Joyland

a hub for short fiction
Toronto

I Was a Teenage Minotaur

A.G. Pasquella
Editor: 
Emily M. Keeler

At the mall a lady offers me a free sample of zit cream and I’m about to be all sarcastic, like “Look, lady— I’ve got a giant bull’s head. No one’s going to notice a few zits.”

But there’s something about the way she’s smiling at me, not a plastic fantastic artificial airbrushed smile like all the ladies on the magazines, that draws me up short and makes me smile back at her (have you ever seen a bull smile? It took me years of practice to get my lips to curl just right) and yeah, I know she’s been trained in the fine art of zit cream sales but either she’s the best actress in the world or she’s the nicest person in the world and either way my heart just melts. Zits or no zits, suddenly I know this year is going to be different.

*

“You’re sure you want to do this?” my mom asks, piling my plate with spaghetti and drenching it with sauce, just the way I like it.

Midwest

Cousin Barnaby Is Dead

Clifford Garstang
Editor: 
Charles McLeod

 

I’m in the middle of an argument with my mother—she thinks I should ask her friend’s daughter Denise Knickerbocker out on a date while I’m home for Spring break, and I think that’s the worst idea ever—when the phone rings. I want her to let the answering machine get it, or make Dad answer it, wherever he is, in their bedroom or the basement or sneaking a smoke on the back porch, because I want her to listen to me for a change. Instead, she glances at the caller ID and lifts the receiver.

After “Hello,” she’s silent, nods solemnly as if the caller can see her and will understand that she’s taking whatever it is seriously. Then it’s “Yes,” “Yes,” “I’m so sorry,” and she hangs up. She looks at me and there are tears in her eyes.

“Cousin Barnaby is dead.” She says this with resignation in her voice, as if the news is inevitable.

New York

Fukushima Mon

Tom Paine
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

Last month, by Gmail, I got the invitation to your funeral in Japan on March 11th.  It took me a few breaths to remember that was the first anniversary of the 2011 Tohoko earthquake and tsunami. It would seem impossible to forget—even for the span of a few breaths--one of most the powerful earthquakes ever recorded, or a tsunami with waves 140 feet high. It would seem impossible to forget a force powerful enough to jilt the earth itself four inches off its axis, or leave us with days that are shorter. And then the meltdown of three of the seven reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.  Could I forget that for a moment? Or the heroism of your father Masao who saved the northern third of Japan?

And then there was you, Himamari.

Could I forget you?

Montreal Atlantic

The Border

Arjun Basu
Editor: 
David McGimpsey

And then she pulled off the highway and rolled into the town there and stopped in front of a bar and said “Get out” and I said “For real?” and she said “Get out” and I got out and she popped the trunk and I retrieved my bag and closed the trunk and without looking back at me she gunned the car and drove away.

This was how it was going to end, in a kind of preordained melodrama, with an egregious stupidity that would manifest itself like this. We had just crossed over from Quebec. The gust of wind kicking up the parking lot dirt was probably Canadian. And now I was here, the first town in New Hampshire, and I was in front of a bar and that triggered a thirst.

Midwest

Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid

Tan G. Digger
Editor: 
Charles McLeod

“So I was reading this article in the Times about how, apparently, there’s like way more people who want to write books nowadays than actually read them.”

As I spoke, my wife was texting.

“Man, how depressing is that?”

“What?”

Infuriated by her inattentiveness, I slid under the bed.

“Honeypot, why are you hiding down there again?”

“Because it’s safer down here.”

“Then how come you’re crying?”

“I dunno, sweetness.  I’m sad, I guess.”

“And why are you sad?”

“Jesus fucking Christ, what’s with all the questions?  Why were you texting when I was talking?”

“I was texting you, idiot!”

“Bullshit.”

“I swear to fucking God.”

I burst out from underneath the bed and dashed over to the drawer where my cell phone was stashed.  Squinting, I read the screen.  There was a text.  From her.  It said: “I ♥ U!”

“Happy anniversary, honeypot.”

“It’s our anniversary?”

Toronto

The Poncho

David Balzer
Editor: 
Emily Schultz

The Poncho is excerpted from Joyland/ECW’s latest short story collection, Contrivances by David Balzer. It also features work from artists Marcel Dzama, Margaux Williamson, Sholem Krishtalka, Vanessa Rieger and many more. You can purchase the book here.

When Deb first arrived at the cabin, when she was still wearing clothes, she tried in vain to remove the mirror over her bed, giggling to herself all the while. With a screwdriver and wrench she began to unfix the edges of the glass from the beams to which they were fastened, her skinny arms and hands reaching up out of an oversized man’s shirt, her feet balanced shakily on the mattress. She stopped giggling when she realized that more force might have cracked the glass, or the wood behind it—or, at least, have marred the wood enough to leave a quartet of large, ugly holes above her pillow.

New York

The Untitled Lincoln Love Story Project

Katya Apekina
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

 

“Your speech was phenomenal, Mr. President.”

Lincoln hunches over as he walks to better hear his companion, Mr. Seward, a small man with a large head.

“What would have taken me two hours, you said in two minutes.”

Mary Lincoln is on the other side of the President, leaning heavily on his arm. She appears distressed, but it’s hard to tell because of the lavender handkerchief she’s holding over her nose. As the men talk she glances down occasionally at the hem of her brocaded dress dragging through the mud. There is a lot of mud in the field.

“The men went wild, oh, how the men went wild,” Mr. Seward continues as they make their way through the crowd.

Consulate

Eulalie Laid

Elise Levine
Editor: 
Emily Schultz

At forty feet on a weedy plain aglint with crushed beer cans, observed by pouting bass, he bumped her. She finned to catch her balance but he was enormous as a dirigible in his black suit and hood. Frictionless as a tumble through sky, she scared mindless — new to her gear, the water — until his gloved hand clamped her shoulder and he pressed his mask to hers, his eyes flushed. Weeping? With his other hand he jiggered the regulator in her mouth. For a second she sighed: now this? Then she snorted, breath-exhaust balling surface-ward. Could he be more in her face?

***

Midwest

Hearing Test

Anna Prushinskaya
Editor: 
Charles McLeod

 

You’ll never be quite what you used to be because you’re always getting older. Everyone is. This was her ex-husband’s mantra, but now, they were not only divorced, but he was dead. Sylvia really didn’t have to believe it anymore.

In her living room, on the antique chest which needed some work though she had it restored already, apparently not well enough, there was a souvenir from a trip she had taken with Thomas in their fifties, several years before the divorce. Ah, Sardinia, the stem of sardonic, he had mused, a few times too many. He wasn’t a linguist, but he admired language. Both weighed heavily on Sylvia as of late, the souvenir and his mantra, not because of his death, but because she was feeling not quite how she used to.

New York

The Underside of Charm

Leopoldine Core
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

Ava sat in bed with Gretchen, a woman she’d met the day before in an AA meeting. Gretchen had been sober for eight years and it was her bed, her story.

“The bigger fear was that I wouldn’t die,” she said with a glazed look, closely monitoring Ava’s responses. “It was sick, to manage and control this thing – drinking – like it was God. To prove that I was God over it.” Gretchen ran one hand over her tawny crew cut and sighed. It was a story she had told many times, a story she liked to tell. There was the version she told in AA meetings and the version she told to lovers, but both framed her as a macho street urchin, staggering through life swigging from a flask and having epiphanies. She had an aura of smugness, even as she strode across the room to open a window, she bore the expression of someone receiving a compliment and finding it to be absolutely true. Her face was broad an

Consulate

Professional Development

Megan Stielstra
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

With AWP 2012 starting this week in Chicago, we're posting this topical story by Megan Stielstra. Megan is reading at Joyland's event at Quimby's this Thursday, March 1 at 7PM, along with Jeff Parker, Eugene Cross and Kevin Chong. 

*

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

—Henry David Thoreau

 

Vancouver

The Morrigan

William Ilan Rubel
Editor: 
Kevin Chong

Wren

Connected to the bog-land by a wooden causeway, the crannog roundhouse was ringed by rough, stout poles.  Wisps of smoke rose from its chimney, as it sat, squat and secure, built atop four crude juts of white stone, jutting onto the black bog-lake like a wheel cross. Beyond the bog-land, ash, beech, willow and cottonwood skirted a rill sparkling down from the greenmen. To the north, foothills of the greenmen rose, each taller than the last, stone giants heaving themselves up out of the earth, rounded shoulders trimmed in a wavering line of mist. 

Vancouver

Safeway

Claire Matthews
Editor: 
Kevin Chong

There is something to be said for sucking dick in a freezer. Between the rack of uncooked blueberry muffins and the ice cream, his pants are around his knees. It’s minus twenty-three degrees, minus eighteen when the door is open. And the door is open. We’re toward the back, past trucks of back-stock and cakes. If the seafood manager were to walk in for her skid, those wooden palettes that orders are stacked on, she wouldn’t see my feet. The product settles with the changing temperature, fissures in the otherwise silent freezer. This is what Safeway employees do when they’re finding those Eating Right Cinnamon Raisin bagels that you had to have. I’ll check in the back is synonymous for I’m going to fuck around for the next ten minutes. Literally. This freezer is deep enough and always overflowing with racks of product, skids, and dollies. It’s one of the only places illicit activity can happen in, where the chances of getting caught are slim.

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