Below,  is the first Six Sentence story I wrote, which appeared  in February 2009 at 6 Sentences. I'm taking the liberty of reprising it here.   Since then, I've written a few more.  I want to express my appreciation to all the members of 6 Sentences who have read and commented on my emerging "oeuvre".  You've been very kind and immensely supportive. So, now, for better or worse, I'm determined to write the next 400--give or take 1 or 2.  Readers beware…

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I carefully watch the ring master’s hat of fire, bright and deep, like a diamond-cut trench.  I immediately want to run home and write you an anonymous letter, warning you trouble's only just begun.  I’ve learned you can never be too careful, unless you’re dead.  Of course, who among the living can know this?  We are all wearing broken watches.  For each of us, each in our distinct way, it is already too late.  "Seek an alternate route," I want to tell you, "or be done with it."

 

Oops.  Accidentally shot my ex-boyfriend.  Twice.

From across the street, I watch the neighbor's house—the one with the too-handsome husband and the pretty, but recently divorced and departed wife—quickly burn to the ground, as if it were a melting toy set aflame by a giddy, pyromaniac child.   As the fire trucks belatedly arrive—their sirens blaring and blood-red paint shining, I want to phone you at work, to warn you about some indeterminate sin, to warn you that I have a vague, uneasy feeling that trouble's only just begun. But I don’t.…

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Time slowed down for Buck. 

 

As Lola punched him again and again, he observed her perfectly applied lipstick---how the tiny vertical lines in the skin of her quivering upper lip looked like cherry-red ink spikes on a Richter scale.  And Lola’s paper-white blouse—as she’d wrestled him to the ground—it had remained perfectly clean and starched, as if it had been freshly retrieved from the dry…

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The octopus was talking--in eight languages, all of them dark as squid's ink.  He wrapped his arms around the saltwater and chanted suction.  He was prophesying earthquakes, yet to come--rumbling from the black bottomed tectonics of the seemingly pleasant Pacific.  The water in a wave does not move, only the energy.  On land, you are out of your depth. No one was listening.

Except for my black socks and green porkpie hat, I stood there, entirely nude, my moon-pale skin and slight paunch my only distinguishing physical characteristics.  All I’d wanted was little frolic, a little ‘roll in the hay.’ She took the pictures--said it would be “ real fun.”

 

Then, things between us went terribly wrong.  Terribly.

 

Now the video's  all over the…

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The smooth ease of the Vicodin blossomed in me, with all the weightlesness of a pleasant mid-September Gulf coast tornado.  “It’s a routine operation—no bigee,” the nurse said, as I faded into the white, dreamy gauze of a surgical sleep.  Later, I woke up for a moment, and they were amputating the wrong leg.  I didn’t care. “Take 'em both,” I slurred, “and  push a little more into that IV, please.

Sell my shoes.”

You didn't hear the word "dismay" in many rap songs, he thought. Why was the publisher named 'Random House'--- was it because it was a house, by chance? He thought about his old girlfriend---she wasn't really 'old', it had just been a long, long time ago, when he and she had both been very young. Music, love, and time were like that: they didn't occur in any particular chronological order. Like a piece of mail that would never arrive, he was traveling 4th class. Everyone, even…

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