Spring 2026
THE JOY Z JOURNAL
THE GIRL UPSTAIRS
BY JACOB PARK
I first met your brother in the cool, air-conditioned gym down in the basement of our building one sweltering summer. I was a junior in high school and he was a bit older, maybe early twenties, visiting from out of town and staying in the building, it turned out, with you. He gave me a few pointers and warned me against pushing my limits on the free weights without a spot, which he was kind enough to provide, and probably saved my life with that bit of offhanded advice. Then one day, you were there, too. Though I can no longer conjure what he looked like, I distinctly remember thinking that the two of you bore zero family resemblance aside from both presenting as Mexican. You were like Arnold and he was like Danny from that movie Twins, which I’m starting to think maybe we watched together one
night with your friend who had long, frizzy hair. If your family owned a tan leather sofa, then the likelihood that this memory is real shoots up to let’s say 85%.
By the end of that summer, the three of us had become regular gym rats and were sometimes joined by my mom, who’d just been diagnosed with cancer and mostly stuck to the treadmills. I never saw or heard about your brother after that summer. In fact, I’d completely forgotten you even had one until I started thinking about how to begin this literary portrait in a collection tentatively titled Missing Persons Reports: Literary Portraits of People I Once Thought I Knew. Anyway, you can see why it’s still tentative.
It turned out that you lived in the exact same unit as ours only three floors up. In those days, I’d blow off steam by cranking up the stereo and “singing” along. One day you asked if I heard the wannabe rock star who just moved into the building, and I quickly confessed before you could utter the complaint I could feel already forming on your lips.
Oh, you exclaimed, as if relieved to have said no more. Singing never came up again, and I was more careful to linger in the lower registers, always double checking that the windows were closed….
A MANUAL FOR GROWING CORN
BY PAUL HAM
I knew he was gone when there was no “good morning” text. His absence was tangible, his coffee in the morning, his singing in the shower, a cloudy void hanging over my head. I filled it by retreating to our garden with a book I’d found the day before—a pale blue volume with no listed author, simply titled A Manual for Growing Corn.
The Manual promised to help me grow “things that can’t be seen.” Its voice was clinical, precise—a scientist’s approach to gardening, but with a philosopher’s soul. At the Booksmith, the bookstore clerk’s eyes widened behind thick glasses when I purchased it. “Interesting find,” she’d said.
“Have you read it?” I asked.
“Not yet, do you want a bag?”
The pages still smelled of toner, the blue cover slightly warmer than the air around it.
My first seeds went into the soil the next morning.
⁂
I’d been using plants as memory vessels long before he left. The lemon mint I grew when he admitted his wandering heart. Berries from the day he told stories of hunting with his
uncle. I documented each planting with detailed notes of my experiments—dates, conditions, what each plant held for me–with a control plant beside it.
Sometimes touching the cool morning leaves of these seedlings would return his scent to me, the precise cadence of his voice. But the Manual was different. It outlined a deliberate practice of surrender, a systematic approach to letting go….
FOOLED THEM AGAIN
BY FRANCIS DOOLEY
The double doors of the hallway opened with a heavy, cinematic thud. Kelly stepped into the light, her heels clicking against the polished floor with a confidence she didn’t possess.
She reached the mark on the floor, the “X” that felt more like a target.
You’re a fake,” the voice insisted. “A bathtub brewer in a bargain-bin blazer. The red fabric is too thin, the lie is too thick, and the whole look bleeds desperate jester rather than dominant CEO. They aren’t nodding at your genius; they’re waiting for the mask to slip off.
“Hi, Sharks,” she said, her voice steady and melodic. “My name is Kelly, and I’m seeking five hundred thousand dollars for ten percent of my company, Surface.
Kelly spoke about proprietary distillation and global supply chain logistics. Inside, she was a frantic child hiding behind a curtain. Surface was just her grandmother’s recipe and a clever label packaged around unremarkable home brewed soap.
The Tech Titan leaned forward. “Your margins are higher than anyone else. How?”
Kelly didn’t hesitate. “Because we don’t outsource. We’ve locked in exclusive microcontracts with smallscale lavender and eucalyptus farms in the Pacific Northwest, bypassing traditional distributors.” She hoped she wasn’t lying. She hoped that it actually worked….
TOTAL BOSS MOVE
BY WILL COMERFORD
Brian got a money quote, and the whole newsroom was buzzing.
This was June of 2000. Newspaper-style journalism was on its deathbed, but we didn’t know that yet. MTV had purchased our website, Sonicnet, and they rashly invested millions in building a massive news room with seasoned editors and writers for 10 genres of music (pop, rock, hiphop, country, classical, jazz, folk, R&B,
electronic, and I swear there was a tenth. I’m thinking, “world”). The Viacom folks even splashed out for an absurdly expensive ad campaign, with the likes of Sting and Def Leppard saying, “Me music. It’s mine.” This lasted a few months, and was followed by the newsroom’s paranoid monitoring of fuckedcompany.com, that real-time chronicle of the Dotcom bust, to catch wind if we were about to lose our jobs. We did.
I was, incidentally, a terrible reporter due to a disabling fear of asking dumb questions. That is death in journalism — great reporters love asking dumb questions and watching their subject squirm. So instead I was relegated to writing content filler like “birthday articles,” tour announcements, and occasional interviews of C-list bands….
Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life
REVIEWED BY ERIC SOMMERFELD
THE BULLETIN
The Joy Z Journal 