Richard Holinger

January 2026 | nonfiction

Diapers

In rural northern Illinois northwest of Chicago, a raised, pressed, gray gravel path, long ago a railroad track, runs straight for miles, bordered by trees. On one side, farmers harvest their cornfields, green John Deere combines and tractors stirring up more dust than smoke from a forest fire. On the other side, houses on two-acre lots show off manicured, landscaped backyards with two and three-story mansions with castle-like turrets and floor-to-ceiling windows.

Walking through this shadowy tunnel one day, I meet Blackjack, a 14-year-old deaf, half-blind black lab. The man walking him, Mike, looks like Hemingway in his later, Ketchum years. He tells me he is a retired contractor.

I am strolling our family’s miniature poodle, a dog rescued when ten-years-old, now lying wrapped in blankets in a baby carriage because, at 18, partially deaf and mostly blind, she no longer walks.

Like aging men do, we start talking general aches—physical and familial—and how we handle them, then graduate to specific body parts. I brag two replaced hips, he a prostate.

“The friends of mine who had them taken out all wear diapers today,” Mike says, his voice low, gravelly. “Me, I got nuclear implants. They put in radioactive seeds that kill the cancer. They said I had eight years. That was back in 1998, more’n twenty years ago.”

Before surgery, Mike asked his doctor, “Will I still be able to get it up?”

“I’m not a miracle-worker,” his oncologist answered. “Can you get it up now?”

I tell him when eight or nine-years-old, I had to tap twice with the first two fingers of my left hand each light pole passed when walking to my elementary school on Dearborn Place or else something horrific beyond imagining would befall me.

I never missed touching one. Maybe I was afraid each would collapse if not tapped.

After one or two more serendipitous meetings, I no longer met Mike and Blackjack. Then Summer died. Occasionally I walked the Great Western Trail thinking I’d run into Mike, most likely alone. I looked forward to seeing him. After many strolls, no sign of him or his dog, I pretty much stopped walking there. Maybe he, like Blackjack, was no longer able to make it out, his prostate issues finally catching up to him.

The town we lived in bought a farm with a prairie growing an infinite number of wildflowers, a marsh where egrets and herons gathered, and multiple pairs of bluebird houses. I would have loved to walk it with Mike. Why hadn’t I asked for his contact information? Every time we met I left after saying goodbye thinking I’d see him next time when we would exchange phone numbers or emails, when more convenient, when we had more time.

Now I step onto the gravel trail, look up and down the shady path, see one bike rider in the distance, know it’s not Mike, know I won’t see him today, and know I won’t see him again, ever.

 

Richard Holinger

Richard Holinger’s work has recently appeared in Chautauqua, SIR, Cleaver, Whitefish Review, Cutleaf, and elsewhere. Nominations include the Pushcart Prize (5), Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction 2025, including the latter. Books include North of Crivitz (poetry) and Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (essays). His 2025 poetry chapbook, Down from the Sycamores, is available from www.finishinglinepress.com, and a short fiction collection, Unimaginable Things, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publications. He holds a doctorate in creative writing from UIC, taught high school and community college English for decades, and lives in rural northern Illinois.

John Dorroh

January 2026 | fiction

My Daddy Was an Omnivore

He drank coffee in the wee hours long before the sun oozed its way up over the hardwoods at the end of the property. He played Solitaire and smoked Camels before he woke all of us up to begin our day. My mother had to be at work by 7. Daddy took care of her like a cake maker, frosting her sides with a thick coating of meringuelike candy, opening the door of my bedroom, asking the same question: What would you like for breakfast? I slept like a bear cub, not sure who this man was interrupting my dreams about girls and flying boomerangs with dogs and wispy clouds. What? I’d ask. Denver omelet or pancakes? One day when I came home from playing down at the railroad tracks with my buddies, I found him crouching in the garden pulling up greenery and placing it in a Tupperware bowl. Dandelions, wild onions, unidentified grass and weeds What are you doing that for? I asked. This is dinner tonight. It’ll be great with those pork chops you like. As it turned out, the salad greens from the backyard weren’t so good for most of the family. My sister refused to touch them, and my mother gagged. Since he always seemed to like me, I decided to humor him and have a taste. Explosion on my tongue, in the back of my throat. Fireworks! No meat required. Transformation like spine Unfriending notochord, transmitting blasts of bovine deliciousness into the atmosphere. I am wild and grazer and hologram of urban sunsets, their lemon essence and citrus aftertaste diffusing into my soul. My mother demanded spaghetti and handmade meatballs. My sister didn’t care because she was in love with a man from the plastic factory. And Trixie, the terrier, ate everything she was offered. I pushed my pork chop aside that evening, but my father urged Don’t give it up…yet. You need both hands to make your dreams come true.

John Dorroh

John Dorroh likes to travel. He often ends up in other people’s kitchens, sharing culinary tidbits and tall tales. “Learning about cultures begins with the food,” he asserts. Six of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Hundreds of others appeared in journals such as Feral, River Heron, Burningword, Kissing Dynamite, North Dakota Quarterly, Penstricken, and North of Oxford. He’s had a book of micro fiction and two chapbooks of poetry published in recent years. Once he was awarded Editor’s Choice Award for a regional journal and received enough money for a sushi dinner for two.

Priscilla Long

January 2026 | fiction

One Day in the Life of Donna DeSimone

Donna, you will never become less deaf, her audiologist informs. Keep learning, she encourages herself. In ASL she has reached the letter L. Keep living. She buses down to Pike Place Market to purchase potatoes and greens, maybe collard. Downtown, she deboards into the midst of an ICE raid. Masked goons are throwing a well-dressed, screaming woman to the asphalt. People are holding up phone cameras, yelling Fuck you! Get out! A tall man is photographing. She knows that old camera. Husband of her youth. Why had she left him? Henry! He looks up. Donna! she sees his mouth say.

Priscilla Long

Priscilla Long is author of nine books including Cartographies of Home: Poems (MoonPath Press, 2026) and On Spaces and Colors (University of New Mexico Press, 2026). Her work has appeared in publications such as The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and The American Scholar. Her awards include a National Magazine Award and ten of her essays have been honored as “notable” in various years of Best American Essays. She has an MFA from the University of Washington and grew up on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. To learn more, go to www.priscillalong.com.

Jim Ross

January 2026 | visual art

Rained Upon Rose 4 - Jim Ross

Rained Upon Rose 4

Jim Ross

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, he has, in ten years, published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid works, interviews, and plays in 200+ journals on five continents. Photo publications include Barnstorm, Blue Mesa, Burningword, Invisible City, Orion, Phoebe, and Stonecoast. Photo-essays include Burningword, Kestrel, Litro, NWW, Sweet, and Typehouse. His most recent interview, published by Terrain.org, was conducted with an artist. A Best of the Net nominee in Nonfiction and Art, he also wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim’s family splits time between the city and the mountains.

Carlos Cunha

January 2026 | nonfiction

Monochrome Lane

The strip mall may well be on its last legs, but it still litters the landscape of many American towns and suburbs, especially here in Florida – an aggressively charmless, deservedly unloved suburban phenomenon that usually consists of nothing more than a basic parking lot with, at one end, a drably functional strip of windowed boxes that are usually rented out to low-end retail businesses, some local, some nation or regional chains, their motley commercial signage usually obeying no single design standard.

Running an errand on my bike one afternoon, I came to the example of this phenomenon nearest to where I live, a fairly large one, and, to avoid the unpredictable driving of cars using the busier sections of its expansive and otherwise mostly empty parking lot, I chose to cut through the service lane that runs between the back of the stores and some woods and wetlands where, as a bonus, I thought I might spot some interesting water fowl, although what ended up catching my eye instead was the back of the strip mall itself, and how extreme an aggravation you might say it was of the drabness in front. If the front looked drab, the back was drabness itself, because all of it was painted one color, a light, muddy yellow-brown. The effect was eerie, and ended up seeming even artful. It was as though a revealing statement were being made about the deceptive nature of the front, about how, behind commerce’s meretricious variety, lies a drably monochromatic, rather industrial sameness. And it was a statement that, sadly, could have extended to the lives of those suburban residents, including me, whom this strip mall was intended to serve. Not only were the backs of the different stores not distinguished by differing hues, the features on those buildings were not, so that I had to concentrate to notice, then to identify, the things camouflaged by that monochrome mudslide of yellow. The building backs were deprived not only of difference but, practically, of a third dimension, the clayey quality of the paint being such that it seemed to elude shadows, flattening doorknobs, locks, door jambs, vents, grills, lamp standards, lamp shades, awnings, AC plants, large industrial alarm bells, sundry wires, cables, pipes, casings. It called to mind the desert topography of long-dead worlds where all features are merely vestigial.

So it came almost as a shock when one of those vestigial doors swung open and someone — a living person, a woman, a worker — appeared, backing out uncertainly. It turned out that she was pulling a shopping cart after her, and her hesitancy had to do with the fact that the cart was piled high with precariously perched empty brown boxes, the sameness of their color echoing the sameness of the color of the back of the strip mall, as if delivering the same dismaying message.

 

Carlos Cunha

Carlos Cunha is a journalist. His literary writing was noted in the Best American Essays 2019 anthology edited by Rebecca Solnit, and he has been published in the Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a Seattle Review edition edited by David Shields. Born in Portugal, he grew up in South Africa and lives in Gainesville, Florida.