Category: Six Sentence Story
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29.09: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #8 (catch-up with all episodes here) Episode number 08: Dead Men Don’t Drown That night I sleep badly, pitching from one side of the bed to the other as though the cottage has come loose from its foundations and we’d gone to sea. At dawn I give up, pad barefoot downstairs,…
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29.09: A Six – SSC&B Alcove
The Alcove The Heist (episode 1) Chris, aka La Raconteuse, opens her laptop, a fork stands flag-pole-straight in our shared slice of Mimi’s Chocolate Cake for Challenging Days — she types so hard the keys chatter as she chases through New York landmarks records, Madison Avenue plans, façades, floor layouts, and every architectural scrap the city has…
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28.09: The Liturgy
Liturgy for the Answers That Yield More Questions(for the pacing, the waking, the silent photographs) I. The Floor That Knows Your FootstepsYou have worn a path in the carpet.Back and forth,as if the fibres might rearrange themselvesinto a confessionif you walk them long enough. But they do not. The carpet only holds the shape of…
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2309: A Six — SSC&B Alcove
Strikethrough a book called “Le Grand Herbier en Françoys” I am wearing time’s dust skin here: this is Montpellier University Library Archive, and beyond the tinted glass lies a flame-singed copy of Le Grand Herbier en Françoys — a sixteenth-century root-system of human knowing — it has brought me full circle, and something in me goes very still grows very…
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2209: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #7 (catch-up with all episodes here) Dead Men Don’t Drown When I tell the volunteer that Jacob Macleod was my grandfather, her face changes by the smallest degree, not surprise exactly, but the expression of a woman who has just heard a floorboard answer back. She does not ask whether I…
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2209: The Liturgy
Liturgy number 07 Dead Men Don’t Drown “Liturgy for the Sea That Refused”(for the man who became paper, and the wave that said no) I. The Reduction of a Man to PaperThey gave you a file.Not a body.Not a burial.Not the salt-scoured bonesthe sea should have surrenderedafter the proper amount of grieving. They gave you…
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1609: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #6 (catch-up with all episodes here) The next morning I take the spaniels’ silence in hand to the local history room above the museum, not because I have never heard of Love Dogs, but because family knowledge is a slippery thing and I want paper beneath it. A volunteer with hair…
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1509: The Liturgy
Liturgy for the Proof in the Photograph(for the moment the past confirms what you thought) I. The Search Through the Silent FacesYou spread them out like evidence;photographs that have waited in drawers,their corners curled, their colours fading,their smiles fixed in a time you never lived. You are not looking for memories,but proof.A face. A shadow…
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1409: A Six – SSC&B Alcove
The Alcove #3 Strikethrough Salisbury District Hospital; Wednesday; rain crawls streaks down the sky window; TV on mute the TV mutters silently; the medicine trolley rattles in the hallway beyond the door; my tea cools beside his cloudy juice; he says everything the air tastes metallic of foil; the oximeter pops slips from his finger; alarms set the room complaining, and oh how we laugh. He…
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0909: A Six – SSC&B Alcove
The Alcove: Strikethrough two on the fence, one grey squirrel motionless, an the other — its tail a rudder steering through speed, crimped and flagging semaphores messages; a spiderweb at the window, delicate as Brugge lace, a breeze inflicting coaxing teasing a minute tremor through its lattices; autumn arrived two months early, as though woollen socks had some private grievance against summer the world had grown impatient with…
