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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San Francisco

Divestment

Helene Wecker
Editor: 
Kara Levy

Helene Wecker's debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni, is now available from HarperCollins.

Gerda Kohl, eighty years old, sat in the den of her house, surrounded by cardboard boxes. Her two daughters were fighting in the study next door. They kept their voices lowered, but it was an old house with thin walls, and although Gerda couldn’t understand the words, the tone was clear enough. Charlotte and Anne had never gotten on at the best of times, and it was probably inevitable that they should fight now. She only wished they’d picked a more distant room.

San Francisco

Blow the House Down & Other Stories

Peg Alford Pursell
Editor: 
Kara Levy

Blow the House Down

 

“Blow the house down!” Tommy says. He’s in his pajamas, thin at the knees, too short. His ankles and wrists jut, pale angles. Her brother drops onto the couch beside Shelly, bounces up and down, his cropped hair sticking up every which way, mouth stretched wide.

Sounds good to her. She’s in. She doesn’t know what it means.

“Wait,” he says and goes into the kitchen.

The only light is the TV, flickering shadows on the walls.

He comes back with the carton of chocolate-covered malt balls, his cheeks gorged already.

“Here,” he says, but he holds the box up high, out of reach. “Jump.” His words slur with the candy in his mouth; a strand of chocolate-pocked saliva hangs suspended before it drops to the floor.

San Francisco

God Time

Caitlin Myer
Editor: 
Kara Levy

Harrison’s sister pulls back her hair to show him the gill. A little opening like a mouth on her pale neck. He asks if she can breathe through it. She tells him to plug her nose and cover her mouth and put his ear next to the gill to listen for breath. But maybe she has to be underwater, so they jump in the pool and float in the blue world and watch each other. Harrison gives up first, swimming up toward the sun.

 

Harrison unfolds his palm. BUY MILK is written on his hand.

 

The doctor presses Record on the video camera. Harrison watches the red light blink on. He watches himself in the monitor.

 

I’m jumping on the bed with my sister, Harrison watches himself say. Her hair is sticking up.

 

Harrison’s son is jumping on the bed. His oldest son, the one who’s older than the younger one. Both of them jumping on the bed, their sweet screaming laughs, Get up, Dad, get up, Dad!

 

San Francisco

Eva's Room

Aggie Zivaljevic

Aggie Zivaljevic's story Eva's Room won third place in the Summer Literary Seminars 2012 Unified Literary Contest, judged by Mary Gaitskill. Joyland will be publishing several of the finalists over the fall.

After the sun sets behind the bakery, and the sky turns a dark Prussian blue, the children feverishly play their sweetest games before being called in. From the hilltop they see how the downtown lights cast a golden glow on the glass dome of the City Hall, in the center of old Sarajevo. They hear the rattling of the streetcars below, and the barking of stray dogs in the Mt. Trebevic suburbs. The twilight breeze lures them with the river’s scent. Brothers and sisters can always go home and play or fight, but children without siblings cannot.

Eva cannot go home now. The yellow jersey shorts, showing her bronzed legs to the boys, and her mother’s buying power to the neighbors, are ruined. Eva’s mother Stella bought them for her eleventh birthday.

San Francisco

Destiny

Ammi Keller
Editor: 
Kara Levy

The man sat hunched above us on the hot tub’s ladder, his ankles in the water, his nipples pendulous and oyster pink.

            “So what brings you to Hot Springs?”  he asked.  My girlfriend Macy and I had just slid across the hotel’s marble atrium, up the stairs and onto the deck, then out of our clothes and into the water safely, like ball players coming home.

            “We’re here for our friend’s wedding,” I lied.  “Gina, from college.  You know how some people need to top everyone else’s occasion?”

            “Oh I do!” a red-haired woman in a two-piece said.  Beside her a man with a walrus mustache and a woman with a long, wet ponytail lolled in the backlit water.  “But at least you get a vacation.”

            “That’s true,” I said.  “It’s been wonderful.”

San Francisco

A Tarantella

Zoë Ferraris
Editor: 
Kara Levy

Massimo was not weak. You could not call him weak. He was tough, mean, and shithouse poor, scrubbing toilets and cooking ragu in a sleazy hostel, but only because his brother owned the place and was doing him a favor. He’d done a ten-year sentence for selling drugs, but now in his poverty and miserable labor, society made him pay for a thousand more crimes they imagined he’d done, would someday do. He’d never had it good. His father, dying, had cursed him; his mother had slashed him with a kitchen knife; and his wife, pregnant, had screwed his best friend in St. Minerva’s confessional. But despite the loss, his whole being crackled with power, tremendous like fire from the black, hot core of the earth.

San Francisco

Fall, Winter and Mercy Kill

Lizzy Acker
Editor: 
Kara Levy

In October, I stopped eating. I spent the month walking around Seattle. This was after I left Ben in my dorm lobby at 3:00 a.m. and took a taxi to my dad’s apartment. When I only had five bucks and so Ben gave me two dollars and when I said that wasn’t enough and he said, “Well, buy something nice anyway.”

I wasn’t hungry for like three months.

I wandered to the Space Needle and stared at the fish-thrower guys in the market. A girl from high school started sending e-mails around about a Thanksgiving party and in my mass response I wrote, “We should all wear costumes.”

I wanted Ben to know I was working on other things.

San Francisco

Something More

Erica Lorraine Scheidt
Editor: 
Kara Levy

Avery was a rapist, but that’s not the first thing you’d notice about him. You might observe his pale skin or his glasses, the way the slender metallic frames highlighted his blue eyes. How his eyelashes brushed up against the glass. Or maybe his narrow, straight nose, and the way he was thoughtful when he listened; how he tipped his head to the side to regard the speaker. Every week when she saw him, Jackie noticed his long, white fingers and how he held each stem over the bucket, weighing it between his thumb and index before adding it to the bouquet. 

San Francisco

Folsom, Survivor

Kate Schatz
Editor: 
Kara Levy

1. MYSELF & THE CITY

My name is Folsom and the most important fact of my existence, as determined by others, is that I survived the Kindergarten Massacre. I am one of eight. My memories of the event are minimal but precise, as I have been made to recount them countless times over the years: Fisher-Price, safety scissors, smell of smoke, exploding sounds, hair flying, bloody carpet, I can’t tell you any more. While the rest of them ran, I managed to climb into a cubbyhole and black out, and so saved my life.

It has always been believed that the only witnesses were myself and the seven others. In the years since, we have been studied and analyzed, but what we recall is truncated and unreliable: no one has been able to surmise the reason for the sudden violence that swept through our classroom. It remains a case unsolved, motives undetermined.

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San Francisco

Sourdough and Outer Lands

Meg Pokrass
Editor: 
Kara Levy

SOURDOUGH My sister Jane was full of secrets about the art of making world-famous sourdough bread. Pretty in an apron, too. She had seven aprons, custom-made, hanging in the pantry. A photographer from the San Francisco Chronicle lined them up and made a photo, and then made a photo of Mom and I. We were the backdrop, he said. That was true. Nobody would catch me smoking outside, readying for the sight of Tom looping his brown arms around Jane's tiny waist inside the Cliff House. Things were growing serious between them. The waves were rushing in and out, the sound was abrasive — the summer fog gathering syrupy thick. Hard to believe there was such a thing as summer in other places. The bay and the ocean surrounded us with a never-just-right scent. There was no way to win. Tom's daddy was in jail sometimes, sometimes not. No big crimes, just little embarrassing ones that grew like the scrub brush around Lands End. That cliff was so beautiful, nobody trusted it.

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