Fall 2022 - Creative Writing Class Zine!

Dear Reader,

The work in this zine was created by several of the students enrolled in ENGL 2307 (Intro to Creative Writing) at North Central Texas College in the fall semester of the year of some god, 2022. Though every voice isn’t represented, I...I guess I should mention that my name is Jacob and someone gave me the keys to this train we built while rolling down the tracks (do trains have keys???)...think that you are going to enjoy the work that is here.

It is alive. Like a living, breathing thing. Maybe with wings? Who knows. But each piece is going to breathe a little life into you when you consume it. Love comes up and packing sinuses. Sleepily drifting through painless memories and falling. Even elephants make an appearance.

I won’t go on and on like some pedantic academic. I am proud though. Quite proud of the work that every student created and vulnerably gave to us for review. Every time I signed on to see what they had turned in, I smiled knowing I was about to experience more than fifteen little bits of awesomeness that would become like regulars in my mind. They would speak truths to me.

That’s it. I swear it. Read on, dear reader. Enjoy the work that follows. Thank you for your time. We know how precious it is these days.

Your friend, JA

Pip Chrustawka

An Angel’s Moonlit Game of Lost and Found

“Are you lost, or have you already been found?”

The strife of starlight burns bright on a night like this one as defiance to the subtle

With the tip-toeing of Earth’s bravest soldier, burrowing feet underneath the dusty rubble Though his eyes have failed him before, the world burns still with all its undiscovered lore

“Are you an angel?”, his voice whispers out A vocal blister in the grand expanse of space and time Their voice echoes back as a flawless, flowing rhyme “Is that really why you have come around?”

“I see … you are both found, and lost.”

From the great cacophonous crack that sent snaking splinters shivering through the world’s crust

An astronaut sent adrift through the abstract rift in the Earth’s final dramatic fuss

The angel with their tilted halo can do nothing but observe the fauxmap

As if some God had sent a poisoned arrow Shot blankly and stubbornly through the entire grotesque scenario

Pip Chrustawka Second Chance

Turning 18 is a very special checkpoint.

As the marked turn from teenagerdom to adulthood, those two digits establish the very beginning of what will either be growth or bitter, bitter stagnation. When those flowers are planted in the lungs of a fledgling thirteen year old, the resulting rosebuds are only just starting to wedge their way out of the dirt by the ripe age of eighteen. For dwindling daffodil Rene, he felt more like a deflated, overwatered mound of dirt as he sat kneeled by the collapsed corpse of the family bird.

“If mom had just taken him to the vet when he first started wheezing, he would’ve been okay. He would’ve been fine,” he later on spoke with a sniffly nose to a friend on the phone. “She was just too stubborn about it. She pretended like it wasn't even happening. It’s so… it’s just not fair. She’s always been like this.”

“ … Sorry it had to happen on your eighteenth birthday. Sucks, man.”

“Sucks,” René repeated bitterly.

As he put the phone down on his cabinet – exhausted of conversation and numbed by the chilling effect of shock – he leaned on the window, watching as rain streaked down the glass. From below him, his mom tussled her black hair until the rubber hand snapped against her thumb and forefinger, and proceeded to stare aimlessly at the big, round lump where mon petit oiseau was now buried six feet under. Against the glossy warbling of the window, she tossed a snide remark at a questioning neighbor, watched as he rolled his eyes and slammed the door to his house, then bowed her head into her hands and began to weep.

When René next awoke, he found himself facing a peculiar species of red fiery rebirth, orange beak fussing with a few stray feathers on his ashen wings.

“Before you ask – you are dreaming,” he said casually – something that, oddly enough, did not phase René as much as it should have. “Happy birthday, youngest Lachance. It is a very important thing in this family to turn eighteen – are you aware?”

He blinked, reached for some skin on his arm to pinch, and winced lightly. “Are you … who are you?” René felt a cold chill run down his back. “Where am I?”

“Perhaps I was a Lachance in the past – perhaps I was reborn to be the bringer of cathartic transformation,” the phoenix said with an exasperated sigh, tapping his claws on the rim of a half-full, halfempty glass. He clutched it between his talons – singing the glass and sending smoke up from the marks – before twirling it aside, wheeling it out of sight. “It does not matter who or what dies. Every single person

in this family experiences a loss on their eighteenth birthday. Have you not noticed this before, René?”

“I just thought we were … cursed, or something.”

“Blessing, not a curse. Perhaps a more neutral term, but not a negative. It is the gift of grief.”

René, feeling more asleep than awake, furrowed his brows. “I wouldn’t call it a gift,” he spoke bitterly, mind clouded with thoughts of his dearly departed Luz, struck with a cough that had shuddered his feathered body for weeks before he passed. “It never did anything good for my Mum.”

“Do you know what your mother did when she turned eighteen?”

René gave him a quizzical look.

For as much as a phoenix could, he scowled deep and dark. “She was the one who killed me.”

" … What?"

"Your mother killed me," he repeated hollowly, lifting a foot to preen it. A few feathers sputtered down from the session. "What an observant one she was, the youngest daughter of three. She watched as her sisters lost the things they treasured the most, and the way they crumpled into pieces in the aftermath."

René frowned as he faintly remembered talk of his Auntie Eléa, dead at nineteen almost a decade before he was born. "So, she … "

"She watched all of her sisters lose their loved ones upon eighteen, and decided she would be different. Alas, she took initiative." His eyes flickered in the light. "On the night before her eighteenth birthday, she cornered me with a stolen pocket knife as I snuck through the window, tracking ash on the family floor. She told me she would kill me before I could touch anything she loved."

"Did she?"

"She killed the family parakeet in retaliation," he glowered. "She thought if she killed something before I could arrive at the scene, it would stop the inevitable from unrolling. Unfortunately, bringing on your own destruction does nothing to control what bad things occur to you. It does not aid you with control. She woke up, and her most precious minou had passed overnight. When she awoke here once more, with me, all she could do was stare."

René’s skin prickled uncomfortably. Something shifted deep down inside of him, causing his insides to coil and twist like he had eaten a foul dinner. “Why didn’t Mum… tell me?”

“Has grief ever been talked about in your family, youngest Lachance?” the phoenix blinked his beady eyes. “Curses are not put on people by an uncaring universe, or by bad luck – some curses are brought on by people themselves.”

Despite the nervous foresight that their time was limited, René looked up at the phoenix in front of him as if it had the meaning of life hidden between his beak.

“Does that mean … are you Luz?” his voice felt frail and meek, washed out by his own heartache. “I don’t understand. Wh-who are you? Are you like the Grim Reaper?”

"I am not the soul of your beloved bird, René – nor am I the departed spirit of your mother's dear childhood cat. My only job is to be the moth to the flame, the phoenix who rises from the ashes of loss.

That is all. In a family cursed by unfair grief, I am the pastor preaching at the funeral to their weeping faces … unwillingly. To a family line who refuses to listen!"

He made a bitter squawk as he rose up above René, showering little sparks with each flap of his wings.

“Does that make sense, youngest Lachance? Do you understand what you must do?” his voice echoed down, almost holy in its timber. With a wave of flame in his wake, particles of ash tumbled down from the very tips of his feathers before blowing away into the blank horizon surrounding them. “I am not here to punish you, nor am I here to consol you in your loss. I am here to help you rise from both the ashes left behind in tragedy, and the tragedy those who came before you have bestowed upon you. When the world entrenches you in horror, you must harness that emotion and shed your old skin so that you may be reborn. Dearest René, that is the only way to make the Lachance family name a truly lucky one.”

With his eyes as wide as dinnerplates, fractions of fire beamed off of the reflection in René’s glossy eyes. Sniffling, he messily wiped at his face, nonetheless transfixed by the being fluttering in front of him. “That’s not fair,” he mumbled, shoulders slumped, “I just want my friend back, I just want my Luz back. I don’t … I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

The phoenix quieted, the only audible sound being that of his beating wings, sending a shower of sparks down. He cocked his head in question, true to his nature.

“It is not fair,” he spoke again, “I never said it was. It is an undue, unfair burden to a pesky, stubborn family. But you will rise again, and the importance lies in that. I have grown tired of watching your family relish in their own destruction, and I have grown cynical seeing it happen time and time again. It is not fair to me either, you may say!”

As his vision blurred with tears, René pressed his sweaty palms against his face and shuddered. “Okay,” he sniveled, “okay. I just wish, I just wish you wouldn’t do this to me. I wish it could be different.”

For once in the entire bitter conversation, the phoenix's beak twitched with what almost seemed like a smirk.

"Did I ever say I was God, or only his messenger?"

Grief was not a beast tamed nor talked about in the family of Lachance. In a family cursed by their own bad luck, Auntie Eléa lost her highschool sweetheart to-be husband at eighteen, and Auntie Louise lost her eldest sister Eléa to her own hands when she turned eighteen the very next year. Grandmother Eleanor had rammed her high expectations down the throat of every daughter she bore, and each carried their mother’s grief in their bones, just like she carried her mother’s and every parent down the line had carried theirs for centuries. To speak about it was to make it real.

Curled up on the edge of his mother’s bed, René folded his legs underneath his own weight and watched his mother’s wavering, forever

distant face as she sat and stared into the distance. With a few words, he felt the world shift beneath him.

“Mum,” René spoke quietly, throat closing up and tightening with each word. “ … I miss Luz.”

And for the first time, her wet eyes met his. “I miss Luz too, René.”

Kady Finley

L is for…

Five minutes and a red light are all that keep me from you. How many nights we’ve spent alone while existing three hundred seconds from each other.

Living our lives, Working our day jobs on the same street, Passing each other in school hallways, Knowing the same people yet somehow never meeting the other. Our other half; existing, living, learning, growing…until fate decides to step in, To push us closer and closer until we meet And we fall in love.

Love…

The sound of that word stops my heart. I’ve been in love before. Love is earth shattering. It leaves a bitter and burnt taste on the tongue Initially disguising itself in a sweet and sugary coating. Love is a terrible and all consuming trick. It’s a hall of warped mirrors; lights and carnival music bouncing around in a narrow corridor

Unsure of which way is right, you run and you run spinning and twirling in delight

Until Smack! Your face ricochets off the mercurial glass. Reality flooding back; The honeymoon carnival ride has ended.

You stare into the mirror that has just assaulted you, The person staring back is familiar. They make your coffee the way you like it and fold their socks the way you taught them. They know what makes you happy and the right things to say to get under your skin.

Your clothes and theirs smell the same because you share a washing machine.

They know how to break your heart and how to do it completely.

That famous saying “All's fair in love and war”...I get it now. Love is war, on your brain, your body, and your heart. I wish that red light had been longer. I wish the distance had been further. I wish fate hadn’t stepped in. You took my heart as your battle trophy, and I want it back.

Georgia Earhart

Joel Warm, soft water that runs through my fingers and warms my skin

You are wild and lovely Low and slinking Cool wind, it is as crisp as the leaves crunching underfoot in the fall

Everything is perfect as I hold you in my arms The smell of the first smoke of the beginning winter, the dust in your tabby fur

You are my baby for now, for the baby I’m afraid I can never have Taking solace in the feeling and the sound of your purr reverberating in my chest

Damp and warm jaws, a smell that is faint, sweet and biological, a rot, gums rub against my face

Your sharp teeth biting Small daggers, piercing the fragile skin of my nose Eyes stinging, I laugh and the sound seems to echo in the open room Mythical and sweet, eyes half lidded and blinking slow, an outstretched paw and a tiny nose

I run a hand along a soft feeling, and the sun begins to show He’s like no dog, no companion I’ve ever known Love is a sleepy, feline feeling

Jackie Causey

Drifting

While drifting dreamily along in a raft made of rocks, Dazed eyes Meet mine

And determinedly spout Dizzying lies until their thoughts are mine And I find the strength to surrender.

Even though my mind is misaligned, I could survive

As long as the light still shines. Still, I look to find More reasons to try, So the world twists until it’s fine.

Drearily drifting along in a raft made of rocks A cacophony needles my mind Brine stings my eyes And everyone pretends to be serious in the absurdity, So I laugh until I forget why

Casey Cloud

Tempo

Inside the confines of your mind, can never choose a choice.

Focus on it, give it time. Listen to its voice. Constant strings of thought. What a messy disposition. Losing health of mind, caught in disassociation. Cloudy like a poison, scared of any change. Numb and always frozen, wasting all your days.

Masked relief in the form of a drink. Forgotten decisions, or a thought to think. Wasted away, no laughter, or cries. Long hours after, feelings arise. Frail like a shell, fragile thoughts start to bleed. Belief within self? Foreign concept indeed.

Painful memories, you did not ask. Daily remedies, bring up the past. Change the song to something new. Let go of shame, one day you’ll do. Pray for guidance, ask for help. Save yourself, then someone else.

Casey Cloud

Bones Trapped by the cages inside of my mind.

I start whole; in a world that does not seem so dark.

As I move through life on land, my clothes become torn, my body becomes skinner, slowly starting to feel as if I am disappearing. The sounds in my mind become deafening, controlling.

I do not think that I can survive and am told that it will get better. That time can heal, and that I will feel complete again. Mental pain eats away at the creases of my brain.

What if I could breathe easier below the shadows of the sea?

What if the deep blue could clothe me in a protective hug?

What if I could float for a while, and turn my back on a life that is too much to bear?

To feel as though my body is as light as flakes of snow drifting through air without a planned destination.

I dip my toes into a place that takes the chaos of the world away; it is cold, different.

I comb through the water with curious hands, walking deeper within; neck just kissing the surface.

Slowly, I am surrounded by the colossal blanket of the ocean.

I move one arm, then another, move one leg, then another, moving; moving into a new place unknown.

I am now floating. Floating through blue waves of silence. No more noise, no more pain. no more suffering.

That was many years ago when a decision was made to exist instead of live. I have not touched dry surfaces since.

I have heard the tales of those who have tried to stand up on land again. That some become whole, and others fall apart.

The what if saga is one, I know well.

What if I could rebuild myself?

What if there was more to see than just this?

What if I were no longer afraid to feel?

What if feelings could be felt, without the pain attached to the depths of what some claim is a heart?

I have withered away; my heart beat is faint. I feel as though I am on the edge of despair, but a glimmer of hope pings within the confines of my soul.

I should try to turn the glimmer into a flame. Try to hold onto hope that there are happier places beyond this cold blue sea.

For if I shall die, I die trying, if I am not already dead.

Drops of water start to rain onto my porcelain head. It comes every day, and is now leaking down my chiseled face.

If drops of water had a color, my face would be permanently stained. I look up and see the crying sky melting away.

Strikes of lightning are all around. Soft gray cotton-clouds swallow the light as it is replaced by dark.

Thunder crashes through the atmosphere, rattling my body. I looked beyond the surface of the sea and noticed…land.

For years it has been untouched by the bones of my feet. I decided to swim towards it, with as much courage and strength I could muster.

I reach the shore. I look back with shock. I am without the haven of water that became a constant cold companion. I move one foot in front of the other. Looking around at the environment around me, I decide to stand up. I feel the weight of my bones, of the weight of my past. I am suddenly aware that I am feeling.

Panic.

The sounds are too piercing, although they should sound beautiful. The smells are too fragrant, although they should be welcoming. Colors look too bright, although they should be inviting.

The dark passengers that once existed in the pockets of my mind awaken.

They whisper that I should go back. They scream that I do not belong here. They have misguided me for so long, that I had forgotten how to silence them.

I look down at my fragile hands, and through my hands I see the sand. It is painfully fitting. I am physically as hollow as the soul I possess.

The weight of my body is too heavy without the water that once surrounded me.

I am falling. Falling slowly. Slowly becoming smaller. Falling into a pile. Into a pile of bones.

Kaitlyn Crowley

In The Event That Your Mom Must Get Her Sinuses “Packed” After Her Septoplasty Goes Wrong

“Now Gwyn, this can get quite grisly, so grab your daughter’s ha ” a death grip adheres deep into my palm with daggered nails like brads on

labeled folders. Label. I read the label aloud to relax her nerves. Rhino Rocket…sounds dirty, doesn’t it? Must you always be so perverse?

Great name for a vibrator. I whisper to my mom, but the nurse overheard. “Which is why we won’t wedge it in until we lube it up.” Awkward, but I allow it.

“Okay on the count of three. Ready: one, two, three!” And thrust upward. Push! Bulging, the veins on my hand finding no relief, my skin a pale beige turning blue, but my mom is bleeding and believes I’m the most comforting person, and when she tells me later that labor was the only pain outranking this one, I’ll shudder to think she did that for me, and imagine that her clasping my hand will transfer the agony to me like magic. My superpower is that I’m her daughter. So please, grip on and don’t let go.

Tears trickle toward her chin and her legs tremble terribly, in the same way I threw temper tantrums as a child. Her face flushes crimson as the doctor infuses the Rockets with air, and the green in her eyes grows like our St. Augustine grass in the spring, the way they always do when she weeps. I’m so sorry You’re doing great. The process repeats.

I switch sides and the skin on my fingers singes and tingles from the slap of cold they receive. Regrip the opposite hand, piano-fingers intertwined. The syringe sends in more air, and she cries. “You’ll want to alternate tramadol and hydrocodone for the discomfort.”

She stiffens and constricts my fist, imprisoning the physicality of my support.

After the appointment, I fetch us food, pick up her prescription at the pharmacy, feed her pets, and pretend to enjoy Forensic Files until she falls asleep. I watch her winded breathing and worry when I hear a wheeze. Caregiver guilt is…impossible…to ignore when it’s your responsibility to ensure that your parent doesn’t drown on her own swallowed blood in her sleep. So, I do! jumping! jacks! to stay! a-! wake! while! watching! Hacks! on my! iPad! and glancing! her way! in between! silent giggles! Siri, set a reminder for 3 a.m.

“What do you want to be reminded about?”

Give Mom Tramadol.

Jacob Arnold

The Present is Candy-Coated

Firecrackers are like the light that burns the ant up on the concrete, like white elephants that are made from cotton candy and laughs who eat themselves one bite at a time. The candy isn’t sweet, so they don’t gorge themselves. The elephants whose skin feels like cement or something thicker than topsoil. I bet they taste like topsoil, real elephants and not the cotton candy ones. Can’t you see them? They are stringy and smell like addiction.

Wasn’t it you, Carol, who lived in Tanzania for a summer, building spitmud huts for squirrels? Think about those days when you need to remember your minuteness. And remember, no elephants can be made from cotton candy nor do they laugh. Thinking of the sky, let’s wonder about being buried for a bit. How bitchin’ would it be to lay under a blanket six feet thick? Isn’t the cold enough to call for thick sheets? And burying is caused by living a life of excess. Excess snot, yellowed by the dust from the lives you never even tried to live.

Who are you now though? I’ll betcha that you can’t recall when we met. It was under the doomed light, raining cats. Just cats. Thick ones that splatted upon impact. Can you imagine? I wish that we could still imagine. What stole that from us? The bland soil of love makes me think it was a severe drought. Not of water but of intrigue. Of questions. Of coloring pictures with crayons, preferably broken ones. Bits and pieces of color making lines to scream a picture into the thick world. This reflection will be hard to decipher. It will take ingenuity and a raised sense of awareness that we lost, like leaves in the bag of the lawnmower, lawn mover, lawn mother. That doesn’t make sense to me or you or us.

Saw around your skull, and examine your pink brain. I hear it’s pink when there’s blood, but it quickly becomes light grey as life breathes in the opened world. But Jakey don’t know nothin’ really. That’s what keeps me going. You will learn to love to learn again. I have faith. We started with firecrackers and look at us now. There will always be room to invent if we create habitually. Create light like eggs, potential for life there. Room for growing.

Don’t ever listen to the yolks, where the potential is thickest, because the brain isn’t fully formed until 25. I read that somewhere. Maybe Smithsonian? Pero, soy un perdedor. That is definitely from somewhere else and not my own head. Pick around in yours for a while. Then listen to the couch say, “Sleep on me when your children are already sleeping.” And oblige. Suck the pink sugar from the elephants and don’t get buried by the present. It’s falling away with every second.