My friends played in the church stairwell To let the time go by. I would have gone if I was brave, But fear left me standby.                   I wanted to go up the stairs, But asking them was dumb. One night, the tables turned on me; My friends asked me to come. “I don’t know if I want to go,

On the Sunday when my father’s grandfather died, Father got up early and went to the house, yellowed With age and perched on a wishy-washy foundation. When he returned late that night, he only said, “It was cold in that yellow house.”           I always wondered what he meant by it, until yesterday— The Sunday when I got up early

No darkness covered my own eyes; the darkness was within. A bitter, cold, unwavering mass that was my covered sin. Every crevice filled with black, each thought perfused with ebony, These thoughts collecting in a whole, preposterous cacophony.           Then that day, a wondrous day, when this cruel darkness fled. The warm embrace of my Savior God as to the cross

Look at that tremble: your fingers Clutching your coffee cup like a mast, Like a slice of Still amid the Turning— The knife scratch, the child’s cackle Of those playing the “them” to our “us.”         Yet we are part of this rush, aren’t we? The very noise that runs off us, drowning Some other shy soul strangling some

Check-in day at BJU dawned cloudy with a chance of tears—for me anyway. I pushed the door open to leave the girls’ dorm and blinked at daylight like a groundhog coming out of hibernation. Seven weeks of Christmas vacation had kicked my introvertish nature into hyperdrive. I wanted to turn around, head back to my bed, and hide under

You can’t finish something you never start. Shocking, I know. Procrastination isn’t just something we do with homework. Instead, it haunts every area of our lives. Conversations can happen tomorrow. Coffee dates are scheduled for next week. Dinners are planned for next month. But tomorrow becomes a week. A week becomes a month, and a month becomes a

In 2018, my dad, mom, brother, and I moved from the United States to France. It was a hard transition. I had made other transcontinental moves before, but France…was different. It was both like and unlike what I had always known. That move was full of many “initiation” moments. The following is an excerpt from my journal one week

In a tiny, dusty store with strange operational hours, a young woman with a plant’s name was cradling a wire duck and her dreams, both crushed. While a store packed with old things might seem like an odd place to visit to mend your crushed dreams, the store owner loved Amaranth Birde, as she had been a neighbor and

It’s been seven years since the darkness started killing people. Wade had listened to the whispers this morning as he’d trudged along the busy sidewalks. People huddled in groups, talking in hushed voices about everything that had happened seven years ago, just like they did every year on the anniversary. Now, sitting in the back of a public

What a glorious day, Nod thought, as he inhaled the sweet scent of the early afternoon. He closed his eyes and felt the warm breath of raspberries and cinnamon swirl past the threshold of his door to meet with the cool pine air drifting off the forest. He stepped down and promptly tumbled the remaining steps to the earth, flailing

To read the past two parts of “Pirate Hunters,” check out Volume 2, Issues 2 and 3 in Inkwell Literary Magazine’s online archive. Once we had docked in A Coruña, Captain Deney took Monkey and Bucko into town to look for our contact. Cook, Willie, Fiddler, and I, along with a few others, left the ship a few minutes

“Alrighty. We’re here.” Eloise’s mom shifted the car into park and looked at her daughter in the passenger seat. Eloise’s eyes stayed glued to the window, which framed a large brick house. No, not a house. A mansion. “Eloise. Sweetie?” Eloise’s mom reached out and swept one of Eloise’s long brunette braids to the front

I miss the birdcalls. Now through my window flashing seeps The siren-gusts hurtling around my apartment building. I miss green leaves. Through the curtains, The metallic sky stares at me From the other side of the tracks. When I step outside,   It freezer-burns my nose in two minutes. I scurry to my destination And try to forget the trip, Except