Sample People

by Patrick Parks

They were a small couple, elegantly dressed, but very small. They looked to me like sample people, something you might see in a shop, a display for the full-sized variety. They were so dainty and so delicate in their movements that I was overcome by the wonder of them and tears sprang to my eyes. It must have been a common reaction. They looked at me with something like pity as they passed. Each raised a tiny hand and gave me a brief, knowing salute.

6S

Patrick Parks authored a novel, Tucumcari (KERNPUNKT Press, 2018), and has had fiction, poetry, reviews and interviews appear or forthcoming in a number of places, most recently The Millions, The Writing Disorder, TYPO, Change Seven, Ocotillo Review, Bridge Eight, Another Chicago Magazine, and Full Stop. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop and lives with his wife near Chicago. For more, visit his website.

Never Boring

by Anonymous

I liked Reddit for a while. I liked reading people’s conversations. There were people from all walks of life talking about what they did. Teachers, nurses, police officers, blue-collar workers. As an immigrant, I found America’s ever-squabbling population fascinating. They can be annoyingly ignorant about the other parts of the world, but they are almost never boring to observe.

6S

Anonymous is an anonymous female. Her six sentences are excerpted from "The Year When My Husband Started to Act Like a Tsundere Teenage Girl to Get My Attention."

Autumn Leaves, Autumn Lives

by Pablo Libedinsky

The old man shuffled along the solitary path, crunching dead leaves under his feet. The cold breeze, the autumn smell, and the spectacle of red, gold, brown, and ochre leaves dancing in the wind made him feel alive. He spotted an empty bench, sat down, leaned back, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. The wind surged, and layer by layer the leaves began to pile on him. When the wind stopped, the man had disappeared, buried under a silent mound of dry foliage. A sudden gust shattered the stillness, blowing the leaves away, leaving a clean, desolate bench.

6S

Pablo Libedinsky is a retired computer programmer living in San Francisco. He wrote a few stories when he was 12 years old and then stopped, later returning to writing as an adult. His stories have been published in Down in the Dirt, Let Me Tell You a Story, The Gorko Gazette, 10x10Flash and CommuterLit.