Welcome to The Ink Well Showcase
A selection of the best original stories and poems from Week 2 of the Summer Challenge. Enjoy them over a coffee or sit down with a long cool drink and read them all. The prompts this week were "ghost" and "when the rains came".
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Five Star Fiction
The Ghost in the Rain by @wolfofnostreet
The Ink Well Review: 💋💋💋💋💋
@carolkean says:
What a great story! I love this! Full of surprises. This is fab:
"I never had a boy in my room while I was alive. I never had a boyfriend either and was 22 when I died. Todd had a well chiseled face and arms any girl would love to have around her. I follow him to the bathroom and watched as he had a shower. I'm going to be looking forward to shower time."
#LOL
Love his reaction, then hers:
"You're Jessie? The Jessie? Haunted house Jessie?". Well, I didn't know I had gained a title around here.
Great line:
"I had never known a love like this living and unliving and I was ready to protect it."
This too (it could be epic as an opening line, but the one you have is cool),
"I wish I knew how I died but I don't. It's always been a blur..."
The ending! #Love it!
@theinkwell says:
This is a dark witty story that kept me reading and guessing right to the end - I had no idea what was coming!
The Day the Rains Came by @dirge
@dirge says:
I tried combining the two prompts for a ghost story / fairy tale.
The Ink Well Review: 💋💋💋💋💋
@theinkwell says:
This is a charming fantasy fairy tale, creating a far distant world in another time and place. If you read @dirge's last piece for The Ink Well, the horror thriller "The Last Time I Saw You", you'll notice a very different writing voice. A superb story teller!
Kim Eunji foraged far from her village, pulling up herbs and mountain greens. It was spring and the air was thick with the aromas of flowers and wilderness. She fixed her straw hat to block out the sun, bent over with a stick, digging into the earth and pulling out a fat tuber and tossed it into a cloth bag. This would be enough to feed herself and her ailing mother. Then she heard the thunder and looked over to the east.
Interrogating A Famous Ghost Story by @deeanndmathews
@deeanndmathews says:
I started reading Shakespeare at 9... my grandmother had copies of Macbeth and Henry VIII, and the editions had footnotes on all the words I couldn't understand ... Hamlet was the one that hurt me the most... I mean, to the soul. Two entire families wiped out, including the true royal line of an entire kingdom ... even the innocent do not survive (poor Lady Ophelia!) all the scheming of those involved in various degrees of evil... which is why I suspect that the "ghost" was someone else entirely ...
The Ink Well Review: 💋💋💋💋💋
@jayna says:
Hamlet, of course, is a classic tragedy. My father was a professor of theater and I remember him directing it ... I was terrified throughout the production.
"We have no peace about the eternal fate of any of them except perhaps Lady Ophelia, who also was too sensitive to survive all that was rotten in the state of Denmark."
I love [the] homage to the famous line something is rotten in the state of Denmark!
Five Star Poetry
The Ink Well had twenty-five entries this week - here is a selection of the best.
Summer Rain by @letalis-laetitia
@hazem91 says:
This was so amazing <3
I love that song of hers, and her perfume :)
The Ink Well Review: 💋💋💋💋💋
@theinkwell says:
This is just lovely, melodic, absolutely beautiful.
The air began to sing
First in loose, irregular notes
A twanging ping
A muffled splat
The Aroma of Earth by @josemalavem
@josemalavem says:
My poem is originally written in Spanish ... in free verse ... and without the use of punctuation marks ((in the modern poetic stream inaugurated by Mallarmé from A stroke of the dice...
The Ink Well Review: 💋💋💋💋💋
@marlyncabrera says:
... our sensitive speaker goes swiftly and smoothly from the physical impact rain has on our senses to its mysticism, which touches us spiritually. Powerful images ("the earth /and its green sprout /are born and travel," "naked the intimacy /of the bodies," "primordial humid"...) take us to the moment in which we feel the rain beyond the physical (without lessening the sensorial relevance of this aspect), and connect with nature.
@jayna says:
I really like the soft cadence of this poem ... like a soft rain.
I Found a Land by @hillarypowers
@josemalavem says:
It is a poem of heartfelt loving emotion, where the image of the earth reaches great strength; moreover, it has a good rhythm.
The Ink Well Review: 💋💋💋💋💋
@theinkwell says:
The picture, with the setting sun and long shadows, perfectly matches the powerful imagery in this story, skillfully set out over the eighteen lines of the poem.
I found a land, a fertile field to grow my love
And I spent all I had to purchase it;
Special Mention
On Behalf of the Poorly Ghost by @marlyncabrera
@marlyncabrera says:
As a child, like many of us I think, I feared ghosts. The ghosts of some evil people who had undergone horrible deaths would appear at midnight and hurt you because they were still angry or in pain, or just because they were wicked. They’d pull your feet from under your bed—maybe straight to hell ... Later ... I understood that ghosts were not necessarily bad; At some point, some of us stopped believing in them as something supernatural and ... our unfinished businesses become ghosts.
The Ink Well Review:
@hazem91 Says:
I loved how the first part was about feelings, mostly fear.. and the second was about understanding, or rather blaming ourselves for not understanding earlier..
@theinkwell says:
This was a complex poem, encapsulating mysterious powerful feelings and ideas exquisitely composed in a Petrarchan sonnet. Beautiful, difficult, damning.
You hold your breath; you’re small and unprotected.
You freeze, you stare; you need to play along,
Desert Ghosts by @raj808
@raj808 says:
I felt a great feeling of nostalgia while I wrote this poem. A quiet, yet heart rending, beauty. Kinda like a lament for the simplicity of nature. I guess maybe appropriate in these times of complex adversity.
Despite the loose setting of a desert devoid of life - a post apocalyptic scene of a land ravaged by gods - I was also writing about how we ravage this world with our ideas. Constructs of the mind that often bare little relevance to reality. Religion is one of these ideas (in my opinion), hens the mention of dead gods.
The Ink Well Review:
@jayna says:
Beautifully done ... I love every line. “These ghosts of gods” gave me tingles. I love it when that happens in the reading of great verse.
@theinkwell says:
Beautifully written metaphor composed in a Shakespearean sonnet, the soft susurrations of the sirocco gently caressing a darker heart.
These ghosts of gods can be heard
in the gentle whispering sirocco,
shaped by the theatre of absurd
hopes of promise land of Jericho.
Thank you to everyone who took part.
The Ink Well Summer Challenge May-August 2020
Fiction Programme and Curation Policies - Challenge published Thursdays
Poetry Programme and Curation Policies - Challenge published Mondays
Winners of 500HP Delegation for Seven Days
Congratulations @josemalavem and @dirge - you won the draw!
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I'm really honored you enjoyed my piece. Thank you @carolkean, I totally agree with your suggested opening line, would have been so cool lol.
You had a lot of epic lines to choose from. Awesome story!
Congratulations to all the amazing writers and poets who were listed here 😊
and I'm glad some of my comments are showing hehe
It is amazing the job you're doing, @theinkwell. It's a pleasure and an honor to be part of this challenge. Thanks for opening this space for us lit lovers.
Congrats to all writers listed here and everyone who has joined in!
Very grateful for the recognition you gave to my poem, friends of @theinkwell.I am also grateful for the incentive to literary creation (in story or poetry) and the opportunity they give to writers to publish and disseminate their texts. I congratulate you on your initiative. Greetings.
Thanks for including my prompt in this. I've enjoyed having a weekly sitdown and practice schedule from these.
Good to hear you're gaining value from The Ink Well :)