The Animal Trade

November 12, 2009.Reading time 51 minutes.

Winner of the 2009 New Ohio Review Prize in Fiction (selected by Peter Ho Davies)

By Christine Nicolai

Featured Art: Paard by Anton Mauve

It was close to midnight when Vic heard a shotgun echoing somewhere nearby. If Sue were still around, he’d have put on his boots and stomped out to the porch in his bathrobe, scanning the front yard and street in the twilight. If she were here, he’d have seen that it was all clear and come back to bed where she’d have been frozen under the blankets, breathing those shallow, rabbitty breaths, like she was flattened in a clump of weeds, waiting for the fox to move on. Without Sue, Vic told himself it wasn’t a shotgun he’d heard, because shots at midnight usually meant someone was doing something they shouldn’t.

This was midsummer, humid and hot. Even though it was long after the fourth, the noise could have been an M-80 or Salute, picked up from the reservation. Every couple of weeks one of the guys at the restaurant complained about kids lobbing cherry bombs into front lawns and tearing off down the street, yelping at the stars. That was an explanation he could almost hold in his hand, except that he knew it was the sharp-edged sound of a shotgun that had crackled through the night. His jeans were on the floor. He put them on in the dark and went to check the doors, sticking his head out the back, trying to make out more than just the outline of the barn against the dark sky. The gate leading to the back pasture appeared to be shut, which meant that Toby, the gelding Sue had left behind, should be all right. He closed the door.

Foreign Excellent

October 14, 2009.Reading time 70 minutes.

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.

Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry

May 16, 2009.Reading time 55 minutes.

By Christine Sneed

Featured Art: Self-Portrait in the Artist’s Studio by Emile Masson

Antonio Martedi, a painter and sculptor who had sold what he sometimes boasted were his least interesting works to American museums, told his granddaughter, April Walsh, on what turned out to be the day before his death, that he had not lived in fear of mediocrity so much as the disdain of beautiful women. He had made art because he wanted to be loved, preferably by many beautiful women in a slow but uninterrupted progression, women who would remember him fondly after their affair had ended and keep whatever sketches or canvases he had given them in an honored place in their homes. “But if after a while they sold my work for a good price to someone who knew how to appreciate it, I wouldn’t have held it against them. The money would be another way for me to keep my place in their hot little hearts.” This was the first time April had heard any of this, and she had no idea what had prompted it. Her grandfather had a reserve of stories that he repeated with depressing regularity for a man widely known for his flamboyance. She assumed that she had heard all he was willing to tell by the time she had graduated from film school and was failing to sell her scripts or to get hired as the production assistant’s own scorned assistant.

The Number One

April 30, 2009.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Ashley Cowger

On Friday, November 30th, 2007, at precisely 7:48 in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, Anna Kelsey McMillan became, for the duration of 5.3 minutes, the number 1 most beautiful woman in the world. 3 of those 5 minutes Anna spent in her car, alone, where nobody saw her in all of her splendor. But Anna spent 2 of those glorious minutes traversing the parking lot of the large business complex where she was expected, at 8 o’clock, to commence her presentation on farmed salmon.

Tableaux Vivants

October 5, 2008.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Katherine Lien Chariott

Featured Image: Icebound by John Henry Twachtman

1: Winter

Here is the beginning. I’m walking down the sidewalk and then the curb, sidewalk and curb again, under a sky full of tiny sad stars that light up this city as well as they can, but not as well as the neon signs all around me, not as well as the rainbow glitter of the Strip, just five miles away, I’m walking with the glitter and the neon and the stars, in front of the Sav-On Drugstore and then past it, towards the Dottie’s—video poker and snacks, cheap smokes and booze, twenty-four hours a day. I go into the Dottie’s, with money in hand for two packs of Reds, and a hey there to the man working security. I’ve seen him before, know that brown skin and that smile, so I can look at the carpet instead of at him while I tap my hands on the counter, waiting to be rung up. He’s watching me, I think, and when I look at him, I know. Just like I know he hasn’t seen or doesn’t care that I came in with someone.

Water We Made Ourselves

September 12, 2007.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Sara McKinnon

Featured Art: by Creative Commons

My mother said to do it standing up. To make it damp. To push it up and down. To press it back and forth. To keep moving. To start on the inside. To turn it over. To keep moving. I saw my mother do it on the kitchen table. She wasn’t standing up. She didn’t make it wet. My father had to be at work by seven thirty.

I never listen to my mother. And when my boyfriend’s father dies, I pay another woman to do it for me. I drive across town in dark glasses. I walk up the steps to his front door. His shirt, under plastic, in my arms. I help him to pull it out. I watch as he puts it on. I stand in the hallway with my hands on his shoulders. I turn down the collar myself.