Weaving a Cultural Tapestry

     The Spring 2010 issue of Inkwell brims with the culture and humanism illustrated by its cover painting by Lee Kui Bae, which shows a girl and a boy under an apple tree, the boy playing a small wind instrument, the girl listening and smelling a flower, a sleeping dog at their feet. Lee Kui Bae is South Korean, as is the winner of Inkwell’s 12th annual short fiction grand prize Anam Kim. As editor-in-chief Richard R. Binkele says in this issue’s introduction, “This year Inkwell received a record number of submissions from every corner of the world… (therefore) the themes and voices to be found on these pages are strong, sure and, most of all, varied.”

     Anam Kim’s prize winner, "Dancing On Knives", follows the travails of Bobae, a girl outcast from her village because she is born without legs. She leaves to forge a life for herself as a worker in a factory that employs other physical outcasts. Bobae runs away once a month, poorly treats the others in the factory and the squalid dorm the workers are forced to share like circus freaks, and believes herself to be special.

     Bobae starts helping Spirit Mother, a woman whose clients pay to distract the dead from acts of revenge upon the living. Bobae longs to draw the attention of the spirits, and learns much from Spirit Mother, including, ultimately, the art of walking on knives. With images both lyrical and natural, Kim shows Bobae as a hardened, fiercely independent girl who longs to be loved, who longs to be normal enough to walk on knives, allowing room for the reader to both dislike and sympathize for this broken girl.

     Another story representing Inkwell’s competition is E.B. Moore’s short fiction honorable mention, "Where The Road Begins", about Joshua, a boy from a Lancaster, Pennsylvania family of old order Amish. They “live Plain in black, pledged never to raise a hand against another.” In stark yet lyrical and rich language, Moore shows how Joshua lives on a farm with younger sisters, a caring mother, but a stern, hardened father. His father is a Deacon who treats his flock (the townsfolk) with the care and respect he often refuses his own family. Some nights the Deacon, after praying in the barn and drinking in the name of the lord, beats Joshua with a “head full of God, on his breath the liquid of his visions.”

     Moore fills her pages with engaging details of Joshua, living a bleak day-to-day life on the farm under his father’s heavy thumb, while also trying to savor certain quiet moments: “It’s a good evening. I feel it in the sweet ache of hard work, every bite of my dinner earned.” The Deacon is always disappointed in Joshua, no matter that he’s only twelve and doing the hard farm labor that would break a man twice his age. When Joshua brings home Dante’s Inferno, his father proclaims, “Wastrel,” and burns the book because it is not the bible. One night when the Deacon takes Joshua to the barn, Joshua, believing his life in danger takes matters into his own hands.

     Inkwell’s global journey continues to New Orleans for Maury Feinsilber’s "A Lagniappe for Billy and Stagger Lee", in which the 1895 murder of one William Lyons at the hands of ‘Stag’ Lee Sheldon is replayed against an anomalous snowy contemporary New Orleans Friday. Billy just got paid. He takes himself and his paycheck to the Mother’s Moustache bar and grill for a taste of “a little somethin’-somethin’.” A man with a plan, Billy is gunning for strong, silent, scary Stagger Lee. Or rather, Lee’s Stetson, a “four-season fixture.” When he walked into the bar, Stagger Lee “moved as lava flows, and his complexion was like a perfect Hershey Bar.” All this should have scared Billy, but he “wasn’t afraid, didn’t know why, worried a little that he wasn’t.” Billy remains fearless challenging Lee to a game of dice, and even when Billy keeps winning, and even after Billy says “everything on the hat,” suggesting they play for the Stetson.

     Feinsilber infuses the bar location with a timeless quality. He contemporizes the setting with “FEMA’s pen clicking shut,” even when the bar hangs “a few glowing plastic signs advertising brands which hadn’t been produced in years.” Billy wins the final game, but history repeats, and perhaps the lessons learned and missed for New Orleans are cursed to be repeated as well. Feinsilber brings us the story of the final hours of Billy. Billy, who is no longer afraid, but cursed at the hands of repeated history.