The Journal is proud to announce the winner of the 2011 fiction contest, “The True Story of the Romanian Dog Boy” by Christopher Mohar.

Lee K. Abbott, judge of the contest, says of “The True Story of the Romanian Dog Boy”:

If you like, as I betimes do, to link arms with the literary Lou Reed for a walk on story’s wild side, then welcome to Paradise as imagined by Christopher Mohar channeling Dali, Bosch, and P. T. Barnum, a place made cockeyed by want and rue. Here’s a story, folks, about the tribe gone crooked, where love is as freaky as it is felicitous, where the engine of narrative does not clank or blow a fuse or sputter to a stop, where the aesthetic risks are as huge as its rewards. No effete ruby slippers, friends. No Woolworth magic wands. Just writing at the cliff’s edge and for keeps.

Christopher Mohar is the recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin and The Southwest Review’s McGinnis Ritchie Award for Fiction. Christopher has taught writing at two UWs (Seattle and Madison) and in a men’s correctional facility, and in past lives has been a metallurgical engineer, a busboy, and a legal assistant’s assistant. Some of his recent and forthcoming work can be found in Creative Nonfiction, Lit, Gastronomica, and New Stories from the Midwest – 2011 (Indiana University Press).

From the story:

The lobby. To your left you’ll see the exploded animatronic baboon with its latex face-skin flipped inside-out and fur suit unstrapped, and me buried to my elbows in tubes and cylinders. To your right, Bob has taken over the register after telling me to give the baboon a “total overhaul,” like I’m some kind of mechanic. That’s how I almost miss her, though I’m waiting.

For the third day in a row, she comes in like a payout on the penny slots, $12.99 dumped to the counter one handful after another. She doesn’t wait for Bob to count it before disappearing through the entryway. I glimpse small breasts, straight hips, a birthmark down her neck with the texture of crystallized honey. If I were Romulus, she’d be the she-wolf to suckle me to safety. If I were a bear-boy, I’d feed on her.

Look for “The True Story of the Romanian Dog Boy” in the Summer 2012 issue of The Journal.

Cheers,
The Editors