Cincinnati Review

It takes very little to become a difficult patient. Having questions, feeling unexplained or anomalous pain, being uncajoled, seeming nervous for one’s first dose of chemo. The nurse looked at me sideways as I walked into the chemo-complex, and asked, “Are you all right?” as if I should have been. As if I looked excessively …

  Assistant Editor Molly Reid: This piece of flash nonfiction pulls no stops. Despite the apology of the title, Jenifer Lawrence lays the scene for us with raw, unapologetic honesty. Through juxtaposition—a dead decapitated seal found on a beach and a fraught moment between the speaker and her son—Lawrence digs into feelings of regret and …

I am sleeping when the pain starts, dreaming of full hospitals and empty classrooms, a dark tunnel, dates on a computer screen, a diminishing roster of students, dead links, a riot of wildflowers—yellow to orange to code red—a superbloom of fires. My body jerks. My eyes open in the dark, and I am sucking air. …

Piya has just turned thirty. She works in her family’s hotel. Tonight she will become pregnant. In twenty-some weeks, she will lose the baby, and the state of Indiana will sentence her to twenty years in prison for feticide. One year for every week. But for now, it is early on Tuesday, and on Tuesdays …

Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In Katie Cortese’s deft hands, this story juxtaposes the greatest kinds of loss with the mundane details of a life lived in the aftermath. Medieval torture shares a paragraph with the limitations of automatic doors at a gym, and “Windex and elbow-length rubber gloves” show up near the memory of a funeral. …

There’s nothing much wrong with the Bridgeway Motor Court. The carpet in Coleman’s room is dappled with burn marks, and the exterior wall, the one with the windows, has these psychedelic zigzags at the bottom, like somebody’s kid was left to run their crayons back and forth over the same spot, rubbing them down to the nubs. It’s cheap, though, the motel, and there aren’t any bugs.

  Assistant Editor Caitlin Doyle: In Bruce Johnson’s unsettling and Kafkaesque flash-fiction piece “The Slabs,” we enter a world that brings to mind the 1960s television series The Twilight Zone and the more recent Netflix series Black Mirror, wildly popular shows that invite viewers to navigate the line between the quotidian and the strange. Johnson asks …

To be a child again. Is my wish. Something earthy and pleasant. Something before knowledge. Before. Me and the kids down the street making wooden gravestones with our names on them for Halloween, before we knew that one kid would die. How the gravestones lived with us years after, in the garage. Childhood, like a …