Blind Justice

by Brad Rose

In my sleep mask, I’m thinking about you. About how you said they’d never find the kid’s body. I told you to wait in the car. If you were here now, I’d tell you something: the polygraph lied about one of us. Don’t worry. When I get out, I’m going to look you up.

6S

Brad Rose's website is here.

Mostly Water

by Carly Migliore

My science teacher says I’m mostly water. I don’t think she’s right though, cuz if I’m made of water, then why don’t I go down the drain in the tub? When it rains how come I don’t wash away to the river? I wish she was right, but I just don’t think she is. But maybe it is true though, because if I’m not mostly water then why do these stupid drops keep leaking from my eyes? I can feel the water busting through my body and breaking it to pieces and I can stand here and cry in this stupid rain because I know when the sun comes back, I’ll get to fly.  

6S  

Carly Migliore lives in Maine and is trying hard to never grow up. (So far, so good.)

Friday Night Dates

by Estrella Azul

When he offered to walk her home, she agreed without showing her eagerness, distracting him as they kissed passionately in the cab all the way to her apartment. After she invited him in, she poured a glass of wine, in the blink of an eye sat in his lap, kissed him with desire and continued down on his neck. A flash of fangs and one bite was sufficient. It was still early. She graciously stepped over his bloodless body, glanced at the beautiful black dress’s reflection in the mirror, adjusted a few creases and left to wait for her next date in front of the flat. The weekend repeatedly turned out to be her favorite time of the week; lonely gentlemen were the most desperate to have a date on Friday night.

6S

Estrella Azul's six was first published here on March 9, 2010. Her bio described her as a young emerging writer, passionate about reading, floral art and photography, with an artistic personality and a soulful outlook on life. Her blog survives, and may be calling her back soon to share her talents.

Vicious Cycles

by Tom Vanderbilt

A study looking at scholastic chess tournaments found that when female players played male players, they seemed to underperform. As the researchers wrote, "Girls lose to boys at a rate that cannot be explained in terms of initial rating strength." The reason, they hypothesized, is the phenomenon of "stereotype threat:" female players were battling not only male opponents but the perception that they weren't as good. What's more, female players who didn't do as well as their rating would predict played in fewer tournaments the next year - an effect not seen in boys. Life was going to be full of these vicious cycles, I reasoned. Let us tackle them head-on, right now.

6S

Tom Vanderbilt's six sentences are excerpted from Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning, which in part describes his experience learning chess alongside his four-year-old daughter.

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.

Lila Darling

by Alun Williams

She wore a red dress, made from a material that I guessed was plutonium because it had explosive quality and literally blew the room away. It was softer than scarlet, clung on like a limpet, laid on her bare shoulders like a cascading transparent pinky red wrap, draped over her back like an Amazonian waterfall. Adding to this elegance was the fact she wore snow white elbow length gloves and a three tier string of opaque pearls around her slim neck, same as Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany's. She had red hair, flaming dark red that some lucky hairdresser had probably touched some hours earlier and who now I pictured crying because he’d touched heaven and now only faced hell. Every so often she would drop her head to the side and muse on some old guy’s poor taste joke and smile at him and make him happy. That was the first time I met Lila Darling.

6S

Alun Williams lives in Wales. He writes in Critters Bar and Zoetrope under "maxie slim" and "Maxwell Allen." Several shorts by Alun have been published in Write Side Up, Cambrensis and Secret Attic.

Texas: A Love Story

by Ryan Ridge

She went looking for love. Got lost. Ended up in Texas. Afterwards: law school. Later, she became a public defender in Dallas and saved two innocent men from the electric chair. If that’s not love, what is?

6S

Ryan Ridge is an English instructor whose work has appeared in 5_Trope and Salt Hill.

An Easy Life

by Vigdis Hjorth

"If you want an easy life," he said, "all you have to do is make yourself insignificant. Believe in one thing today, another tomorrow and something completely different by the end of the week. Turn yourself into several people and parcel yourself out. Have one anonymous opinion and another in your own name, one spoken, one written, one in the Internet, another in the shop and a third as a lover, yet another as a PR consultant, or as a private individual. And then all your trouble will go away, you'll see." I closed my eyes, but to no avail, I started to cry.

6S

Vigdis Hjorth is a Norwegian novelist. Her six sentences are excerpted from Long Live the Post Horn!

How To Remember A Superstar

by Samuel Berman

The bath overflowed while I was reading on my phone. Another great wonder of the world had passed on, sadly. This one really had me shook- really had me shaking. So, the girlfriend who won’t stop stepping out on me tries for comfort, pulling me in. “It’s really going to be okay,” she says, patting her hand against my wet hair. “Do you want to get a tattoo, something real that you can remember him by?”

6S

Samuel Berman is a short story writer who lives in Idaho and works in a warehouse with Bill & Whitney. They are terrific coworkers.

The Embers

by Leon Jackson Davenport

What will I remember about you, now that the fire of our love has burned out and the embers are cold? I will remember only the good times; when we walked in a field blooming with sun yellow daisies; the winter picnic at the beach (we had to stop on the way home for a snifter of cognac, to quiet the deep chill in our bones); our trip to D.C.; your smile and wit and finding someone that appreciated Kurt Vonnegut as much as I. You, I fear, will remember only the bad; our arguments and revelations (“...it will be difficult,” you said, “but yes, I can love a Cubs fan...”). I am bewildered as to how someone that professed to love me more than her own life could become a stranger - I’ve come to believe our love wasn’t real, it was only a mist of memories that disappeared, like you from my bed, when the sun came up. Today, when I saw you exchange a kiss with an old, ex-friend, I understood. For you the moment was real, it was only the moment, no future or past, only the now, where you live: no matter, I’ll keep the memories, I’ll cherish the past, because for me that made it real.

6S

Leon Jackson Davenport, an occasional short story writer, lives in New Jersey but enjoys thinking about being somewhere else.

Qu’est-ce que c’est, Psychokiller?

by Jack Leonard

You’re not going to like this; no-one does. It’s the brain spattered hammer in the hand and that moment of realisation. That stupid, pleading look in their eyes. As if I could explain their meaningless existences and equally pointless deaths. People like a 'round trip;' make something out of nothing. Truth is forged with the hammer blow; nothing begets nothing.

6S

Jack Leonard lives in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, with his wife and two daughters where he runs nature-connection services and writing workshops in the great outdoors. He has lived in other places too but mainly inside his own head. Writing is a way of stopping it from getting too crowded in there. His first published work, Dark Inscription, is available on Kindle. For more, stop by The Lighthouse at the End of the World.

Learning to be Happy

by Trevor Mcpherson

The three schizophrenic men were, to my juvenile eyes, nothing more or less than nicotine stained Muppets. Slouching, wrinkled, giggling, and talking to themselves as much as amongst themselves, they were more interesting than TV. Growing up in a small town, the need to amuse oneself was a necessity, and these three were my early role models. As per my unfortunately unbalanced mentors, all one required was a comfortable chair, coffee, cigarettes, and a rumpled sport coat. Lacking a mental illness I've had to rely on imagination. It has been considerably more difficult, but no less rewarding.

6S

Trevor Mcpherson thinks Six Sentences is the perfect outlet for people with short attention spa- Hey look! An ice cream truck!

Revelation

by Mary Pfeiffer

From across the room the first time he was there, she noticed only how the white shirt darkened his bronze arms and black hair; the next time, he was wearing corduroy trousers and he had a square jaw. Gradually, she discovered that the shadow of his beard that outlined the lower half of his face even when he was fresh shaven annoyed her, making her think he would have made an excellent example of the man who used the “other brand” of razor. His quick, firm walk declared a strength beneath his hard skin. She noticed there was something in his clean rugged looks, in his vivid personality, in the smile that played at the corner of his mouth, that exercised a lively influence of friendliness over those in any group he joined. It was after she knew him well, had memorized and catalogued each feature of his wiry frame that she found his eyes. Hidden under bushy brows and dark lashes too long for a man, their blue intensity drew her into his very soul.

6S

Mary Pfeiffer resides in Texas, living in Walter Middy dreams where she entertains readers with her words. In real time, she teaches writing and needs to complete her own assignments.

Goat Boy’s Enquiry

by Brad Rose

Out here, among the lonely trees, I’m taking inventory and rounding off the square numbers to the nearest Dewey decimal point. Beneath a hundred-story sky, nothing is forbidden, although there aren’t enough mummies to satisfy the dead. Don’t you love the elated wind? Cupid’s bite is much bigger than his bark. It’s his fashion statement. “Are you kidding me?” enquired Goat Boy.

6S

Brad Rose's website is here.

On Meeting My Future Self

by Edd Howarth

During my childhood, on the cool, star-sprinkled summer night of the village fair, an old gypsy lady held my palm and told me that, one day, I'd meet my future self, and I'd kill him. Granted, it was a strange thing for an old gypsy woman to say to a young boy, and I never gave it much stock until yesterday when, while waiting on a bench at Piccadilly Station, working steadily through a pack of Marlboro, I faced a man who just had to be my future self. His appearance was softer, greyer; body bent with the weight of age, wrapped up tight in a worn Anorak with one hand pressed to his throat; but beneath the fog of age the familiar features, the bent nose, the razor-scar nicked into the chin, the slight scowling expression, pierced through. I barely had time to think before the overhead clock chimed in a new train, and the future me was up and hobbling across the stone floor to the gate, still holding his neck, like those tobacco-mudded fingers were the only things keeping his head and body together. In the end I panicked, and I think that's what annoyed him: me grabbing his sleeve, yelling about being him from past, and dropping my cigarette and stooping to pick it up while his eyes lingered on the smoke and his hand tightened around his throat, giving me that one angry wheeze before storming off. My future self departed into a swish of coats and baggage, and I stood there knowing I'd missed the most important opportunity of my life.

6S

Edd Howarth obtained his BA in English and Creative Writing from The University of Plymouth, and his MA in both at Longwood University.

Solo

by Tim Wilkins

I hit the first red light on the way to work and spend the time gazing at the passenger seat of the car I’ve had for almost a year now, and I begin to notice the virginity of the seat beside my own. The padding is still solid and supportive, and no creases are visible in the leather. The floor mats are spotless. It’s a shame that I’m wasting this other seat; I’m sure somewhere there is someone who needs an extra seat in their car. I wonder if they sell cars with just one seat. Maybe I should get a bicycle.

6S

Tim Wilkins is a pre-service teacher from the Midwest. He blogs here.

First Date

by Andrew Morgan

Her luck might be changing. True, he hadn't said too much all night, and yes, he basically looked like all her old, dead weights. Granted. And to make matters worse, he was a little too hung up on the church for her liking but she supposed concessions had to be made, because in this day and age, it was becoming impossible to find that special someone. Her up-do squirmed uncomfortably, restless and unnerved by this evening's awkward small talk. She smiled nervously while tucking a stray cobra behind her ear and secretly wondered if this gargoyle even had a car.

6S

Andrew Morgan - who lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario - loves being a makeup artist, though secretly wishes he could trade his Diorshow mascara for a publication credit.

You Have No Messages

by Rashmi Vaish

Icy cold panic gripped his heart and clung to his insides like wet seaweed. He had accidentally deleted the voicemail message she’d left for him, a humdrum handful of words saying she was on her way home. He called her cell phone and it went straight to her greeting, her soft yet businesslike voice alternately making him calm and wanting to throw up and scream. Hands clammy and heart pounding, he logged into his inbox but there was no new email from her. “And there isn’t going to be, you stupid jerk,” a voice inside him cursed at him. He remembered with a dull, throbbing nausea – it was a month to the day that he had interred her ashes in the family plot.

6S

Rashmi Vaish, former newspaper journalist and urban dweller, now lives in rural northern New York state and is currently dabbling in creative writing, photography and horse riding.

My Music Teacher

by Joanne Godley

My fourth-grade music teacher was a tall, grim-faced man who enforced strict rules about how we were to sit in our seats during class and how we were to sing. If he caught you touching the back of your chair with your shoulders or mouthing the words to a song instead of singing, you were called to the front of the room and he would either 1) grab you by the shoulders and shake you or 2) strike your outstretched hand with a paddle. Whenever a kid was punished, she cried and cried causing snot to whirl around the room, especially if she was being shaken. In those instances, I felt as though I was bearing witness to a secret torture scene and I wanted to explode. I would close my eyes and imagine my teacher shrinking down to a mere two feet in size and me expanding to six feet of snarling, growling adult mass. Then, I would stand there for a moment, towering over him, letting him feel my power, before tapping him ever so lightly with my toe, sending him flying.

6S

Joanne Godley is a Maine-based writer, poet and physician. Her six sentences are recalled from her childhood memories.

Incident at the Homeless Shelter

by Charlie Kerpen

Dennis volunteered because he felt guilty about not spending any of his free time doing anything conventionally worthwhile. He did try to help, sort of, but mostly he avoided everyone and left as early as possible. A talkative former-regular named Harold - this was Thursday I think - tried to shake Dennis's hand. Dennis couldn't hide his disgust. Very embarrassing moment. Neither of them have been back since.

6S

Charlie Kerpen has written for The Huffington Post and The Underground News.

Now That You're Here

by Jennifer Tatroe

Did you know that the olive green jacket you had, the one with the black stripe down the side, is the most popular coat in all of Seattle? Or that a hundred feet in this city wear those same ratty deck shoes I despised on you? Today, in the market, I chased after a grey hat bobbing in the crowd in front of me, after a tawny-haired ghost, after a prickle on the back of my neck. Since you left, my life has become an endless series of double-takes. Now you’re laughing. You got a new jacket.

6S

Jennifer Tatroe loves Elvis, hates olives, and is currently ambivalent about pirates. Her website is here.

Reckless Woman

by Barrie Miller Kirby

When she got home at the end of the day, after she stepped out of her car at the front of her driveway to get mail from the box, she didn’t put back on her seatbelt. She ate yogurt a day or even two past its expiration date. When she washed her hair, she ignored the instructions on the shampoo bottle to “repeat.” If she was particularly tired at night, she would go to bed without flossing her teeth. Sometimes when she had sex, she used only one form of birth control. She was not merely reckless; she was wild.

6S

Barrie Miller Kirby is a writer living in North Carolina.

My Harrison Ford

by Ottessa Moshfegh

I still needed a strong male lead. Someone in his mid-to-late forties, a kind of Harrison Ford type. I'd always thought Harrison Ford looked a bit like Walter, handsome, strong, vulnerable, and sensitive, a man with an intuitive sensibility, a mind reader of sorts, someone successful, debonair, distinguished. That kind of man could get away with anything. My Harrison Ford might be an avaricious landlord, making uncouth deals in darkened alleys or the back rooms of jazz clubs, but always with the highest moral agenda, always with a warm heart. And he'd have a posse of good-natured underlings at his beck and call.

6S

Ottessa Moshfegh is an American author. Her six sentences are excerpted from Death in Her Hands, her newest novel.

Married/Single

by Jerry Seinfeld

When I was single I had married friends. I would not visit their homes. I found their lives to be pathetic and depressing. Now that I'm married, I have no single friends. I find their lives to be meaningless and trivial experiences. In both cases, I believe I was correct.

6S

Jerry Seinfeld's six sentences, and many more, can be found in his newest book, Is This Anything?

Trying to Prove a Point

by Sean Ennis

Spent the morning unsubscribing, with the hope I might disappoint or piss someone off. The internet suggests everyone else is, like, hiking. It has been four days since I’ve taken my escitalopram and aripiprazole and I’m feeling mean. The other side effect is being flooded with every bizarre and embarrassing moment I caused or endured with every woman I’ve ever been intimate with. This is the old Catholic libido resurgent. I am not trying to prove a point.

6S

Sean Ennis is the author of CHASE US: Stories (Little A). He lives in Mississippi and more of his work can be found here.

Shared Hilarity

by Christopher Hitchens

Laughter can be the most unpleasant sound; it's an essential element in mob conduct and is part of the background noise of taunting and jeering at lynchings and executions. Very often, crowds and audiences will laugh complicitly or slavishly, just to show they "see" the joke and are all together. (The worst case here is the unfunny racist joke, requiring the least effort to trigger a laugh response. But there are also consensus comedies so awful that they require the post-Pavlovian imposition of a dubbed-in "laugh track.") It's therefore not true to say, as some optimists do, that humor is essentially subversive. It can be an appeal to the familiar and the clichéd, a source of reassurance through shared hilarity.

6S

Christopher Hitchens was an English intellectual, polemicist, and socio-political critic who expressed himself as an author, orator, essayist, journalist and columnist. His six sentences are excerpted from Letters to a Young Contrarian, published in 2001.

Phyllomancy

by Amy Barnes

Left behind tea leaves leave autumn fortunes on my white laminate, starter home countertops, green-brown veined reminders of a failed family forest. The left-me-behind starter husband drinks espresso now, pour over coffee poured by a poreless “Best Wife” mug holder with a blonde roast please mug shot he keeps prisoner on his phone screen. There’s no yoga yodeler hippy, hippier because I’ve had his three children teacup lover next to him now, just his brand-spanked-by-him new, new face, new breasts lover in their not-starter second wife house. Stacks of aqua, mint chocolate chip, verdant, grass shirts green his walk-in, live-in closet, chosen by a woman with no tree rings or tree leaves to fortune read, a palm with no lived life line like mine. I read the tea-to-me messages, listen to them speak over honking school buses and trash trucks and sapling voices begging for breakfast. Each leaf fossil whispers one last time as I scrub them, him out of the kitchen.

6S

Amy Barnes has words at a variety of sites including: FlashBack Fiction, Popshot Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, X-Ray Lit, Stymie Lit, No Contact Mag, JMMW, The Molotov Cocktail, Lucent Dreaming, Lunate Fiction, Rejection Lit, Perhappened, Cabinet of Heed, Spartan Lit, and others. She is an Associate Editor at Fractured Lit and reads for CRAFT, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, NFFD, The MacGuffin, and Narratively. Her flash collection, "Mother Figures" is forthcoming in 2021.

Alphabetical

by Kinneson Lalor

Mumma named us in alphabetical order, Abel through to Wendy, and I often wondered why she didn’t try for the whole half deck. This was before I knew any better of what it means to carry a child and why Mumma’s teeth fell among her porridge. I especially thought it when Mary fell off a horse and Harry smoked himself to cancer. But then my Adam went off to war and all that came back was his name on a telegram and I knew then that, even if I liquified my bones in a blender to go through the alphabet twice, it would make no difference. I had lost a vowel. There were words I’d never make again.

6S

Kinneson Lalor likes writing, walking, gardening, and her dog. She followed a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge with an MSt in Creative Writing from the same institution while writing her first novel, teaching mathematics, and co-founding a supercomputing start-up. She is Australian but has lived in the UK for over a decade. Her work has appeared in The Mays, Tiny Molecules, and Microfiction Monday Magazine, and she writes a regular blog about sustainable gardening for edibles and wildlife.

Ice Bridge

by Raewyn Bassett

Face down, spread-eagled, I cautiously slither forwards along the fragile, squall-sculpted ice bridge. Without warning, my feet slip sideways, hang off the jagged edge and threaten to wrench me into the crevasse below. My heart pounds, competing with the relentless cracking and thundering of ice all around me. I thrust the ice pick into the frozen surface, grip it tightly, and heave my flailing legs back onto the ledge. Fear dribbling down my chin, I lie inert until the risks of lingering seep into my mind, startling me to action. Sliding perilously with each small advance, plunging the pick into the wind-polished ice, I dig toe crampons deep, stretch, reach, and repeat, slowly inching closer, my weary eyes fixed on the other side.

6S

Raewyn Bassett, passionate about the craft of flash fiction, enjoys creating strings of character and plot that tell the tiniest of stories in just a few words.

Back at You

by Brad Rose

I brush my horse with a horsehair brush. It doesn’t seem fair. After I put a few things in order and finish up here, I’m going to read my new book: Writing Conclusions: A Guide for Beginners. Some people think I’m just a dumb blonde redhead. My medical chart says, Do Not Resuscitate. Thanks, and the same to you.

6S

Brad Rose's website is here.

Reaching Luck

by Louella Lester

Today, I ran for the bus and one sock slipped into my shoe. Reaching to pluck it out reminded me of a certain drunk teenage boy. His fingers tried, but he didn’t know body shirts had snaps that clipped closed between legs, and the luck was not with him that night. He was certain, but that drunk teenage boy didn’t know. And he slipped, so I slipped out and ran. I ran and the luck was with me.

6S

Louella Lester is a writer and amateur photographer in Winnipeg, Canada. Her work has appeared in New Flash Fiction, Spelk, Reflex Fiction, Vallum, Gush: menstrual manifestos for our times (Frontenac House, 2018), and A Girl’s Guide to Fly Fishing: Reflex Fiction Volume Three (Reflex Press, 2020). Her Flash-CNF book, Glass Bricks (At Bay Press, 2020) is upcoming.

Greenwich Village

by Ford Madox Ford

I look abroad on this fair world into which pour the rays of the sun - for truly today the sun shines over Greenwich Village as if it were Florida. It is, the world - and Greenwich Village too - full of gay and gallant men and of women utterly charming. The children laugh over their games; artists paint in the garrets; in the basements poets are hard at their verses; on the intervening floors are musicians. The radio sounds unceasingly. Who could not be happy in Greenwich Village? But who is?

6S

Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor. His six sentences are excerpted from "O Hygeia!" (an amusing look at the tiresomeness of health and diet, published in Harper's Magazine in May of 1928).

No Gravity

by Kyle Hemmings

At the club, Arctic Heist, my friend Kim buys me another Split Lip with lime. He’s an ex-classical pianist who lost his fondness for minor scales. On the dance floor, he tries to save me from my wild techno-inspired spins. But I never fall all the way. Three drinks later, I tell him that I have recurring dreams of mounting a horse on the wrong end. "Who’s watching?" he says.

6S

Kyle Hemmings has been published in Unbroken Journal, Sonic Boom, and elsewhere. He loves 50s sci-fi movies.

Nothing Changes

by Paul Hewson

All is quiet on New Year's Day. A world in white gets underway. I want to be with you. Be with you, night and day. Nothing changes on New Year's Day. I will be with you again.

6S

Paul Hewson still hasn't found what he's looking for.