Category: Six Sentence Story
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1702: Ash and Interleaf
Part 2: Of Ash and Interleaf — from Brigid’s Diary: Paris, 17 February 1833 The pages between here and the turn of the Seine have been removed, fed to the fire, their spines cracking like small bones. Felreil says Paris is a danger made of touchpaper and of men who read silence as a lip-wet…
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1602: The Liturgy
Liturgy for Those Who Burned Their Names to Stay Alive(for the ones who fled too late) I. The First Mistake of BelievingYou thought the river would wash you clean.You thought the new tonguewould taste sweeter in your mouth. That the accent you couldn’t shedwould be mistaken for poetry,not origin. But fear travels without papers.It crossed…
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1002: Six Sentence Story
Passport Interrogation Part 1, Calais, 12 November 1830 The paddle-wheeler pitched us into France; the quay fatigued by tides, received us without welcome, smelling of coal and old salt. Under a dripping lamp the policeman collected our passports like birds he meant to keep, and we surrendered them as one surrenders breath to winter. Felreil,…
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0902: The Liturgy
Liturgy for the Provisional Passport (a hymn for the unmoored and ink-stamped, waiting) I. The Arrival Without WelcomeThe quay,it tolerates you.Coal-smoke and old salt.A lamp hissing in the rainan unwilling guard.You step from the paddle-wheeler’s pitchonto stone that has forgotten how to welcome.This is not a border crossed,but a threshold endured. II. The Surrender of…
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4 Feb: Six Sentence Story
Brigid’s Diary: Prologue Brigid’s Diary: Prologue — 12 November 1830Note: Set before the dated pages that follow. We left England before the crows could count us, a small arithmetic of breath and bread. The field-reapers and threshers learned new names for old hungers; men with clean hands arrived asking who tended the sick, the broken…
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0302: Six Sentence Story
The Tidal Deconstruction of a Beach I. (The Taking Tide)The first pull doesn’t cleanse — it draws out the salts of pretending, the bitter, crusted lines worn too long like old salt on skin. It siphons from your marshes without asking, leaves you stinging and unarmoured, wondering what else you’ve been built from. And in…
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0202: Liturgy of Unmasking of a Beach
Liturgy: The Unmasking of a Beach (Or: Where Water Meets the Wound) Note: This week, I am trying something completely different with my Six. Not a six sentence story (as usual) but the (anthropomorphic) psychological effects of storm-driven tides on a local beach. I. The Withdrawal of the SeaThe tide does not come to cleanse.It…
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2701: Six Sentence Story
A View on Voyeurism Louise’s kitchen window faces two houses: Alison’s, her husband, a retired podiatrist, and Jean’s — her husband lies face-down between the hydrangeas and the electricity meter. Southeast Ambulance Service stands with him, or rather does not; the defibrillator is put away, as if it’s a game they lost interest in playing.…
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2601: The Liturgy for the Watching People
Liturgy for the Window Vigil I. The Geometry of WitnessingA window is a frame.Not for art,but for the ordinary.We think we are looking out,but we are really looking in. Into the small, sudden theatre of endings.Where medics close a defibrillatorlike a book whose final lineno one wants to read aloud. II. Of DistanceWhat we see…
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2101: Six Sentence Story
Untitled In the church across the road, up a hill too steep for cars when it snows, they gather every evening — always the same few — coats damp, smelling of wool and fish. They sit on worn pews, reciting worn prayers, asking for health, or pardon, or nothing they can name, until twilight and…
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