Joyland

a hub for short fiction

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Joyland Retro 2 is now in print, with work from Peter Orner, Kate Durbin, Daniel Mueller and more. Every copy sold will help support Joyland and its authors.
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Essay: The Real Portlandia

Richard Melo
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

Richard Melo's new novel, Happy Talk, is out this June from Red Lemonade.

I was half out of my mind if not all the way. One year, I became a single dad. Then a year and a half later, my kid’s mom died. My first novel, a book I had spent the decade of my twenties writing, was finally coming out, and while I should have been ecstatic at my first publishing experience, with so much sadness at home, my face felt too heavy to smile. George Bush was president and acting like someone who never met a war he didn’t like. These were dark times.

Some people in circumstances like these might have turned to drugs and alcohol, others to Jesus Christ. All I wanted was to take care of my four-year-old daughter and surround myself with as much laughter as I could stand until life turned back to normal. Lucky for me, I found LiveJournal.

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Staccato

Colin Graham

 

Here the men are different. Of course they are. They could not be the same as us. I knew that this would be so. Though, when I first arrived, I had not expected them to be like this. Of how they do things, of how they carry out tasks, it is not my place to say “this is right” or “that is wrong.” I cannot be of their ways. Who can inhabit another? But I can see them. I watch who they are. And I wonder if they ever watch me.

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The Poetry Audition

K. Anis Ahmed

Excerpted from Good Night, Mr. Kissinger and Other Stories, available now from UPL Books.

Bahram and Jamshed were dressed alike as children because their father believed it to be the best way of preventing sibling rivalry. Rather than make them better friends though, their identical wardrobes led to some petty confusion. The brothers often wore each other's clothes by mistake. In family photographs of the time Bahram appeared scowling in shorts that hung down to his knees, while Jamshed smiled bravely in collars that nearly choked him.

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Hotel Palestine

Tom Paine
CC image courtesy of Flickr
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

JORDAN

A few days after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, Ann Prendergast left the hospital after a miscarriage. She slipped over the border from Amman, Jordan and after a tough and often terrifying journey across the western Iraqi desert ended up at the Hotel Palestine. Her bed was last slept in by a journalist who days earlier had been killed by U.S. troops. The city was on fire, almost post-apocalyptic, as looters continued their sweep.

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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?

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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. 

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

—Henry David Thoreau

 

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Tiger’s Got Teeth

Ethel Rohan
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

 

Roberta refused to move past the antiques shop, its grimy front window crowded with Korean furniture, ornaments and bric-a-brac. Anna protested her immovable mother; they were on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Seoul and en-route to Chanddokkung Palace, why delay in a creepy antiques shop? Roberta pulled Anna past the colossal stone creatures on either side of the shop entrance. Anna couldn’t decide if the bizarre-looking statues were supposed to be dogs or lions. She and her mother separated immediately, Anna drawn to the rustic urns and Roberta elsewhere.

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Incredible

Megan Stielstra
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

From Everyone Remain Calm now available from Joyland and ECW Press.

How it ended was, I got drunk. Like falling off the bar stool. Like lying on the floor and laughing at nothing. Like getting pulled to my feet by some random guy and falling over again, so he had to wrap his arms around my waist to keep me up. “Thanks,” I slurred. And, “You’re really ssstrong!” And, “You’re cute, too. You got a ssshaved head, and a sssweater, and that’s a lot of sssss’s.”

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American Weather

Charles McLeod
Editor: 
Guest Editor

 

The blonde tennis star is in a robe on my sofa. She won’t stop asking me questions about my wife’s external defibrillator. It’s late afternoon, the first Sunday of August. Link prints are back in and here on my shirt, with its French cuffs and broad collar, are thin chains of gold in a plaid sort of pattern. They look like the cords for men’s pocket watches. They say: I own Time. They say: I am powerful. The shirt is bright white. I am deep bronze. I’ll throw the shirt out in a month or two, tops. The tan stays year-round. In winter I turn slightly orange. I’m forty years old. I’m wearing board shorts. I’m worth about thirty-five million. My house, in the suburb of Piedmont, California, makes up one-fifth of this total. On my west-facing oak deck are a half-dozen chaises; they look at the Bay, at the bridge, San Francisco. Today, heavy smog: fine, brown, acrylic. Smog promotes fear. Smog makes me money.

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