Spark: A Creative Anthology, Volume VI

Foreword:

It is something of an oddity of the human mind that as we grow older, our ambitions become increasingly more complex and increasingly less ambitious. Over the course of his life an inventor eventually lessens his aspirations from his five-year-old dream of a blue fire that makes everything cold to a new control valve on programmable thermostats. An athlete s initial goal of leaping over the Atlantic ocean eventually lead her to a record setting performance in a tennis tournament, on either grass or clay. It is a thing of growing older, both the world and ourselves. We learn as we get older that we can only do so much and so much has been done already. Adam set the world record for everything just by waking up and walking out the door.

The first stories were like the first people. Their lives and forms were simpler than ours. But they were no less meaningful. Like art, life is always equally meaningful. In each instance you either see it or you don t. But in these crude forms life and art and meaning are quite easily apprehended. Later on in life when we have seen the complexity of things we are tempted to dismiss the meaning we saw with simpler eyes, but it is always there.

That is not to say that simplicity is always done in the pursuit of truth. The stories in this issue are fables. They are lies and departures from the world. But these lies are attempts by their authors to move the audience with an ancient literary arithmetic. They are also attempts to speak to you; to communicate with you and show you some ideas that they have or what they care about. Sometimes literature can be just as simple as that.

Goodloe Byron

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Cover art by Goodloe Byron

Illustrations by Paul Pederson

Poetry:
Robert Menegus, Crawdad
Todd Walton, Honey
Linda Simone, Carlota s Thrush
Kristine Ong Muslim, The Day It Rained Stones

Fiction:
Renee Carter Hall, The Frog who Swallowed the Moon
Kat Alexander, Migration Patterns of the Striped Eastern Mallard
Tom Howard, How Tigers Got Their Stripes
Jeff Suwak, The Familiar and his Alchemist
George Wells, All That Never Happens
Heather D. Boyd, Esmeralda
Llanwyre Laish, Lyric
Alexis A. Hunter, Subject Stellar
Daniel Rosen, To Kill the Stars
Arley Sorg, Edyn the Monk
Sean Gill, Mortimer's Sanctuary, and What He Found There
Christine Darcas, Heaven is a Howl Away
Dan Pitts, The Mosquito in My Ear
Butterflies, Stephen Koster