* This story made Tangent Online’s 2018 Recommended Reading List *
In a world of black ink on a white background resides the fictional town of Good Ol’ Days. Born and raised in the divisive comic, college student Curious Negro finds his way to the boarder of his world.
With his curiosity driving him, Curious leaves behind the confining panels to explore this new world. Getting caught will mean trouble, but Curious has risked worse before…or so he thought.
SOME THINGS are worth dying for. Curious Negro’s father had told him that, but he never understood it—never felt it—until that day when he found the edge between the black and white world as he knew it and the perception altering world of the creator.
Beyond the edge of the panel that bordered the town and the world of Good Ol’ Days, the creator’s world had…
Curious struggled to find a word for it.
Depth.
That’s the word his old grade school teacher Smart Negro used when describing the introspective feeling that you got from a good book. But this kind of depth was more like one of Uppity Negro’s underground pamphlets. The ones that guessed at there being something beyond Good Ol’ Days. A third dimension. One where the world wasn’t only made from black ink.
The creator’s world was no longer a theory on some leaflets that Curious kept hidden under his bed. It was real and made from inks other than black. Inks he didn’t have words for. The new inks made Curious feel depth when he hoisted himself up onto the edge of the panel and peered out into the creator’s room.
On a basic level, the creator’s room looked like Curious’s own dormitory with a messy full-sized bed piled high with dark covers next to a small desk cluttered with schoolwork. While Curious’s walls were mostly as bare as his earthen floor, the opposite wall had posters of bands, mostly men with guitars and long hair. The flooring was hardwood panels.
A large light-filled window was to the left. Where Curious’s room had one pennant above the window, the creator had two: USV, and University of Southern Virginia. Curious couldn’t help but wonder, if there was a way to get there—other than going over the panel’s edge—how far would USV be from his own Nigger U.
The delicious smell of fried chicken filled the air.
There were no curvy scent lines indicating where the chicken rested in the room to show him where the smell was coming from. The smell was just there. Hanging in the air. Same for the heat in the room. He could see the light from the window, but there weren’t any wavy heat-lines to indicate the toasty warmth on his face, neck, and chest. In his world, there’d been two or more lines showing the heat source.
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