The Inkwell: Ignite

THE INKWELL

IGNITE

Co s nt

e nt 3- How To Lay a Fire, Fox, How Not To Lay a Fire 4- Alchemy (All of the above by Lizzie Smith) 6- Denial by Courtney Stoddart 9- Hotdogs and Buns

by Molly Chen 12- There Are More Ways To Be Chaotic

by Clara Ng 14- Verisimilitude

by Lola Gaztañaga Baggen 20- After Every Conversation

by Olivia Brunton

24- Jörð

by Hedda Annerberg 26- Foreign Thoughts

by Miri Hartley 27- Embers

by Glen Maddison 30- A New Cycle

by Lisa Dupuis 34- Quicksilver

by Anna Jones 37- Terms of Endearment

by Julianna Ritzu

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Editor’s Note Chiara Hampton

We entered 2020, and with it the new semester, in a state of alarm: the planet was burning. We wanted to select a theme that would enable writers to explore this sense of destruction in all its urgency and anger, while simultaneously creating space for new beginnings.

‘Ignite’ has not disappointed, inspiring submissions which capture both the sparks of creation and the wreckage of a blaze. Ranging from discussions of the environment or the cosmos to the serendipitous chaos of everyday interactions, writers explore the meaning of the theme in ways both somber and whimsical. For many, ‘ignite’ is a feeling, one which manifests in the energy of their prose and verse.

As usual, a massive thanks is owed to our editorial team and our graphic designer for their efforts to transform an unfiltered assembly of files into a print magazine. Another thanks goes out to everyone who submitted. We love reading your work; please continue to give this publication its life.

Finally, to the person reading this volume: we hope you enjoy and that, just perhaps, you find something within these pages that prompts an idea, a desire to read, an impulse to create, a spark.

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How To Lay a Fire First, roll up last week’s Tragedies. The fledgling flames Must be weaned on words.

Fox A burnt umber offering Sears at you, soot-tipped: Something in the soul Needs to burn russet, Never red.

How not To Lay a Fire Flames falter: pilgrims Clinging to a mountain pass As they nod in prayer.

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Alchemy Although we are in construction, Some sparks will escape Between blue plastic wing-sheets: A seagull pivots with a clutch of red; Light climbs roofs to escape The burning of itself; A blackbird circles with his charcoalSharpened song The same iterative equation; Smoke pours from a traffic cone.

By Lizzie Smith Photography By Auro Varat Patnaik 4

Photography by Auro Varat Patnaik

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Denial

By Courtney Stoddart I’m a powerful tool I can make you ignore anything that you choose Deny that pain came from the bruise Deny all hatred from its very roots Disguise the lynch mob and hide the noose Pretend the berry wasn’t hung strange fruit Burn all the pictures of the children smiling While behind them the black man hung dying It may have been slow or it may have been instant Depends if the neck snaps with the resistance But who cares?

You took the pictures from a distance Act now like you don’t continue to colonise Act now like you don’t see the tears in my eyes Your denial is there to save your pride though My denial is for my very survival Pretend that I don’t see the weight on me Feel the burden of race as it’s placed on me Be polite and say thank you please Say Bless you as you sneeze Pretend that we both don’t know that we’re different Like we don’t have a completely different take on the world Like we don’t know how your privilege occurred Like we both don’t know the white man said first came his word

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So I adopt your ways to move beyond a slave in chains To move beyond waves and a ship And I’ll pretend that you’re not still cracking that whip And you’ll pretend I carry a chip on my shoulder Damn right I carry a chip, it’s the size of a boulder Older though I may be Still you try to separate me from me my dignity White asses twerking right in front of me As if we hadn’t been doing that for centuries So should I be polite and say ‘go Miley’?

In preservation of your white fragility In resurrection of white Christ on me Well please tell me where does his judgement be?

For I feel I bear the weight of the cross on me You steal with the state and the cost is on me Don’t cross me in debate your lies are lost on me You seem shocked when I say it like it’s a mystery For the sake of fake colonial history Doesn’t take a genius to work it out Please tell me now To which lord you are devout?

Please tell me now How you afford your big white house?

Built on foundations of denial Cause you used my ancestors for your financial survival Where did your inheritance come from?

Is it tea, coffee, gold or coltan?

You can try to deny it but I know this was your plan

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Daylight robbery and your white snobbery it’s your devil philosophy That you place on me ever so politely And I’ll try to deny that white righteousness Isn’t the price for this Isn’t the cost of freedom Cause it seems to me the cost of freedom mental or otherwise is denial And white capitalism is using it for its very survival

Photography By Auro Varat Patnaik

White state snakes in Like a burglar he breaks in He rapes children Raises stakes on skin Places rope under chin And hangs

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Hot Dogs And Buns

By Molly Chen Mr. Marcus’ brow furrowed as he ran after his daughter down the cereal aisle. He was beginning to regret buying the light-up trainers for the little girl and giving them to her before going grocery shopping.

“Look! Look!” She stamped her feet on the ground and jumped up and down for the hundredth time that day to show off the flashing red lights. Mr. Marcus couldn’t help but smile anyway. “Yes, Cecilia, very nice. But Daddy has to focus on finishing the groceries so don’t run away. Hold my hand.”

His daughter pouted but he took one of her hands and practically dragged her across the store, weaving in and out of the crowds of people. He knew he shouldn’t have come at lunchtime with Cecilia in tow. She was tugging his hand every so often and whining to look at this and that, but he ignored her and kept an iron grip on her hand.

He absolutely couldn’t lose focus. Now where were the green beans?

Lucy strained to peer over the growing tower of groceries in her aching arms. She had come in thinking she’d buy only a bag of oranges to fulfil her fruit shortage at her dorm, but celery had gone on sale and the muffins had smelled really good and then she remembered she hadn’t baked in a while so…

She couldn’t help it. Her hands had a mind of their own and what were always supposed to be five-minute drop-ins to pick up last-minute things had always turned into half-an-hour excursions which ended up in overdraft woes and mild regret at the spoilages of all the things she’d thought she’d eat but didn’t.

There were lessons to be learnt here, she supposed. The first one being that if she had to buy all this stuff, she needed to get a basket to put them in. She squeezed between people and excused herself as she bumped into them, half-blind behind her tower of goods. That was not a lesson to be learned today, unfortunately.

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She had almost made it to the checkout line when she remembered she needed yoghurt. Well, not really needed it. She rarely ate it but just in case…

With her leaning tower of grocery goods, she stumbled her way back to the dairy section.

Ian picked up the vanilla yoghurt and dropped it into his basket with a loud clang. He glared at the back of the girl in front of him who had taken the last pot of mango yoghurt. I hope you accidentally drop it and slip in it!

With how much stuff she was holding, he wouldn’t be surprised if she actually did. Was she feeding a family of ten?

He wasn’t always this bitter. But the list of annoyances of the day had put him on edge and he no longer had the tolerance he usually had. He had woken up late in the morning which led him to be caught at peak time at the grocery store. It had started raining just as he left his home and he had ended up soaked. His favourite sugar cookies had gone up by ten pence and now he had to eat plain old vanilla yoghurt because his usual yoghurt had been stolen right under his nose. Worst of all, the store had run out of his usual yoghurt pairing: apple cinnamon granola.

He gritted his teeth and marched across the store, eager to get the day done with.

Amelia stared bewildered at what was in her hands. In her left hand was a can of eight hot dogs. In her right was a package of six hot dog buns.

Just a few minutes earlier, she had agonised over which ketchup brand to buy, ultimately settling on the cheaper store-brand version after doing some calculations in her head to determine the value of buying the expensive brand version instead. She had given up on these calculations mid-way through, though, as they began getting tangled in her mind, and opted to play ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, moe’ instead.

Now she was faced with an even greater challenge of reconciling

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this discrepancy between the number of hot dogs she could buy with buns and the number of people at the party.

If there were eleven people at the party and hot dogs came in cans of eight while buns came in packs of six, how many bundles of each should she buy? What if people wanted seconds?

Her head began to ache. With a heavy sigh, she gave up and picked up four packs of buns and three cans of hot dogs and threw them into her cart. She pushed her cart with all her strength and frustration, perhaps with too much of both, and it rolled swiftly right into the man in front of her.

“Hey!” The man turned to her with a glare. She began apologising, but to her dismay, he began yelling at her. He waved his arms wildly in the air and she tried to placate him as he screamed something about apple granola and rain.

To her horror, there was a person with a tower of groceries moving towards them fast and it seemed like the person was headed right for a collision with one of the angry man’s moving arms. She opened her mouth to warn him, but it was too late. Flour, muffins, celery, and an assortment of other things crashed to the floor with, most prominently, an explosion of yoghurt. The smell of mango filled the air.

The angry man became a shocked man and he stuttered out an apology while picking up some of the groceries that had fallen to the floor. Amelia heard rapidly approaching footsteps nearby and someone yelling ‘Cecilia, stop!’ in the distance.

In a blink of an eye, there was a second crash ending with a wailing little girl with flashing red trainers lying in the puddle of yoghurt. A man dashed to her side. People stopped to watch the commotion before them.

The man began yelling at the original angry man and the woman with the tower of groceries. All three of them were yelling back, trying to calm him down. The girl continued sobbing and Amelia thought she spotted splotches of blood on her. Some people in the crowd had their phones up recording. She retreated back, trying to make herself as small as possible.

In the midst of the chaos, she had completely forgotten how this ruckus started.

It was only until she looked back down at her cart that she remembered.

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There Are More Ways to Be Chaotic

By Clara Ng Chaos: ash-sputtering fire. Melting ice. Acrylic stirred: blue, red, plum.

Order: lemon meringue, parquet, woollen sweaters, Beethoven’s fifth – a rare Thing. All we know once packed neatly into a pinpoint Until it coughed. Sputtered into a tumult of stuff, lattices of quarks come loose. And from the rubble Havoc. Mountains heaved from nothing; stars cooling from violent births. Beetles, highways, apricots. Knees.

Like a Rubik’s cube scrambling in all its flavours of madness: billions to one true state.

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Solving one is simple: first one face. Then the middle.

Then the four sides: white yellow. Blue green.

Orange red.

But you can’t unmix paint, unboil an egg or draw fire from burnt ash.

How, then, to unscramble the universe, untangle it all – the highways and knees –

Photography By Auro Varat Patnaik

– squeeze it speck by speck back into the hot dense “!” and fasten the bolts?

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Verisimilitude

By Lola Gaztañaga Baggen

They say that mermaids have bodies made of seafoam, and a soul made of pure hellfire. Their eyes are pits of charcoal, their lips matchsticks, ready for a spark. They say every scale is dipped into the liquid desire of virgin maids that live by the shore, and every strand of silvery green hair is painted with the hunger of crones who yearn to devour young men, head to toe. They say that mermaids trick you into thinking them creatures of tranquil, soothing water, when in reality they do nothing but burn you to a crisp.

They say that he who eats the flesh of a mermaid will harness the power of fire, gain the love of whoever they desire and live forevermore.

They say a lot of things about mermaids, down in Blackwater. Schoolgirls gossip and chitter about them, crossing their frilly-socked ankles underneath bare legs and pleated skirts as they picture making the apprentices down at the wharf fall madly in love with them. The nuns overseeing them scowl and scold, then go home to dream of silvery fins and the possibility of regaining their youth. Well-rounded women joke about them behind the counters at bakeries, laughing with loud voices and winking saucily as they hand over rolls and plump cakes so that their audience may eat their frustration away. Men sing about them in pubs at night, over jugs of dark stout and dishes of salted herring. They sing of them in loud, boisterous tones with slurred consonants, and then they dream of them as they spread the pliable thighs of two-penny whores and thrust into not-quite-wet warmth, and they imagine them salty and dark like herring and stout, and slippery like the mightiest of fish.

Millie doesn’t talk about mermaids – or about much at all, really – but she listens to all of it, her ears perked like a cat’s and her hands tight balls in the pockets of her skirt. She listens to classmates hum songs on her way to class, and the wailings and hoarse warnings of crazy old Seagull-Pete, who waves about an empty, cracked cup and stomps his

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scuffled bunny-slippers. Millie keeps her head down and listens; she looks out at the sea with dark, shifty eyes and a twinge of a spark in her chest.

And waits.

When she was five, Millie’s father beat her mum black and blue one last time and disappeared for good. He’d left Blackwater for greener pastures, the neighbours would say, left his wife and child for another woman – but her father’s mistress had stayed behind in the village, so affected by the news that she’d hung herself the very next day. Her mum hadn’t told Millie anything, but she’d seen her brush the sand off of the wet edges of her skirts out in the back garden. Sometimes what was not said was as mighty as what was.

They lived alone after that, the two of them, but Mrs Chambers next door made sure they never had the chance to be lonely. She’d come visit twice, thrice a week, and talked about her late husband. She never mentioned how he’d passed, but she frequently bemoaned her lack of funds, her loneliness, her age – all the reasons why she wouldn’t quite so easily catch another. Then, one day, she told Millie’s mum that she’d met someone remarkable and promptly skipped tea to go for a walk down at the rocky beaches. The next morning Dr Williams, a devoted bachelor half her age, announced his intentions to marry her. When the old widow dropped by to share her happy news, Millie watched the wind-tousled curl in her hair and the salt underneath her fingernails, and smiled with dark, knowing eyes. She didn’t visit again.

A handful of years later, Millie’s Geography teacher took a shine to her. Mr Tench would watch her like a crane, his long, wrinkly neck tilting and turning every which way as she nervously crossed her legs and shifted in her seat. Nobody liked him, with his reddish, squinty eyes and long, pointed fingers, but nobody disliked him as much as Millie. She hated the horrid man: hated the way he’d brush her hair off of her shoulder, the way he’d make her tiptoe and stretch as far as she could to write lines on the very top of the blackboard. She hated

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his breath on her skin and his hands on the thick wool of her skirt. Mr Tench had too many friends in too many places, and all of Blackwater stayed silent. But Millie thought of sand and salt, and sea-tousled hair, and gathered her books and readied her sandals.

The wind howls, tears into rough puffs of clouds hanging over the horizon. Millie’s feet sink into wet gravel and slip along rapidly growing puddles, murky with sand. Grey upon grey, as the sea tries to claim the land. As she makes her way down to the beach, her mouth is set in a determined line, her small limbs firm while they sway like reeds. The wind tugs on her skirt and her blouse, tearing open buttons and slipping hair out of her braids as it pulls her down towards the coves, luring her towards the waves amidst rain and rock.

They’re singing, soft and low. Her chest throbs in response to the haunting murmurs of love lost and ancient deaths, and she tightens her grip on her mum’s jagged breadknife.

When she reaches the coves, she is not alone. Emeralds peer out at her from the shadows, shimmering locks of hair spun from seafoam and moonlight, bodies carved out of coral and pearl. Soft, wet, white flesh. Trembling, quivering. Almost human. Millie’s cheeks are wet with tears as they sing to her. She doesn’t understand the words, but she understands the song. It swells, echoes off of the curved walls of the cave and bounces around in her skull. Her skin tingles and burns, heats up until she is certain she’s on fire. A sausage in a pan or a witch at the stake.

And she knows what to do.

They say there was a terrible storm that day, down in Blackwater. Gale force winds and waves high as towers. They say lightning struck the house of a poor, unfortunate teacher and burned it to the ground.

Miraculously, the fire didn’t spread to any of the surrounding houses or even the vegetable patch in the back garden, but the man’s remains were so charred they were almost unidentifiable.

The truth was left unspoken.

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Artwork By Funmi Lijadu

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Artwork By Maria Park

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Artwork by Maria Park

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After Every Conversation

By Olivia Brunton I used to call you my little firecracker. Do you remember? It was, perhaps, not the most original nickname, but it really stuck. It suited you. I’ll admit, I used to find great humour in your tantrums. Your face was permanently purple, your feet forever stomping, always completely immune to placation. Not once did you fall for bribery or blackmail, never mind reason. Sometimes, just for the joy of it, I found myself provoking you, watching your face screw up into its familiar obstinate growl. You were always so quick to anger.

Do you remember the toast incident? Maybe not, you must have been all of three or four. I asked you what you wanted for breakfast, and you said toast. So, I duly plated up two slices covered in jam. In a split second, they were on the floor. You had, of course, changed your mind. Now, those two slices of toast had to be bread instead. It didn’t matter how many times I told you that I couldn’t turn them back into bread, you wouldn’t calm down. I offered you two slices of bread from the packet but that wasn’t right. You didn’t want any old two slices of bread, you wanted THESE two slices of bread. Which were now toast.

But you wanted them to be bread.

It perhaps wasn’t that funny at the time. I seem to remember it being a day where we ended up running late for swim class, simply because I couldn’t convince you of the physical impossibility of your desire. Cereal was the answer in the end, I think. I avoided serving you toast for weeks afterwards, afraid that your anger at physics would spark once more. As time passed though, the humour of it all grew enormously. I would find myself sitting at work, chuckling,

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thinking of your balled fists and pure determination. All of it over a couple of slices of toast.

I don’t know when the anger changed. Of course, you had learned not to lash out by the time you entered school. Your anger was still there though, a thin layer right under the skin. Some days, I could see from your stance that the rage had never left, that you had just learned to control it. Like when Charlie jokingly told you that nobody could be an artist, pilot and history teacher all at the same time, you just stormed away. It was only when you got inside our house that the histrionic speech began, promising to show him your amazing talent and the extent of the wondrous things you were destined to achieve.

So, I don’t mean when your anger was hidden. I mean when it disappeared.

After that happened, such comments didn’t create veiled threats of revenge. They prompted silences, deep and long and miserable.

They provoked tears which weren’t hot and burning, but slow and unending. Instead of arms flying mid-speech in the middle of the living room floor, these occasions created shut bedroom doors and muttered assurances that you were fine.

I had never really known how to handle your anger, but your upset was much, much worse.

I can’t see the thin layer right under your skin anymore. You were still a teenager when it melted away. Rather than explosions, you answered in sighs. I desperately wanted to pull my little rebel out from somewhere in your mind, push you to wear that beautiful heart on your sleeve once more. I tried, I think. I worry that I didn’t try hard enough.

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Like when we went bowling, remember? I wish I could say that I didn’t care about winning, that I was just happy to participate. But of course, I would be lying. As soon as the ball was in my hand, the competitiveness came out. And I won. As a child, that would have endlessly irked you. There would have been shoving and arguing and huffing. Instead, your eyebrows furrowed for an instant, you shrugged, and walked away.

By the time you were an adult, people telling you of your fated failure didn’t elicit any reaction. No more tears, hot or cold. When you’d smile, only with your mouth, I’d feel your numbness spread to me. Is it my fault? Did your Dad not knowing what to do, not knowing how to fight, cause this?

Now, when we see each other, the passivity of my little firecracker astounds me. I ask you who you have yelled at this week. Any tantrums? I ask every time, though I know the answer will only be a small laugh and a quiet “No one, Dad.” It should make me proud that you left it all behind. After a lifetime of hysterics, you’re calm. Part of growing up, you said to me when I gently mocked. Part of letting go.

You can’t always get your way, and you know that now. Somehow, I wish you didn’t. I wish the barefaced emotion of childhood still lived within you, even buried deep. I worry now that it is gone.

Or perhaps, even worse, that the anger is still there. The upset is still there. The screams and tears and chaos are still there, just with nowhere to go.

After every conversation, I sit and think. I am happy if you are happy, my little girl. But I worry that you’re not.

Your little laugh doesn’t have the same power as your yell.

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jörd

By Hedda Annerberg remember ýmir sacrificed their body to become the earth i know you know in your heart you know because your heart from the earth

was forged was forged

it never forgets where it came from. how dare you drain their blood crush their bones extracting oil from flesh uproot yggdrasil, cut it into industry-standard pieces

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Photography by Aiyah Sibay

from ýmir’s flesh and, unlike you,

extracting souls from trees commodifying the eternal. yet surtr still lives in the volcanoes, waiting to ignite he knows trust me, he knows. do you feel jรถrรฐ quake beneath your feet she knows trust me, she knows. if you thought the old gods were sleeping/slain/slandered into nothing ignorant of the fact that you carved blood-eagle on their foremother you will know trust me, you will know.

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Foreign Thoughts

By Miri Hartley

Imagine A palm of hand filled with lake we split the bill and laughed about the free water This little girdled city Towelled by the wind and cosied by tepid rain Cracked by the faces of the seated on the street Accents stuck in the air like burrs to wool In boneless dreams thoughts become flames Shapes treated with caution, without forms; Air stiffened with heat and shouting Adding together every colour in a culture-drowned head Subtract the faces and the pavement and it’s still different Distance is thick, and days trickle viscous Lovely are the unspooled clouds, grey Or unpeeled with inglorious new words The sun paces the city Breathing on cold stone And each ten toes are touching the floor.

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Embers

By Glen Maddison Embers still cling to some corners, Pricking a nostril here or there.

An ebbing smoulder carefully tended By those who cherish what’s still there.

Passing into darkening hills, An acrid presence lingers, A town from where sparks once burned bright, Barely remains a glimmer.

“The bairns divn’t kna but we still dee, It’s scorched into me memory.

Sit yesell doon, have some tea, Am sure ah’ve got the DVD About what happened at the colliery.”

Coal cutters Consist of a rotating part with a number of teeth or picks.

These picks hit a pocket hard A patch of pyrite produced A spark Ignites the firedamp No time to hark–

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Pit so foul With afterdamp, smothering rescuers By the dozen with canaries overcome so sudden.

Dour cloud, the sinister pursuer.

Eighty-one entombed Nine-hundred feet beneath those darkening hills.

On some of those summits they still Stoke that heat from under their feet.

“Ah’ve still got the paper from the day.

Take a look for a bit.

Ya see the headline on the front?”

Hope Recedes in Stricken Pit Yet embers cling to these corners, Albeit ebbing, Though still pricking nostrils Here and there.

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Artwork By Marlena Nowakowska

All but one Killed instantly, souls for a moment Incandescent, now left incensed, Forced to ascend from the work’s postponement.

Artwork by Dalia Al-Dujaili

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A New Cycle

By Lisa Dupuis Today, the machines were a bit worn out. The yield had been declining for the past two weeks, and the bosses were starting to get nervous.

They needed to investigate the matter and find a solution to get back on track; they couldn’t afford to fall behind schedule when building the world.

JS-415 went back home completely exhausted after his shift, just like every day. He was out of fuel and had to find something to fill his tank, even just a bit to get him going. His pay didn’t allow for much; he already struggled to find lodgings, and the squalor of it threatened his functioning. It was so damp he could feel his screws rust almost by the minute.

He was rolling around in the streets, trying to find puddles of fuel one of the humans’ vehicles may have leaked, or even just a slimy streak of oil that would serve as food. But he found nothing, and he was almost out of energy. No energy meant no working. If machines couldn’t work, not only would they die from their pathetic poverty, but the world wouldn’t be built – how had the humans not identified the issue already?

Some machines used the little energy they had to protest, but the humans never listened. They assumed everyone should pay for their food. JS-415 only wished they would stop building this new world and enjoy the one they have already.

Defeated, he went and spent his last cents on a few millilitres of fuel that would last him until tomorrow… he wouldn’t get paid until next week. He’d think about that tomorrow, when he’s out of fuel again.

When he got out of his tiny and moist house in the morning, he met DT-800, crying on her way to work. JS-415 knew the machines were constantly on the verge of a breakdown, but he rarely saw one having it in public. He decided to check on his neighbour, and whirred in her direction, “DT? What’s the matter?”

She turned around and faced him as he got closer.

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“XT-800 died yesterday.”

“Really? I’m so sorry! What happened? He was still a recent model!”

“I don’t know. He did have a bit of fuel left, but… Sometimes we just go to sleep and never wake up. Who knows what’s actually going on in our gears?”

With this, she shuffled away to the factory.

JS-415 rolled into the factory after a short journey of troubled thoughts, but this time his thoughts weren’t about how to get food.

He was thinking about something bigger and deeper. He was thinking about the whole existence of the machines. They were made, they built the world under the command of the humans, got energy to carry on working, and, ultimately, died. There was no alternative. They had to live in indecent accommodation because their job at the factory paid next to nothing, and this left them without enough money to cover fuel. If they couldn’t shelter, they would rust, they would break early, they would die. So, each day, they chose between dying from hunger or from rust. How come he had never noticed that before? A saddened hum got out of his vent as he busied himself at his post.

After an eternity of screwing bolts, he jolted out of his grind when he heard a deafening droning sound coming from the workshop next-door. He saw several other machines leaving their posts to find the source of the racket, and he followed them. Behind the door, he witnessed an odd scene. Dozens of machines were gathered in a cluster – in front of the humans. The bosses.

They weren’t building, but the noise they made was so loud their tanks would empty in no time. How could they waste it that way?

JS-415 could swear they were looking at the humans defiantly. But what they did was beyond anything he had seen in the history of machines.

Their droning turned into words. They were shouting, “No fuel, no energy, no new world!”

But it wasn’t just whirring as the machines use to communicate.

The witnesses looked at the dissidents in awe. They had somehow

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found a way to produce human sounds. They were broadcasting their message in the human language! It seemed to surprise the humans too.

“Pay for our fuel! Our energy is your responsibility! Stop destitution, boost construction!”

JS-415 tutted. This could not be good. The humans were not the compromising type.

He was right. After a pause, the bosses burst out laughing.

“How absurd!” they said. “Pay our workers for the fuel they consume? You have got enough already!” and they laughed some more.

Without a warning, one of the rioters produced a flame with his built-in lighter. His followers engaged the oil evacuation process. The curious workers that shuffled out of their post gasped in a collective murmur. JS-415 held his ventilator. No one does that on purpose!

Fuel is too precious.

But then, they understood.

The machine directed the flame to the ground. In a blow, the puddle of petrol burst into flames. Fire danced in the humans’ eyes, and they stopped laughing. They were losing a dozen of machines, and their factory was burning. They started shouting and went for help. But the fire was spreading quickly.

JS-415 noticed one of the witnesses rolling forward, determined.

Deep inside, he knew what it was about. His co-worker entered the blaze and, as the flames licked his metal body, a new explosion detonated. Some machines backed off, appalled. JS-415 didn’t. He saw DT-800 come forward, still crying. She rolled into the furnace, and the eruption of flames ignited the high ceiling. JS-415 watched the flames take over his prison, forming clouds of blazing destruction.

He felt nothing. His nearly empty tank felt heavy inside of him. He checked his levels. He wouldn’t have lasted the day anyway.

With the rest of the machines, he came forward to be swallowed by the fire, and his explosion blew the factory to pieces.

The new world wouldn’t be built today.

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Photogrphy By Aiyah Sibay

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Quicksilver

By Anna Jones

A black Land Rover rests at a cliff edge; the bonnet sniffs at the sea air, the back end waits on the rocks. They’re a hundred feet above the frothy folds of a waiting tide. The wind is strong in the North East, and with each blast of its breath, the car edges slightly further forward. A silver key sits in the ignition. Her fingers tremble against the embossment of its head, still cold to her touch. All this will take is a little twist of the wrist, a sharp pull of the handbrake.

She’s curled her hair to feel young again. She speaks through painted lips, “We’re here.”

The sound of the sea is euthanising. Her husband does not wake.

She tries to recall the last time he was awake. He’s a fluctuation of states, these days, but never awake. Not like her. She considers consciousness and wakefulness as distinct, the difference being in the way a body breathes, the degree of light in a pair of eyes, the content of dreams, the favour of a ‘yes’ over a ‘no.’

And they used to say yes to everything – bungee jumping, paragliding, white-water rafting. You name it, they’d done it. They met on the edge of a plane and hit it off in mid-air, him strapped to her in a dive from the sky. By the time they touched the ground, a date had been scheduled.

They bubbled ‘I do’s at a scuba-dive wedding, took a honeymoon in the rainforest, rode bikes over Death Road, chased storms in Texas, edge-walked skyscrapers. Nothing had been impossible.

Six months sailed by before the money ran out, along with his enthusiasm. The bulb behind his eyes went bust and he told her to get serious. For him, it had just been a phase, so she took a risk on stability; a feat she hadn’t tried before. Then they sighed through thirty years at a snail’s pace and she knew she’d jumped the gun. Life became a trudge through the stages – from settling down to nine-to-five, ‘let’s start a family’ to ‘let’s make it bigger,’ holidays at Butlins to weekends in Wales, parents’ evenings to university tours, Christmases with the in-laws to nursing

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home brochures. They spent each night in that dingy sitting room with that mantlepiece, that knackered fireplace and that God-awful couch, him with soup stains on his jumper and that overgrown moustache, feet on the fucking coffee table again, The Sunday Times and a beer, beige corduroy trousers crumbling into the armchair, distorting the line between its start and his end.

He became a man who had an extra cup of tea before sleep to celebrate a Friday night. She’d slipped Halcion in the mug this time, a little treat for the weekend. She’d bundled his body in blankets, dragged him onto the backseats, and hit the road.

A part of herself she hadn’t known for a while brought them straight to the coast and left them at the brink. She feels content here, the imminence of the fall smelling sweet in the air. The thrill of it! This is living. She sits with the swell of possibilities, the quickening beat of her heart.

She turns to watch him sleep. He’s spread along the back, his palms together in a prayer, tucked under his cheek. The moonlight paints a second layer over his pale grey skin.

She will wait; there’s no rush for him to wake. All around her lies the eternal space of blackness. She drinks in the vision, drenching her thirst.

When his spirit deflated all those years ago, he chose slow as his means of speed, yet, in that moment, he wakes up with a start. He jerks his head upright as hers turns back towards the windscreen, the last chance to align their views gone amiss.

“Susan?” His voice fumbles through confusion. “Susan, what on earth–?”

The bonnet is gulping up the sky now. The grip of the back wheels is all that they have. Falling is just a jolt away; so close she feels the prick of passing air on her skin and the splash of sea against her, like coming home.

“What are you doing?!”

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The problem with a body so used to the thrill is that the need will never leave. The mind can be set on one route, but impulse hurries down a different path.

Her husband slams one hand on each front seat and slides his body into the gap between them. The car groans. He rests his chest on the gearstick and the bonnet stoops lower under his weight. He reaches for the steering wheel. The key is too far a stretch from his desperate hands. She watches him struggle, then, unfazed, lets her eyes sweep to the scene beyond the window to her side; her sight of the moon eclipsed by the sinking of the window frame. The drop is coming. Her stomach is on fire.

He retreats and grabs at the door-handle to his right and yanks it towards him. Rejective, it snaps straight back into its hold.

He begs her, in tears, slamming his hands against the car door, “Reverse this thing!”

The car shakes. She is still. Her eyes are full of the ocean.

“Susan! Fucking reverse!”

She contemplates reversing and it doesn’t appeal to her. There’s no need to go back; she’s found what they had lost.

She’s doing it for him, too. This is what he wants.

It’s the North East and the morning is coming; the wind breathes strength into a new day, and the car creaks a few more centimetres towards the drop.

Sitting upright, her husband centres himself on the backseat.

Transfixed, he stares straight ahead.

“Susan, please.”

Their view through the windscreen is a photo-framed end, deep blue waving its welcome.

She feels for cold silver. The sensation is too much.

Through the twitch of a smile she whispers, “I’m just bored out of my mind, David.” She turns the key in the ignition, steps on the gas.

“I’m bored as hell.”

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Terms of Endearment Julianna Ritzu Ignis fatuus. A medieval Latin lover.

Second-declension foolish. Third-declension fire.

A scrupulous pairing. Linguistic copulation at its finest.

Ab igne ignem. A close ancestor. Drunk uncle, maybe.

“From fire, fire.” Alternately, “as you sow you shall reap.”

Translation so often proves the culprit of misunderstanding.

I try to ignore the irony.

Phosphine, Diphosphane, Methane; tempestuous triplets; will o’ the wisps are the product of an organic decay.

Technical explanations proffered against folkloric cruelty.

Earthbound. The Promised Land was at capacity.

Confined to riverbeds. Marshes. Swampland.

Elysian Fields for the less than honourable among us.

Seeping. Inexorable. Emboldened by the recklessness purgatory affords, they remain bound to fulfil their mythological duty: Impromptu arbitration of those who stray from the path.

A two-faced fire. As you sow you shall reap.

Chicago. Still bears the mark of years of linguistic slaughter, willful bastardisation performed by the white man’s tongue.

Shikaakwa. Meaning ‘wild onion.’ A natural obstruction.

Discordant to the rhythm of industrial progress.

Discarded and displaced from their native banks like the Miami tribe who named them.

The swamp remains.

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Re ap i W h Re w ap e W ing h Re w at ap e S o i n W g ha w t eS o Heed the scars draping the knuckles. The vocal cadence, once honeyed but steadily cracking.

This plaster comes with chips.

Our very own dendrochronology.

Able to discern not only a tree’s age but the atmospheric conditions of its life.

Such scientific precision has never been afforded to this city. This heaving swamp.

Never hearing when time has been called, he covers his ears and keeps on swinging.

The midwestern underdog ready for a 12th-round knockout.

Just let him off the ropes.

Shot reverse shot. Look at me when I speak to you.

For I am tired. Worn. So too the product of ‘atmospheric conditions.’

Smith & Wesson .38m. A local favourite.

A cookie-cutter Carbon Steel Saturday Night Special.

Say that three times fast.

Four hundred and ninety bodies knew the warmth of a bullet last year.

Compliant prizefighters for a city who didn’t understand—

no one was ever punching back.

Awaiting foolish fire. Expecting arbitration, and reaping what we sow.

Photographyby Aiyah Sibay

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President’s Note

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It feels strange to know that this edition marks the end of PublishEd’s activities for the year, when it feels like it was only recently that we held the traditionally chaotic bookshop crawl to kick off the academic year.

The second semester of the 2019/20 academic year was filled with a number of exciting events. We started off with another edition of Write Drunk Edit Sober, where performances of Shakespearean epics were interspersed with poems composed entirely of Kanye West song titles. We continued to hold monthly Open Mics, where many performers (including some talented committee members) chose to share their work with an audience for the first time. The audience was as much of a highlight as the performers, and I am immensely proud of creating such a welcoming and supportive space, which we could all return to every month. A special thanks goes to our poetry editor Ben for championing the Open Mics and being the best host we could have ever wished for.

PublishEd also had the privilege of welcoming some publishing industry professionals for events this semester. Vivian Marr, editorial Content Director at Oxford University Press, talked to us about how to become an editorial director and the average work-day-in-the-life of those in editorial positions.

We then hosted Eris Young, talking about their experience writing about non-binary identities and publishing ‘They/Them/Their’, as well as diversity in the publishing industry, in an event that was a personal favourite.

After the Media Ball, the planned events sadly came to an abrupt end – we are very sad to miss the final Open Mic and not be able to host an event to launch this edition. However, as always, I was deeply impressed by the quality of submissions and enjoyed seeing the edition come together. I would like to thank the entire committee for all the hard work and passion they have put into planning and organizing events, as well as designing and curating the Inkwell. It has been a pleasure working with everyone on the committee and getting to know our members at events and I hope to be leaving the society in good hands, so that we can continue celebrating student creativity and the power of words.

With Love, Karolina

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Th e

Te am

President - Karolina Zentrichova Vice President - Anne Van der Poel Secretary - Evan Bayton Treasurer - Niya Ivanova Events Organiser - Ian Kirkland Media Editor - Mia Morgalla Editor in Chief - Chiara Hampton Prose Editor - Ailsa Bridgeford Poetry Editor - Benjamin Park Drama Editor - Will Penkethman-carr Copy Editors - Beth Park - Olivia Johnston General Editor - Jana Phillips Head of Design - Emily Hughes

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