We begin again likewise,
we look to end the stutter
we want to start laughing.
Author: Idle Ink
REVIEW: Inner Workings
Review by J.L. Corbett
Writer: Cooper Anderson
Artist: A.C. Ironside
Publisher: ArrowKey Studios
Release date: 3rd March 2020
Price: £10 (plus p&p)
Inner Workings is the first title produced by ArrowKey Studios, a comic book publisher based in Glasgow, UK.
Dog Days by Kate Lunn-Pigula
The first week of the summer holidays was wonderful. I finally had some much-needed alone time, time to read books that I had accumulated since September. I lay down in my sunny garden with my dog, Fred. He’s half-Westie, half-poodle. A Westie-poo, the woman at the rescue place said when we bought him. He’s a mutt, said my now ex-partner.My ex didn’t like Fred.
My ex also didn’t like that I worked in a rough school. By rough, he meant “state”. He said I didn’t have enough ambition. I had ambition, I told him, I want to be a great teacher. I’d like more money, who wouldn’t?, but I was comfortable earning what I was on now. You need to get your life together, he said towards the end. I can’t go on living like this, as if we were destitute.
The Inner by Emily Harrison
He tells the customer on the other side of the counter that I’m “good to stand and look at when it’s quiet, helps pass the time.” He says it like it’s nothing and hands over the boxed-up pizza. The customer stifles a laugh, scuttling out the door with a reptilian backwards glance.
I stay still and silent. He turns to the ovens and lifts a stack of greased black trays towards the sink, dropping them in. The belt that pulls the pizzas through is still rotating.
INTERVIEW: Joseph Sale, writer and editor
Joseph Sale is a writer, editor, content-creator and writing coach. I first came to know him when he submitted a wonderful short story, “The Heaviness of All Things” to Idle Ink in 2018, and since then I’ve followed his work (and there’s a lot of it). In addition to working with The Writing Collective and STORGY Magazine, he’s written a slew of novels and offers his services as a writing coach and editor. He is, in short, many things all at once.
The Weary Malevolence of RuPaul by J.L. Corbett
Back in 2009, season one of a late-night reality show called RuPaul’s Drag Race first aired on cable television. It presented a familiar talent show format: each week, a group of drag queens competed in a zany challenge and the weakest amongst them faced off in a shared lip sync performance, which ended with one of them being instructed to sashay away from the competition. Ultimately, the final queen standing was crowned America’s Next Drag Superstar.
It was a fun show. The footage was fuzzy, the runway was rickety, and it was all a bit tongue-in-cheek, a send-up of its more serious contemporaries such as America’s Next Top Model and American Idol.
Reconsiderations by Jason Jawando
An inspirational English teacher will stay with you forever, infuse your mind mind with a love of language and literature, and an appreciation of the beauty of the language. I met Phil Riley when I was in my second year at Grammar School, and he almost put me off the subject for life. He spent the first lesson talking about himself, and how wonderful we would find his class if we were refined enough to appreciate it.
Ah, no, that’s unfair, Jason. He was a decent man trying to explain his expectations. He would have preferred, I’m sure, to have been extolling the delights of Wordsworth: it’s just gobshites like you that made the talk necessary.
The Book of Ross by Jake Kendall
The great frustration began on May 19th, 2020, at 5.24 in the morning – Greenwich Mean Time.
Here in Britain, few noticed the change. Most were asleep and those few that experienced it chalked the matter up to other factors: tiredness, alcohol, sleep deprivation, and so on.
However the world over, people were experiencing the same phenomenon. Slowly but surely the reports began to snowball. Hashtags trended on twitter. Incredulous news sites took up the wild claims behind a veil of cynicism.