Joyland

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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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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.

Montreal Atlantic

My Last Summer in Washington

Sarah Steinberg
Editor: 
David McGimpsey

At first, I said moving to DC was like stepping inside a candy wrapper. That seemed right at the time but, then - not. A candy wrapper isn't necessarily humid or sticky inside. DC's summer was the wrapper with the chocolate melted in your pocket, all over your keys and your loose change. When I found out Washington had actually been built on a swamp, I imagined dark woods with simmering ponds, toads on toilet paper lily pads.

Midwest

The State of American Letters

Chris Leslie-Hynan
Editor: 
Charles McLeod

When we arrived at the colony, they sat us on the lawn and told us, don't drink and drive on the major streets. We'll bail you out if you do, they said, but only the first time, and we listened, and took this warning seriously, and that's the way we lived all the rest of the summer. We were artists now, and we had carte blanche to do anything, and in our back pockets we carried the security officer's card to prove it. It said we could get out of jail for free.

Joyland South

Day Trip

Erin Brooks Worley
Editor: 
Jim Hanas

My sister would sneak out late, after midnight. I’d hear her door open, then watch through my bedroom window to see her run down the end of our dark, curving driveway. Then headlights through the trees. She would come home a few hours later and run a bath. The noise of the pipes in the wall next to my room would wake me again. From the hall I could see the thick line of light under the door, smell her sweet vanilla bubble bath. One night, I opened the door and saw her floating in there, drunk, her wet red hair sticking to her flushed face and shoulders. She kept her eyes closed until I said her name.

“Hey, Angie-love,” she said.

“It's late,” I said. 

“Mmm-hmmm."

“What do you want for breakfast?  I can make pancakes.”

“Breakfast is always good, Angie-love,” she said.

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.

Toronto

The Entertainment Room

Daniel Scott Tysdal
Editor: 
Emily Schultz

They are all anonymous. There’s the budding actress who takes the controls of the subway train for her first solo drive. Five years ago, after receiving her BFA in Theatre Studies, she never would have guessed she’d be dressing up in a transit uniform, or operating under a badge number, instead of preparing to play Celie Johnson in a musical revival of The Color Purple, or a female incarnation of “the Moor” in a gender-inverted adaptation of Othello, or, when she really caught her break, the irreverent lead in a sitcom that truly rewrites the formula and spurs spinoff after copy after homage after nudge-nudge-wink-wink reference in feature-length animated films pitched at parents and kids. She is meant to grace the ads on the sides of buses announcing the next prime-time hit, not operate the vehicles that spread the good word stop by stop by stop. She eases the train up to the subway platform for the first time, undershoots it by four feet.

New York

Ghost Theater

Robert Schirmer
Editor: 
Brian Joseph Davis

Terrence Sheppard wasn’t sure why he decided to run in an isolated wooded section of Prospect Park that afternoon.  Usually he jogged one of the paved roads that divided the park into sections, or else satisfied himself with a couple laps around an open field where people tossed shiny Frisbees and chased their hyperkinetic dogs back and forth.  But he was in a more restless mood than usual—he could feel a ragged pulse in his blood—so followed a dirt path that turned increasingly narrow the deeper he ran into the woods.  Soon the blood pulse weakened, and with it, his energy.  After another minute of increasingly sluggish running, he slowed to a walk and then sat to rest on a roughly cut tree stump just off one side of the trail.  The scribbles of sky visible through the trees were gray and overcast.  An abandoned strip of yellow crime tape—Do Not Enter—hung in tatters from a nearby tree that had a couple of nails pounded into its trunk.  Beside the spiked tree was a pair of

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