Thrice 10 Notes
RW Spryszak, Editor
The best part of this job is tipping readers off to writers who have
never been published anywhere before. There’s no guarantee
they continue, and there’s no past they have to live up to.
Their work is raw, open, new, and totally honest. They haven’t
developed a writer’s persona. They’re just going for it. Right for
the balls.
Dave and I are both pretty proud of the new writers we’ve added
to these pages. Meaning – heretofore unpublished. The stories
they sent are worth it. The future is up to them. In the meantime,
Thrice would be happy to see its name on the top of their list of
publications; and if any of them turn out to be somebody we all
need to know… we hooked them first.
There’s a few more in the pages of this issue. And we promise still
more. We start as we mean to go on.
In other news, thank God the winter is over. Now it’s time for
baseball and our Spring issue.
We’ve also added a few words of wisdom from our friend Gloria
in this issue. Not exactly a story, and not really fiction, but it fit so
well with the new voices in this issue, we thought it was something
that needed to be said. Thanks Gloria.
Things of the Spirit
Howie Good
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An angel descended on our town via an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys. “Who would you rescue if you could rescue
only one — wife or child?” the angel asked the men he met. He beat more than a few to encourage them to answer. “I’d
much prefer to be drinking coffee,” he assured them, the darkness so thick they couldn’t always tell what was grabbing at
them with big, meaty fingers.
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An old young man in a stained T-shirt, a bruise purpling his chin, lurches out the door of the Church of Holy Shit!
“Mister,” he calls, “got 60 cents?” I can’t quite decide the right thing to do. The street is crawling with spies and assassins,
and all because of a faulty chemical switch in the brain. It’s like a story from the Bible, God betting Abraham which sugar
cube a fly would land on.
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The Buddha is portrayed with his eyes closed for a reason, but perhaps not the reason everyone thinks. Seeing is a neglected
enterprise. When I happen to look out the kitchen window, I count four deer, or four spirits disguised as deer, crossing the
yard. It isn’t snowing, but it should be, an inch per hour, a long, cold sentence without clauses to cause the reader to pause.
There’s a theory that the only things you need are the things you already have. By that measure, I don’t need a quote from
Simone Weil tattooed in a spidery script on my neck: “Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our
real life.” Some areas of the body must be extra painful to tattoo.
And thanks to all our loyal readers. 3000 strong these days. Not
bad for an indie lit mag.
HOWIE GOOD, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the
And wait until you hear our other news!
forthcoming poetry collection The Middle of Nowhere (Olivia Eden Publishing). His latest
chapbooks are Echo’s Bones and Danger Falling Debris (Red Bird Chapbooks). He co-edits
White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.
Later.
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THRICE FICTION™ • April 2014
Issue No. 10
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