Summer 2026

THE JOY Z JOURNAL

JIM

BY FRANCIS J. DOOLEY

To the neighborhood, Jim was just the guy at number 383 who used to teach high school math. He was a quiet man who kept his yard immaculate and preferred the company of a crossword puzzle to small talk over the fence. His son, Kevin, grew up thinking his father’s biggest stressors were a leaky kitchen pipe or a bad play by the Giants on Sunday. Jim didn’t have a VFW sticker on his Chrysler. He didn’t march in the Memorial Day parades. To Kevin, his dad was just a guy who lived a completely ordinary, pleasantly boring life.

But lately, Jim was slipping. The sharp mind that used to grade calculus papers in his sleep was getting tangled up. He’d drive to the

grocery store and end up sitting in the parking lot, confused about how he got there. He’d stare at the clock like it was written in a dead language.

One Thursday, Kevin went over to check on him and found the basement door wide open. Down in the musty humidity of the cellar, Jim was sitting flat on the floor. He was hunched over an old footlocker that Kevin had never seen unlocked. Jim looked up, but he didn’t see his son. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and frantic, his knuckles white around a small plastic casing.

“The perimeter is collapsing,” Jim muttered,

his voice dropping into an authoritative register Kevin had never heard before. “This is Highball 6. We are pinned down. Target is mortar position, grid Yankee Delta Six-Three-Zero-Two-Two-One. I am within fifty meters. Danger Close. Do you copy? Over.”

Kevin dropped to his knees, his heart hammering against his ribs. “Dad? It’s Kevin. You’re in the basement.…

LEOMINSTER

BY PAUL HAM

Marcus of all people should know better. His 3-year stint in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Middlesex County DA’s office, where it’s just OUIs and fentanyl. Down Route 2 from Ayer to Athol, he watched how it was made and sold, but also how it was sourced, packaged, and delivered. He learned it’s not the easy parts that make it successful: the backwoods cooks, the hand-to-hand dealers, the users. It’s the hard parts: imports/exports, interstate delivery, security, warehousing. And in his case, it’s not just mixing powders with spoons: like his college major, it’s biochemistry.

BPC-157 is what’s called a peptide — a tiny protein molecule your stomach lining produces to help heal all the muscular grinding and acidic dissolving work of digestion. The peptide is what your stomach uses to self-heal, but it also heals other things. Tennis elbow, golf-torn rotator cuffs, bad backs from pickleball. You can buy non-sketchy vials off of Amazon as “raw chemicals” for experiments. People inject that shit at home.  

But that’s the main problem: people hate needles. And most peptides die in the Venus-like

cauldron of our guts. If they survive, they need to figure out a way to soak through the gut lining to travel into our bloodstreams where they now have access to the entire body. But the gut is the challenge. The gut wants control. It wants swallowed BPC to become just expensive poop….

EMPTY MIND TRAVELS

BY JACOB PARK

We must’ve met through Elle my freshman year in college. You were both in the year ahead of me—just a couple of years older than my daughter is now, come to think of it.

You owned a sensible, red compact car that was kept uncommonly clean, and gave several of us a lift out of the Berkshires that first Thanksgiving break to drop me off in New Haven. I was visiting a friend from Jersey City, this girl I hadn’t spoken to since she left for college herself the summer before who used to live upstairs from me.

The drive ended up taking twice as long as it should have, which you charitably attributed to all the bad weather that would

blanket the state in snow over the next five months. Elle sat next to you in the passenger seat, keeping the mood upbeat with her endless stream of effortlessly engaging patter, while I sat in the back beside a faceless person without a name, who was dropped off first at a busy bus stop somewhere en route and never heard from again, at least not by me.

The streets were desolate by the time we arrived in New Haven, though it couldn’t have been much later than nine in the evening, nine-thirty tops. You’d abandoned all well-laid plans to reach New Jersey before nightfall over a hundred miles ago, and with such intentional cheerfulness that it soon became clear how determined you were to

preemptively quash any passive passenger guilt either of us (Elle and I) might have felt. The memory of that snow continues to fall—even after the mind has been successfully, if temporarily, emptied of its contents—through some unequivocally social substrate that  remains itself unshareable, flickering for a fleeting instant in the butterscotch glow cumulatively cast by the neat & endless rows of wrought-iron streetlamps lining the streets of New Haven, before claiming dominion over all that has been subdued into wintry silence, undoing the diligently shoveled lanes, and gently covering up evidence for anyone unlucky enough to have been forced out into all this precipitating loneliness.…

CONFRONTATIONS WITH LAUGHTER

BY GRANT KOO

“So the doctor picks the baby up off the floor, holds it out to the mortified mute young couple and jokes, ‘Nah, just messin’ with ya—it was stillborn!’”

The audience reaction is decidedly not mixed. Scattered groans and gasps of disapproval resolve themselves into a singular silence like rainbows refracting in reverse, canceling each other out into transparency & heatless light. It’s been a polite crowd thus far, and so I reach for a smile with the best of intentions, but only end up grimacing into the mic instead.

“Sorry. That was just…awful, and I’m totally with you there. You were so right not to laugh at that one.”

The long swig of somek produces a fuzzy warmth up near the crown of my head like some kind of halo effect. I stall to consider my transitions. 

“So when I’m not on stage doing standup, I’m in the classroom teaching.” I air quote ‘teaching’. “Anybody ever take an English class?” Several hands shoot up, but it’s the woman sitting alone at the table to my right who captivates my attention. 

“And you are?”

She mouths something inaudible, in a manner that seemed to have almost been deliberate. 

“Excuse me? I didn’t catch that.”

“Oh, just call me Stella.”

How lovely!

“Like star, right? As in constellations?”

As she nods, her eyes seem to sparkle like a pair of diamond-encrusted dice tossed carelessly across dark green felt. 

“So tell me, Stella, was your daddy a thief?”

“What! But how did you know? Not a very good one, sadly. Caught and executed within a week. For finding a head of cabbage,” she adds with a pinch of wistfulness that sabotages both my punch and pickup lines.

Snake eyes….

HAIKU

BY GRANT KOO

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