Joyland

a hub for short fiction

Midwest

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.

Midwest

Blue Girl

Emma Törzs
Editor: 
Charles McLeod

 

The inside of the freezer was very blue and the girl was very blue as well.  Her eyelashes were silvered with frost and her pale limbs arranged over the bags of ice as if she were armchaired and sleeping.  Julie came around the corner of the gas station, tugged open the heavy freezer door, stared down, and was dumb.  The wrongness of it clattered through her like dice: how girls shouldn’t be in freezers, how they shouldn’t be blue, how they shouldn’t be splayed out like this, so cold… For a moment no one breathed but the freezer, panting mechanical huffs of frost into the April air, until finally Julie’s lungs unclenched with a ragged gasp, and she began to scream.

 

Midwest

Fording the Street

Colin Fleming
Editor: 
Charles McLeod

Ever since I retired on the southern side of sixty years old, I have spent at least a couple hours a day at the Highland Park Historical Society, here on Chicago’s North Shore. My background in corporate law means that I am a research fiend at heart. I enjoy digging through old books, and piecing together scraps of narrative. I also enjoy art—maritime art especially—and have managed to assemble a tidy little collection that my wife, Tamsin, adds to each Hanukkah. Our arrangement is simple, if less than traditional: I forgo eight days of gifts for one sublime canvas that she picks out for me at our favorite Chicago art gallery. My requests never vary: the painting must be old, authentic, and it has to be put the smell of sea salt in my nostrils.

Midwest

Seven Names for Missing Cats

Martin Seay
Editor: 
Charles McLeod

And what if we don’t look? — Erwin Schrödinger

Señor El Gato

It’s everywhere now: the lampposts, the telephone poles. In every corner lot, stapled to wooden slats. Everyone gave permission. We’ll keep our eyes peeled! Smiling, happy to help. Jolly suburban adventure.

Let them bring home the news, then. Make the report. You can keep looking. Stay out a little later. All night, if you have to. Thinking like a cat.

Making lefts, skipping blocks. Spiraling outward. The neighborhoods getting strange: lawns greener, houses bigger. Equivocal, anonymous. Lights coming on now, televisions. Curtains open onto empty rooms. Dioramas. Fairy castles.

A wrong turn into a cul-de-sac: three girls your daughter’s age, conspiring under a streetlamp. Halters and flip-flops, hands on cocked hips. Sodium bulb sputtering overhead. Staring as you pass. The lamppost between them bare. The frontier, now.

Midwest

Babies

Ricco Siasoco
Editor: 
Charles McLeod

More incredible things had happened, Hugo thought, than a man giving birth. Frogs were born with six limbs; praying mantises laid eggs in gummy lines, backtracked, and then ate them like licorice. It was the last late afternoon of summer and Hugo propped his pillow up in bed, copyediting a piece about the equinox.

"I want to get pregnant," Hugo said, placing his hand idly on Mitchell's head. Earlier that day, in the crowded newsroom, a freckled intern had seen a push-pinned photo of him and Mitchell, and remarked that they would have the most beautiful children.

Mitch pushed Hugo's hand away. "You're kidding, right?" He placed his thin spectacles on a stack of milk crates--Hugo's idea of a night table. "Reality to Planet Hugo? We can barely pay our mortgage and now you want a child?"

Midwest

The Chamber of the Enigma

Jac Jemc
Editor: 
Charles McLeod

“You tell me,” Buzzard whispers in my ear. Buzzard and I made a baby, but that baby ain’t anything like we’d ever expected. Think of a doll the size of boy. Think of a mannequin plucked from the children’s section: vague and featureless. Buzzard and I are small and soft, malleable and hand-powered. Where had this blank and stiff being come from?

Midwest

I Am Having A Funeral

Mark Piekos
Editor: 
Charles McLeod

I hate this place. I come here each morning at nine a.m. I am greeted with the frigidity of the security guard, dour and unwelcoming. The dim, fluorescent light offsets the purple faces of the secretaries. I know they all judge me. The big blue sign, emblazoned with the moniker SOS Business Solutions, looks smugly at me. I pause to grimace back at it. I hack loudly, drawing the attention of the desk ladies, buried under their binders and files. The skinny one doesn’t even raise her eyes at me. I swear she smirks.

Midwest

The Narcissist's Dilemma

Robert James Russell
Editor: 
Charles McLeod

Six PM. Thursday night. Jack’s Café Bar. Usually called Jack’s. Sometimes The Jack. College crowd hasn’t come yet, which is fine. There’s a special on pitchers of beer that ends in an hour, so I’d think it would be slamming in here, but finals are going on right now, so I assume they’re all studying, hiding. Worrying. Doing things that those titans of genius do at about this time.

Midwest

St. Kevin of Cleveland

Patrick J. Salem
Editor: 
Charles McLeod

Let me say right off that if any of you mooks repeats this story to Eric or Max or the other guys from school, I’ll call you a liar and find a way to make you pay for it later. Ask around West Park—ask around the whole Westside—you don’t eff with Pearse Rooney.
Not that I’m ashamed of what I’m about to tell you, because I’m not. It’s just that a fella’s gotta worry about his reputation, especially a senior and the captain of the hockey team. So do us all a favor, and keep this to yourself.

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