The West | JOYLAND

Carnation Milk

Hannah Lee Thorpe -

At night, I dream that I’m pregnant, my belly sagging like a sack of tarantula eggs, unholy and fat. I’m not superstitious, but I’m...

Nanohydroxyapatite

Jessica Poon -

The first time he sees her he’s thinking about another woman. She wears a crewneck sweatshirt that suggests she’s been to Harvard’s School of...

Mr. Bananaman

Kyle Seibel -

“I’m looking for some friendly faces,” he says, popping the lid off his coffee and blowing on it. “Some students—former students, only the brightest...

The One With the Multiverse

Josh Riedel -

Mark wasn’t thrilled to return to Webster, the copy-and-paste town west of St. Louis where he’d grown up. The town was cluttered with the...

Today’s Problems

Sara Jaffe -

It started this morning before we got out the door, when my baby ran up the stairs and said he wouldn’t go to school....

Love Calls You by Your Name

Trey Sager -

I got to the producer’s house around nine. It was dark inside, much too hot for a cocktail party. I’d left my pills in...

Love Hurts

Brittany Newell -

"Love Hurts" by Brittany Newell was selected by the editors at Joyland magazine as a finalist in the 2022 Open Border Fiction Prize. It was both...

Trapunto

Callum Angus -

The first injection I ever did was in a sheep’s rump. A friend of my mother’s had a flock whose wool she sheared and...

Reappraisal

Claudia Ross -

There were four tall men sent to complete the reappraisal. One of them, Devin, was the lawyer—we’d met before, five years ago, at the...

Black Ribbons, Black Water, Black Sky

Piper Gourley -

A week after Jack’s decapitation, Peter drove Jack’s old truck through the San Fernando Valley and straight into the Los Angeles River. Jack’s truck...