Tick vs Tock

by Steven Lemprière

Tick; Harry, Grandfather’s antique wall-mounted dining-room clock. Tock; Father’s nineteen-sixties General Electric—appropriately named—bedside timepiece. Tick; dinnertime and Harry chimes, summoning family as metronome-like, he conducts us to our traditional Sunday roast. Tock; dawn, beep, beep, beep—the sun rises, as does Father, and therefore, without choice, so do I. Tick; Father has clocked out. Tock; no longer alarmed, I roll over and return to sleep—Zzz-Zzz-Zzz…

6S

Steven Lemprière's work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, The Drabble, Friday Flash Fiction, 50-Word Stories, 50 Give or Take, Punk Noir Magazine, The Hoolet’s Nook, Literary Garage, Suddenly and Without Warning, and Paragraph Planet. He took a creative writing course while a patient at an Irish psychiatric hospital, and shortly after his discharge, the Cúirt International Festival of Literature shortlisted him for the New Writers Prize. When not writing, he’s seeking the sleep he lost as a child.

Good

by Wesley Morris

“Good” meant trying hard and helping out and listening and being a devoted friend. It meant only the best news for my parents and being liked. But goodness as a personal policy is strange for a child to have. It’s for grown-ups; not for kids. Teachers like good kids; some teachers prefer them. The kind of goodness I’m talking about is suspicious to other kids.

6S

Wesley Morris has won two Pulitzer Prizes for criticism, including in 2021 for a set of essays that explored the intersection of race and pop culture. His six sentences are excerpted from "My Mustache, My Self."

Revenge

by Thomas Baron

There’s a crow in the front yard and I’m pretty sure it hates me. Every time I leave, it caws at me and, if I go too close, it pegs juniper berries from the tree and drops them on me. My wife says I must have done something to upset it, that crows are famously vengeful, but I don’t know what I did to deserve this. Maybe it’s mad at me for cutting down that tree in the spring that was already dead, or for being too loud when I pull into the driveway, or maybe it wants me to feed it and is angry that I don’t. Maybe it saw what happened that night in the parking lot behind the Wendy’s and wants me to know that somebody saw and that somebody knows and that the world will remember even if the people forget. Either way, I don’t think I’ll leave the house today—there are more crows out there now, and I don’t know what it’s telling them.

6S

Thomas Baron is a British writer living in Northern Colorado.