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 
The Ink Well Review: 💋💋💋💋💋
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!
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 
I tried combining the two prompts for a ghost story / fairy tale.
The Ink Well Review: 💋💋💋💋💋
This is a charming fantasy fairy tale, creating a far distant world in another time and place. If you read
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 
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: 💋💋💋💋💋
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 
This was so amazing <3
I love that song of hers, and her perfume :)
The Ink Well Review: 💋💋💋💋💋
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 
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: 💋💋💋💋💋
... 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.
I really like the soft cadence of this poem ... like a soft rain.
I Found a Land by 
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: 💋💋💋💋💋
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 
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:
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..
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 
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.
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.
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
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