit at one of the desks, or walk out of the room. It was not possible to walk around within the room. He was standing in the walk channel, his arms horizontal, bent at the elbow, and decided not to see. He had two reasons for deciding this.

First, not seeing would encourage him to turn inward, where he could build a secret chamber hushed, but with just enough elbow room. Others would be able to enter only if he permitted it. He needed to form this architecture because he lacked the sedative of space in his daily life. For even this bedroom, small though it was, was not his. If it were, he would have cherished it, in all its close airlessness, for its privacy. No. This room was where his children slept.

He slept in the living room, where a narrow red chair folded out for his nights. From there he could hear his wife, in her own small room, play out her illness in silences and exhaustion and screams and cruel words. Something was growing in her brain. Something that would not kill her. But something that the surgeons determined they could not excise. Perhaps the doctors were wrong. Perhaps what was growing in his wife’s brain was not a thing, but a process. A reverse alchemy: emotional gold transmuting to base metal.