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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Los Angeles

The Pop-Up Restaurant

J. Ryan Stradal
Editor: 
Mathew Timmons

 

We admit it. Like almost all of you, we here at Spice Rack have never eaten at a restaurant called “The Pulitzer.” We’ve never tried what Food Source calls a “Grand Marnier and orange zest crème brulee that’s like a double fake orgasm while dry-humping a Cara Cara tree.” Or their “small plate of bacon-wrapped kale in pomegranate truffle oil” that apparently has “the flavor intensity equal to a motorcycle driven by a grizzly bear on fire, if the grizzly bear was made of bacon-wrapped kale.”

We hate to throw anyone under the food truck here, but we suspect the writers from Food Source, like most everyone else, had never eaten at The Pulitzer and were just trying to fit in with the other food bloggers and reviewers who also claimed they had. Let us here at Spice Rack, with our three James Beard Award nominations for accuracy in food writing, set the example.

Los Angeles

The Swan as Metaphor for Love

Amelia Gray
Editor: 
Mathew Timmons

The Swan as Metaphor for Love is also available in Joyland Retro Vol. 1 No. 3.

A swan's foot, like a duck's, is a webbed claw. In traversing swan shit and mud, the claws gunk up and reek. Nobody in the history of the world, save another swan, has licked a swan foot while that foot was still attached to the swan. The feet resemble rabid bats in their sickly color and texture.

Moving north on the swan's undercarriage, one will find an eroded civilization of swan shit and pond scum. This is a banal phrase, "pond scum," one that is easily ignored, but look closer, take a more personal approach. Swans eat grasses, sedges and pond weed, each teeming with murk. The birds will also eat insects, snails and a fresh shrimp if they're near one.

Los Angeles

Sappho Shtoltz Needs a Story

Liana Scalettar
Editor: 
Mathew Timmons

To tell her son. That she is not a blond beauty with black eyes is clear. That she does not shake hands like a man is too. That she is not a baroness or in any other way connected with the Russian or any other aristocracy is too. Nots, Sappho thinks, are easy.

She is stripping a king-sized bed. Its linen sheets are no dirtier than others, but they are more zigzaggy, as if the sleepers had tried to turn themselves into mummies.

She works in the grandest of the grand hotels in New Paltz, as a housekeeper. Her uniform is candy blue. The guests of this hotel, having a somewhat spiritual bent and liking to walk in the woods, tend to be decent tippers. Although many are not. The management of this hotel also having a somewhat spiritual bent (diluted by time and profit and, Sappho thinks, by the sheer cliffy gorgeousness of the view) tends to pay decent salaries although not the kind that keep up with inflation or with anything else.

Los Angeles

Glory

Catie Disabato
Editor: 
Mathew Timmons

The three of us tossed Avi in the bathroom and locked her in.  She screamed for hours, until her voice gave out, then banged on the doors.  We slept in shifts.  We had crudely soundproofed all the walls with our heaviest blankets (and we were cold when we slept, thanks to Avi’s fucking habits).  We’d cut a little mail-slot in the door so we could give her cigarettes and fresh clothes.  Sometimes Avi would stick her hand out, grabbing for us or grabbing for the khat we were keeping from her.  It wasn’t real khat, which in its purest form is a mostly non-addictive African coke-like thing.  Avi snorted some bastard of coke and khat, with maybe some Adderall cut in, and a mystery Caribbean addictive stimulant. I am pretty sure there was also bleach in it, or baking soda; it was pure white.

Los Angeles

All Of The Arctic Explorers

Bryan Hurt
Editor: 
Mathew Timmons

PYTHEAS
            First of all Pytheas, Pytheas of Greece.
            He was everything that you’d expect from an ancient Greek person. Toga laurel wreath, all of that.
            Everywhere he went he discovered things.
            He discovered the Baltic.
            He discovered amber.           
            He discovered the British Isles and everyone living there. People who painted their faces blue and who traded in tin and who had not yet discovered themselves. When his boat made landfall, Pytheas, the British people said, discovered them. And then, when he left the British Isles, sailing north, he continued discovering things.
            The midnight sun, for example.
            Pancake ice.
            The relationship between the moon and the tides.
            He discovered Thule.

Los Angeles

The Measure Everything Machine and Other Sketches (an excerpt)

Mark Wallace
Editor: 
Mathew Timmons

Troll

A man devotes much of his energy to studying poetry. At times he even manages to write poetry, yet whenever he sits down to write, he thinks of all the great poets throughout history who have written such wonderful poems and he feels like he could never live up to their standards. Because of this feeling, he’s not able to write many poems. Every time he tries to write he feels ashamed. He often falls into long mocking conversations with himself in which he obsessively lists all his failings as a writer and all the terrible things those failings have caused. Maybe the most common of these is that if he really were a great writer, the world would be a better place. People would no longer be as unhappy and desperate, and they would acknowledge the greatness of his wisdom and the role he had played in their happiness.

Los Angeles

The Failure Age (An Excerpt)

Amanda Montei
Editor: 
Mathew Timmons

He reads her poetry that he hasn’t written. He weeps as he reads it. The words loll around on his tongue like melting ice cubes. He says the first one needs more salt. That one’s just right. She likes to think of poems as food. As the hours pass, all that movement desiccates his tongue. “It’s feeling dry! That’s how you know it’s upon you!” she says. “I think how you know is your whole body feels dry, like your tongue seems to feel right now!” (There are things that make you fall apart so fast.)

*

Los Angeles

The Girl in the Case

Lisa Teasley
photo by Imogen Teasley-Vlautin
Editor: 
Mathew Timmons

Rob Ruskin put an ad for the job on Craigslist: Wanted attractive, intelligent girlfriend, who will love, cherish and respect me, tolerate my family, friends and bad habits.  Salary: $5000 a month. 

The firm’s receptionist, Adele, at once sylph, salamander, undine, gnome, was trusted with the task of sifting through applicants. That Rob was an attorney, a partner, and she not yet at the assistant’s level sought, made it risky and complicated. He told her it was an experiment in which these women would serve as a control group against those who would volunteer for the position.

Los Angeles

Guidelines for Flying: 3 Destinations

Samantha Cohen
Editor: 
Mathew Timmons

San Pedro, California

Descend onto the rockiest beach you see, the one with the greatest differentiation in color among its rocks. The beach you choose is nearly sure to be empty of humans. Use this emptiness. Spend some time alone with the beach. With its rocks.

Pick up a pointy red rock. Run it along the sandstone cliff wall, or across a white boulder. Notice how easily one thing marks another, how it changes the other thing's appearance. How it loses a tiny amount of itself in the marking. Sit, if you want, and rub the pointy red rock against the white boulder until the red rock is dust and nothing, a rust-colored coating for the pale other.

Walk for a long time and notice what you notice.

Fly close above the ocean like a gull.

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