Joyland

a hub for short fiction

Joyland South

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.

Joyland South

Dead Air

William Kelley Woolfitt
Editor: 
Jim Hanas

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.  My son Zack was a junior counselor, not even sixteen till August.  The camp hired him at such a young age only because he had completed lifeguard training.  Learn to swim, we’d told him.  Learn to ride a bike!  Deliver things!  The wave pool is hiring.  We told him so many things.  Put your pennies in a piggy bank.  Save for a car!  All the little children, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight!  Leather craft, BB guns, nature walks in the arroyo, what could be so hard about that? 

Joyland South

Portrait #37, in Red

Christine Fadden

“You should have forgotten their names by now,” Mike said.

He sat in the driver’s seat like it was a living room chair, his left leg jackknifed under his right.

“You mean I shouldn’t mention them,” Kat said.

“I mean they should be ghosts.”

Browning stalks of corn stood motionless awaiting harvest. Every now and then, a piece of farm equipment, a rusting red thresher against the plain blue sky, merited pulling over for a photograph. But they were doing eighty, and Kat could tell that the ease of the past few months they’d spent getting to know each other in Mexico was fading.

“My step-dad’s ex-wife always came for Thanksgiving,” Kat said. “Sometimes Christmas. It’s no big deal.”

“Nineties psychology,” Mike said. “You set ex-boyfriends into this place and time like they’re my contemporaries.”

“I haven’t had a serious relationship for three years.”

“It’s like this boyfriend mural.”

Joyland South

A World of Flirts

John Brandon

The name of the lot was COOS AUTO BROKERS and the motto was Good Cars—Good People. Joyce used her weight to open the glass door. A girl who looked about thirteen stood behind the desk. She squinted at a toaster-sized television playing a British movie. The man on the screen crowded up to a woman holding a cup and saucer and said, “Are you quite sure there are no efforts I may make on behalf of your comfort?” Joyce announced that she needed a car immediately, that she was in desperate, pressing need of an automobile. The girl behind the desk said, “Me too,” and summoned someone named Garrett.

Joyce asked Garrett to show her the finest specimen on the lot, and he led her to a black Saab station wagon not two years old. The gleam of the wheels made Joyce avert her eyes.

“Is this a firm price?” she asked.

“Pretty firm,” Garrett agreed. “As firm as any.”

He looked like a Navy kid home for a holiday—crew cut, thin sweater.

Joyland South

Jenny Sugar

Scott McClanahan

When I was in the fourth grade this little girl in my class got killed.
I showed up at school one Monday morning and Randy Doogan was telling me all about it, “Hey Scott did you hear about Jenny Sugar? She got killed in a car crash yesterday. Yeah a tractor trailer hit her Mom’s car and they’re both dead.”
Of course, I didn’t believe him at first because Randy Doogan was always making stuff up like this. He was always going on about how his Dad lived in England, even though this was just something his Mother told him because his Dad left them and never came back.
But he just kept going on about it. “Yeah my Mom saw it on the news last night and she’s dead.”
Then he giggled and moved on to the next kids sitting at the cafeteria tables, “Hey guys did you hear about Jenny Sugar and her mom? They got killed yesterday?”
I stood and giggled too not really knowing what was going on and wondering if it was true or not.

Joyland South

Ricky's Shoulders: an excerpt

Blake Butler

in the room there below Ricky, Ricky saw his mother’s newer size, Ricky’s mother’s body had quadrupled in the weird light off the wall, where before the windows to the front yard had once been, quadrupled or some exponent, Ricky did not know the name for when a thing became so many times the size of what it once was, Ricky’s mother’s body had ridges set into it wide enough to climb inside,




Joyland South

Homesick: an excerpt

Robert J. Stevens

Someone is stealing her dresses. They were only snake skins, snail shells, but he had wanted them. There was once a whole flock of them hanging limply in her closet, and he would lay them out on her bed or hang them from light fixtures to imagine her there. At any moment there could be a dozen of her in the house in various stages of dressed, one teaching him mathematics, another shaving her leg in the sink, another folding his underwear on her bed. But they are being picked off one by one. Every time he comes to the closet the count is lower. Of course the dresses aren’t the only thing she left behind. There’s still the faint print of her lips on the rim of a glass, neat stacks of folded clothes, the alphabetized spices, her cluttered purse, rattling with pills, and half-used makeup. Under the bathroom sink there is a bag of her hair. The pills are interesting and he looks like a hussy with some lipstick and rouge, but the dresses fit him perfectly.