Category: Six Sentence Story
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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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200125: Six Sentence Story

Dancing with Lions — Part 2 Brigid arrived home from the Six Sentence Café and Bistro in a rainstorm designed by and for fish; the gin was still amusing her, but even so it was an impressively Dickensian squall. She went straight to the kitchen, reached for a frosted mug, dropped in two scoops of…
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1301: Six Sentence Story

Dancing with Lions She anchors her black stiletto heel to the bar stool; the ritual wait for a man that doesn’t exist, polishing the fantasy of him until it shines. A muffled laugh works loose, a private rebellion echoing in her throat — the kind you make when a voice you invent leans in and…
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1201: The Voice, A Six Liturgy

A Liturgy for the Hollow & the Heel The Invocation This is the hook on the polished stool,the calling of lacquered lightand murmuring ghosts. This is not emptiness,this is a chamber.The Bistro.The Stiletto.The Anchor.The Hook of the Night. The Invented Whisper. Of Anchors and Architecture This is sacred geometry.This is waiting.The black heel,the spike of…
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0701: A Six Sentence Story

Clinging to Small Solid Facts in Six Sentences We talk about Venezuela, as if naming it might steady the water, and I drift in the jacuzzi like a bubble, briefly convinced of my own shape. I mention that Einstein had flat feet — facts don’t ask questions because saying something solid feels like ballast against…
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05.01: A Liturgy for a Bubble

A Liturgy for the Bubble in a Current Once upon a time We gathered at water’s edge,in a jacuzzi between the spokenand the dissolved. We knew when a metaphor was not a metaphor,but a bubble wearing a skin of air, and we spoke to the Brief Republic,the Spinning Borders,the diamond thinning to memory.We called it…
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30.12: Six Sentence Story

It Sings at Night At dusk, on the edge of a pond bordered by palms and deciduous trees that have forgotten how to lose their leaves, a call rises only at night that sounds like a woodpecker at work. There are, however, no woodpeckers in the forest of Anapoima, Colombia. This is a goatsucker; a…