Trick of the Light

November 17, 2025.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Jessica Jo Staricka
Featured Art: “Nope” by Alex Brice

One night twenty years later, among cardboard boxes fuzzy with dust in the basement of my mom’s final house, I find a tennis racket. I’m puzzled. We never played tennis. Maybe the racket was trash left behind by a previous renter that we accidentally packed and brought with us on one of our many moves. Maybe Gladys and I begged a dollar off our mom to buy it at a garage sale and made up our own game pitching pinecones to each other in one of the back yards.

But when I pick it up, its exact heft and balance rush me out of this basement and twenty years back, to the perfume of white pines and the prick of their needles through the holes in my sneakers, to the gravel yards and dandelion lawns and empty horse corrals and collapsing barns of the half-dozen ramshackle farmhouses we rented growing up, to their living rooms on summer nights, where Twins games played on TV, where I tinkered with salvaged arts and crafts, where my sister Gladys played an out-of-tune piano if the house happened to come with one, and where a bat appeared in the corner of the ceiling.

Essay: Acres of Gold

October 27, 2025.Reading time 51 minutes.

By Katharine L. Wiegele

Dear Friend, it began.

Around the last week of April in 1944, farmers around the country received a letter from the DeKalb Ag seed company.

Twelve common kernels of corn would mean nothing to you, but the kernels in this envelope are far from being common. In fact, they are special seed kernels of a new DeKalb hybrid variety. […] Put them in safe keeping until you plant corn. This seed will produce a hybrid which neither you nor your neighbors have ever seen.

Stapled to the letter was a small envelope containing twelve seeds.

* * *

A seed is an embryo. Every farmer and gardener since the Mesopotamians chose seeds to save and replant the following year. This allowed people to stop roaming around looking for food in the wild. We passed seeds from hand to hand every year in a chain of nearly 450 generations. Parents and grandparents died, but the seeds continued. If the seed was lost, we were lost.

The Names of Those We Love

June 1, 2025.Reading time 38 minutes.

By Kenyon Geiger

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2012. Oil on canvas, 16″ x 20″. “Cirlce” series.

It was finally settled: the competition was rigged, and Mrs. Klein would not be receiving her lifetime supply of free groceries after all. She set the letter down on her countertop with shaky hand and shaky breath. This was not a surprise. Aside from the mystery of how the competition was supposedly rigged, the news brought with it a strange comfort for Mrs. Klein. She was used to things not working out.

Her mother always thought of everything as God’s will, all part of His divine plan; this was atypical for a Jewish woman, at least in Mrs. Klein’s experience. Her mother reminded her more of the parents of the evangelical friends Mrs. Klein had at school; they often talked like that, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Of course, she wasn’t Mrs. Klein then, back when she was in school. She was Rebecca, a little girl with her entire life ahead of her.

The Oregon Trail

September 30, 2017.Reading time 21 minutes.

By Corey Van Landingham

Featured Art: Wooden fence with two black buffaloes by Markus Spiske

When my first boyfriend’s mother died of breast cancer, I spoke with him on the cordless, from the bathtub, trying to console him. He was calm in his grief, and I broke his heart soon after. A cruelty only vaguely acceptable at fourteen. A week before we had snuck out, in the middle of the night, and driven up the snaking mountain roads of southern Oregon. Toward what? Toward something. We could feel a pull all around us, the silence in the woods, the ghosts of the Shasta people passing below our windows.

What did we know of love? Across the screen, in the dark computer labs of our youth where we played The Oregon Trail on our soon-to-be-extinct Apple II computers, love was entering in the names of those you wanted to take with you, west, toward the promised land. We could all begin a new life together, if we purchased the right supplies. Unless we were in a particularly harsh environment, we knew to conduct a brief funeral. Here lies Laura. We wrote epitaphs across the virtual tombstones before continuing down the trail.

Return of the Media Five

November 21, 2012.Reading time 50 minutes.

By Maya Sonenburg

Second Prize, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest
selected by Charles Baxter

Featured Art: The Eventuality of Destiny by Giorgio de Chirico

I am this heart, this brain, only these, right now—no other. This is what Susan (that’s her name now) tells herself every morning upon waking. She opens her eyes and sees the flaking ceiling above her, sees the wash of sunlight coming through leaves. She touches her chest, feels her heart beating steadily—no rush of fear—and exhales. She’s alone. She touches her head, hair just starting to gray and she’s not bothering to color it. “This can be my new disguise,” she thinks, “my new self.” One of the million selves she’s been in the last twenty-odd years. She rubs her eyes and before she can silence herself again, she remembers days when she thought more, remembered more: a million legs all running toward the Pentagon or induction center or federal courthouse. Flowers in the barrel of a gun. A Viet Cong flag. Giant puppets of Kissinger, Nixon, McNamara. Or their heads atop the bodies of gigantic hawks, perched among the blackened trees of a burned landscape. Bring the war home. A placard of a napalmed child. If people see, they will join us and this atrocity will have to stop. A million hands waving. A million arms, fists raised in salute. They were the million legs and hands of her—her legs and hands—the million-limbed body of resistance, then revolution. Why does she allow these things to come back to her today? Because it’s spring and her curtains are the color of a daffodil she handed to a child once at a demonstration? She remembers when the remembered voices were always with her, singing off-key but loudly together. She never felt alone. But then suddenly she was alone, amputated from everyone and everything she knew. Most mornings she silences these memories of memories, she manages to.

A Permanent Home

November 20, 2009.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Nicole Walker

Featured Art: Houses at Murnau by Vasily Kandinsky

We had been in Michigan only five months when we heard the people we sold our house to back in Salt Lake City had decided not just to remodel but to start completely over. They were tearing it down.

Erik had painted every wall of that house. He painted the moldings with enamel paint—hard enough to last forever. That’s the house Zoe was born in. It’s the house where Erik first brought me oysters and the house where I first made him salmon. It’s the house we brought Zoe home to—where I first nursed her and where I first fed her puréed sweet potatoes. That house was where I learned to make cassoulet and where I made my mom her favorite vichyssoise.

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.