Joyland Read Online Free

the size of a fist, and the town where Chris lived was little more than the smell of manure and gasoline, the sound of breaking glass and midnight factory whistles, a series of houses he had or hadn’t been inside. Permanent items disappeared in an afternoon, and Chris would later wonder if they had ever existed. A lost street-hockey ball, its lonely green fuzz languishing to grey in a thick lilac bush in some backyard beyond penetration. An incarcerated swingset whose legs had always kicked off the grass with their enthusiasm. The dog who couldn’t stop humping, though Chris didn’t even know what that was then, the mangy beast seeming only excitable and overly affectionate toward him until the older kids clued him in, pausing their whoops for a minimal parcelling of information. Chris shook his leg and the dog wrapped its paws Chinese-finger-trap tight. Chris shook, then kicked, the dog’s butt scuttling across the cement. These other kids moved out of the neighbourhood gradually, like cranberries falling off a nostalgic half-dried Christmas string — two and the thing was drooping, four and the neighbourhood seemed on the verge of decay. A set of sisters too old to bother about. A pair of grape-juice-lipped brothers, one with a motorized go-kart, the other with the unnatural ability to recite the entire alphabet while belching. Chris and Tammy stood on the curb and sang, “Na-na-na-na, Na-na-na-na, Hey Hey, Goodbye!”
    But the Lane house didn’t change. Nothing changed except the television commercials, and the things Chris wanted. A bitty grey woman growled, Where’s the Beef? A long-eared cartoon bounced between two blond child actors, his shape stitched immaculately to the screen somehow, above or behind their blood-and-bone figures, the point nothing more than brightly coloured breakfast cereal: Silly Rabbit, Trix Are for Kids! The ongoing inanimate argument between solid, dependable Butter and the sneaky-lipped dish of Parkay. A bear knocked on the door, proferred a cereal bowl: More Malt-O-Meal Please! Meanwhile, in other corners of the household, a ten-year-old set of toenail scissors stood guard, in their usual station on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet. They donated their opaque moon-shaped testimony to the Lanes’ normalcy.
    Like all children, Chris felt his parents mysterious — their joint and sudden chorusing into songs he had never heard on the radio, their individual smells, the way they would fuse occasionally at the lips or fingertips as if drawing power from one another, recharging. His father’s accent lifted around the other kids’ parents and eventually cologne-faded from dense to faint, American twang settling into something flatter, something Canadian. Mr. Lane’s brown brow hid a machine of knowledge. Mrs. Lane’s polyester pants had the miraculous ability to turn into a folding chair where Chris could sit for hours. Days smeared under his palm like eraser guts (Pink Pearls and Pink Pets, Rub-A-Ways and Arrowheads, Unions, a bright green Magic Rub, the Sanford Speederase made in Malaysia, the godly Staedtler Mars Plastic); they blew away leaving only a faint grit. Chris seemed to age in three-year increments, passing from three to six (before three was thumbsucky and didn’t count), six to nine, nine to twelve, and twelve to fourteen, an age that, fittingly, broke the cycle. Running Creek Road was the world, and the world was big and small simultaneously, easily forgotten.
    Joyland opened in the midst of the third trimester. Chris underwent a delivery, in reverse, leaving the outside world behind as he clamoured into the dark.
    He found a just-across-the-street understanding of the opportunity for pleasure. The constant presence of temptation smoothly transformed into something less like sin and more like human experience. Holy mechanics comprised a system that could be predictable and random simultaneously. This was the world of the video game. In this universe there was no