The News from North Korea

November 23, 2025.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Jim Marino

We’re three bites into not-quite-Christmas pie when my mother breaks into the epic tale of Dad leaving her for another woman. Sometimes it’s a blonde, sometimes a spurious redhead, depending on how inspiration moves the teller. Like all great oral epics, it’s founded on a myth. My father’s been dead almost four years. The other woman he left my mother for was an inoperable brain tumor. But who wants to hear that?

“All those sexy young dental hygienists, and in the end? He leaves me for a patient.” Mom wags her fork like a finger, emphasizing, demanding attention, making just one point more. “This little Puerto Rican with big fake tits and fake blonde hair and two impacted molars. Consuela. And would you believe the worst part?”

My husband wears the Jesuit-school poker face I envy so, eyebrows raised as if he’s just been told some modestly interesting fact. Eddie, approximately 2.4 years old, is busy experimenting with whipped cream between his fingers, and my sister Judy, who drove Mom the two days from Miami, still looks a little dazed. But Larry from work hangs on Mom’s every word.

Essay: Original Sin

November 13, 2025.Reading time 36 minutes.

By Anna Davis Abel
Featured Art: “Self-Portrait” by Rachel Hall

“You’ve got to be feeling better!”

Kim, the nurse practitioner I see every month, beams at me from across her desk, framed by a fortress of file folders and half-drained pens. A congealed yellow mass perches in the corner of the tabletop, leering at me like an inside joke I no longer find funny. This is what ten pounds of fat looks like! she’d said once, jiggling it between her hands. You’ve lost four of these!

“I do feel better,” I lie, curling my lips into the smile I know she loves.

I am her only eating disorder patient—a peculiar case in a weight loss clinic that masquerades as a wellness program. They market health here, but the waiting room tells a different story: anxious bodies perch on plastic chairs, flipping through pamphlets promising transformation. The air smells faintly of antiseptic and desperation.

“You’re a real success story, Anna,” Kim says, slipping the reading glasses from atop her head. Her fingers dance over the laptop keys, scrolling, scrolling—pausing. A satisfied hum. “Looks like we’re only twelve pounds away from your BMI goal! And how long has it been since a binge?”

I aim for optimism. “Three months.”

THE CANYON OF UNKNOWN WATER

October 31, 2025.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Kent Nelson
Featured Art: “Close Up – Spatial Neighborhoods” by Alex Brice

Henry shoved his drift boat from the trailer into the river, unhitched the winch line, and wedged the anchor into a crack in the cement ramp. He drove his Tundra and boat trailer up the ramp to the parking lot. He’d already loaded his gear into the boat—fishing rod, all-time favorite foods, stove, lantern, camping crap. He put his parking permit on the dash, locked the cab, and pocketed the key—no sense letting people steal what his daughter could use. He’d sent Catherine the spare key and a note that said the truck was at the Spring Creek put-in on the South Fork of the Snake River, which, given his habits, wonts, and desires, was the place he loved most in the world.

The note went out in the mail Wednesday morning, August 17th, from Idaho Falls. Catherine wouldn’t get it in L.A. until at least Friday or Saturday, if she checked her mail, but probably Monday. The truck wasn’t going anywhere without a driver.

In Our Nature

July 18, 2024.Reading time 36 minutes.

By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

Petrified wood is a lesson in belief, not so much a belief in what you see but in what you feel. Touching it, rubbing your fingers over its impossibly stony skin, you have to remind yourself that what it once was has changed entirely. A sequoia transformed into a rock wall. The language of trees turned to silence. Given the right conditions, the elements moving perfectly into place, it’s only a matter of time.

The Wild

I met Pete the summers I spent working in West Yellowstone, Montana, the tiny town situated just outside the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park. I was a freshman in college and had never lived away from home. A senior in high school, he hadn’t either. I’d also never had a boyfriend. Pete tied and sold flies over at Jacklin’s Fly Shop and dreamed of being a fly fishing guide one day. More experienced outdoors than I was, he naturally held a youthful energy for the place while developing a kind of wisdom I always envied. Each time we drove through Yellowstone Park, he recited to me the scientific names of the wolves, elk, and buffalo, those gorgeous Latin words decorating our conversations: Canis lupus, Cervus canadensis, and the comically redundant Bison bison, which always made me laugh. He even knew the scientific name of the lichen growing on the rocks (Pleopsidium), and older fishermen remarked to me how adept he was on the river, especially for an eighteen-year-old. I was proud, of course, of finding someone so unique. Instead of flowers, he brought me the best flies he’d tied for the week, and I stuck them in my ball cap and wore them all summer, woolly buggers and caddisflies flapping against my head in the breeze.

Down in the Valley

November 22, 2023.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Mary Birnbaum

The Featured Art is “Sea Library” by Greta Delapp

I was supposed to go on vacation to a National Park, but I don’t vacation. I mean, I did go, but I came very close to not seeing anything at all, because here is how I am accustomed to seeing: There are windows in my home office, but my desk does not face them, so light enters from the side. I am obliquely aware of the day. Sometimes I twist my body to see if the sun has risen, whether fog covers or wind stirs the big green shrub outside. In this small room in my house, I face three computer monitors and their glowing non-sun. I do a real-time job. Creation and consumption of the product are simultaneous; I make live captions for people to read on the Internet, like a stenographer does in court. I do it for seminars and webinars and legal proceedings, in Zoom or Teams or Chime or the platform du jour. My job is to listen and talk at once. What I do is called Voicewriting. It is a job of ears and mouth, an occupation more physical than cerebral, though I’m very stuck at a desk. I receive an audio feed from a remote source and say aloud what I hear as I hear it. Voice recognition software instantly converts my speech to text, which appears in a unique URL, or onscreen in a meeting platform. Someone I don’t know, someone far away or near, reads it as it unfurls. The job is sweaty and live. I’ve parroted defense contractors, nuclear regulators, pastors and poets. It’s echo, not interpretation.

There is no time to fall behind. A dropped word can be fatal to sentence meaning, a dropped sentence is dereliction. Tethered to my laptop by a web of cords, in my black microphone-headset, I resemble an air traffic controller. When a meeting has weak audio, I jack the volume up, and with my palms I press the headphones to my skull, so I am filled with sound and its vibration, then quickly I move my lips and tongue. If I get a very speedy talker, I close my eyes to eliminate all extraneous stimuli. The trick of the job is to tune out your own noise, to be a channel of syllables divorced from sense.

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.

Balloons

May 13, 2023.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Catherine Uroff

Featured Art: Polar Chroma Squall by John Sabraw

We’re waiting for a hot air balloon ride up by the old Warren County airport, in the middle of an open field, nothing around us but the long airport shed and a guy with a bushy beard sitting on the flatbed of a truck. Kent’s talking to the pilot about the weather, asking about refunds because it’s a little windy out. The pilot laughs. White teeth flashing in the middle of all that dark hair on his face.

“It’s a breeze,” he says. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Sherri calls me then. She’s lived across the street from us for years. She’s a gossip, telling me things that she shouldn’t, like who in the neighborhood is fighting over money, whose child is questioning, whose husband needs a lawyer. Last year, she asked my daughter, Aimee, to babysit for her while she played tennis. Apparently, Aimee turned on the television almost instantly and forgot to feed the kids their lunch and by the time Sherri came home, the house was wrecked and the children were stunned from all the shows they’d watched, and a boy was coming down the stairs, tucking in his shirt.

Come as You Are

May 2, 2023.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Ryan Shoemaker

Featured Art: Delta Bloom by John Sabraw

“Bruises on the fruit, tender age in bloom.”
— Kurt Cobain, “In Bloom”

“He walked out the back door of Exodus and climbed the six-foot wall … over the next two days, there were scattered sightings of Kurt.”
— Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain

Thursday, March 31, 1994, my eighteenth birthday. That was the day Scotty and I helped Kurt Cobain out of a tight spot and then jammed with him in my basement. I know what you’re thinking — I’d have thought the same if it hadn’t happened to me. But it did. This was back when I played guitar and Scotty drummed, back when we had this crazy idea, like a million other kids drunk on the grunge zeitgeist, that all we needed to be rock stars were some ratty jeans, a thrift-store cardigan, three guitar chords, and enough repressed angst to pen the next great teenage anthem. But that was years ago, six days before Kurt put a shotgun in his mouth, before Scotty really did become a rock star, and before I stopped caring about all of it. That day I met Kurt, that changed everything.

Memoir: I Went, Running

May 21, 2020.Reading time 24 minutes.

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.

A Non-Orientable Surface

March 15, 2019.Reading time 56 minutes.

By Mari Christmas

My husband manages a cheap hotel off the interstate five days a week, and every Wednesday night he visits the community center pool. Some days I meet him there. I like to watch him push the water around. It helps with the arthritis, he says, sculling the surface, making frog legs. He believes I deserve an office job, something that allows me to move between cities while wearing a thin blouse. We hardly speak. This is because of all the guilt. I look out across the pool. Children shiver in wrinkled suits, sucking their hair. Inside, it is airless, hazy, the windows fogged. The water a dark tangle of rope. Even though I cannot see him, I know he is there.

After swimming my husband will stay in his small room, equipped with a desk and a plastic lamp, and berate his romantic Romanian pen pal over the phone. He feels the need to give important looks, to demonstrate his rigor over a crowded table, and so forth, even internationally. “If you piss in the corner, I piss in the corner,” he tells her, speaking in English. For two bars of chocolate a month she puts up with all of that. He refuses to learn her language, as he cannot be bothered with the gender of specifics.

Tonight, he comes into the kitchen with the phone saying he wants a son, one he will name Atilla. Atilla? I think. Like Atilla the Hun? I marvel at my attraction to this bareheaded man, whose age has a secure density to it, like a landmark, and how this makes me feel intimately bound to him. “Something that does not weaken the spirit. Nothing that gives him an ironic existence,” he explains to his girlfriend, and then retreats down the hall, padding softly, his shirt untucked. Through the walls I hear him say the name ennobles mankind and something about plundering a northern province. He is never done. He talks and talks. Another blind Milton dictating to his poor daughter. The top of my head says, at least they’re not sleeping together, but I no longer believe in any of that.

Bodies That Drift in the River Flow

May 28, 2017.Reading time 43 minutes.

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.”

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.

Black Telephone

September 23, 2016.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Robert Long Foreman

Featured Art: Death: “My Irony Surpasses All Others” by Odilon Redon, 1888

Michael, you are gone, and in this house where you once were there is an antique telephone as black as your coffin. Heavier than it looks, it is as full as the hole the men dug for you, early one morning, as they talked about summer and things they saw on TV.

Old things weigh more than they look—dead, leaden things like you and the black telephone.

You have been gone three weeks, and now my mother is gone, too. When she left for Providence she left me here with Michael, whom you left behind like a copy of yourself when you went. He doesn’t ask where you are anymore. Instead he says, nine times a day, that he’s going to call you on his telephone.

He found it at the flea market where my mother took him, to take him off my hands and take me off of his.

When I’m not looking, he lifts the receiver and talks to you. He doesn’t say your name, and I don’t ask who is on the line. I know it’s you.

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.