Joyland

a hub for short fiction

New York

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New York

Thirty-three Drops

Jeff Parker
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

I took the elevator from triage to the main floor. I wasn’t supposed to have any liquids, much less a coffee and cigarette, but like that Miles guy in Risky Business, sometimes you just got to say, “What the fuck. Make your move…”
This orderly in the elevator. He looked me up and down—my gown was blue, and I had slipped my bare feet into some loafers I found on the bench outside the change area—and then his gaze fixed on my left ear. There was nothing to see there. The golf-ball-size wad of gauze was tucked between my brain and the inside of my skull.
“You got the look of life all around you,” the orderly said, talking to my ear. For no reason at all he said this.
“I need a coffee,” I said.
“Get you some fresh air on top of that. Worse you can do is hang around. This place’ll kill you. Two Brazilian girls run a café on the corner. Go out the exit and walk left one block. If you miss it, ask any dude you see.”

New York

Collection Day

Kurt Gottschalk
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

Xian took a paint marker and an old mini-cassette recorder from his pocket. “Second and C,” he said into the tape recorder.

His work was marked by symmetry and a lack of clutter. No plastic bags, rarely a can—just things, objects with meaning. “Old air conditioner, bicycle wheel, laundry hamper, Ikea shelving unit, bundled magazines, guitar case, two broom handles, two feet of chicken wire. March 10, 2010.”

His friend Roger, a minimalist musician from New Zealand who played tambourine exclusively, had encouraged Xian, with misused words, to destroy the “large-object hegemony” he had created and allow mass groupings of smaller, like objects. Thus began the “utensil series.”

New York

Traces of Hugh

Greg Chandler
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

1. Veronica stormed off set and just kept going. She blotted her sweaty, heavily made up face with the linen scrap she kept in the pocket of her costume. Her costume, a copy of a gown worn by Madame de Montespan, a favorite mistress of Louis XIV, weighed fifty pounds. In the film, Summer Felicity, she does not play Madame de Montespan, but a fictional character named Felicity, the mistress of Guillaume Amfrye de Chaulieu, a renowned poet and wit of the 1680s. Craving solitude, she traipsed through a grove of sycamores, too embarrassed to acknowledge the prop girls downing Red Bull as they touched up the gold leaf on her palanquin. Fully aware of her mood, of the recent tabloids, of the rustling satin and dust cloud in her wake, they ignored her. Soon they were gone, and with them the klieg lights, the reggae blasting at craft services, and the director, perverted little Timmy, berating Dani, an ingénue ten years her junior.

New York

August: an excerpt from Follow Me Down

Kio Stark
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

It’s dusk on a Saturday, I’m out walking. There’s a man, unsteady on his feet, with a long, curled-handle umbrella. He’s holding it up to his shoulder like a machine gun, staring down the barrel and swiveling abruptly, a jungle commando, pausing to catch his image in the scratched Plexiglas window of the bodega. A small boy wanders out of the store and stands a few feet away, watching. The man pivots slowly, beginning to grunt and growl before he comes around to face the boy. The boy pulls his arms around himself and waits to see where this is going. So do I. The man hunkers down and grunts his way toward the boy, the umbrella-gun carefully aimed. I’m weighing my slightness against the man’s new equilibrium. In case. Then, something invisible passes between them and the tension breaks. The boy giggles and runs behind a tree, peeking out. The man pulls a forty-ounce out of a pocket and sits down on the bodega steps. The evening begins.

New York

That’s How Wrong My Love Is

Lynne Tillman
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

A while back, I watched a pair of mourning doves in their nest every day, watched as one then the other sat on an egg; saw their baby emerge from the egg, watched its being carried food and fed, saw them all fly away one late summer morning, never to return, I thought. But there are many mourning doves around my neighborhood and maybe those three are back.

Every morning, right to the window; every afternoon, come home, open the door, right to the window—I witnessed the entire cycle of a nesting mother and father, a chick’s beak cracking through the eggshell, the baby’s care, its parents’ nurturing it, the baby’s first flight.

New York

The Malibu

Zinzi Clemmons
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

I am in the back seat of my uncle’s BMW in Constantia Kloof, a wealthy enclave in the hills to the west of Johannesburg. We are idling in front of the gate to the development my cousin lives in. It is hot; the kind of dry, baking heat that reminds you that you are in Africa. In Johannesburg you are never outside; there are sidewalks and parks, but the sidewalks are empty of people, and abutted everywhere with tall security gates and spikes that make you feel like you are walking a prison yard. The parks are where the criminals live. So you are in your car, always, and you are sweating.

New York

The Cat Sitter

Olena Jennings

Claire’s hair made her sad. It fell out in black clumps every morning. After a series of blood tests, she was found to be in perfect health. She noticed a group of strands on her empty pillow and hesitated before unwrapping the towel from around her head. Her boyfriend Travis covered his eyes. She couldn’t be too sure that it was a coincidence, just something that he was doing to block out the sun streaming from the windows.

Claire threw open her suitcase. She had a job as a cat sitter. She stayed in other people’s apartments while they were away. The last apartment she stayed in had a grand piano. She would sit in front of it to wait for the sound to flow through her fingers, but it never did.

Travis had the apartment to himself most of the time and when he wasn’t working as a mechanic, he was at home. He said he liked the feeling of the remote in his hand even when there was nothing on TV.

New York

Wonder Bred

John Cotrona

“It’s a holy day.”

“No it isn’t. It’s a regular day.”

“Why are they marching us off to church then?”

“So they can film us. They’re perverse.”

One of the reasons I’d chosen Gerry Richards as my friend was because he used words such as perverse. He also read books for fun and listened to Frank Zappa. Gerry was an evil genius. A few years later he would be killed in a war. No one was sure which war. We just heard he was dead.

Brown pants, yellow shirts, plaid ties no tropically fevered Scotsman could’ve conceived of.

“Check out Dalfino,” Jeff LaFlamme shouted. I watched a lot of sitcoms and knew Jeff was going to grow up to be a maitre’d.

New York

The Pump Twin

K. R. Sands

Voices above the surface.

Eight hours to remove the parasite’s internal organs . . . amputate . . .

Who’s speaking? Talking about?

Nervous system disorganized . . . chaotic . . .

Circles of pink light. Spreading fast.

No paralysis in the autosite . . .

Bitter. Smell? Taste?

Four hours to suture . . .

Metal clangs. Water runs. Where?

Earlier separation . . . much simpler . . .

Murmuring, mumbling, laughing.

Twelve years old . . . quite late . . . psychological adjustment . . .

Tapping. Slapping?

Voice, very close: “Daman. Are you awake? Can you wake up? Your father is here.”

No moving. Eyes closed. Cold cocoon. Sleep.

Later? Daddyji’s voice: “Daman. Daman. Wake up now. Everything went fine. It’s all over. All you have to do now is rest and recover.”

New York

Come When You Call Me

Courtney Elizabeth Mauk

At eight o’clock in the morning, Alyssa shows up at Danny’s apartment door with a stack of bright yellow flyers. He has not seen her in three months, since the day she moved out. Two new wrinkles appear between her eyebrows; new creases fold around her mouth as she looks past him into the living room. Her cheeks have grown sharper, her shoulder bones more prominent, her hair longer and darker and not as well kept. She is more beautiful now, although in a dangerous, unpredictable way that Danny is not sure he likes.

She wears a batik sundress, one he remembers, a favorite, and large copper disk earrings that look painfully heavy. Sweat collects along her forehead, and he can smell the amber coming off her skin. She uses a real stone, kept in a little wooden box, which she rubs across her wrists and neck every morning. He has searched for her scent in the grocery store, on the subway, on dates with women he never calls back. No one else smells like her.

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