Kyle Lucia Wu

Jul 23, 2024 | joylandmagazine.com | S.M. Sukardi |Kyle Lucia Wu

There comes a time in a girl’s life when she will dance with her father. We know this because all the girls before us promise us so. They tell us about the suits and ruffled dresses; the curls and drugstore makeup. The glitter packed into eyelid-creases and sewn into gowns; the heirloom jewelry winking off wrists. If this is true—that is, if justice exists, if promises are carried through—then there must be something that excludes us. We must not be girls. Yes, I think that’s right.

Jul 16, 2024 | joylandmagazine.com | Kyle Lucia Wu

For the past two days, Mildred Wong hadn’t been sleeping well. She’d awoken that morning in Amsterdam, her body consumed—by aches, fever, an unfamiliar weakness. She’d briefly—or it seemed briefly—been dreaming. This is how the dream always ends: her mother’s voice. The Japanese soldiers, coming for them. And they have to be quiet. But they must go as well. They are in a hurry. And then they are discovered, soldiers, already descending upon them, one after the next.

Jul 11, 2024 | joylandmagazine.com | Aarti Monteiro |Kyle Lucia Wu

The girl’s smile was much less awkward in person than it had been in the photo. In real life the sides of her mouth rose naturally and her face relaxed. Shilpa had seen the picture a month before Sunil said he was bringing home a girlfriend. She hadn’t meant to snoop, but social media was the only way to know what was going on in her son’s life these days.

Jul 3, 2024 | joylandmagazine.com | Christie Louie |Kyle Lucia Wu

The night before her grandmother moves in, Holly soaks her tongue in vinegar. It floats in the clear liquid: pink, bumpy, unzipped at the frenulum. The fissures on her tongue are magnified by the glass it swims in, and when Holly holds the highball to her eye, she sees everything else bigger: the toilet bowl, the mottled brown tiles, the water-stained taps that are labeled backwards. Online, it said ten minutes in acid would make a tongue soft enough to re-mold.

Mar 4, 2024 | electricliterature.com | Sarah Mathews |Kyle Lucia Wu |C Zhang |Lily King

According to CEO and psychologist Jessica Pryce-Jones, people spend 90,000 hours of their lifetimes at their jobs. Whatever form that profession takes, it’s inevitable that it will coincide with significant individual change. Work forces people to confront obstacles like office politics, autocratic managers, flaky colleagues, and productivity quotas, the tackling of which teaches them about who they are.