Joshua Shaw
Sophie is going through a rough patch in middle school. Her parents decide she would benefit from learning valuable life lessons. So, they sign her up for a 4-H competition. Two weeks later, a Little Miss Ohio arrives in the mail.
The Little Miss Ohio comes in a sturdy cardboard box wrapped in layers of packing tape. A label states which side is up. There are breathing holes punched in its sides.
Sophie opens it to find Styrofoam peanuts, a smaller box, more packing peanuts, and, in the center, a soft fuzzy sock. A terrified-looking Little Miss Ohio cowers inside the sock. She is dressed in cutoff shorts and an oversized T-shirt. Her hair is the color of beach sand.
Sophie gingerly taps the Little Miss Ohio out of the sock and into the wire cage on her nightstand. The Little Miss Ohio spends her first night in the habitat huddled in the corner, doesn’t eat any of the Girl Scout cookies Sophie leaves in her food bowl, but perks up the following morning. Sophie wakes to find her doing jumping jacks and calisthenics.
For a time, everything goes fine. Sophie and her Little Miss Ohio bond over their shared love of avocado toast. They braid friendship bracelets. Sophie convinces her Little Miss Ohio to try out cosplaying; they resolve to attend cons in Columbus dressed as characters from Arcane and Hazbin Hotel.
Sometimes, Sophie catches her Little Miss Ohio singing Taylor Swift songs when she thinks she’s alone. Her voice is beautiful, like windchimes in a quiet garden. She’s shining like fireworks over a sad empty town. She’s too busy dancing to get knocked off her feet. She doesn’t know about you, but she’s feeling twenty-two.
It no longer upsets Sophie that her former best friends, Kelsey and Brooklyn, refuse to let her sit at their lunch table, or that someone scrawls “Ugly” on her locker in indelible marker. She looks forward to spending time with her Little Miss Ohio. She fucking loves her Little Miss Ohio.
A few weeks before the county fair, Sophie makes the mistake of sitting behind Madison Salsbury in the bleachers at an after-school 4-H workshop. Madison boasts about how she competed at the state fair last year, which is, like, totally bigtime. She plays videos on her phone of the Little Miss Ohio she’s planning to show this year, and, holy shit, it’s one sickass-looking Little Miss Ohio.
Madison has kept hers on a raw paleo diet and enrolled her in Krav Maga classes. Her Little Miss Ohio is sinewy and lithe and totally jacked. She looks predatory, with cheekbones so sharp you could cut yourself looking at them. She looks like gunmetal lipstick. She looks like that-which-does-not-kill-me-makes-me-even-more-pissed-off.
Sophie gives her Little Miss Ohio a hard appraising stare when she gets home. She notices how one tooth, an incisor, is slightly askew, and how her Little Miss Ohio’s lopsided smile, which previously struck her as adorable, diverges from ideal conformation. Also, her laugh, isn’t it snorty? And if Sophie’s being brutally honest, hasn’t she fattened her up on too many Girl Scout cookies?
No, she thinks, this won’t do. This won’t do at all.
She puts her Little Miss Ohio on an ever stricter diet, nothing but ice water and creatine and celery sticks. She forces her Little Miss Ohio to do endless sets of burpees and kettle bell swings.
The night before the 4-H competition, Sophie’s parents drive to the fairgrounds in Saint Clairsville. They book a room at a motel off I-70, but Sophie insists that her Little Miss Ohio must spend the night alone in the tin-roofed exhibition pavilion where the judging will be held.
Her pen is freezing, nothing but handfuls of sawdust on cold concrete floor. Sophie’s Little Miss Ohio listens to the animals, their rustle and breathing, the Angus cows and Shetland Sheep, the soft little Chinchillas, in and out, in and out. She tries to remember the words to a Christmas song, the one about little lord Jesus asleep on the hay, the cattle lowing, no crying he makes.
She wakes the next morning with sniffles and a low-grade fever.
“Suck it up, buttercup,” Sophie tells her.
When Sophie’s name is called over the speaker, she carries her Little Miss Ohio to an aluminum folding table. Stern-faced judges with clipboards tell her to state her name. Then they prompt her to list her Little Miss Ohio’s failings, the many ways she falls short of ideal breed standards.
By the time she is done, her Little Miss Ohio’s eyes are slick with tears.
Sophie receives a white ribbon, which, in 4-H scoring, means she and her Little Miss Ohio are both letdowns. Sophie’s parents insist they are proud: she has learned valuable life lessons about caretaking and breeding. On the drive home, Sophie and her Little Miss Ohio avoid all eye-contact. They stare out their windows. The landscape vanishes into the dusk.
That night, Sophie weeps into her pillow.
Her Little Miss Ohio climbs out of her wire cage and curls up beside her. She braids Sophie’s hair and sings quietly to her. Sophie says, “I’m sorry.”
They tent the blankets and stay up all night trading secrets and passing a flashlight back and forth beneath them. They make-believe the blankets and pillows are the walls of a cave, a crack in the earth, a burrow where rabbits might hibernate, sheltered by acres of stone, safe from all in the world that would hurt them.
Joshua Shaw is a philosophy professor who began writing fiction mid-career. His first collection of stories, All We Could Have Been and More (Livingston Press), won the 2022 Tartt First Fiction Award. Joshua grew up in the outrageously quaint New England town that inspired the TV show, The Gilmore Girls, but now lives in hardscrabble Western Pennsylvania.