INKLING

Volume 24 Spring 2014 Number 1

Inkling is the creative arts magazine of Lone Star College-Tomball. Students of LSC-Tomball are invited to submit poetry, essays, short stories, or artwork for this annual publication. All copyrights revert to the authors and artists. No portion of Inkling may be reproduced without consent of the individual contributors.

Senior Editor: Jeffrey Rodriguez

Editors: Elizabeth Bailey

Shanna Dudley

Staff: Elizabeth Bailey Lorena Bentz

Cody Copeland Shanna Dudley

Udo Hintz Sarah Huntsman

Khodi Jacks James Lambdin

Clark Shaw

Advisors: Amy Hirsch

Mari-Carmen Marín

Catherine Olson

Melissa Studdard

Cover Art: Midnight Snack Rachel Eckert

The cover artist has found great joy playing with paints and the many colors in the world. The artist would also like to dedicate her cover painting to her brother Nick, who is not only the cover model but her partner in crime and with whom the artist has been making 3:00 a.m. pancakes since the beginning of time (thus inspiring the painting). Inkling

Table of Contents

Carry You with Me by Cassidy Krause...... 1 First Place Poetry Winner

Evanescent Existence by Madison Estes...... 3

Lyric’s War by Andrew Robinson...... 7 Second Place Prose Winner

Fairy Tales of Youth by Emily Smethers...... 11

Patience by Amanda Fulton...... 12 Third Place Prose Winner

Stalkers and Addicts by Mary Elizabeth Stamper...... 13

Nighttime Visitor by Amanda Fulton...... 15

Hnnng by Traci Overstreet...... 16

My Tomb by Brandie Webb...... 17

A Stampede of Words by Lorena Bentz...... 18

Heart-Shaped Box by Mai-Aleesha Morgan...... 19

HIM by Morgan Severn...... 20

Roller Coaster by Sara Watts...... 27 Third Place Poetry Winner

Untitled by Rachel Eckert...... 28

True Art Never Kills by Cloie Barcelona...... 29 Third Place Art Winner

The Art of Levitation by Charlene Woelfel...... 30

Five O’Clock Shadow by Meghan Elsik...... 31 Shadow of the Past by Sarah Huntsman...... 32

Space City by Sarah Huntsman...... 33 First Place Art Winner

Berlin Writings by Meghan Elsik...... 34

The Life of the Spring by Charlene Woelfel...... 35

Hanging Around by Sydney Allen...... 36

Feel the Music by Sydney Allen...... 37

Transformed by Bethany Jarvis...... 38

Lost Treasure, delivered by Ike by Felicia Barcelona...... 39 Second Place Art Winner

A Conversation between Mat Johnson and Inkling transcribed by Shanna Dudley...... 40

(Tap Snap Wrap) by Rachel Eckert...... 51 Second Place Poetry Winner

From Dust till Dust by Jack S. Moorman...... 52

The Eagle and Child by Dustin Inkster...... 55

Alzheimer’s: The Second Hell by Morgan Severn...... 58 Third Place Poetry Winner

On the Clock by Madison Estes...... 62 First Place Prose Winner

Inkling Staff, Club Members, Advisors Photo...... 64

Acknowledgements...... 66

Contributors’ Biographies...... 67

Submission Form...... 68 First Place Poetry Winner

Carry You with Me Cassidy Krause

My life in sum is the moments between goodbyes The plane tickets that tears are shed on It’s a box filled with letters My life can be visualized through punctuation It’s a colon and a star instead of your lips on mine These faces taunt me They clearly display distance

My life in sum is the moments between goodbyes It’s a light inside and out that can’t be extinguished It’s the look on your face when you see me The strength of your grip around me It’s hours filled with giggles Photographs to keep you in my heart My life is dancing around the kitchen While our dinner boils over It’s running through the rain by choice It’s the designs my fingers trace on your skin It’s lying awake, completely intertwined Cursing each passing minute Don’t say it Please don’t say it Just hold me

My life in sum is the moments between goodbyes It’s the blackness that sets in for days It’s lashed-out anger towards everyone but you It’s reaching over and not feeling your warmth My life is continuous daydreaming

1 I carry you with me Until there are no more goodbyes

My sailor says goodbye I can be strong My sailor says hello I break

2 Evanescent Existence Madison Estes

The citronella candle scent mixes with the smell of grass and cologne. This unique aroma triggers a sign within me as the meddling mosquitoes drop dead into the wax. The hammock we lie on sways. My head nuzzles against your chest. I stare up at the moon, the stars, the constellations, the endless universe, and I feel as insignificant as the insects compared to infinite space and time. I feel smaller than an atom, as unique as a grain of sand on a beach. But then I look at you, and think of us, together on this amazing night, and I feel more like a morning glory that has not yet withered. I exist for only a short amount of time, but I am cherished while I’m here.

3 Second Place Prose Winner

Lyric’s War Andrew Robinson

He was only nineteen years old, but you could see across his face that he had experienced much more life and death than any nineteen-year-old should ever have to experience. From his clothes and demeanor, people would consider him unapproachable, possibly even dangerous, but if you looked into his eyes you would see kindness, you would see hope, you would see life. He would not have wanted you, or anyone else, to see those things. At this time in his life, his anger and his gang and his apparel were a great wall he had built to protect himself from the pain he endured as a child. He had heard so many people tell him he was better than this, but the only things that echoed in his mind were the insults that had been spewed his way from people who could not see past the wall he had built. He didn’t know it, but he longed for someone to see past the wall. He longed for someone to see what was behind his deep blue eyes. However, he would never have told you that. On this day he sat on a bench, looking out over the Gulf of Mexico. He knew there was something stirring inside him. But he had no clue that today would be the day his life would change forever. Thoughts slashed through his mind like a fencing match, back and forth and bouncing off one another. Occasionally, one would strike him to his core. If you had seen him, you would have thought he was just wasted from the drugs he was obviously addicted to, but on this day he was stone-cold sober. It had been a tough six months for him. Two of his friends had been murdered, another died in a car crash and a fourth committed suicide. Several of his friends had been locked up, and he himself had only narrowly escaped the same. Sure, he had his charges pending for robbery, but at least he was on the outside. For now. Physically, he was on the outside, but mentally, emotionally, spiritually, he was like a starving lion in a cage with a steak just out of his reach. He knew he needed something, he knew he was dying inside, he knew physical death could be right around the corner, but he had no clue how to get what he needed. The truth was he wasn’t even sure what it was he needed. All he knew was that he was dying, and something had to give. The night before, he had lived in a beach house with a few friends. People were always

4 coming over to party or to make purchases. He was constantly surrounded by half-naked, and sometimes fully naked, girls who looked like they’d just jumped out of a magazine. He was also constantly in a haze from whatever drug it was that caught his attention that day. Then the cops came in. It was the third time in as many weeks that they had come to his house. The cops said they knew drugs had been sold out of that house. He just forced that cocky smile he had perfected, knowing that all the drugs had been flushed down the toilet just seconds before the cops arrived. It was the closest call he’d had yet. He told the cops that the next time they came over they better have some rent money. He hid behind his humor as if it were a veil which could keep the storm raging inside of him a secret. On the outside, he looked like the arrogant gang leader most people thought he was. On the inside, however, his heart was about to rip through his chest like a wild beast tearing through its prey. His palms were so sweaty he was sure he could slip through the handcuffs which clasped his wrists. The cops found no drugs. They left, dejected after removing the handcuffs from the wrists of everyone in the house. After the cops left, a couple of people went to the back to take apart the pipe and get the waterproofed drugs out. Lyric just sat there in silence. Ron and Jim sat there looking at him. Ron was older. Technically, he held the highest rank in the gang. He was the enforcer. If anyone wanted to fight, Ron would drop hands on them in a heartbeat. In reality, no one really wanted to fight if Ron was involved. Jim had the connections. He was the smallest one in the crew, and his grandparents had bought the beach house for him when he turned eighteen. But Lyric was the one everyone looked to for answers. Lyric was the one who was always calm, or so it seemed. In that moment he wanted to cry. It was the first time in a while he had felt emotions like that. He experienced the familiar old feeling of just wishing there was somewhere he could hide, wishing he had someone to protect him. The problem was there never was anywhere to hide, never anyone to protect him, and this is why he had spent his whole life building this wall that everyone believed in. Jim spoke up, “freakin’ pigs man…what do we do?” “What you mean? We’re good; we’re too slick for ‘em, Jim!” Ron laughed, “We just outsmarted ‘em again. They’ll never catch us, man!” Ron said, looking to Lyric as if they were on the same brainwave. “Man, that’s three times in three weeks, bro!” Jim butted in, “We can’t keep winning like this, yo! It’s only a matter of time before they catch us slippin’!” “I don’t slip, nigga!” exclaimed Ron.

5 “Man, ya’ll trippin’,” Lyric spoke up finally. Anyone could tell he was deep in thought, and this argument between Ron and Jim was just keeping him from gathering his thoughts. “I know you ain’t tellin me I’m trippin’, Lyric. You better watch who you talkin’ to!” said Ron. “You right, bro, my bad. Hey, I’m out. Ya’ll be easy,” Lyric said as he rose from his chair, still not making eye contact with either of his friends or the other people who were returning to the living room now. Ron looked confused. “What you mean you’re out? You takin’ a walk?” “Yeah, homie, I’m takin’ a walk. But I ain’t comin’ back.” Ron grabbed Lyric’s arm, they locked eyes, and the toughest guy in town knew this was a battle he could not win. Lyric shook his arm loose, grabbed his hoodie, his beanie cap and his wallet the cops had laid out on the table, and he walked out of the beach house that he’d once felt was paradise, into the darkness of the night. He could barely see where he was going, but he knew he had to go. In his head, he was going to sleep on a bench and make a plan when he woke up in the morning. The only problem was he never fell asleep. He sat staring into the vast body of water which had brought him a mild sense of tranquility throughout his chaotic life. The sun rose, and he didn’t even notice it. The only thing he noticed was that his body had stopped shivering. He wondered if that’s what it’s like when you die. Did all the pain and discomfort just stop? If it did, then he thought he may as well swim into the Gulf until the pain stopped. As much as that force tugged at his soul, pulling him towards the water, he sat firm, like a monument to the struggles he had made it through. There was no way he would break now. Not after all he had been through. But he just couldn’t figure out what his next move would be. So he sat there, thinking about the family who had given up on him and the family he had just given up on. The more he thought, the more he felt like he had no options. Lyric wanted a new life. He wanted a fresh chance. But how was this notorious gangster going to get a fresh chance? Everywhere he went, people knew who he was and what he was about. When he was thirteen, he vowed to build a reputation. It had worked, and now he was paying the price for it. He sat there pondering opportunities squandered, the basketball career, the academic path, and the chance to go live with his father in Pennsylvania. He had good reasons why none of them would have worked, though. At least, that’s what he thought. Though he appeared to be a junkie with an expensive chain and though he appeared to be completely numb to every emotion

6 there was, he was currently fighting the most explosive battle of his life. Something kept whispering to him, “You were made for so much more.” That thought seemed as toxic to him as the idea of swimming. Lyric began to recollect some of the conversations he had had with his dead friends, conversations about hopes and dreams. He thought his had died with them. But something was telling him his dreams could live again. “I can’t live in this world anymore!” Lyric said out loud, surprising himself as well as the old woman walking by. She glanced at him, then looked away, not wanting this young thug to notice her glance. He noticed the look way more than he noticed the glance. The tears began to flow down his cheeks quicker than he could wipe them away. Now he felt exposed. He began to think he needed to get out of there before someone noticed him. He slipped his hood over his head, wiped the tears away and took one last look at the Gulf and the sun that had now brought an orange color to the once dark blue water as it slid into the horizon. Lyric began to walk down the street aimlessly. The orange and red sky turned black, and the previous night’s chill returned to his skin. He was beginning to feel weak with hunger as it had now been roughly twenty-four hours since he had eaten any food. Suddenly, he heard a familiar voice. “Lyric! What up, cuz? The hell you doin’ walkin’ down the road by yourself at night? You know there’s too many people that would love to catch you slippin’ out here!” “Kevin?” Lyric cracked a smile. “What’s good, man? I don’t know what I’m doin’ out here. I just had to get away.” Kevin realized that something was going on with his cousin. He pulled into a parking lot and walked over to Lyric, “Yo, you alright?” Lyric looked at the ground. “I don’t even know, cuz. I just know I’m tired. I’m tired of fighting, tired of looking over my shoulders, tired of havin’ to duck every time I see a cop car ridin’ by. Just tired, homie. I can’t do this anymore.” “So you want out?” Kevin asked Lyric. Kevin looked around to make sure no one could see his older cousin in this moment of what could be perceived as weakness. “I guess. What’s it matter anyway, lil’ cousin? Ain’t no way out for me but the grave. I’m stuck, and you know it as well as I do. I may as well just go back to the beach house and settle back into sellin’ dope until someone takes my life. I wish I could take it myself but I can’t…I tried, but I can’t.” “You tried to kill yourself?”

7 “Well, tried to talk myself into it anyway. It didn’t work.” Kevin had been looking at the ground as if he was in deep thought and suddenly picked his head up. “I’ve got an idea!” “Oh, yeah?” “Yeah, bro! Remember that place Carlos went? I actually think Gary’s there now. I know Carlos came back and went right back to the same stuff, but he always said it was a great place; he just wasn’t ready to change yet.” “That place in Houston, right?” “That’s right. Yo, I bet I could get you started on goin’ there tonight!” Kevin said as his excitement began to show. “What are you, like, their middle man?” Lyric felt confused. This was one of the few times in his life someone had offered him concrete help. All the other times he had flat turned them down. Either that or he had used that same old wall that made people feel they could never get through to him. “Naw, man…but I know who is…kinda.” Kevin laughed nervously. “Who’s that?” “It’s Officer Baris.” Lyric had been listening intently to what Kevin was saying, but when Kevin mentioned Officer Baris, Lyric’s face dropped, and he went back into the shell he had been in. “Officer Baris? Oh…okay, well I ain’t talkin’ to that fool, so I guess I’ll holla at ya, cuz. Tell ya mom and ‘em I said ‘what up’.” “Wait, wait, wait! Nah, man, you look bad. I ain’t lettin’ you walk away from me. Not tonight.” “You ain’t letting me?!” Lyric said laughing “I love you, lil’ cousin, but you ain’t quite big enough to step to me. You need to reassess the situation, home boy.” The old familiar wall that Lyric had sought refuge behind his whole life began to rise up. Kevin had knocked it down for a while, but now Lyric reverted to his image, reverted to that image that had stopped people from seeing him as a target when he was young. However, there was still something in him telling him not to walk away, telling him not to give up. Something about this place Kevin was talking about appealed to him. Kevin was a little worried. He saw Lyric’s wall begin to rise up, and he knew if he didn’t help his cousin right now, it could be a long, never-ending night for Lyric. “Man, chill! I ain’t tryin’ to fight you or nothin’. I wanna help you. You want help, and I know how you can get it.

8 You wanna go or not?” Lyric laughed again, nervously this time. “Man, I thought I already told you; I ain’t about to go talk to Officer Baris! That fool hates me more than anyone. I’ll go talk to him, and next thing I know I’ll be in handcuffs on my way to jail. I already got pending charges. I can’t afford another trumped up charge from these pigs! Why the hell would I just walk into one?!” “Lyric…bro…chill. I wouldn’t let that happen to you.” “Are you the police, Kevin? How the hell could you keep them from arresting me? You know as well as I do that when they wanna take you, they take you.” Lyric said. On the inside he desperately wanted to be convinced. But he wasn’t sure if he could allow himself to take that leap of faith just yet. “Naw, but check it out. It’s a Wednesday, and I know where he goes to church. They won’t arrest you in no church, cuz!” “Man, this is crazy. If I go to jail, you better bond me out.” Kevin suddenly got a smile on his face. “I got you, I got you!” The two climbed into Kevin’s car and drove away. They pulled up to the church, and Kevin opened the door and said, “Alright, man, good luck.” “It’s like that, huh? Well, I guess I do need to do it alone. You got some balls talkin’ to me like this, lil’ cuz, you know it? I’m not sure whether to have more respect for you or to knock you out.” Kevin smiled nervously, and Lyric got out of the car. The cold was once again shaking his skin, and now he felt a nausea that would have erupted into vomit had there been anything in his stomach to expel. Lyric stepped into the warmth of the church and suddenly felt a different chill, one he liked. An old woman approached him. “How are you, young man? Are you looking for the youth service?” “No, ma’am…I’m um…I’m looking for Officer Baris. Is he here?” Lyric couldn’t get his jaw to stop shivering. He was feeling a nervousness he had never felt before. Perhaps nervousness is not the best way to describe it. It was a mixture of fear, excitement and hope all rolled into one. “Robert? Of course he is! I’ll get him for you!” The woman exclaimed. The old lady walked away, and Lyric stood there wanting to do the same, only in the opposite direction. All he could think was that if Officer Baris tried to ask him any information, he would walk straight out of there. Finally, the woman returned with Officer Baris. “Can I help you, Lyric?” “I-uh…I heard that if someone wanted to get off the streets, you were the one to come

9 to.” “Yeah, Lyric, I can help you. Let’s go back here and talk.” Lyric felt so uneasy walking into a private room with this police officer, but something was telling him this was the right decision. Lyric sat down in a chair, and Officer Baris sat down across from him. He couldn’t bring himself to look into this cop’s eyes. This was a man Lyric had long considered an enemy. Now he was essentially placing his life in his hands. Officer Baris spoke first. “Lyric, I know you probably know a lot about a lot of stuff that I really need to know.” Lyric’s fists clinched as he prepared himself to pop out of the chair. “But I’m not going to ask you anything. I’m going to help you make a clean break.” Lyric was in complete shock. “You’re going to what? Why? You don’t owe me nothin’!” Officer Baris smiled, “When I was young, I had my own set of problems. I came to a church and got a fresh chance at life. I want you to have that same opportunity. Take advantage of it, Lyric.” “I will. I’ve got no other choice,” Lyric responded. Officer Baris told Lyric about the program he would go to in Houston, Texas. He walked out of the room for a few minutes and came back with a bus ticket. “Here you go, Lyric. This ticket is on me. Your bus leaves at six in the morning. Don’t miss it.” “I won’t,” Lyric said as he made eye contact with Officer Baris for the first time. “Do you need a ride?” Officer Baris asked. “Umm…yeah, I think I do.” Lyric said looking at the empty parking lot where his cousin’s car used to be. “I want to go now if that’s okay.” “Why don’t you stay at my house tonight?” Lyric laughed. He surprised himself that laughter could come out of him in a moment as tense as this. But the thought of a thug like him sleeping in the house of the most well-known cop in town was comical to him. “Not to be rude, Officer, but I don’t think I’m there yet. I’ll just go to the bus station if that’s okay.” The next morning, Lyric stood at the bus station. The sun was just beginning to peek out from under the street. Lyric peered intently at the bus, which seemed to come from inside the sun. So many questions raced through Lyric’s mind, but the only thing he knew for sure was that things would never be the same again.

10 Fairy Tales of Youth Emily Smethers

As a young girl, I always dreamed of my happily ever after. As I’ve grown older, Perhaps even colder, Reinforcing the barriers that surround my heart, I realize that the happily ever after is just the fantasy of a child, A beautiful fantasy that we wish to forever hold, But truth be told, Life is a cruel, hard bitch-slap to the heart and innocent dreams Of a prince galloping up to you on his steed, Whisking you away to your castle. When you’re young, love isn’t a hassle, It’s a dream, A fantasy That you want to return to the innocence of your youth. When you realize the truth, That happily ever after is just a fairy tale, A dream. May you never awake from that beautifully false lie, Stay forever in your ill-conceived happily-ever-after fairy-tale life.

11 Third Place Prose Winner

Patience Amanda Fulton

I already know what she wants when she walks in the room. She is just standing there, staring at me. I am rinsing the dishes before loading them in the dishwasher. It was something that seemed a little redundant to me. However, it was how my mother loaded the dishwasher and how her mother had done it before her, and so it’s now how I do it. The dainty curls that frame Sarah’s face remind me how little she still is, but the fact that she is tall enough to reach things on the counter shows me how much she has grown. I am ignoring my daughter because I am supposed to wait for her to say something. The doctor explained that she was behind in her speech and that we need to motivate her to talk by doing things such as forgetting to give her a spoon with her morning cereal. I am trying not to notice her head as it slowly starts to drop or the disappointment in her eyes. This is hard for me too, so I look down and smile at her. I have not said anything. However, the reassurance that I see her brings back her bright smile. She is now growing more impatient. She is twisting the hem of my skirt in her fingers while she tugs on it slightly. I have explained to her that she needs to start asking for things that she wants instead of just pointing. I have also stressed the importance of using complete sentences instead of just one word. I look down at her and wink. She lets go of my skirt and starts to jump up and down while she is grunting in a voice so low that I am reminded of our caveman beginnings. It is growing harder for me to not laugh at her sweet frustration. She stops jumping and looks at me with her lips pursed in a half defeat. She is breathing loudly through her nose the way movies always portray a bull before it charges. “Juice,” she says, the word erupting from her lips. Progress. It is now my turn, and I have to be careful how I word my questions so as to not give her the words she needs to use. “What kind do you want, and what are you going to do with it? Are you planning to pour it on your spaghetti?” She forgets for a moment that we were having a standoff, and through her joyous laughter she says, “No. I want to drink it.” My question worked, and I watch as she dances out of the room, throwing in a twirl with every other step. She disappears from the room as I retrieve a cup from the cupboard. “Apple,” she yells from the dining room.

12 Stalkers and Addicts Mary Elizabeth Stamper

I peered over the balcony of my second-floor hotel room. There she was again, walking to the Starbucks across the hotel parking lot. It was approximately eight at night, as it was every night she came. And tonight, just as the others before, she would go in alone, yet come out with two drinks. I like to imagine who this young woman is bringing these drinks to. One for herself most likely, though she does spend a lot of time in there and could have drunk a small coffee in that amount of time. I would like to believe that both are for others because if one was for herself, it would imply that she was going to be alone with someone else. Is it just a friend? Maybe a colleague at work? Possibly a boyfriend? She is definitely pretty enough to have a boyfriend. Could she be married, and the other coffee is for her spouse? That’s likely too. I stand there, just staring at the door, waiting for her to exit. I can’t see inside because there are way too many posters and decorations in the window. Perhaps I should go down there today and get a cup of coffee, see her up close for the first time. But I won’t. I’d most likely hyperventilate if I got within ten feet of her. I just continue to stand awkwardly, wondering what she does as she waits for her order. Does she text? She has a brief case, so maybe work? Could she be chatting with a stranger, bonding over their love of coffee? My thoughts continue like this until I finally see the door crack open, bringing me out of my daze. I was right. She is once again walking out with two drinks. As always, she slowly makes her way towards me, but that is just my wish. as she disappears behind the hotel to God-knows- where, I sigh loudly. I think I love her. He’s there again today. I noticed him for the first time two weeks ago. He watched me as I went for coffee after a hard day’s work. It’s become somewhat of an addiction, not the coffee but having him watch me. I walk slowly and calmly as to not alert him. Sometimes I’ll even check my compact mirror to make sure he is still there. As I enter the establishment, he loses sight of me. I know this because I can still see him. He paces back and forth, looking really hard for a view but never finding any. I giggle a little at his behavior before turning my attention to the cashier, ordering two tall mochas before heading to my usual seat by the window. There are two posters attached to the window, leaving a small gap just big enough to look through. It is now my turn to watch. He always stands there looking at the door, waiting for me to leave. I imagine what he is there for and why he watches me. Is he on vacation? It has already been two weeks since I first saw him on that hotel balcony. Is it a business trip? What’s he like? Is he just a stalker after me? I look away as my name is called to come retrieve my drinks but sit back down to watch a while longer. I nervously chew on one of the straws in front of me as I gather my courage and slowly stand to leave. I’m going to do it today. It’s the second floor, second room from the left. I make

13 my way towards the front of the hotel and walk across the lobby and then into the elevator, almost at a snail’s pace as I have done every night for the past two weeks. I arrive at his door and raise my fist, ready to knock but stop midway as I hear the balcony door open, and then close once again, signaling that he is now on the other side of this door. I turn, heading back to the elevator. I always fail to knock and regret it soon after, for this is a hotel, and he could be gone tomorrow.

14 Nighttime Visitor Amanda Fulton

Tiny dinosaur, you reptilian thief, You come to me uninvited. My sleep is gone from the moment our eyes first meet. We are both frozen, unsure of what we do next. A scream bubbles and escapes me As I watch your body slither sideways on the wall To the place behind my shelves. My books Have now betrayed me as you find Sweet shelter there. I slowly creep backwards As I crawl back into bed, closely watching all the angles For your stealthy escape. Hours later as the dawn creeps, Into the space between us, I wave my white flag of defeat And find my own safe sanctuary in the shower.

15 Hnnng Traci Overstreet

His movements were slow His eyes white as snow His head was bent low As He gnawed on the toe.

She was so smart She went for the heart It was the part He wanted from the start.

But His brain was dead He thought not with His head And that’s why He said “Unnn” to Her instead.

“Hnnng,” She replied Her tone, a little snide The feet, She’d been denied When He came to her side.

Too bad He didn’t know That she wanted that toe Since zombies are slow Desire doesn’t show.

16 My Tomb Brandie Webb

I slowly lift my head from the wet pillow, a trace of salt on my lips and I cautiously open my eyes. Blackness envelops me and the world is spinning around. Where am I? A moment or two passes… ah, comprehension settles in. The bed linens have a peculiar odor, they are drenched in sweat and tears. Salty remnants on my mouth ring memories of the beach. My eyes refuse to seek light as the swollen lids struggle to stay closed against my will to escape the darkness. Oh what pain! Pounding, pounding, pounding of drums in my head … a high pitched ring so shrill it pierces my soul. Quickened heartbeat, short raspy breaths. My enemy must have visited me last night, emerged from the deepest wells of subconsious. I hate that wretched being, that frightening face lingering over me. So many expressions, so many nameless faces. Those deep vacant eyes chill my spine. The uncaring, selfish hands are cold and I shiver as the memory of those unwanted touches haunt me. Tiny hairs stiffen on my neck with the damp, hot air from his mouth, goose bumps exploding across my epidermis as the creepy crawly prickles ripple down my back. No matter what form he takes when he visits, it is the same words that come from his filthy mouth. I struggle to even conceive of my faults in the matter. How is it me? Because I am beautiful? Is my hair too shiny and long? How can such innocence provoke such hurtful deeds? NO! I refuse such accusations, damn him for his selfish choices of vulgarity. He is the cause of my current countenance. I lie awake night after night, scared of what waits for me in my slumber. How is it that he still has the ability to creep into my thoughts as I lie in bed hoping of grand castles that reach up into a sky filled with sunshine and rainbows while wild horses race in green pastures? I do not wish him to be with me always, in my mind, my broken heart, my shattered life. Curse him, that wretched fool! How dare he? He has no right! I struggle always from his grip, run from his ever-changing face, the cold hands, the hot jagged breath, the ugliness, his trespasses. Delusions of insanity are awakened inside of me, trapping me in my own hell. I hear whispers of his promises to see me again, but he never truly leaves. No matter how fast or how far I run, he still lingers on my skin and in my mind. I loathe my enemy, this thing they call my past. It can be as beautiful as the setting sun… which comes all too often. I am enclosed in my tomb of life, exhaustion heavy on my eyes, and I fight to not drift off again, knowing he is there waiting. Darkness creeps… once again defeated … knowing I will never be free.

17 A Stampede of Words Lorena Bentz

A stampede of words crossed my path today. They did not kill me on the outside. They broke me on the inside. No one noticed for my shame kept my pain silent. The stampede did not just hurt me but they too were too scared to scream. Too afraid to say, “Ouch, that hurt!” We all stayed quiet during the following stampedes never knowing, never thinking we were all hurting just the same with each stampede that followed. How do you stop an out-of-control stampede? The animals are so beautiful when they are at peace. The fact is that anything can set off a stampede, and nothing can stop it. Distance is your only protection from a stampede. Stampede away. I do not feel. They do not feel the ones that I love. No more stampedes for us So stampede away

18 Heart-Shaped Box Mai-Aleesha Morgan looking for the perfect piece she eyes the prospective flavors until she finds the most intriguing one it starts out immense it isn’t too sweet and doesn’t cling but after a while the flavor just isn’t as fine bored with the norm, she finally spits it out parts of the last piece reside with her for what feels like eternity then she tries a new one it pushes the stale remains from her mouth but the new piece ends quickly for it was only there for damage control she tries lots of different flavors none with same power that the first piece gave her she waits a little while to try another, because she has grown tired of the toothaches finally she decides to try the last one it makes her like chocolate again nevertheless that piece ends as all the others did and the box is empty

19 HIM Morgan Severn

Hung over from a night of downing what seemed like thousands of alcoholic concoctions, Rose awoke in a cold sweat. Her pores were erect, and a pool of perspiration had formed under her spine, soaking the mattress below. If she hadn’t known better, Rose could have sworn that she had just emerged from a swampy lagoon. “Maybe I’m still drunk,” she contemplated aloud, slurring her words to the slightest degree, one so minute it would be hard for a trained police officer to detect. She had a natural, slight lisp anyway, something she’d been horrified and ashamed of since she began articulating complicated words as a grade-schooler. Her mother and father, two loving parents from a humble town in Arizona, found it entirely too endearing. “Aren’t you just so cute? You’re like Thindy from the Brady Bunch,” they mused, mocking her accent with no intention of hurting her feelings, but, still, the blood ran to her cheeks, and her chest stiffened. She rolled to her side, wiped the sandman crust from her eyes, and opened them. Looking to her left, she stared through the Victorian-styled windowpane, adorned with patchwork draperies she had painstakingly sewn last year. That was when she first saw him. Well, at least she thought she did. It was just a millisecond that she saw the silhouette’s shadow reflect off the window’s glass. She blinked out of disbelief, her eyes widening as she procrastinated on looking behind her, and froze in place. Her blood turned to ice, and her heart doubled its speed. She looked at the window once more. The reflection was gone. Grabbing a sharp quill from her stationery set by her bed, dedicated to writing weekly letters to her parents, she turned around as fast as she could. No one. Maybe the intruder went into the living room. “Oh God, oh God, oh dear God,” she thought instinctively. Though Rose was an atheist by her own personal reasoning, she often found herself silently praying to a God she didn’t fully believe in in times of extreme emotional distress. She finally turned around. Expecting to see some deranged psychopath with wild eyes wielding a straight blade or box cutter, she instead found herself face to face with her empty bedroom, save a few pieces of furniture she had bought at an estate sale. She loved the fact that all she owned she owed to someone that she didn’t know. Goodwill was also her haven. After

20 all, it was hard to survive financially with two part-time, medium-wage jobs. Suffering from Generalized Anxiety Disorder her entire life, she needed time to herself to recharge and find the self-assurance needed to be a normal, functioning member in society. Because of this, and her inherent, reclusive nature, she couldn’t work full time or attend college. She was aimless, broke, and perpetually scared. Now she was more scared than she had ever been in her twenty-year-old existence. “Hello?” she asked meekly into the quiet, one-bedroom apartment. To her relief, after searching every nook and cranny, she came up empty-handed. There was simply no one there, yet she knew that she had seen him. Him. Was she entirely sure it was a male figure? She felt certain, although she didn’t exactly have merit. The one thing that perplexed her more than anything was the fact that the silhouette she had seen, the presence she had felt, did not feel ominous. Instead, she had a strange feeling that she needed to know this person. This entity. This ____. She didn’t know the word she was desperately trying to articulate, but then she found it. “Messenger.” The word seemed to fall from her mouth like water from a leaky faucet; it was as if she were channeling someone. Now she was scared again. She repeated it again, without thinking, but this time a few more words escaped her lips. “Messenger. Pandemic. Must prevent it.” “Messenger. Pandemic. Must prevent it.” “Messenger. Pandemic. Must prevent it.” This continued for what seemed a few seconds, the syllables cascading faster and faster like some kind of mantra. The spell faded, and she returned back to reality. But this reality was different. She felt as if her senses were heightened; her usual murky eyesight was now crystal clear. She could smell the cigarette smoke from down the hall, something she hadn’t ever noticed until that very moment. After all, she had been living there for over a year. Rose clasped her head between both hands and squeezed her eyes shut. She squeezed them harder, until green swirls and stars erupted behind her eyelids. “I am going crazy,” she said into the empty room, and slowly walked back to her bed. She looked at the clock above and gasped in disbelief. It dawned on her that she had been repeating the mantra for not seconds, but hours. She had previously thought that only sex and sleep were modes of time travel, but, apparently, so was being spellbound. Rose climbed on her bed, legs shaking, her body wobbling, and pulled the clock from its hook on the wall. Its black, glossy surface glinted up at her as

21 she examined the ticking. Sure enough, it seemed to be working correctly. She fished for her cellphone in her purse and pulled it out. It read the exact time the clock did: Eight-thirty. She had been talking to herself for two hours. Rose felt faint. She pulled her long raven hair into a ponytail and slowly sank back into bed. That was when the first vision hit. Suddenly, her bed wasn’t a bed anymore; it was a cold metal chair, and she was upright, sitting in it. Four black walls surrounded her, and in front of her was a table with one empty chair parallel to hers. Out of her peripheral vision, she saw a shadow. She felt the familiarity. It was the silhouette, and she knew it. Rose turned completely, and there he was. Clad in what looked like a Biblical tunic, he seemed to glide over the concrete floor as he approached the seat. His blond hair was like a waterfall falling down his back to his hips in perfect ringlets. He sat down, and she studied his face. It was beautiful. His sharp, angular cheekbones rose through his alabaster skin, and his eyes were the color of opals. They were iridescent, and when he turned toward the single light bulb hanging from the ceiling, they shimmered and shone like a perfect rainbow, the kind you would marvel at as a child, filled with wonder. She felt just like a child at that moment, in the presence of someone very important. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she certainly did. This man, this deity, this whatever, was something to be respected. “Wh- who are y-you?” Rose stuttered, and not only because of her speech impediment; she was awestruck. He studied her for a moment before opening his pearly pink mouth. “I am Raziel, and you are Rose.” “How did you--” She paused, suddenly out of breath without exerting any physical energy. “How did you know my name?” Raziel was silent for a moment. “I am omniscient, and you are the chosen one.” “The chosen one?” she shrieked. “Everyone on this planet has a destiny, a fate. Yours is to save the Earth.” “What?” Rose had suddenly gone blank. She could not process the information that was being bestowed upon her. Raziel smiled. “Yes, sweet girl, something very bad is going to happen tomorrow, and it is your duty to

22 stop it. I am not in control of this world. I cannot stop the bad from happening, because I am not entirely human. I can only speak to those carefully selected and guide them in the right direction. It is your decision to do what I am going to ask you to do, but, if you don’t, there will be serious consequences for not only you but the rest of this planet.” Rose didn’t understand. “What exactly is going to happen? Am I dreaming?” Raziel suddenly looked very sad. “Your brother, Mark, whom you haven’t spoken to in five years, is a CIA agent and is going to start a pandemic under the instruction of a top-tier globalist. He has a virus given to him from the Netherlands, carefully invented and cared for like a child until it reached maturity. He is going to put a microscopic drop of it on a single postage stamp. As soon as that one person licks it, the virus is airborne. It’s a hideous bird-pig hybrid with the potential to wipe out 90 percent of the population. There is only one vial of it in the world, and only one vial of an antidote. Both are potent enough to destroy, or repair, the entire planet.” “What in the hell?” Rose yelled at the beautiful man. “Where am I and what is this, some kind of sick joke? When are the cameras going to appear and reveal that I’m on some sort of prank show? Am I be Punk’d? WHAT ARE YOU?” Raziel sighed, paused, and then continued. “I,” he stopped, as if he deciding whether or not to continue, “I am an archangel, and you have twenty-four hours. It would be in your best interest to do this as soon as possible.” “Do WHAT as soon as possible?” “Kill Mark.” “Excuse me?” Rose’s anxiety was peaking. Kill her big brother? Sure, they hadn’t spoken in years, and he’d always been a quiet, mysterious guy, but did Mark really have the potential to do such a thing? “How do I know this is true? How do I know he’s really going to do this?” She started to sob, the salt in her tears stinging her blue eyes. His angelic voice, smooth as velvet, sweet as honey, seemed to envelope her. “Because I can do this.” With the wave of one hand, two or three inches from her face, the inner panic and anxiety immediately faded. It was as if she had never suffered from the disorder at all. She hadn’t felt this calm since her mother would rock her as a child after a night terror--except this was no nightmare; this was a divine intervention, something she never believed in, something she scoffed

23 at. It was now happening to her. She suddenly, without a shred of doubt, believed him fully. “Okay. I’ll do it.” Immediately after the words fell from her lips, she was back in her bed, back in her tiny, cracker-box one-bedroom apartment in New York. She didn’t know where she had previously been, but she had the inkling that she had been in another dimension, another realm, and another plain of existence entirely. She sank into catatonia for an hour, her mind buzzing with thought, like the Energizer-bunny on crack, but her body still and not responding to external stimuli. Not even when her landlord banged on her door to remind her, for the fifth time that week, to pay rent. When Rose awoke, it was noon. She had missed work but, for some reason, didn’t care at all. She felt light as a balloon, the polar opposite of what she felt like the previous day, waterlogged and lethargic, dreading every moment of the day, hiding behind the veil that anxiety and depression bring. She didn’t take her morning medicine. Instead, she picked up her cellphone, paused, and dialed Mark’s number. It rang twice before the familiar, yet somehow unfamiliar, voice answered. “Hello?” “Mark, it’s Rose. Something really bad has happened, and I need you. Please.” She began to feign sobbing, something she had mastered as a manipulative teenager. “What is it? What happened?” His voice sounded entirely unconcerned, almost annoyed at her sudden burst of emotion. This solidified, in Rose’s mind, the change in her brother Raziel had mentioned. He was no longer the kind little boy who would share his Juicy Fruit with her and have bubble-blowing contests. No, this was someone entirely different, and she knew it deep within her questionable soul. “Please just come down and keep me company. I’ll explain when you get here. I’m too shaken right now.” “Fine. Be there at ten o’clock sharp. You better be awake.” He sighed, annoyed, and hung up before she could share a “thank you” or a “goodbye.” Rose marveled at how different Mark sounded since she had last spoken to him; it was as if everything Raziel said was really true. There was no compassion, no brotherly concern, and no comforting words. It suddenly dawned on her that her brother couldn’t possibly be a contractor like he had claimed to be for the past ten years. How could he afford his lavish lifestyle? The fancy dinners, the cars, the Rolex, the women--none of it made sense. She wondered how she could have not noticed the discrepancy before and the holes in all of his stories. He never showed up to family dinners or events; he was simple always “busy.”

24 Rose shivered but still felt calm. She knew what she had to do. After lighting the fireplace, setting her alarm and taking a double dosage of Tylenol PM, she settled into bed and pulled the covers over her head, rolled, and created a cocoon for herself. Calm, but in need of comfort. It was a weird type of cognitive dissonance that she had never experienced before. She drifted off within minutes of lying down and had muddled dreams of Raziel, a serrated blade, and her brother’s face bobbing in and out of sight. There was a relentless banging on the door. It shook her out of deep sleep, but she was immediately wide-awake. Cool as a cucumber, she sauntered toward the door, paused, and prepared to begin her façade. She smeared her eye makeup from the previous night to make it appear as if she had been crying, furrowed her brow, and squished her face. She knew she looked ugly when she cried, but her mission was not to impress Mark. Her mission was to end him. She opened the door. Mark looked like he hadn’t aged a day. His glossy black hair, a mirror image of her own, was slicked back with gel. He wore an Armani suit and black leather shoes and held a briefcase in his right hand. “This better be quick,” he said. “I need to go to the Post Office.” That was it for Rose. She knew his destination was the only thing he wasn’t lying about, the only thing he cared about. She felt as if the two weren’t even related. He was a stranger in her home and as cold as ice. “I just--I just need a hug before I tell you what happened,” she pleaded. The last time she hugged Mark was a demand from her mother after they had a fight. “Jesus Christ, Rose.” “Please?” “Fine.” He took her into his arms, stiffly, and held. Rose knew this wouldn’t be a long hug, and she didn’t have much time before he would pull away. She held tighter, but he did not reciprocate. This infuriated her. Without thinking, without even questioning what exactly she was doing, she reached to her side, pulled the kitchen knife she had slipped between her pajama pants and waist the night before, and, in one swift movement, stood on her tip-toes and plunged the knife deep into the back of his neck, severing his spinal cord. He was dead before he hit the ground. “Quickly now, the suitcase.” Raziel’s voice echoed inside her head. It didn’t surprise her. Nothing did anymore. She

25 crouched down into the quickly expanding pool of blood and grabbed his suitcase, opening the clasps with the hands that usually shook for no reason. She did not quake. “The inside pocket.” As if Raziel were taking control of her body, she fished through the pocket and quickly found two vials, one labeled “H2N1 VIRUS” and the other “H2N1 ANTIDOTE.” What she was holding was something unfathomably dangerous, something despicable, and something asinine. It was something that shouldn’t exist, let alone be manufactured by the experts who are supposed to keep us safe from disease. “Fire.” She knew what Raziel meant. Without hesitation, she picked up both bottles, stared at them for a quick moment, and threw them angrily into the still-burning fire.The flames lapped and licked the vials, obliterating them, the virus, and the antidote. No one will be hurt, now, Rose. Forgive me. She didn’t need to. She knew that this was the last time that she would speak to Raziel or, rather, hear him telepathically in her head. None of it made sense at all, but she knew she had done the right thing. The probability of her going to jail for the rest of her life for murder was imminent and quite possible, but she did not fear that fate. Instead, she sat. She sat for hours and watched the wild element destroy the remnants of the horrifying disease. She sat and contemplated the absence of God from her life. She realized it was Wednesday. Ash Wednesday. She reached into the opening of the fireplace, dragged her finger through the soot, closed her eyes, and used it to form a cross in the center of her forehead. “Forgive me father.” Her voice wavered with emotion. “For I have sinned.”

26 Third Place Poetry Winner

Roller Coaster Sara Watts

Take me higher and drop Me like a lightning bolt. Let the wind carry my Hair behind my head. Give me a twist I soon Won’t forget and those Loops that make me Scream cause the joy that Puts a smile on my jaw. Rushing forward is a Thrill that is positively Sick. Turn me every Direction and don’t Stop till we reach the end. Then let’s go again.

27 Untitled Rachel Eckert

28 True Art Never Kills Cloie Barcelona Third Place Art Winner

29 The Art of Levitation Charlene Woelfel

30 Five O’Clock Shadow Meghan Elsik

31 Shadow of the Past Sarah Huntsman

32 Space City Sarah Huntsman First Place Art Winner

33 Berlin Writings Meghan Elsik

34 The Life That Spring Brings Charlene Woelfel

35 Hanging Around Sydney Allen

36 Feel the Music Sydney Allen

37 Transformed Bethany Jarvis

38 Lost Treasure, delivered by Ike Felicia Barcelona Second Place Art Winner

39 A Conversation between Mat Johnson and Inkling Transcribed by Shanna Dudley

In February, 2013, Lone Star-Tomball’s students, employees, and community members listened excitedly as Mat Johnson read from Pym, his novel inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Afterwards, Johnson kindly gave an entertaining and insightful on-stage interview with Inkling secretary Abigail Ferguson about his career and his preoccupations as a writer. The questions and answers from this interview are included below. Johnson has been described as “a novelist who sometimes writes other things.” He is an innovator in several different genres outside of the traditional novel, including the graphic novel, detective fiction, and historical nonfiction. In each of these genres, he explores themes like racial identity, passing, America’s slave past, lynching, and the continuing presence of racism in American culture. Pym examines Edgar Allan Poe’s racism from the viewpoint of a bi-racial college professor who travels to Antarctica to retrace the voyage of Poe’s titular character Arthur Gordon Pym. Johnson’s first novel, Drop (2000), was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and his novel Hunting in Harlem (2003) won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. More recently, Johnson won the 2007 USA James Baldwin Fellow and was awarded the Dos Passos Prize for literature in 2011. He is currently a permanent faculty member in the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

INKLING: You grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in Germantown, a predominantly African- American neighborhood in downtown Philadelphia. How did your experiences there inform your preoccupations as a writer today?

JOHNSON: My mom is black, and my dad is white—Irish. I look white to a lot of people now, and I really looked white when I was growing up. Coming of age in that neighborhood—at the height of the 1970s and the Black Power movement—shaped me as a writer because I just got my ass kicked all the time. It was not a great time to look like a Caucasian in North Philadelphia. Fifty years earlier, I would have been the next Adam Clayton Powell, but my timing was off.

INKLING: So getting your ass kicked made you a writer?

40 JOHNSON: In a sense—yes—because while other kids were outside playing basketball after school, I was running home to avoid being terrorized, and I would not go out of my house. And when you are in the house all the time, you read. At that time, we didn’t have video games. Cartoons were something that came on between nine and twelve on Saturday, and that was it. So I read comic books and eventually read prose books, which I transitioned to because I couldn’t afford to keep buying comic books. The library had books I could read for free and for longer stretches at a time. So growing up in Germantown was ironically helpful—and not just because I got my ass kicked.

INKLING: What else did Germantown bring to your writing?

JOHNSON: As a writer, you end up drawing a lot from a place, wherever you are. Germantown was a very historic part of Philly. The neighborhood I grew up in was predominantly black and working class, but it was originally an upper-class, white, German area, with nineteenth-century mansions all over. When I was growing up, those mansions were divided into small apartments where twenty or thirty people were living—but they were mansions, all the same. They brought out the storyteller in me and made me wonder, What happened here? And I got the sense that I was constantly walking through stories and that the stories were a kind of magic that I had to uncover.

INKLING: So do you think there’s a carry-over from your life to your fiction? After all, Chris Jaynes, the narrator in Pym, is from Germantown, just as you are, and he describes going to the library to hide from kids who tormented him. That’s where he meets his friend Garth, who was also being terrorized.

JOHNSON: That’s true, but a lot times what happens with fiction—at least with my fiction—is that the characters end up being like figures in a dream. You might have a dream about something. Everything in that dream is something you recognize. There is that store and that person you know from life, but no person acts as he or she would in real life, and no place looks exactly the way it would in real life. Everything is mixed up. So imagine your real life as a book of photographs. Your dream life is those photographs just chopped into little pieces and rearranged into something that on one hand is familiar and on the other hand is completely unfamiliar. And that’s what writing fiction tends to be like.

INKLING: So is Chris Jaynes your dream self in a rearranged photo album of your own life?

JOHNSON: One of the things that some readers don’t understand is that I don’t see myself as the main character of my novels. I created Chris Jaynes. I like him, and I even love him—because he’s my character. But he’s a pompous ass. And so he is supposed to read like a pompous ass.

41 Yet what many supposedly smart, well-educated people don’t understand is that no one assumes they (or the writer) will agree with the narrator. Some people have told me, “This book sucks because Chris Jaynes should have gotten fired for not doing his job.” I agree.Yeah, he should have gotten fired! He wasn’t teaching what he was hired to teach. You get hired for a job and you don’t do it—you get fired! Of course—but that’s not the point. The point is the character. One of the things you have to do—which Americans have a particularly tricky time with—is to learn how to distance yourself from the narrator in any story. Brits are the opposite. British people are just mean—and I say that as an Anglophile who lived in Britain for a decade. They assume from the outset they’re not going to like the main character. So if you look at British mysteries, like on Netflix or PBS, there is automatically a distance between you and the main character. You’re not supposed to feel everything he or she is doing, but in American stories the main character is often assumed to be an everyman (someone we can all identify with). He is not supposed to have morally questionable actions, and that’s why a British TV show like House seemed so innovative to American audiences when it aired here—because the main character in that show is a jerk. It turns out that you really can enjoy the show, even if you don’t agree with everything the main character is doing.

INKLING: You said earlier that your mother is African American and your father is of Irish descent. In other interviews, you frequently describe yourself as a mulatto. How has being a biracial man influenced your writing?

JOHNSON: As much as everyone in the room’s ethnicity has affected the way they look at the world and their writing. The thing is when you’re not in the majority, you notice it. When you’re white and you’re writing, you don’t oftentimes think of yourself as having an ethnicity. You think of yourself as “normal”—as having no ethnicity, even though you do. It’s just like having an accent. I said I lived in England. When I came back from there, my cousins in Philly asked, “Did everybody over there have an accent?” I thought to myself, “Yeah, and you too have an accent, dumb ass!” The point is that when you see yourself in the majority, you think you’re the universal. So, yeah, my ethnicity has influenced me. And probably the biggest impact is in seeing my own viewpoint as just one of many.

INKLING: But why do you call yourself a mulatto, considering how racially charged that term is and how closely connected it is with slavery? After all, the word “mulatto” comes from the Latin word for mule, as in mixed breed.

JOHNSON: I consider myself an African American of mixed descent, and I also consider myself mulatto. I like saying “mulatto” because it just makes people uncomfortable. But for me, the most important thing is not so much classification as acknowledging the ethnicity that influences the

42 way you look at the world. My mother is African American. I came out of an African-American community, and a lot of my cultural influences are African American. So even though I look white to a lot of people, it doesn’t really matter. You know, a zebra without stripes is still a zebra. It’s not a funny-looking horse. My ethnicity definitely affects me, but it affects me in the sense that it makes me conscious of things many people take for granted.

INKLING: Your character Chris Jaynes also calls himself a mulatto, and he goes to Antarctica to discover the origins of whiteness by tracing the voyage of Edgar Allan Poe’s character Arthur Gordon Pym. What compelled you to write a response to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and how did you get through it, since it is so long-winded?

JOHNSON: First of all, I would have sold a lot more copies if Poe’s novel had been a better read. There were many people who said to me, “I wanted to read your book, but I thought I should read Poe’s book first. But after the first five pages of Poe’s book, I thought, ‘This sucks’ and ended up not buying your book.” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is an insane book that ends in a cliff-hanger. It starts with a guy stowing away on a ship leaving Nantucket. The only thing that passes for plot is that the ship is going south the whole time. Eventually, they go to an island where everybody is so black that even their teeth are black. And then the book closes abruptly without explanation. All we know is that they show up in Antarctica where a white shrouded figure stands on the ice and lifts up his hand while a chasm of ice opens up behind him and the boat goes in this chasm. That’s it—and it makes no more sense than what I just said to you. You don’t know who this shrouded guy is. You don’t know anything about anything. The book just ends. Part of the problem might have been that Poe didn’t know how to write a novel. He was a short story writer, and he didn’t know how to do that kind of art, but there are other concepts too. As a reader, you begin to realize that this novel is not based on anything, except that Poe grew up in a pro-slavery environment and had a lot of racial angst himself.

INKLING: So it was the absurd ending and Poe’s racial angst that appealed to you?

JOHNSON: Toni Morrison has this idea that just as Poe saw blackness as horror and everything that is wrong with the universe, he saw whiteness as perfection. But you can’t have a novel when things are perfect. There’s no novel that says, “Today was a wonderful day, and we sat and stared at the sky.” That’s not a story. Stories are about bad things. So over the years, a bunch of people have tried to solve the ending of this novel. Jules Verne wrote a version (The Sphinx of the Ice Fields), a supposed sequel in which it turned out, it wasn’t a shrouded figure—it was a magnet. It just dragged them in, and they all died. Then other people had other versions of it. H.P. Lovecraft was inspired by Poe’s book and expeditions to Antarctica and wrote At the Mountains of Madness. And so it has become a literary gauntlet that’s been thrown down, a challenge—and one

43 that nobody had played with in decades. So when I stumbled on it, I thought 1) It would be really cool just to see what I could do with it, and 2) There is a lot here that actually is interesting. We are at a point now where we’re trying to move past our racial caste system and into a new type of being, but in order to do that, we have to unpack a lot of baggage. And so my character Chris Jaynes has this idea that he is going to try to unpack American culture’s misunderstood notions of race and whiteness. That’s why I thought that replying to Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was an interesting project.

INKLING: In your version of Pym, you seem to focus on the tackier side of American culture. Jaynes’s friend Garth has two obsessions: Thomas Karvel, whose quaint paintings of light recall Thomas Kincaid’s mass-produced work sold in shopping malls, and Little Debbie snack cakes. Why are you so interested in our bad taste, both figurative and literal?

JOHNSON: The intellectual answer is that Garth, the character who likes these things, has a lot of mass taste. That is, coarser taste, which Little Debbies are a part of. I can give you a host of other intellectual reasons behind it that justify these snack cakes being there. But the other part is I’m diabetic and I can’t have any damned candy or pastries.

INKLING: But what do Little Debbie Snacks and coarse taste have to do with “unpacking our racial baggage,” as you just mentioned?

JOHNSON: When I started putting Little Debbie references in the book, my agent (a sweet lady who is almost ninety) would send every draft back with comments like, “What the hell is going on with all these Little Debbie references?” and “You’ve got to take the Little Debbies out. They’re too much!” But I kept thinking, no, they have to stay in the book. What I realized is that I was ruminating on this concept of whiteness. When I say whiteness, I don’t mean people of European descent. I don’t mean Irish people or Italian people or French. I’m not talking about ethnicities or cultures. I’m talking about a caste system, an American caste system that branches off from the European caste system. Whiteness didn’t really exist until around the 1400s. For me, whiteness began with the Enlightenment and with Immanuel Kant, because even before then, when we had Europeans mixing with Africans or Asians, we still didn’t have the concept of whiteness. That came later.

INKLING: So do you mean Little Debbie Snacks have a lot to do with the history of whiteness as superior over blackness, brownness, or any other color?

JOHNSON: Yes, because whiteness is a power system turned into an ideology. I was actually thinking about Shirley Temple when I wrote Pym because Shirley Temple and Little Debbie are almost identical images of each other. Hollywood presented Shirley Temple as a sexualized

44 child—a winking, seductive, cutesy thing in little dresses. What I realized was that she was presented to 1930s America as a symbol of perfect whiteness—as visional whiteness, whiteness in the sense of being unblemished. Part of what emphasized her visional whiteness was having her dance next to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who, by contrast, was old, black, and male. We have a young, cutesy, white child, and then we have an old, darker-skinned, African-American man, and there’s the contrast.

INKLING: Now that you mention it, Temple’s character in The Littlest Rebel (one of four films in which the two actors shared the screen) was named Virgie—as in pure. Bojangles’s character went by Billy, the diminutive form of William. Putting her next to him created a dichotomy, suggesting whiteness was pure and youthful (therefore powerful) and blackness was sullied and aged (and so impotent).

JOHNSON: Yes, that’s because whiteness as a concept has always depended on there also being blackness. You didn’t have whiteness until you could say, “This is blackness and this is whiteness.” The whole idea of whiteness and blackness does not make sense when you think about it anyway. You lump together one random ethnic group because, among other features, their skin happens to be brown. Then you take another ethnic group whose skin happens to be pink, and you say, “Yo, you brown people—you’re black.” When they reply, “But we’re not black; we’re brown,” you say, “No, you’re black. And you pink people—you’re white.” The truth is that we’re not black or white. I have never seen a white person in my life—and if I did, I would shit myself! There are no white or black people. But European and American culture began to take for granted that one group of people is black and one is white. And once we did, we began to label white as positive and black as negative. And we now assume that these labels reflect the truth. I’m not complaining. Things are a lot better now than they’ve ever been. They’re better than when I was a kid, they’re way better than when my mom was a kid, and they’re unbelievably better than when my great grandfather was a kid and was a slave. But I think part of our growth as a nation must be moving past our caste system. It’s just that we still have these vestigial limbs from our caste system when it comes to race.

INKLING: Vestigial limbs?

JOHNSON: Here’s an example. I remember watching The Today Show one Halloween morning, when Al Roker was interviewing a Caucasian couple in black face. They had Afro wigs on and plastic bones through their noses. Their kid was with them, and he was also in black face—only in a big pot that they were pretending to stir because they were cooking him up. Al Roker was just standing there smiling. I lost some respect for him at that moment, but I was also wondering, what the hell is he thinking?—because that’s a leftover image. That was a common cartoon image

45 when I was a kid. Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker episodes would often feature primitive savage man eaters. But those images never really existed. The point of having those cannibal primitives on any show was not about the supposed primitives themselves. It was about the white folks being civilized and black folks primitive.

INKLING: So again, it’s the contrast—the dichotomy—that counts.

JOHNSON: Yes. Here’s another example, an analogy. I have an aunt who hated growing up poor and did all she could to separate herself from her past. She married a doctor, who later cheated on her and divorced her, but my story occurs before the divorce. My aunt was so proud of the fact that she had this big-ass house (unlike my mother and me). When we would come over for dinner, my mother would try to set the table with the flatware in the kitchen drawer, but my aunt would correct her, saying, “Oh no, we are using the special silver.” Then when my mother would set out the kids’ dishes, side by side, for me and her son, she would say, “Oh no, my son cannot eat at the same table with you. He has special china, so he will eat over here.” My cousin wore a ruffled shirt (but despite this, he has turned out well). She would talk to me like I was dirt, and she would talk to my mother like she was dirt too. To everything my mother said, she would reply, “Oh no, you can’t do this,” or “This is not how you do it.” My mother would bring over food, and she would say, “We know you don’t have a lot of food, so we’ll save that for you. You take that macaroni and cheese back. We just want you to have some food for later.” We were constantly being patronized. And I realized later that my aunt talked to us that way because it made her feel so much better about herself and how far she had come when she could look at us and think, “You’re poor, you’re trash, and you live in a basement apartment with roaches, where people find guns and needles in the backyard. But I live in a big fancy house—look how well I’m doing.” It’s a common human way of building self-esteem. I’m sure you recognize that type of behavior.

INKLING: So even your own aunt—an African-American woman—fell prey to whiteness?

JOHNSON: Exactly—because race can function the same way, with one group saying, “Well, look how sophisticated and smart and civilized we are because look at those savages, oh those savages. And cannibalism? Those savages eat each other, they’re constantly killing each other, they’ll eat you, and they’ll eat us all. And cannibalism is evil. But now let’s go to church and eat the body of Christ.” Yeah right. That’s odd that you have a group obsessed with cannibalism that is at the same time going to church every week to eat Christ and drink his blood. It’s a little weird, right?

INKLING: So you mean it’s the first vampire story, in a sense.

46 JOHNSON: It is the first vampire story—and I say this as a baptized Catholic.We have a lot of stuff like this that we do without questioning. We need those kinds of dichotomies—you have to have blackness to have whiteness. And we have to have a lot of discussion about taking apart blackness and moving past blackness and post blackness. But the bigger issue in the room is whiteness and getting past whiteness, because whiteness is invisible, and it’s everywhere. I have faith in us, as Americans, but I think this blindness is something that we actively have to deal with. And I’ll tell you this, too—and I’m not saying it to pander—the South (Texas included) is doing a better job with it right now (despite the past) because the South has had to face racism directly in the last twenty or thirty years. The East Coast and the North haven’t. The East Coast and North are comfortable with their superiority on racial issues. It’s not as common for people to challenge them directly or for people to say things directly. And I know from going around reading Pym. For example, here in Texas on your campus, many students and faculty discussed this book in their classes. People have asked me about it, but no one has seemed ready to burn me down and torch my car (though I’ll check my tires when I leave here). On the other hand, when I went back to Philly and went to a reading for Temple University grad students, I walked into a room of about thirty students—all white—and furious. They were angry that I was racializing everything because they have been privileged enough not to have to think about race as often as most black people anywhere in America or as most white people in the South have had to think about race.

INKLING: Speaking of audiences, you have mentioned readers’ responses many times in this interview. How do you feel when people criticize your books?

JOHNSON: I would hope that almost all of them would question parts of my work. We live a culture now where you can criticize without losing anything. For example, if somebody presents a piece of art to me, and I look at it and say, “That sucks,” the only thing that anyone else will think is that I have very high standards. But if I bring in a new piece of art and say it is important and beautiful—and even say why I think it is so—then I have something to lose. It’s the easiest thing in the world to be dismissive, but it takes bravery to have a more sophisticated response to art. When I write, I assume that there will be some people who love it. They love it because it hits every note they want hit, and it makes little winking references that only they get. Now, there are also going to be some people who say, “I like this part of your work better than I like that part.” That group would probably represent most readers. Finally, there are going to be those people who say, “This sucks!” no matter what they read of my work. My feeling is that the latter people are assholes, and I don’t really care what they think. As for people who like and don’t like my work, they are inevitable and fine. But the sweet spot you write for is the people who have a strong, positive, emotional response to your work. Writing was easier for me initially,

47 when I knew no one was going to read what I wrote. Then all of sudden when I started getting an audience, I had to confront this issue of audience response. For example, I end up doing a lot of promotion on Twitter. I have about fifty thousand people who follow me. So anytime I write something there, I know that maybe five thousand people will love it, forty thousand just won’t care, and another five thousand will hate what I write and hate me and want me to die. So what’s my point? As a writer, you can’t stop moving, and you can’t please everyone. So you have to try to please yourself and an imagined audience.

INKLING: Do you like reading aloud for audiences?

JOHNSON: Well, I hate being boring! Sometimes, I’ll be reading funny shit at a reading, yet people are just sitting, staring at me. I don’t care because even if they’re going to be bored, I ain’t going to be dead-bored. I don’t have time for it. I only have some much time on this planet, so I want to have a good time. And every time I read for an audience, my rhythm is different, and I learn something about what I wrote that helps me in the future. So, no, I don’t like readings in general. There are some readings that are fantastic, but in general, we’ve gotten in this habit of mutually agreeing to be bored, and so we sit dutifully as if we were sitting through a religious service. We’re praising the idea of books, but we’re not thinking we need to be entertained. For example, when I go to church, when I get dragged to church—I don’t usually go in thinking, “Oh this is going to be good.” I go in thinking, “Okay, we got out of bed. I’m going to church, I’m good. My kids are in Sunday school. We’re here. We went to church. Good, we did it.” We often approach readings the same way, and that’s one of the problems with literature, and it’s why audiences are not bigger—because literature and readings should be fun. A reading should be an event. Something should be risked. You should go thinking, oh this writer might make an ass out of himself, or he might do something interesting, but I’m not going to be bored. So what I’ve always tried to do, even if the crowd appears bored, is to make it interesting for myself. And it’s the same thing with writing. The biggest key with writing is, if you’re bored, everybody else is going to be bored too. So you have to be excited about it and if you’re into it, then you can have the faith that other people are going to be into it, too.

INKLING: Before we close, I want to switch gears and ask about the broad range of genres you write in. Let’s face it—you are a renaissance man—you’ve written nonfiction, novels, detective fiction, and even graphic novels. Is there any one genre you are particularly drawn to?

JOHNSON: Yeah. I’m a novelist because writing novels is what I am best at. I have been called a novelist who sometimes writes other things, but I’m best as novelist. As a comic book writer I’m okay but not as good as I am as a novelist. I can innovate within the fictional form. Most of my training has been in fiction, and the innovation I do artistically is in fiction. In comic books,

48 oftentimes, I’m having fun, and the innovation I do in comics is often in the subject matter because I focus on subjects that other people don’t. But writing comics is kind of a side hustle.

INKLING: If comics are a side hustle, then why did you ever start writing them?

JOHNSON: When I started doing comics, I had had two novels come out, and neither one of them had done particularly well. They had gotten good reviews, but nobody bought them—which is usually what happens when you come out with a novel. Then DC Comics approached me about writing a graphic comic for their imprint Vertigo, which publishes comics for adult readers who want more sophisticated themes and subject matter than traditional comics have offered. I jumped at the chance—but with this feeling that I was probably going to ruin my career. After all, if you’re known as an artist, as in a fancy “Artist” with a capital “A”—say if you’re a fancy painter and you’re trying to get your work into the world’s finest museums—and then people see you at the mall selling your paintings in a kiosk, you get in trouble. People begin to say, “Oh he’s not a serious artist.” I felt as if I was a ballerina that had trained at the Bolshoi for twenty years and was now suddenly stripping at the airport. But I didn’t care. In fact, I have found that artistically the best things that have happened occurred when I just didn’t give a shit.

INKLING: So do you mean that writing comics freed you artistically, despite the career risks?

JOHNSON: When I wrote comics, I just started letting the work go wherever it went. As a result, when I wrote Incognegro, all these things that I never thought would happen to me—like getting reviewed in The New York Times and having a bestseller—happened for a comic book. But I didn’t really care because comics are not what I really do. Pym took me nine years to write (mainly because I had to wait so long for my agent to read my drafts). But while I was waiting, in between drafts of Pym, I wrote four graphic novels, because graphic novels only take a month or two to write. And so what ended up happening was instead of just waiting a decade between books, I got to experiment with this other form, and experimenting with comics really helped me in novel writing. So I was happy to do it.

INKLING: You’ve written many graphic novels, but you’ve never actually created their drawings yourself, right? Can you describe the collaborative process you use for your graphic novels?

JOHNSON: What I do is I write a script. It’s very similar to a movie script. In a movie script you would say, “A guy goes to a table and picks up the water, and he drinks and he puts the water down.” In a graphic novel, you would say, Panel One: A room in a university. Panel Two: A guy sits up on stage. Panel Three: A bottle sits on the table. Panel Four: A guy lifts it up. Panel Five: He drinks.” So every image has to be broken up individually, in addition to it being basically a

49 movie script. I actually use the same software, and the text is written out like a script, except that every image is described. Once I write the text, I send it off with visual cues. So if I were going to do something about us in this room, I would take a picture of you, I would take a picture of me, and I would take a picture of this room. I’d go online and find Google images for this room, and I’d send them with the script to the artist. And then the artist would have reference points. Then what happens is that, first, he sends me a stick figure vision of what’s going on, and I say “yay” or “nay”and “this looks right,” and then I send it back to him. Then he goes on until he has a finished draft. Once he is done, somebody else usually comes in and does the lettering for it and puts the words in. Also, in many cases, I create these texts with artists via email. Two of the artists I worked with were in England. For my last graphic book, the artist was in Italy, and he didn’t even speak English. So whatever I sent to him, he would put through Google Translate. But he would also add exclamation points at the end of every sentence he would send to me. I thought it was because he was Italian, but it turned it was because he was just weird. Because of the time difference, every morning, I would wake up to emails containing new images from the book. They would begin, “MAT!!!! HOW ARE YOU????!!!!!! TODAY I GIVE PICTURE!!!!!! So, yeah, writing comics is collaborative back-and-forth work. At The University of Houston, I teach a graphic novel course, in which my students use this same process. We hire professional artists to illustrate students’ writing and also hire professional writers to add text to art students’ illustrations. In the past, we showed their work in art shows and printed out a graphic text for each of them at the end of the course.

INKLING: So can you tell us what you are working on now?

JOHNSON: Yes, what I am working on. . . ? I have a novel, which I sold a novel and was supposed to submit in August. But I didn’t hand it in. And my editor sends me threatening emails, and I’m trying to write it. Mostly I just goof off on Twitter, and then I get a couple a pages done here and there. It’s set in Philly, and it’s about a guy who finds a daughter he never knew he had. You know, I ask writers this question all the time too—“What are you working on?”—and it’s never satisfying to answer. So let me just say I’m working on the cure for cancer.

50 Second Place Poetry Winner (Tap Snap Wrap) Rachel Eckert

You’re really an asshole when you’re drunk.

With lowered inhibitions, harsh words pour from your fingers

tap

tap

tapping on the little keyboard, marching across the bridge we’ve worked so hard to build up anew between us

snap

snap

snapping the cords that tether said bridge and keep it steady.

I can feel it swaying, but I’ve seen this collapse

coming for a long time. Even so, I’m frantically

wrap

wrap

wrapping the loose tethers around trees, rocks, anything.

But it’s a band-aid at best, because you’re always an asshole--I’m only just now realizing it.

Tap.

Snap.

Wrap.

51 From Dust till Dust Jack S. Moorman

It was his way to end the day: a pipe to his lip, a light on the dust, and smoke invading his lungs. The bone-white glass pipe abused him, only demanding nightly worship and constant daydream. This was the only constant in his life. Everything else was destined to burn: his money to bills, family and friends to the urn, and the dust into smoke. The young flame swayed across the dusty dance floor. She moved slowly and seductively with experience beyond her time. Her dance couldn’t pair with any manmade tune. The pipe relocated from the perch on his lip to the safety of his crude coffee table. The table was littered with junk mail. The false promises of a better tomorrow advertised on each flyer were only obtained as rolling papers. An eager realtor tried to steal a puff out of his pipe as it rested on her lips. A small metal tin with a faded cartoon character etched on the side held the dust still to come. A clean ash tray camped beside the cartoon character. The ashes typically found themselves on the floor or between the couch cushions. He held the flame alive. He leaned over it as if it were a crystal that held the future. Her spreading warmth met his cold cheeks. The year was old and dying, and without a heater it appeared he might, too. Her dance slowed. “Do you remember?” she asked warily, her lost innocence heavy on her mind. His polished eyes consumed her being but only déjà vu told him that she was familiar. No, she was important to him, and he knew it. Her butane perfume teased him in his frantic search for a memory. “You look familiar.” Instantly he wished the words back. The airborne words transformed her dance into a violent flail. “You really don’t remember.” She slowed for a moment but only before a wind-swept rage overcame her. Her scarlet dress left a burn on his thumb to be discovered when sober. “How could you forget me?” Her trembling lip shook her words. “We had nothing but tomorrow!” Tomorrow was too late; he had died so long ago. The time before the sorrow was rarely remembered, and even then she had brought him the warmth that he needed to carry on. “Wasn’t that enough for you?” Her tone cooled down as she shrank back into the womb. She interrupted his apology. “You killed me. How could you forget?” She shrank down through her floor like he wished to. A few singed hairs blended with the smoke. The world was colder with her gone, yet a sweat fused his clothes to his skin. He shivered. He removed the ashes from his pipe and set down new kindle. The flame was summoned and the pipe reignited. A young night and no expectations for tomorrow allowed curiosity to be

52 explored. After giving his goddess her demanded worship, he averted his eyes to his new interest. Lost for words, the silence reigned. “Now you want to talk?” she asked, annoyed. He tried to force composure with a dry palm to slick his hair back and the back of his hand to smear the drool off his chin and across his cheek. “What’s your name?” he asked apologetically. He leaned close to her, then matched her sway in his eyes. “You need to remember,” she said with a hint of teasing. It wasn’t fair; her entire being was in memory on the tip of his tongue. He grasped her tight with both hands and brought her those few inches closer. He gazed into a soul, so desperate to make things right. His eyes closed slowly. He was now blind, but he thought that he could see. The kiss didn’t go well; the burn on his thumb now had a younger twin on his lip. “We aren’t close?” he asked, only feeling her brush him away. “We couldn’t be closer.” “Am I too old?” “You’re perfect.” “Then, why?” His tongue rolled over where she had touched him with affection. Her gown demanded his attention and he was determined to know every ruffle. He loved her, that much he remembered. She might love him. She was small, frail, and under his control. That was a well fabricated illusion. His mind panned away to thoughts of world peace and fuzzy food. “This always happens. You never remember.” She slowed her sway to match her tone. Misery is a dance for one. Was this real or just a memory? Despite her gloom, she moved free of burden, a metronome for his heart. “You will never understand. Just let me go.” She continued to try to break this cycle. Had she done this before? Was this the first time? Was this real? He pressed down harder on the gas until his knuckles turned white and his fist blushed. The only change that brought was both his hand and her being irritated. “Tell me, or I’ll never let go.” Her youth would melt away in an evening, but her memories from before these nights could change the nights to come. She couldn’t continue to watch him destroy himself nightly. An impatient huff almost extinguished her. “Please, just tell me!” he yelled down her throat, hoping that some echo would return with the answer. “I was your light before you gave me away, your dreams that replayed during the day.”

53 He made her linger a moment longer, and then she disappeared with a gasp. Although an accident, she was free and so were they. The monsters spared from pitchforks and torches by the thin wall of his skull jeered at him. A cocktail of memories replayed, what strangers, family, and friends were all guilty of. These demons had made him lose so much, things he could never get back. He attacked his home. The little furniture he did own met his wrath. The coffee table flew across the room. He ignored his goddess as she screamed and then shattered against the wall on the other side of the room. He clawed at his face in an attempt to either rip out or bury them. Physical exhaustion returned him to his overturned couch. He sat on the couch as it was. The lighter, clenched in his hand, survived the storm. He rested his head against the still warm metal tip, his head against a door he was too ashamed to knock. He hoped he could just nudge it open and everything he needed to know would insist residence inside his forehead. He knocked. Sparks shot out the first few times. He doubted that she would open. She eventually answered. “Hope, I’m so sorry.” She smiled weakly. Her time was burning out and she wasn’t going to go out under her own tears and with him burned. “I forgive you.” The monsters had always been in his head. “But you must forgive yourself.” Tragedies to him were punishment for occupying an unwelcome earth. Suicidal fantasy blended with daydreams before the dust. The dust had made it go away for so long. “I may not always be around.” She brought up her hourglass casually, not raising any panic with a low voice. “But I will always be a part of you. I want you to fall in love with me again. I want you to arm yourself and never give way to the demons in your head that feast on you insecurities. I want you to be able to dream.” A lump occupied his throat and mind. Her warmth flickered across his face a little longer. “I promise,” he whispered, too late for her to hear.

54 The Eagle and Child Dustin Inkster

The day I became a writer, I did no writing. Life had gotten in the way once again. In the previous months, I wrote during what Orson Scott Card once referred to as “stolen moments.” Writing demands time, and I could not justify what time I did spend at the keyboard since I was not a “real” writer. A real writer must publish or rather must earn his living writing. That is, after all, the definition of “writer.” I decided to use the time before bed to mull this over while having a smoke from my Viking Classic Tobacco Pipe. I unfolded my favorite chair, stretching the weathered nylon out over the gray tubular frame. On the back was a yellow glob that was once a “Bass Pro Shops” logo, long since rendered illegible by sun and wear. My match flared to life, filling my nostrils first with the pungent smell of sulfur, then the nutty scent of burning tobacco. Then, my imagination wandered, like so many times before, to Oxford some time after World War II, where there is a pub named The Eagle and Child but known to regulars as The Bird and Baby. In my mind, I could visualize the dirty snow that lined the sides of the wet streets outside of the pub. Drizzling rain had started to fall, carrying along a frigid chill that penetrated to the core. The oval-shaped sign hanging above the door bore the namesake image of a great eagle with a small child clutched in its talons. A warm glow spilled from the frosted, diamond casement windows and voices full of cheer from within the pub’s walls. Once one was inside, The Bird and Baby was tight yet somehow not cramped. Patrons called for pints, engaged in animated discussions, and shared jokes, causing parts of the bar to erupt in laughter. Reddish brown wood grain dominated the hazy, smoke-filled room. Near the back of the pub was the Rabbit Room. The dominant feature in the small private side room was the hearth complete with a glowing fire crackling its invitation. Another fixture of this room, at least on Tuesday nights, were the Inklings, Oxford’s writing club. On approach, the four Inklings greeted me with warm smiles mixed with questioning glances. Two of them I immediately recognized. A balding man with dimples at the corners of his eyes was C.S. Lewis, and the man with a cheerful smile and merry eyes set beneath matching white hair and eyebrows was none other than J.R.R. Tolkien. The two other men they introduced as Owen Barfield and Charles Williams. I was not familiar with Mr. Barfield, but Williams I knew as an author of works centering on matters of spirituality. Lewis and Tolkien were Christians as well, famous for their allegorical work. I admired these men. I shared their love of God, fine English tobacco, and dark beer. In spite of these similarities, I could not shake the feeling that I had no place in this room. This feeling grew in me as Williams asked in perfect Oxford English, “Who is this then?” The room grew silent, and the four men fixed on me, awaiting an answer. “I’m Dustin Inkster.” “Why have you come, Mr. Inkster?” Tolkien asked, his already impossible smile

55 widening further. His tone was kind to cut the tension, and he offered a plate of some sort of English biscuit. “I wanted to meet the Inklings and hear them read. I… well, I just wanted to sit with all of you.” I accepted the biscuit, which had the consistency of pencil shavings and left my mouth dry. “You want to be an Inkling then?” Lewis asked. I washed the shavings down with coffee-colored beer. “Are you a writer or a scholar?” “No, not at all.” I am quite certain a few credits at a local junior college do not qualify one as a scholar. “He should read.” Barfield, silent before now, spoke up. The group exchanged glances as if bouncing the idea back and forth before turning to me. “Very well,” Lewis said, and then proclaimed, “a reading!” I had brought a manuscript in anticipation of this very moment, but now, reading before these giants seemed completely absurd. Not until the second “well?” did I take out the story I had written. The piece was a short story with which I had never been happy and had fiddled with endlessly, engrossing myself in minutia until there was no forest, only the trees that grew in the nouns, adjectives, verbs, and those God- forsaken adverbs. The paper was not my favorite but was the most technically accurate. When I finished, the Inklings looked around at one another, fidgeting in their chairs. The fire had gone out, and Tolkien excused himself to find a log for the fire. Lewis finally said, “That wasn’t terrible, I suppose. Keep after it and you will be fine.” He sounded like a loving parent who has listened to a child squeak and honk through a clarinet recital with teeth clenched. “If you will excuse us, we have a meeting,” Barfield said, his tone curt. Lewis nodded in agreement. Coming back to the here and now of my Bass Pro chair, I realized that my pipe had gone out. I was not a writer, and I was certainly not an Inkling, I thought as I tamped the tobacco in my pipe down. Then, I retrieved another match, struck it, and made to relight my pipe when a thought occurred to me. The Inklings did not reject me because I was not a published author, nor did they reject my work because I did not earn a living as an author. My failure did not stem from a lack of talent or effort. They had… Ouch! The flames had burned down to the tips of my fingers. Cursing, I shook the match out and retrieved another. With a lit pipe, I leaned back in the old chair and let my mind drift back to The Bird and Baby. The Inklings met me with skeptical stares. “You have returned, Mr. Inkster?” Tolkien asked, sounding very much like Ian McKellen’s portrayal of Tolkien’s character Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s film. “Well, obviously he has returned. The proper question is why?” Barfield added. “I’m here to read.” “Yes, we’ve heard quite enough of your readings” was Barfield’s reply. “One more. You won’t be sorry.”

56 No one seemed quite sure how to respond. “Let him read,” Lewis said, “You only come here for the beer anyway, Barfield. You can drink as easily while he reads as you can any other time!” When I felt like I had the floor, I began with “This is a story I wrote that tells of my life and love, and I’ve chosen the title accordingly: ‘An Allegory of my Life and Love’ by Dustin Inkster.” The title was figurative, and I had not written any such story, but I imagined an epic tale rich with veiled commentary of my own experiences. I read my beloved words with passion, and the Inklings said not a word. When I was finished, the only sound was the soft crackle of the fire for many heartbeats. “Well done,” Tolkien said through his infectious smile before placing the stem of his pipe between his teeth to free up his hands for applause. Lewis, Barfield, andWilliams joined in, each laughing and cheering. “I told you he had it in him!” Lewis said to Williams while elbowing him in the side. “Welcome to the Inklings,” Tolkien said, putting a firm hand on my shoulder. I sat smiling in my Bass Pro chair. Once again, my pipe had gone out but not from lack of attention. I had smoked down to the dottle. I dumped the remaining ash out on the grass outside of my garage and then replaced the chair in the corner. I was a writer after all. One’s credentials or even talent does not make one a writer, rather one’s love for writing. So long as I stole moments to write, because that is what I love to do, I would be a writer.

57 Third Place Poetry Winner

Alzheimer’s: The Second Hell Morgan Severn

I can’t believe you’re gone Like a whisper in the wind. I remember you recognizing My face Like a fleeting dream. But I was in your blood And I still carry it in my veins, Like a secret remnant of Your beautiful Existence. I will never forget you, As long as I thrive. I carry you in a metal safe In my heart That no one can unlock. I hold the key and it’s hidden Away In my psyche. Deep in my subconscious. Hypnagogia makes me Remember Your unaltered state- Gorgeous rosy cheeks, Sharp memory, But your love never died, Even though the insidious Disease wanted you to. But you fought so hard,

58 And even the most peaceful Town once was a Battleground. And you fought it, Like a Xena warrior princess, Like a woman dispatched Into a dangerous war. But guerrilla tactics could Not save you from what Hid inside, Festered, Consumed, Took the light from your Beautiful brown eyes. Word salad made my eyes Erupt, But I knew exactly what you Meant. Familial love will never pass, Like you did, and I wish With all my heart That I devoted more Moments to you. I can’t reverse the flow of Time, and only forge forward. But guess what, Grandma? I’m sewing a blanket of Your discarded clothing. I will wear you like a shawl In my sleep. So deep in you, I am. I yearn to remember your

59 Smile. To see it again. But I know innately that I won’t. This brings me grief, But bitter relief That you are out of your Crippling pain. I will bring flowers to your Grave. I will refuse to be a slave To misery and remorse, Because little solace comes To those who grieve. And you’d want more for me. Floating in the nebulas, I dearly hope you are. But we are always reunited In my slumber. With you in your prime And me running out of time Before I awake. None of this is fake, My dear grandmother. I should have written for Your wake, but I was Waterlogged. And now I can only post, Blog, Hope. It’s a hard slope, Recuperating from death. I’ll keep producing letters And poems to read to your

60 Grave. And the situation IS grave. It is hard, a toil, But you aren’t in the soil. Reduced to ashes, But what is better? I try not to think about it, But I kiss your photo every Morning. Every mourning. Before my day begins, I Devote it to you. My blood boils with the Regret I carry, But I will not recoil. I am not a snake, I am a hawk, Who will devour the Slithering pain.

Until I’m dead, you’ll Be in my head

61 First Place Prose Winner

On the Clock Madison Estes

Coffee cools as she types. Words, sentences, and then paragraphs emerge as she struggles to meet the deadline. A quarter past eleven. She has a little over a half hour. Suddenly she pauses, her index finger hovering above the enter key. The last line lacked all logical sense. She highlights the nonsensical sentence and hits delete. She stares at the screen. The words shift and rearrange before her eyes. Her eyelashes flutter involuntarily, and she rests her forehead against the cold, hard surface, allowing the table to serve as a pillow. In her half-conscious state, she sees herself in a cozy bed, cuddling with her husband, enfolded in the safety of his embrace, his head resting on the delicate curve between her neck and shoulder. She’s so protected and secure. She sees her children’s mouths covered in pudding as they wave their sticky hands. They jump into bed, and she laughs. She sees through the mess, noticing instead their great big smiles with missing baby teeth in the front. She sees her elderly mother visiting every Sunday, her hair pulled back in a bun, her voice floating into the room along with a familiar aroma, as she teaches her grandchildren how to bake cinnamon rolls. The sunshine pours in from the tall living room windows, and she is basking in the warm and soothing rays of light. She could live in this moment forever. Her body melts into the plushy couch, and she feels like a puddle, filling every empty space, just flowing outward in every direction. She is a serene lake, surrounded by the comfort of nature; the trees and the call of birds assure her she is never too far away from land, never lost, and never really off track… Except there is no husband. There are no children, and her mother lives state lines away. When she wakes up, the four walls of her cubicle are closing in on her, getting smaller every day and desiccating her vitality. Every day, the work seems more complicated, each sentence a struggle with self-doubt, each article a challenge to the confidence in her career. Once, she had been a river flowing along an uncertain course, crashing against rocks, and discovering seemingly endless uncharted territory. Her life had rushed along as well, her teen years spent working hard to make the grades needed for college, then her 20s spent trying to make the most of her degree, then her 30s just slipped by while she continued to establish herself…well, most of her 30s anyways. Her life became a collage of meetings, deadlines, and a computer screen that greeted her every morning and kept her company in the middle of the night. She was now a

62 weak stream, breaking away from the energetic river she once was, slowing down and running out. Life inched along, each day repeating itself, weeks indistinguishable, a useless means of recording time, for one minute staring in front of a computer could be longer than two weeks that passed by unnoticed, and at the present, time had screeched to a halt. Years seemed to come and go as her eyes tried to focus on the bright, blurry screen. The digits on the bottom of the computer read eight fifteen. She sips her coffee, cold now, as she types the last few lines and runs spell check. After anxious scanning though the article again, she sends it with almost five minutes to spare. She gives herself a moment of silence, a moment to step out of this non-stop cycle and reflect and promise herself that one day she will find fulfillment in this as her vision of a family and a home with a backyard beckons her to step away. It seems so far away, like she had already passed it long ago. She glances at the clock on the wall as she leaves the building. She thinks it must be her imagination, but the hands seem to be moving faster than they did yesterday. She notices the time on her radio while driving home, although she is too tired to care about changing the station. When she gets home, she walks past the kitchen, and the green lights on the stove seem to scream the time at her, how late it is, how late she is, in life and in everything. She slides into bed, and the time is on the ceiling, haunting her. As she lies there, trying to sleep so that she can do this all over again tomorrow, she thinks that there is nothing as unforgiving as a clock. Then she finally escapes, briefly, for a few hours at least, before the cycle continues.

63 Contributors’ Biographies

Poetry and Prose

Lorena Quintana Bentz is a woman whose loves are God, family, and writing.

Rachel Eckert is an artist, writer, diva, and oddball who likes to frozen yogurt, big words, and obscure references from The Producers. She also sparkles.

Madison Estes is surprisingly not residing in a padded cell just yet, but when she gets there, she hopes the walls taste like giant marshmallows.

Amanda Fulton is an English major who spends her free time reading and trying to squeeze in some writing.

Dustin Inkster is a Lonestar student who partakes in creative writing as a past time.

Cassidy Krause is a sophomore Economics major who likes to dabble into writing because of her obsession with reading.

Jack S. Moorman is a student who enjoys creative writing as a past time.

Mai-Aleesha Morgan is a sophomore who gets a kick out of reading and writing in her free time.

Traci Overstreet is an Education major whose big dream is to eventually publish a novel.

Andrew Robinson is an aspiring author who endeavors to share hope with the world through his writings.

Morgan Severn is a student who has a knack for creative writing.

Emily Smethers is a sophomore and a Fine Arts major who has been writing poetry since age eleven.

Mary Elizabeth Stamper is a student at Lone Star who enjoys creative writing.

64 Sara Watts is a self-proclaimed rock star who loves poetry, church, God, her cat, and the people closest to her.

Brandie Webb is a Science major with an interest in philanthropy. She plans to be an occupational therapist.

Artwork

Sydney Allen is a sophomore studying to be a nutritionist, who has a love for photography, music, and poetry.

Cloie Barcelona is a sophomore, who has a passion for music, acting, fashion, and photography.

Felicia Barcelona is a Lone Star student whose hobby is photography.

Rachel Eckert is an artist, writer, diva, and oddball who likes frozen yogurt, big words, and obscure Producers references. Also sparkles.

Meghan Elsik is a freshman Art major who fancys painting and taking photos. She also loves her horses.

Sarah Huntsman is a freshman with no specific major, whose love for music is a major influence on her works, whether it be for a paper or for fun.

Bethany Jarvis is currently a college student. She enjoys reading, writing, drawing, and playing guitar.

Charlene Woelfel is a student who adores taking photos and reading, and she likes to spend time in the great outdoors.

65 Inkling Staff and Advisors

Inkling Editors

(from left to right) Senior Editor, Jeffery Rodriguez Editor, Shanna Dudley Editor, Elizabeth Bailey

Inkling Creative Writing Club

(from left-front to right-front) Sarah Huntsman, Shanna Dudley, Amy Hirsch, Mari-Carmen Marín, Catherine Olson, Melissa Studdard, Khodi Jacks, Samuel Thonnard, Clark Shaw, Icela Martinez, Stacy Nelson, James Lambdin, Elizabeth Bailey

66 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Inkling staff, editors and advisors would like to extend their sincerest thanks to Lone Star College-Tomball for the opportunity to publish another spectacular magazine!

We’d like to thank sponsors of this year’s reading series: the LSC-Tomball Library, the President of Lone Star College-Tomball, Dr. Susan Karr, and the Office of Student Life. With their support,Inkling was able to host an on-campus reading and interview with Aliki Barnstone, two-time Pulitzer nominated poet and essayist. Additionally, Inkling would like to express our vast appreciation to Shanna Dudley, for her efforts transcribing and editing the Mat Johnson interview for publication in this year’s magazine. And, of course, tremendous thanks are due to authors Mat Johnson and Aliki Barnstone for sharing time, talent, stories, and poems with us.

We offer heartfelt thanks to Dean Kathy Sanchez and Division Officer Manager Duy Nguyen in the Developmental Studies, English, Languages, and Mathematics Division. Also, thanks go to Shannon Marino and Danielle Thornton in the Office of Student Life, and to Pam Shafer in the Lone Star College-Tomball Community Library for supporting us throughout the year. And we mustn’t forget English professor Doug Boyd, longtime Inkling proofreader and grammar czar, for the consistent editoral direction he has brought to Inkling over the decades.

Finally, special thanks go to the talented and inspired students of Lone Star College-Tomball. Each year we collect hundreds of submissions, and in the end, we are only able to showcase a handful of the creative works that LSC-Tomball students have to offer. Many thanks to all of the student contributors, this year and in years to come. This magazine would not be possible without them.

67 INKLING (THE CREATIVE ARTS MAGAZINE OF LSC-TOMBALL) SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Go to www.lonestar.edu/Inkling. Click “Submission Procedures” and follow the directions.

1. Submissions received by December 15th will be considered for the issue to be released in the spring semester immediately following the submission. Submissions received after December 15th will be considered for the spring of the next academic year.

2. Only original, unpublished works are accepted. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Please notify us immediately at [email protected] if your piece is accepted by another publisher.

3. Only LSC-Tomball students (enrolled in credit courses at the time of submission) are eligible to submit.

4. All submissions must be accompanied by a submission form available on the Inkling website (lonestar.edu/ Inkling). Please attach the completed submission form as a Word document rather than pasting it into the body of an email. When you send the form, rename it from “Inkling Magazine Submission Form.docx” to include your last name then first name. For example, “Smith Margaret Inkling Magazine Submission Form.docx.” As well, be sure to name the files of your work to include your last and first names and the genre. For example, “Smith Margaret Poetry.”

5. All submissions (including artwork) must be made electronically. Email your pieces and the completed submission form to [email protected]. In the subject line of the email, be sure to list the titles of the pieces and whether they are poetry, prose, or art. Note: Do not paste the work or the submission form directly into the body of the email.

6. Maximum entries per person: six (6) writing submissions and six (6) art submissions.

7. Writers and artists selected for publication will be notified by mail. Expect notification by February or March of the semester for which they are selected.

NOTE: Submissions selected for publication are automatically entered into the Lone Star College-Tomball Inkling Magazine Creative Arts Contest. Winners will receive cash awards (first place $300, second place $200, third place $100).

SELECTION PROCESS All entries are submitted to Inkling Magazine advisors. Advisors replace the authors’ and artists’ names with numbers to preserve their anonymity. A voting packet of all submissions is then compiled and distributed to Inkling Magazine editors, staff members, and participating faculty, who vote for inclusion in the magazine and placement for awards. A staff meeting is then held to tally and finalize votes. Only after final selections have been made do the advisors reveal the identity of those individuals whose works have been chosen.

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