Heeled Sandals

by Naomi Washer

(She may be married now, but I still can’t see her as a wife.) Underneath a similar skin, our sisterblood runs through veins visible between shoe straps, but I prefer flats. As she comes to the door she falters — slips slightly on the rain-soaked front step — and quickly grasps the door frame. Her rings make a tiny clink against the wood. For all her youthfulness, in this brief moment I have watched her age. Briefly, she is an old woman, with fragile wrists and ankles — defiant, proud, and married — but never a wife.

6S

Naomi Washer is pursuing a B.A. in Dance from Bennington College, where she also studies writing and social sciences. (She likes that when spoken out loud, "6S" sounds like "success.") Her writing can be found here.

Oh Jesus

by Chloe Caldwell

This morning my three year old cousin dropped his cup of apple juice and spilled it all over the green ottoman. "Oh Jesus," he said. I cringed and cracked up, because his inflection showed that he got that from me and I knew that I got it from my ex-lover. "Oh Jesus, are you kidding me with those tits?" or "Oh Jesus, your pussy is so tight." Those were my favorites. How badly I wished I were fucking instead of refilling a sippy cup.

6S

Chloe Caldwell is a writer living in Seattle, WA. Her first published piece can be read here.

Winter

by Harry B. Sanderford

An untended Ferris wheel turns slowly against a smoke streaked sunset. The tattered sails of beached sailing ships wave cheerless gray and brown party flags over soldiers of every stripe. Ragged throngs too weary to separate by uniform sit on their helmets rolling tobacco or passing unlabeled bottles, the bitter local spoils of a global contest no longer possible to score. Some drink greedily thankful for another day, others drink just as fiercely regretting the very same thing. One soldier considers a childhood memory of snow falling on a boardwalk that no longer exists. The snow he knows will still fall, but this cannot be my life he thinks, to melt into a puddle, swirling in the gutter like so much dirty snow.

6S

Harry B. Sanderford, author of Bananas, is a Central Florida surfing cowboy who'd sooner spin yarns than mend fences.

Forever Loving Blues

by James Vest

My face transitioned from autumn’s fevered leaves to the silent, angelic pale of winter’s loss. I found you in the trash, this old photograph, a picture of you I had made my own, and put alongside my family and our smiling faces, and we loved you. This tiny still is all that remains of ourselves, our colossal portraits since taken down, replaced with piles of miniature snapshots, black and white memories unframed, heavy in its collective weight, edges worn from handling, details fogged by time. All I have left is this image, haunted by the specter of embarrassment, and emotion’s wasted effort, like the unread novelist, whose belittled words were buried in long, silent rows. And you in my hands again, I can see my warm, slow breaths drop frozen from the air, kisses falling short, vanishing along with the whispers of things I have already said, failing to breathe life back into your mystery. I left you there among the rubbish alone, hoping the season’s first snow would be the official end of a very long and treacherous fall.

6S

James Vest is a writer and artist based in Chicago.

The Kitten

by Juliet Cook

A laugh track inexplicably punctuated with hisses is like a vampire-fanged kitten. Those are the only teeth it has. The Rape-aXe is inserted like a female condom. It has inward-facing barbs. Don’t worry it can’t turn inside out, which is probably why the audience isn’t laughing now. Don’t worry this is just a warm up routine for a whole litany of foreign objects.

6S

Juliet Cook's poetry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Abjective, Action Yes, Diagram, Diode, Oranges & Sardines, Robot Melon and many other online and print sources. Feel free to visit her website here.

So Many Things Happened Last Night

by Matthew Mahaney

I started to forget the idea I had about the plastic city. A city made entirely of plastic. I forgot what I was going to call it, which meant that I also forgot what the people living there would be called. I couldn’t remember whether it would be land-locked or on the ocean. I even forgot the things I hadn’t decided on yet, like how many people it would hold. Whether the animals would stay away, and if not, where they would sleep.

6S

Matthew Mahaney is currently in the MFA program at The University of Alabama, and editor of the online magazine Double Shiny.

Six Geese a Laying

Happy Holidays from 6S!



6S

Six Sentences wishes you a very happy holiday season!

Penmanship

by Janet Dale

Not minding the stares or smudges, she’s going to fill a notebook with your name, written with twelve different pens. The black ink will swirl up to create your ‘A’ and trail back down moving into your ‘L’. She will write until her left hand performs the same sequence of letters perfectly – next she’s going to repeat the cycle in a different notebook with twelve more pens, but with her right hand instead. Suddenly she will stop and consider placing your last name behind her first. But her eyes will pop open as she remembers -- I don’t believe in things like love or marriage. Still every time she writes your name, she hopes you think of her just the same.

6S

Janet Dale, who blogs here, now holds a B.A. in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Memphis. Her favorite yoga pose is Savasana (because that's what graduate school applications make her feel like).

Hindsight

by Samantha Tetangco

At the end of his life, Charles knew one thing: he shouldn’t have painted his house green. Then maybe he would’ve known what to say that early April morning when the robin’s nest fell from the tree and his wife cried, large beads of wet salt dripping from her dimpled chin. For weeks, she’d stared into the sky, watching its rise and fall with a stoic silence he didn’t try to understand. Charles should have looked at her instead of the way the house blended with the loping pines. He should have wondered about her instead of whether it would have been better in eggshell white. He should have said “I’m sorry” instead of “what is it now?”

6S

Samantha Tetangco spent most of her life living in California but is currently working towards her MFA in Fiction at the University of New Mexico. She edits Blue Mesa Review.

Dying for a Cigarette

by Rod Drake

She arrived for our meeting fashionably late, as was Faith’s way, at a Starbucks, so everything would be public and witnessed, if that’s a word. She was breathtaking, as always, the source of her power, and now four months after marrying me, Faith intends to take at least half of my considerable fortune in our divorce. The divorce she filed for, charging mental cruelty and neglect, after she had affairs with the pool boy, tennis coach and who knows how many others on my payroll. Faith sits, crossing her long legs exquisitely in the short skirt, notices me smoking and asks for a cigarette, just like I had hoped, so I push the pack across the table to her. I light it for her, good manners to the end, and Faith tells me that as soon as the divorce papers are final, she is flying to Europe for a long vacation, meeting a young count on the Riviera, so would I please sign them and let her get on with her life. I tell her I already have, Faith kisses me on the cheek gratefully, gets up and waves goodbye with her nearly gone cigarette in hand, all the untraceable and lethal poison now in her system, her two days or so of unimaginable and incurable agony soon to begin; I toss the pack of poisoned cigarettes into the garbage as I leave, humming a happy tune.

6S

Rod Drake believes in the law of karma.

Regret

by Tim Austin

I remember how she laughed. I loved to watch her that way, so I did what I could to make sure she was always laughing. It was the part of her that was never colored by self doubt or the pain she had lived through, and it washed away the sadness she tried to hide in her eyes. That was when she was the most beautiful, and when everything else that held importance in my life fell away. That’s when I was the happiest. Those were my best moments.

6S

Tim Austin lives in Fairhaven, Michigan, and likes to try his hand at writing when he can. More of his writing can be found here.

A Picture and a Name

by Matthew A. Hamilton

All I had to go on was a picture and a name. She was last seen wearing baggy sweat pants and a Carolina Panther’s jacket. She was a sixteen year old runaway, missing for three months. When I found her, life on the street had made its mark and it was hard to tell if it was really her. Her branch-like fingers seemed to reach for my hand and as I made the call to tell them that I had found Michelle, her hobgoblin eyes, hollow and dark and mysterious, seemed to ask me why it took me so long to find her. It was my fourth murder case inside a month.

6S

Matthew A. Hamilton is a US Peace Corps volunteer serving in the Philippines. He plans to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing.

Will You Marry Me? (Just Kidding)

by Randy Conner

The other day, and by that I mean fucking Tuesday, I was brushing my teeth quite violently. I made my gums bleed and, after admiring my shiny, red grin, I spit onto the mirror. It made my face look as though I had been involved in a semi-serious car accident, and this made me chuckle. I stopped chuckling, because for some reason this reminded me of your twentieth birthday. I remember going through a lot of trouble to take you to an expensive restaurant for a romantic dinner. I was unaware that you still had the semen of your ex-boyfriend inside you, fresh from the night before.

6S

Randy Conner would like to be your imaginary friend. He lives in Dayton, Ohio and blogs here.

First-Time Winner

by Liza Wyles

She came home with two fish in a bag, named them Goldie and Rainbow, and promised to give them a life better than the one they had at the Orange County Fair. Mom put them in a plastic take-out container, re-washing it make sure there were no traces of wonton soup, and poked five holes in the lid before sealing it shut, but her daughter had different plans; she was going to take them to the brook and set them free. She hummed the theme to E.T. as she made her way past the border where the cut lawn meets the tall grass, over the low stone wall, through the ferns at the mouth of the woods, into the buzz of the cicadas and onto the trail where she once saw a salamander with a smashed head. Crouching down next to mossy rock sunk halfway in, she opened the lid and dipped her hand in the container so the fish could kiss her goodbye, then dipped the finger into the brook - the water colder and grittier, but it was nature, and that is where Goldie and Rainbow needed to be, as their puckered mouths seemed to say to her when she tilted the container and poured them out with the stream of tap water. They swirled and bumped into each other before the current found them and pushed them away from her; they would be dead in minutes, but not before they had lived freely as goldfish. She felt better about that, and about her ring toss skills; next time, she’d try for the tree frog.

6S

Liza Wyles writes, directs and produces commercials in New York City and is looking forward to undertaking projects that last longer than 30 seconds.

Cookie Party

by Louise Krug

We went to a place that had food in baskets. He was in jail for drunk driving but he could leave for an hour if somebody signed him out. He said the food was shitty. I wanted a cigarette, but he said he couldn't smell them or else he would want alcohol and then probably break another law. On the drive back, he said he wanted to stop at a place for ice cream so we sat in the parking lot as he ate his cone. It had not been the highlight of his week, he said years later, and then handed me an invitation to his wife’s cookie party.

6S

Louise Krug has been published in elimae and Glossolalia, and has forthcoming pieces in Everyday Genius and Emprise Review.

Farmhouse

by Timothy Sullivan

There was this one farmhouse in Belgium we hit really hard. When the shooting stopped and we went inside, we found them all dead, and there was blood all over the walls. My guys were dragging the bodies out to the yard when a captain came in. "Sergeant," he said, "get these walls washed down for me; I want to use this place as HQ." Well I said to him, "Captain, I'll kill these German bastards for you, but I'll be damned if I'm going to clean up after them." And with that I walked out, taking my guys with me.

6S

Timothy Sullivan is a journalist from New York. He's the author of "Unequal Verdicts" (Simon & Schuster, 1992) and a former senior correspondent for Court TV. More of his writing can be found on his website.

Peanut Butter

by Nadia Nizamudin

Our relationship started out as a snack. First date: it was a meal only fit for a homeless person; over the years, we have thickened to the consistency of peanut butter. I am sure, as you do, that the stickiness is only because we trust each other and not despite it. Sometimes we step on the map of cuisine and got a taste of something that is best described as raw, and spicy - hot like my temper (of course, you say, because I am Asian). Our lovemaking is a feast of sweetness, of flaky, ‘I-know-you-so-well’ pastries where we burn calories just as dedicated, coming back again to the peanut butter. Oh yes, we love the peanut butter: at night, in front of the television, feet tucked under pillows, we snack on peanut butter while the city outside goes by in reckless abandon.

6S

Nadia Nizamudin gets her ideas from overhead conversations, during office meetings, and most importantly in her daily one hour train commute to work. She prefers writing short stories as opposed to a whole novel, citing "lack of stamina and focus" to complete one.

Bus Stop Blues

by Astrid Lydia Johannsen

The bus to the Daley Center was running late as it pulled up to the curb. I waited at the bus stop next to a fella leaning against the sign with his head down and looking, well, kinda blue like he’d been waiting there forever. The driver opened the door and said that I could get on, but the “blue-skinned son of a bitch” behind me would have to walk. I stepped back and let the blue fella climb aboard before me, which pissed off the driver something fierce. The driver cursed and pulled away from the curb, knowing he was already running late, as the blue fella sat down at the front of the bus and nodded at me. Hopefully that meant “thanks.”

6S

Astrid Lydia Johannsen lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she plays and shoots photography in the outdoors, and writes and draws pictures in the indoors. Check out her creative morsels here.

Rocky Flats

by Shannon Peil

The dust covering this old, forgotten dictionary could have choked me if I hadn't been wearing my respirator. I looked around and everyone was wandering away, making scraping noises with their plastic covered boots against the tiles. Opening this dictionary, flipping to a random page, I closed my eyes and ran my index finger to a random word. I exhaled deeply and the sweat dripped from my eyes, breath fogging up the inside of my plastic face-cage. 'Asbestosis,' it said, deliberately, coldly. At this moment, standing alone in a closed-down nuclear weapons facility, holding my dictionary, wearing my respirator, I believed in God for just a second.

6S

Shannon Peil runs amphibi.us for kicks and hopes the DoE isn't mad about this one.

Residues

by James Adams Smith

Today I bought a can of WD-40, the smaller size, but now they come in these two-for-one packs, bound together with plastic. I fit the red straw down into the crevice, let the nozzle go, flood the space behind the light-switch of my son's 1994 Oldsmobile. They said it was the coffee he spilled, the sticky residue from sugar substitute. One press of the switch, turn of the key, and the headlights are on now, on and useless. People who drive with their lights on in the daytime use to really bug me. But I'm doing it now, lights on, driving, realizing there's nothing this second can could ever fix.

6S

James Adams Smith is a student of literary studies and journalism at the University of Delaware. A native of the Deep South, Smith has lived in a Texas trailer park, a Baptist church, a Hurricane Katrina shelter, and a brandy farm in Romania. He is currently writing a memoir.

April

by Elizabeth Joyner

The air was thick with the smell of mold, and the heat left our temples drenched. My shirt clenched to the lowest portions of my back, and when I leaned in closer to you it felt like someone was ripping tape off my spine. We sat on the back porch, above the bog. You played the harmonica for me, the music ceasing only when you took a sip from your thirty ounce Budweiser. I wore my straw cowboy hat, sitting across from you. The southern girl in me thought it the perfect foreplay to a relationship's end.

6S

Elizabeth Joyner, author of The Shower State, is an English major. She lives in Orlando.

My Metaphysical Evolution

by Mike Donkin

When I was four, on a long car trip to eastern Ohio to visit my father’s sister, I was reported to have proclaimed (perhaps with the contemplative wonderment of Sir Isaac Newton upon having his epiphany under the apple tree) that “when you touch it, it gets hard,” thereby causing my mother to find her son proudly brandishing his little prick in the backseat. Again, at the age of four, in nursery school, I looked about me and saw the other children’s eyes and considered the color lesson Ms. Lathan was teaching, and mused to myself that even though we all have the same word for the color red, it’s possible that what I see as red is something completely different than someone else’s idea of red; but, to my dismay, I was impotent to penetrate any of the other children’s minds, and thus had no choice but to concede, as did Descartes, that my consciousness was the only consciousness I could ever know. At the age of five I was blown away when Aunt Ruby, responding to my query of whether her penis sometimes hurt when she got soap in it, explained, with a thick Mandarin accent, that “girls have vaginas, not penises!” — and it occurred to me that all the women’s bushes I had seen previously contained no penises and that my subconscious mind had been placing them there as if to play a trick on me, or perhaps out of fear that I might die of shock. At age twelve, I would discover, quite by accident, that fervent rubbing of the penis would eventually produce orgasm, and with considerable guilt I wondered if I was the only person in my grade who knew this simple truth. A few months later I would declare to my seventh grade friends—some of whom had been masturbating for years — that mankind’s chief motivation in the world was, and always has been, sex. At the age of nineteen, during a contemplative walk, I reached a fork in the road, and it dawned on me that by defying my inclination to go right, rather than left, I was not exercising free will at all, and that everything I chose to do—as well as everything that had ever happened—was merely the effect of all the causes that had come before it; but in order for this notion to make sense, it had to necessarily follow that there had been a first cause, at which point I was reminded of something that had begun to confound me when I was very young, and that was the problem of infinity, which, no matter how hard I would strain, I could just never seem to reconcile; and I realized then how far I had come.

6S

Mike Donkin occasionally throws coffee in the faces of friends. He is 24 years old.

How I'll Meet My Wife

by Kea Wilson

I don't think a roofie will quite do it. I need to slip you one of those Alice in Wonderland pills, cage you against the bar in my closed fist. I'll whisper to you on the taxi ride home, carry you across the threshold like it's our goddamned wedding night, slipped into my shirt pocket like a love letter. In the morning, you won't be ashamed or call the cops. You'll remember your body in the throat of a linen flower, my heartbeat like the inside of a sonic boom. You couldn't help but love me then.

6S

Kea Wilson is a kinda-writer who keeps a blog of tiny fictions here (and she'd adore you forever for checking it out). She is from Cleveland, OH (and also Interlochen, MI, but Annapolis, MD right now and Santa Fe and Barcelona before).

What Use Are Pregnancy Hormones?

by Rebecca Jane

Re-deployed troops, the expecting woman cries for you. Warmonger politicians, the woman carrying the unborn child weeps every time you cast a vote. CO2 emissions, the woman with the ballooning womb snivels wherever you leak. Trash strewn on the stairs of the subway entrance at 34th Street and 7th Avenue, you make a pregnant woman howl with grief. And when Mommy-to-be overheard the national public radio broadcasting its Spring Membership Drive in her right ear while the man on the street shouted "help feed the homeless" in her left ear, she whimpered then sobbed then wailed. If this knocked-up feme covert had a dollar for every tear she dropped, this pregnant woman would be able to fund the next winning president's campaign, the next Hollywood blockbuster film, and the next military occupations of all hot-blooded and undemocratic planets in the universe!

6S

Rebecca Jane, author of Spoken Like an Ancient, writes fiction to stay out of trouble. She always grins. She sometimes fails. She never squeals.

In the Mirror

by Kevin Jones

The two of them, unbeknownst to each other, had been sitting side by side, hitting hard on a bottle of something brown and for sure the call brand. When the bottle they had jointly polished off was removed, a portion of mirror was exposed that had not been exposed before. The faces they saw were not their own but each other’s. Within the hour, sperm had hit its mark, which is how fate sometimes works in collaboration with alcohol. And for this I am lucky, I guess, for it is how I came to exist. Or so I’ve been told.

6S

Kevin Jones is a writer living in the middle of Texas.

You Can’t Surf Lake Michigan

by Thomas Mundt

It’s a Saturday morning in late November and Luis is sick of sitting in his Clark Street office. He hates the way the view from the Thirty-Sixth Floor makes Lake Michigan look like it’s just a big blue brushstroke filling in the gap between Chicago and Northwest Indiana; he can’t stand that the Lake’s only real to Art Institute kids with tight pants and black glasses scrambling to complete long-procrastinated photography assignments. So, he logs out of his computer, dumps his near-frozen coffee in the sink, and takes the elevator to the Twenty-Second Floor, where they keep the extra building supplies. There he helps himself to a large, oblong sheet of particle board and tucks it under his arm as he makes for the building’s exit. Then he gets in his Acura and drives up Lake Shore Drive to a Billy Joel song that used to nauseate him but today calms his stomach like it’s mint tea. Then he exits at Montrose Harbor and discovers rather quickly that you can’t surf Lake Michigan because there aren’t any waves and a man standing on a piece of particle board just sinks and sinks until his slacks and loafers are ruined.

6S

Thomas Mundt lives in Chicago. His meager catalogue is being not-so-meticulously assembled for your convenience here.

Windemere Road

by Heidi Marshall

Yesterday I lost my footing on ice that looked like the bubbled sheet candy I made in the 7th grade. It was a side-long, graceful ballet move. At least that's what I'd like to think. Ribs hit first and then my head smacked icy ground. The impact brought a sudden awareness to the design and density of my skull and how it insulates a river of memories. The smooth clear ones that like to flow over slate-colored pebbles and the muddy ones that slide beneath the tease of dark branches.

6S

Heidi Marshall teaches literature and creative writing at North Central Michigan College. She also scripts documentaries and paints landscapes and the figure.

The Day After the Good Day

by Lauren Becker

He said he would call tomorrow, which is today and today he said he will call tomorrow. Though he liked me for eight hours yesterday, today's clock pities me. I was wrong to think he could not backpedal so soon. I am a dirty towel, used deodorant, stale bread, an abandoned pit bull, drugstore perfume, Styrofoam. I thought I had some time to hide behind my hair. When he held my hand, I forgot the last time I bought into a pretty scam, paying all I had for a vacation time share built on a swamp.

6S

Lauren Becker works in public affairs in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in Word Riot and DOGZPLOT, and will appear in mud luscious. She was tempted to make her bio longer than her story, but decided to behave like a grown-up.

Cat

by N. God Savage

My cat died today, and I whisper it to myself in schoolboy French: Aujourd'hui, mon chat est mort. I assume he died today, but I suppose it could have been yesterday or the day before: he has been missing for a while. I came home to find a note stuffed through my letterbox, its crumpled tail protruding like washed-out paper petals. It read: "cat dead / remains are in lane behind number 42 / you should probably clean it up / bring a shovel." That cat was the only thing tying me to this city. Without it, I am free.

6S

N. God Savage is a writer and philosopher from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Links to his blogs can be found here.

While the Captors Are Away

by Joe Celizic

Outside, the silver, gray and white city buildings all jut up and down between the streets like teeth. It’s curious how much more you can see up here, just six stories up, like you’ve transcended a moment of time and space. You see the way people shrink and become part of a collective movement. They are punctuation, they are mitochondria, and their deaths don’t matter. Cars drift slowly atop the gray lines, straight and steady, predetermined by the author of the roads. And this is the truth of who you are: a kidnapped girl.

6S

Joe Celizic, a Pushcart Prize nominee, received an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University, where he also worked as the prose editor for Mid-American Review. His work has been published in Skive Magazine and Fiction Weekly, and more is forthcoming in PANK and Southpaw Journal.

An Honest Mistake

by Rachel Sparks

Once upon a time, far away and long ago, there were two sisters: one fair, the other dark. As so many do, they grew up and grew apart. The fair sister got her Ph.D. from Yale and her Juris Doctor from Harvard; the dark sister got her black eye from the corner drug dealer and her broken arm from her loving boyfriend. One day, there was a terrible accident but Gabriel, who has become quite forgetful in his old age, got the two sisters' souls mixed up. It would be reported on the front page of the State Newspaper the next day how a coked out prostitute had miraculously survived a collision with a Land Rover going 40MPH without so much as a scratch as she crossed the street and would live happily ever after surrounded by her adoring children and helpful friends; buried deep on the last page of the Country Chronicle was a blurb about a local attorney who had incurred massive unexplained internal injuries and died alone at Good Samaritan Hospital that same night. So you see child, you must cherish your sister, for though you grow up and grow apart, you will always be connected.

6S

Rachel Sparks is a law school applicant by day and a LOST connoisseur by night. She also keeps a blog.