I Know I Can Do This

by Daniel Davis

As an emergency room MD who moonlights as a volunteer fireman and claims base jumping and extreme Sudoku as favorite hobbies, I’ve faced many challenges in my life, and have overcome numerous obstacles, but none so daunting as the latest hurdle – a requirement to write an entire story in just six sentences. Day and night for weeks, during every spare minute, I pounded my keyboard – and occasionally my head – in vain attempts at achieving completion in exactly six sentences, but the closest I could come was one story of five sentences and another of seven sentences, and the only tangible result was that my wife left me, and took the dog with her. Then, in the deep of one night’s wee hours, and after too much alcohol, too little food, and no sleep, a moment of desperation drove me to extract one sentence – chosen by closing my eyes and stabbing a finger onto the screen – from my seven-sentence story, and plop in randomly into my five-sentence story. I now had not one, but two six-sentence stories under my belt, and even though neither story made any sense, the requirement was to write a six-sentence story, not necessarily a rational six-sentence story. So did I meet the requirement? I’d say yes.

6S

Daniel Davis is a retired technical writer with two published short stories, a pile of unpublished stories, and the requisite unpublished novel.